Select Textures button

When you apply a texture to a single surface of a prim using the “select texture” tool, the frequency of occurrence of the cross hair symbol appears based on the number of repeats selected. Each crosshair symbol is surrounded by a box formed by straight white lines. Three questions:

1. Is this box the outer edges of a seamless texture and should the texture be sized such that the white edges of a single crosshair box touch the outer edges of the prim?

2. Does this approach give the best resolution to the texture on the surface of the prim?

3. It is my impression that seamless textures are truly seamless when they are perfectly uniform across the surface of the texture. If there are imperfections in the texture, such as cracks, lost bricks, etc. to simulate an aged wall, these imperfections repeat themselves over and over depending on the number of repeats that are set. Is this correct?

I would appreciate any thoughts or suggestions on these three points.
Thanks.

Yes, the box represents the edges of the texture, but it makes no difference if the texture is seamless or not. Seamlessness, or lack thereof, is just something that we as humans identify visually. SL has no idea what a "seam" is. All it knows is where one instance of a texture stops and the next one begins.

As for sizing the texture to fit the prim face, if you set it to one repeat per face, then the edges of the texture will be on the edges of the face (assuming we're talking rectangular faces, that is). I'm not sure what you mean by the "should" part of your question. There is no "should" or "shouldn't" about it. Sometimes you need multiple repeats per face, sometimes you need one, and sometimes you need less than one. It depends on what you're doing.

For example, if you're making a brick wall, it often makes more sense to paint just a few bricks on a small canvas, and then repeat the texture many times across the wall surface, rather than using a giant canvas to paint every single brick.


It doesn't work that way. A texture's inherent resolution is fixed. If it's 512x512 pixels in size, for example, it will always be 512x512. The actual resolution at which you view it is entirely dependent on how close your camera is to the prim you're looking at, and the size of your screen.

For example, let's say you apply a 256x256 texture to the front of a cube. Zoom your camera all the way in so the cube fills your screen. If you've got an average sized monitor, you're now seeing that cube filling an area that is something like 1280x1024. That little 256x256 image is now blown up to 4 or 5 times its actual size. Now zoom all the way out. The cube is now taking up no more than a handfull of pixels on your screen. The texture that's on it is still 256x256 though. You just can't see it all from that distance.


Yes, if you repeat a texture, every aspect of it will repeat. That includes cracks, missing bricks, lost puppy dogs, whatever. That doesn't mean the texture isn't seamless though. What makes it seamless or not is whether or not you can see a visible border where one repeat stops and the next one begins. If the repeats (called tiles) blend together with no visible border, then the texture is seamless.

Now, what I think you were trying to say is that just because a texture is seamless doesn't automatically mean it tiles well, and that's true. Good texture artists know to avoid patterning on their textures that will be easy to recognize. If you recall, that's how that Reuters photographer got into trouble a few months back. He clone stamped extra smoke onto his war photos of the Middle East in order to exaggerate the intensity of the imagery (big no-no for a supposedly impartial journalist). The pictures were identified as fakes almost as soon as they were published because the patterning in the smoke was so obviously repetitive, completely unnatural. The pattern was seamless in that there were no visible borders, but the tiling was all too obvious.

Don't make that mistake in your SL texturing. Be subtle with your patterning in textures you know you're going to repeat. Do your best to make things look as random as possible. Avoid "hot spots" and "cool spots". Don't be afraid to be detailed, but keep the details uniform enough in their intensity that the human eye won't easily zero in on the repetition. It takes practice to get good at that. The more textures you make, the more you'll develop an instinct for what works and what doesn't.

About that, Chosen: do you know of any good tutorials, or good articles on the theories of hot spots/cold spots? I know it will take practice (eh eh, like that was a problem ), but I think I need a guiding hand to get me started re. seamless textures.

I'm not aware of any specific tutorials on the subject, Raindrop, sorry. Twiddler covers it briefly in his excellent video tutorial on using the high pass filter, but it's only mentioned as one thing among the many uses for that filter. He doesn't really get into much about hotspots themselves.

Maybe I'll put a guide together one of these days. It's much more of an art than a science though, so it's not something that can easily be broken down into steps. Saying "here's how to make an alpha channel" or "here's how to use the clone stamp" is pretty easy. Saying "here's how to make an image look good" isn't quite so simple.

