Making my own UVW template for my creation

Is there a relationship other than aspect ratio that I need to know about in order to layout a single non repeating texture for an object I have created?

For instance, I have a chess queen or a soup can for what it is worth, and I want to create a texture that will cover it completely and once only and meet at the end as a seem or seemless. However, I would like it's alpha or bump mapping or whatever take care of the detail rather than building up some unbelieveably intricate prim collage.

Is there a pixels per meter rule of thumb?

Perhaps I am simply making more to this than is really involved.

Textures can be fit to size...however if the image size is too small and the prim too big you'll get pixelation. If you want lets say a soup can texture to fit around a cylindrical prim, you need to make sure both edges of the texture match up in your paint program

Ok, so too small vs too big match up. Let's say I have a soup can that i want to create a label for, the soup can is 3.5 cm radius giving me 19 or so cm around. What would be too big or too small a texture to fit on that? Or in the same vein, let's assume I make a 55 gallon drum that is 1 meter across so 314 cm around...

128 or 512 or 1024 or perhaps bigger or smaller or what?

A good rule of thumb for deciding on what size to make textures for objects is to think of how that object is likely to be viewed in most cases. How many pixels is it likely to be taking up on someone's screen when they're seeing it? If something's going to be sitting up on a shelf and rarely zoomed in on, then adding much detail above and beyond it's typical view size is not really necessary.

I think I read somewhere that a 1024 is pretty much unnecessary because most people don't look at things that closely, and it's a drag on the system to send that much info all the time. Is this true?

Quite true, but if you're using a 1024x1024 texture to take the place of 16 256x256 textures, it's a good thing. You might want to have a look at Chosen's excellent texture size sticky thread.

Textures can be offset, repeated, rotated, stretched etc. in the texture tab on any prim. It is not wise to make a texture any larger then 512 x 512. Robin has a free texture map for prims at her tutorial lab. You may want to get that to see exactly what a texture does on any given prim.

Hmm... I edit this response a bit. There is a reason to use larger textures rather than repeating them. Everyone should read the sticky on Texture sizes. It was a big eye opener for me.

Linky!

/109/e6/150360/1.html