In World Texture Tutorials Finished!

Hi Everyone! As some of you know, I've been spending a fair amount of time for the last several months building a set of comprehensive in-world self-paced texture tutorials.

There are nine stations, kind of like the building stations in the Ivory Tower (which is where these will ultimately wind up,) with Notecards explaining each thing. Some of the stations have more than one section, and others don't. Most of the notecards have illos in them, and some have scripts.

The things covered are:

1. Overview of Textures in Second Life
2. Preparing Images for Uploading
3. How to use the Texture Tab (this one has a section for each thing there)
4. Transparency in SL
5. About Prim Faces
6. UV 101 (with sections covering the UV Map on each type of Prim)
7. Animated Textures
8. AV Textures (with sections for each "Template" explaining the good and bad points,)
9. Putting it All Together

You can find it on my land at Benten 18,99. It's the Ring Thing. At the moment, the build itself is still in plywood (although all the objects at the Stations have their textures, except #9, which has a holding texture.) I'm hoping to fix that in the next few days, (although I have to admit that it tickles me to have a Texture Tutorial that isn't textured. )

If any of you would like to go and take a look, and let me know if I left out anything important, or got anything terribly wrong, I'd appreciate it. If you like it, I'd also appreciate hearing that too.

So, that's that!

Thanks Robin,

Nice of you to do that I'll be checking it out.

heh cute a texture tutorial that "is still in plywood "
I would like to check this out ive see your online tutorials
and they are Great!
Ill be in world soon -LW

Thanks, Lyric and Lightwave! I hope that you enjoy them, and find them useful.

They aren't in plywood any more, though. Now the build is textured enough that (hopefully) it will give the impression that I do know what I am talking about.

Robin, you rock! (That song never gets old, does it?) I'll check out your place when I get a chance. Sounds great.

wow GREAT.. now I have two places to run between.. all days long.... YOURS! and Ivory Tower.... nice to meet you to in person,,,

I have not seen it yet but I know it will be as fantastic as the other tutorials on your web site.

If it were possible I would nominate you for Sainthood or Lindenhood or whatever is appropriate along those lines.

It's so refreshing to read something positive and helpful for a change as opposed to all the dismal bickering that can occur on these forums, and to know that some folks are genuinely interested in helping others.

Thanks, guys.

But, honestly, I do need feedback on them, and you might very well find something less than perfect there. So, if you do...

(I just got the words up on the build, so the thing is clearly labeled now. It's under the sky dome, though, just in case you don't spot it right away.)

Robin, now you have me all excited about logging in tonight, and I haven't felt that in about a week

Can't wait to see what you've done. You'll have my own special subfolder, next to my "Ivory Tower" folder

And too bad about the plywood. I love irony, and that would have been comic irony at it's best

Alright, I visited Robin's tutorial last night and I only have one word to describe it: "Wow!"

Great work, Robin. Very informative, easy to use -- in fact, I was finishing up and a friend of mine who only joined SL about a week ago was asking in our group channel about something that was covered in your tut. (It was the white halo problem).

I TP'd him and said, "Here, spend a little time here and your problem will be solved."

I highly recommend this tutorial to anyone and everyone -- in fact I may start referring people from this board to it (IM me for the landmark if you'd like) when they ask questions

Kudos, Robin!

What Chosen said. You rock Robin. We're lucky to have you.

Great Job Robin...really helps pull it together... and timely too!!!

Nicely Done Robin,

Thanks so much. I haven't gotten thru it all yet but was amazed at what i thought i knew but didn't just with the basics. It gave me a few tips i can use to make my "hobbies" so much funner....LOL. Can't wait to get back to find out more....

Thank you so much Robin, this is a wonderful gift to the community.

It's very well done. Bravo!

Oh wow! Thanks, guys! :: blush ::

I have found one error, which I've fixed. In the note about the Cylinder UV Map, where I mention that the texture on a hollow interior is flipped, I said that you need to flip a UV-corrected map in your graphics program to get it to work on the inside of a hollow cone. I meant to say that you need to flip in in the Texture tab, of course. Oops.

Also, someone pointed out this morning that I didn't mention the bug in the Animated Textures that prevents a change in Repeats from "sticking." I thought that had been fixed, because when I did a couple of trials it seemed to be working the way it should. Does anyone know for sure?

(If it hasn't, I definitely need to add that information to the Animated Textures note.)

If anyone else has found any errors, please do let me know.