The basic concepts for making a texture that tiles well are to avoid easily recognizable patterns, work with even lighting, and avoid any details that will be obvious when repeated. If you're making a brick wall, for example, make all the bricks the same color or at least very close to the same color. Don't have a bunch of red bricks with a yellow one in the middle or the repetition will become very obvious when the texture is tiled. If you put any cracks or flaws in the brick work, make the cracking uniform, winding its way across the whole wall. Don't put just one crack up in the corner or something, or again, the repetition will be obvious.

Hope that helps. Maybe some other people can chime in with more tips. This is a good subject for further discussion.

Thank you for the information, it is very useful and helps me understand the prim and applying texture issues. The comments about patterns help much and it appears that it is an inherent problem of texture use on prims under certain circumstances.

Here is an example from my trial and error. I buy two good seamless textures of brick walls that are scaled in the textures to the exact same size (i.e., size of each brick). One is a new wall with exact texture qualities and uniformity, like the brick that goes into a new building. The other texture is of aged brick with imperfections. I use a 10x10m prim to build a wall of a building and apply the first texture. If I use a repeat/meter setting of 1, the entre texture covers the 10x10m prim one time and the bricks are huge (i.e., not to a proper real world scale). But if a use a repeat/meter setting of 10, the brick size is correct and no patterns arise in the surface of the 10x10m prim.

If I use a repeat/meter setting of 1 with the second texture, the entre texture covers the 10x10m prim one time and the bricks are huge (i.e., not to a proper real world scale). If I use a repeat/meter setting of 10 to get the brick size correct, the pattern of the imperfections shows up.

To eliminate patterns in the 10x10m single prim wall, it appears that I will need to make the 10x10m wall out of many smaller prims that have the second texture applied with a repeat/meter setting of 1. I will need to determine by trial and error the correct prim size to get the correct real world brick size. Thus, I could go from using one prim to make a 10x10m wall to 12 prims to make the same wall to eliminate patterns.

Is this thought process correct? I would appreciate any comments on how others approach and resolve this situation.

Thanks.

Mij, just so you know, there is a difference between repeats per meter and repeats per face. If you've got a 10x10 surface, and your texture is repeating once across it, you're at 0.1 repeats per meter, not 1. You are at 1 repeat per face though. The only way 1 repeat per meter can equal one repeat per face is if your surface is exactly one square meter in size.

As for your proposed method for eliminating the patterning on the aged brick wall, if I'm reading you right, what you're planning on doing is repeating the texture once on a small prim, and then duplicating the prim 12 times to make a larger object. Visually, that's going to look exactly the same as repeating the texture 12 times on one large prim. Functionally, you've lowered your available prim allotment by 11. I'm not sure how you expect it to help. Am I missing something?

An easier solution would be to make the large wall, using the uniform bricks, and overlay a couple of smaller prims just above the surface, with imperfect bricks. That way, you could use fewer prims.

Alternatively, make a larger composite texture.

Export the brick textures, make a grid in photoshop that is, let's say, 10x as large as the single texture pane, and then mix and match the purchased tiles across the surface, altering, flipping, and placing them as needed to get a random yet weathered wall. Merge the layers, rezize the result to 512 x 512 or 1024 x 512 or 1024 x 1024, import that into SL, and apply that to a single-prim wall.

The individual bricks will have less definition and detail, but the wall will look more natural.

Now that I think more about it, your are absolutely correct. This discussion is very helpful. Sometimes I appear dense, hopefully less often than more often. This is new to me and the SL learning curve is steep and branches frequently into many areas with their own unique characteristics.

The texture and repeats issue is very complicated, and with your assistance I think I'm starting to understand. What I'm unsure about is when to use the repeats per meter and/or repeats per face. They seem to be linked because the numbers change in each when you change one. Is it more trial and error until you get something that looks nice and is real world correct or is there a process with an algorithmic-like approach that should be used?

How should one approach the use of repeats per meter and repeats per face when texturing the surfaces of a new prim. Any chance you could provide a 1., 2., 3., and so stepwise list of how you would handle the process?

Finally, if I understand everything correctly, when you have a texture with imperfections such as a wall crack, its going to form a pattern on the prim surface no matter how you apply it. Correct?

