Texturing odd shaped prim

I have a box prim that has a top size of .3 on the x and 1 on the y. Not that odd a shape I guess, but I am having all kinds of problems texturing it.

The picture angle is a bit odd but the prim on the left is a normal square prim and the one on the right is the same prim with the top size changed. As you can see the right prim does some interesting blurring of the image.

I'm presumming my original image needs to be modified to fit, but I just cant work out how. The prim seems to be squashing the image on the diagonal, but I'm not having much luck adjusting the original on that premise.

Any help would be *muchly* appreciated right now - lol

Catt

What you're seeing is extremely common for polygonal modeling. Rectangles are not actually rectangles, but two right triangles. When you shrink one side, you're changing the size and shape of the two triangles differntly. One only has its apex moved while the other has its base resized and displaced. If you examine the distorted rectangle in your picture critically, you can quite clearly that there is line of demarkation running from the lower left coner to the upper right corner, segregating the two triangles, and you can see what's happening to each. When you changed the top-size of the prim, you compressed the left hand triangle a little bit, and the right hand triangle a whole lot. As a result, everything on the right side of the diagonal line looks bent and blurred.

You're correct that the way to combat the affect is to correct for it in your texturing. You can do it by hand if you know what you're doing, as described in this thread, or you can automate the process with wonderful set of Photoshop actions created by Robin Sojourner. Check out this thread, and see Robin's inworld texturing tutorials for details.

LL's been talking for a long time now, by the way, about creating better texture placement tools so that we can correct for triangular polygon distortion directly with the build tools, but they have yet to announce any ETA on that. I would assume we won't see it until well into 2.X. For now, pre-correction in Photoshop is all we can do.

<bows before the altar of Chosen Few>



Thank you!

Cattrina

If you don't mind sparing some extra prims and time cutting cubes, and still want the tapered shaped with the texture on, you can try this.

Use cut begin and end on a cube to get a desired slope. Then apply the texture on the sides as shown in the enclosed pic. Now you just have to make a mirror of that on the other side. The one shown on the left is made of 2 of these with no distortion.

I've dropped a copy into your inventory. Have fun.

Thanks Cottonteil

I use PSP rather than photoshop so I was finding the graphical side a bit of a hard slog (and I'm not much of an artist to start with - lol) Doesnt mean that I wont keep trying, its a good way to learn.

Playing with prims is fun though So I'll give this a go as well. The more skills one has in ones inventory the better right?

Catt