Oh, and Chip, may I have permission to host your templates on my site? I hesitate to send anyone from mine to any other sites, since I don't want to burden anyone's bandwidth.

But, because of the size and traffic on mine, I wound up with a plan that gives me bandwidth to burn, and it would just make it easier. (Unless one of the host sites has ads, or something, and would like the traffic; in which case may I post a link to those sites from mine?)

Okay, lots to read and I haven't got through it all but I thought I would comment since that's what you asked for.

I have only found two things. One is just something I did not expect , the other is a horrible mistake!

The first is just that I did not think that clothes and clothing templates were included in "textures." I think it is a great section, I love the templates and you answered a whole lot of questions I have had about templates since the beginning. Questions I could not find the answers to before, so thanks for that.

My only comment would be that it might be better as a sepearate section. If I was putting together a book on SL tutorials, I would put the clothing in a seperate chapter or section if only because the target audiences are probably different even though logically the topics belong together. I may be alone, but when I think of textures, I think of building textures, not clothes. Clothes are textures of course, but perhaps folks dont think of them that way much.

now.... the horrible error!!!......

In NoteCard 4, "Transparency in SL," in the sub-section "Creating an Image with Transparency," in the 6th paragraph, the 8th word is...

"Photoshopo."

I *think* you meant "PhotoShop."

Please correct this at once.

Yeah, I dithered a bit about this. But then I thought, well, it's all together on the forums, so I'll put it together, too.

And, really, the Avatar is nothing more than a special kind of Prim. And, since it uses UV Mapping, I thought that if I put it with the stuff on UV Mapping, I won't have to explain all of that twice. I can just say, "Go look at the UV Section if this doesn't make sense to you."

(I'm also just too lazy to make a second build. )




How could I have let such a grevious mistake slip through! I'm sooooo ashamed!

It's been fixed. And thanks.

I've not been to get these yet, but the most common script uses this

llSetTextureAnim(ANIM_ON | SMOOTH | LOOP, ALL_SIDES, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0.5);

the first two 1's overiding the prims texture repeat to 1 so try this

llSetTextureAnim(ANIM_ON | SMOOTH | LOOP, ALL_SIDES, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0.5);

which should stop the overiding and allow the prim to use any repeat

Yup I tried that,I was trying to solve it for days and then I saw the two lines on the llSetTextureAnim page



I tried to get scripters to help ...no joy

default 
{ 
    state_entry() 
    { 
      llSetTextureAnim(ANIM_ON|SMOOTH|LOOP|PING_PONG ,ALL_SIDES,0,0,0.0,0.5,0.1);
      llSetStatus(STATUS_PHANTOM, TRUE);
    }
    
         on_rez(integer int)
    {
        llScaleTexture(16.3, 3.1, ALL_SIDES);
    } 
} 

It seems to work fine at first and then you get a problem duplicating or rerezzing the textured objects....and then when all of that seems fine you go away log on the next day and all the Tex repeats are reset to 1.0...i love unexplained intermittent bugs ..mmmm

Please correct me if I am wrong or IM me in game and I will give you a demo...I didnt feel a need to put it on the Wikki as it there already ..maybe it needs big red letters though.
It shows up bad here because my textures are so long 16.3 x 3.1 on the repeats.Usually this should save texture cache space and incrtease the overall quality right?
The fix was to just tile the texture above to the needed ratio in Photoshop before upload.Thing is the quality goes right down for a similar filesize

Oh and a new bug that is going in the Wikki if you are still reading lol
If you are having a problem with a TextureAnim breifly showing the whole grid of frames in your looped texture. It sometimes flickers on for 0.2 of a sec at the start of the loop, again intermitently :/ .Just got to the Object settings and Texture tab and turn Shiny on and off. I had this bug for days and days tried everything again scripting blah blah...was gettin desperate and left the script and started clicking all the buttons in the Object tabs Phantom ,Metal, Locked Phys etc...suddenly fixed.then another hour working out what it was lol

Nathan, I was already using 0,0 not 1,1. Which might be why I thought the problem had been fixed. It seems to help, but doesn't seem to entirely eliminate the difficulty.

So, I just went to the tutorials and added the caveat to the Animations, including the bug that Wheel Fizz found. (Thanks for the heads up, Wheel Fizz.)

I also added a script to stop all animations, floating text, and particles, since those things don't stop automatically when you remove the script.

So, there are updates to that notecard. If you have already picked it up, you might want to stop by and grab the new one.

And thanks, guys!