Finally, it seems that the same processes need to be repeated for every surface of a prim and then all the edges aligned with offset buttons such that all shapes like bricks are properly aligned on each surface. So you just bite the bullet and do it, even though it is boring and extremely tedious? Or am I missing some process that actually makes this aspect much easier and less time consuming.

Thanks, so very much.

I'll try your idea, but is it "legal" in SL or RL to edit textures purchased from a creator selling them in SL stores?
Thanks.

hot and cold spot example

i make ALOT of tile textures and it still bites me sometimes heres an example

in the first image i have a seamless tileable brick patteren looks pretty decent, seems kinda ramdom in its variations in color ill go with it (eventho its really 2x larger than it needs to be)

but when its tiled (rather in SL or anywhere else) the 1 dark brick instantly forms a grid patteren, which can be seen a mile away, and IMO looks junky becuase not only am i forming a 4 brick square patteren on each prim, im also forming stripes around the entire biulding

so theres 10 l$ wasted and some more time spent on making it, but its ok becuase i get to use it here

ps dont use jpg when your gonna upload it to SL, just used it here for web friendleness

Thanks for being conscientious enough to ask that question. If the creator is selling the textures with full perms, then technically you can do anything you want with them, including downloading them for editing. It's generally accepted that granting full perms means consenting to allow people to modify your work. It's probably best to ask the creator though before you do that if you don't see any written licensing info. Remember, when you buy an asset in SL, texture or otherwise, you're not buying the item itself, just a limited use right to it.

In any case, I like Ceera's first suggestion better than the second one. Use a small, uniform, "clean" texture to tile across the surface, and then overlay an additional prim to add the "dirt". Put an image of a crack against a transparent background, lay it over your wall, and you can have what appears to be a pretty convincing cracked wall without having to worry about making a huge texture for the whole wall.

The technique isn't always the best solution, depending on the circumstances, but it is a good one for a lot of things. I use it to add lighting and shading to my tiled textures all the time. A good example would be the floor of the Enterprise bridge I did for CBS.



The shadows on the walls are painted directly on the wall textures, but on the floor, that wasn't a practical option. In order to get the amount of detail needed for the fibers in the carpet, the texture would have to be absolutely huge in order for it to be untiled. It would have needed to be far larger than SL's 1024x1024 limit, in fact. It was far more economical to tile a relatively small section of carpet across the floor, and then simply lay the lighting and shading over the top. All the shadows you see on the floor, and the multi-colored lighting cast onto the flooring around the workstations, were created by laying semi-transparent "shadow prims" and "light prims" over the opaque "carpet prims".

The same concept can be used to add cracks, dirt, puddles, stains, or anything else you can think of that would otherwise interfere with tiling. Again, it's not always the best solution, but it often is.



Oh, and Osgeld, good hotspot example. I had to log in with my alt to see the pictures since my main forum account is STILL broken. Lindens, if you're reading, hint hint. Wanna fix it already? It's been what, 3 or 4 months since you first responded to the trouble ticket? Please? With sugar on top?

I can't speak for all texture makers, but any textures that we sell at Textures-R-Us certainly do allow you to export, modify and re-upload the modified work for use in your own builds, whether those are for your own use, or items that you intend to sell. For example, I sell leather textures that are definitely intended for clothing or furniture makers to export, piece together into larger works to make what they need for clothes or upholstery, and then import back into SL for use in their products.

The only real grey area on any full-perms texture is that it isn't usually considered acceptable to modify a texture partially, upload it, and then sell the raw texture. Not without asking permission, first.

An example of that is that I could take a stone castle wall texture, modify that to add a small alpha-mapped window in the wall, and upload it. By asking permission from the texture maker who made the wall in the first place, and getting a positive reply, I would be able to sell that texture as a complement to their existing walls. We both benefit, in that people building a castle with their walls now have a texture with a window in it that matches the rest of the build. Ive asked for and recieved permission to do just that, in a couple of cases. I was even allowed to include the unmodified original wall in the finished bundle, as I split the profits with the original artist on every sale of that bundle.

On the other hand, it would be quite inappropriate for you to obtain, say, a set of 3D Build windows that I made, do nothing more than tweak the color of the window frames, and sell that as a raw texture, presenting it as your own work. You could certainly still use the modified texture as part of a house that you sold, but not sell it as a raw texture.

And Chosen? Magnificent work on the Star Trek set! Wow! I'm impressed!