Positioning a texture

Hi, I have a small texture I want to appear once in the middle of one face of an object, not stretched or tiled the entire face. But I need it to fit in a particular area not exactly in the middle, and possibly not oriented straight with respect to the object.

Is there a way to adjust a small texture's size, position and angle while the texture is being applied or afterward? The only way I can think of to get the effect I want is by making a bunch of large images with a lot of empty space by trial and error, and keep uploading them until I find a combination that works. But then, if i need to change the size or position of the object, the texture will be wrong again. Is there a better way?

Thank you.

use a second prim, place the texture on it at 100% and then scale the prim to the size it should be and position.

You can do what Dekka said, or you can simply put some empty space around the image in Photoshop. Either way, it's a simple problem to solve.

Well, let's say you have a sphere and you want to make a snowman without having to use a lot of prims.
So if you wanted to paint a face to only appear once on the sphere, how would you go about that?
It would just stretch all over the place or repeat more than once..

Is there a template somewhere that includes proportions of what a texture would have to be to wrap around something?

Just as Chosen said, draw the face spang in the middle of your canvas in Photoshop, leaving plenty of white space around it. I'd recommend letting the smile be no more than 1/4 the width of the whole canvas. Upload the texture and apply it to a sphere, moving it around with the offset controls as necessary to get it centered where you want it.

Alternately, of course, you can make a face with four prims (two eyes, a cone for a nose, and a hollowed and cut cylinder for the mouth). I know you're trying to avoid extra prims, but four isn't all that many.

Okay, maybe not something as simple as a snowman.

What if you need to wrap an image around an object.

Like in the image below, Cartman has a hat. So that hat would have to wrap around the top of the sphere, but the face is only on one side.
Or if you wanted to make a pencil, you'd have to create a texture of the angled tip that can wrap around a cone shape.


New to this, obviously

You're facing the classic mapmaker's challenge in reverse... how to create a 2D map that can be stretched and glued to a sphere to create a 3D globe.

You can find pre-made grids out there, but it's easy to make one yourself. In Photoshop, make a texture that is simply a huge checkerboard. Give the rows distinctive colors and then put patterns in enough of the columns so that you can tell them apart later. Upload the texture and put it on a sphere. Photograph it from all angles and save the photos to your hard drive.

When you want to create a new texture in Photoshop, make your checkerboard grid a semitransparent layer and use it as an overlay while you draw on an opaque layer below it, using your photos as a guide. The drawing you make will look really distorted, but when you upload it and apply it to a new sphere, it should look right.

If you have CS3 Extended or CS4, you can work directly in 3D, doing all your drawing on a sphere so you don't have to go through the steps I just described.

I'll start with the pencil, because that's really easy. All you need is a texture with a stripe of black across the top, and the rest should be a wood tone.

Remember, a cone is simply a cylinder with the top shrunk to a point. If you wanted to make the top part of a (capless) cylinder black, you'd have no problem, right? That's very obviously just a stripe across the top. Well, tapering the cylinder to a cone doesn't change anything. The 2D layout is still exactly the same.

For your friend Cartman there, it's very similar. A sphere is basically a cylinder that has both its top and bottom shrunk to points. So the blue hat would simply be a stripe of blue across the top of the texture. The eyes and mouth would go dead center in the middle of a sea of flesh color. Think about the amount of space his face occupies on the head. From side to side, the width of his eyes occupies about 1/3 of the entire front of his head. Cut that in half to account for the back of the head, and the width of the eyes should be no more than 1/6 the width of the canvas. From there, it's pretty easy to decide what to put where.

If you're still having trouble envisioning it, then do as Rolig said. Apply a test grid pattern to the surface, so you can see exactly what part of the canvas goes where on the model. I offered one for free on this forum a few years back. You can grab it at: /109/45/214824/1.html.

Ah! Thank you Dekka. I'll try this, I'm pretty sure I can make this work. Seems so obvious in retrospect.

And thanks, Chosen. I'll give that a try.
That grid is super, too.

B.

followup:

I used both dekka's and chosen's solutions with different objects. Dekka's solution was far easier when applied to a prim with a flat face that i could easily match another prim's face to, and was far cheaper because I only had to upload my texture once and it was perfect.

But i couldn't easily match a second prim flat against the surface of a curved or irregularly sculpted prim, so there i used chosen's method, and her visualization of spheres and other closed curved forms as cylinders with pinched ends was very helpful. But even so, and even with a grid, it took me several attempts to get the texture exactly right at L$10 per upload. So while this technique also worked to my satisfaction, in the end it was more expensive.

As you get more experience, those excessive costs for multiple uploads will become a thing of the past. It just takes practice is all.

Also, make use of the beta grid. You can upload there for free, for testing purposes.

Alternatively, you might want to consider applying your textures to objects in third party 3D modeling applications. Blender and Wings are popular freebies. Or if you have the budget, Maya and 3DS Max are widely used. All are overkill if the only thing you want to do is test textures. But they'll certainly do the job.

Use the Preview Grid for uploads when you aren't entirely sure what you are uploading because you get 5,000 lindens to use when you're there. The funds aren't in any way transferable to the Live Grid but they certainly help reduce production costs while you're getting the hang of things.

To access the Preview Grid, press 'Ctrl+Shift+G' when you open the client. This will bring up a selection box to the right of the 'Log In' button. The default selection is 'Agni' for the Live Grid. Choose 'Aditi' for the Preview Grid and log in. You will see your linden balance increase by 5,000 when you rez. The balance is topped up every few months so don't worry about wasting the funny money.

When you finally have a texture that you are satisfied with simply log out and repeat the process but select 'Agni' for the Live Grid. You will still need to upload your final texture and pay the requisite 10 linden upload fee. Also be aware that anything you create on the Preview Grid will not be in your inventory when you log into the Live Grid.