How do I find the surface of my object?

The title didnt make much sense.
Anyway;
Ive made my object, its just a simple half, hollowed circle. The face on the front of the object, I want to make a texture for it. But, I dont know how im supposed to find out the size, and stuff. Like, The templates on the SL site, for face, shirt, etc. Theyve got the model lines and stuff to base the texture onto, But, Is there a way to, for example, Export my object to a file? a file that has those modeling lines? Because quite frankly, Im lost here.
And I know that post didnt make sense, But hopefully someone can decipher it.
And, I cant spell.

Hmm, your question suggests a misunderstanding about what's going on.

Basically, any texture you apply to a prim face will stretch to cover it (parts of the texture may not display, square textures on curved surfaces tend to be cut). You can change that, with repeats and offsets, but in the simplest case it works that way.

Doesn't matter (in terms of coverage) if the texture is 32 X 32 or 1024 X 1024. In terms of friendliness to your graphics card, and everyone elses, smaller is more beautiful.

To work out which bits are cut off... best bet is to make a square grid texture and apply it. I believe Robin has one in world you can use.

From memory, the curved surface of a hemisphere will have half the texture on it (a full sphere has, albeit distorted, the whole of a rectilinear texture). The planar surface (the circle) probably has a circular area chopped out a bit like a cookie-cutter.

There are no templates for texturing prims. The UV's are just simple grids, so there's no need for templates. The reason there are templates for the avatar is because the avatar is not a simple shape. The avatar's UV's are custom mapped to pull from a specific area of the canvas for each polygonal face. Without being able to see the map (template), you would never be able to texture the thing. On primitives, however, the map would look just like a big tic-tac-toe board, perfectly uniform, entirely normal. There's nothing really to see.

For your sphere, the answer is rectangular textures wrap around a sphere the same way a flat map wraps around a globe. The image gets squeezed to a single point at each pole, and wraps around the equator at regular size.

For more on this, you might want to check out Robin Sojourner's inworld texturing tutorials.

Okai, Thanks for the help.

I think textures that are applied to a sphere by reversing a Mercator projection, which is a distortion applied to a sphere's surface to produce a common type of world map.

There is a demo that shows a globe of the earth alongside a Mercator projection which lets you rotate the earth and move a pointer to a spot on it's surface, and see where the point is on a Mercator projection map. It requires Java and a Java 3d package.

Start at
http://www.cs.brown.edu/exploratories/freeSoftware/repository/edu/brown/cs/exploratories/applets/textureMapping/spherical_texture_mapping_guide.html

The installation instructions link is over on the left of the screen.