Adjusting offsets and repeats in textures

Okay so it's like this...

I've been having a real bitchkitty (that's a bad thing...in this case) of a time trying to apply my own textures (not ones I created, just as a note, but various ones I got for free and bought from various places in SL) suited to the personal design scheme I aiming for for the interior (and exterior) of my personal virtual abode. The primary problems have revolved around the fact that the house is, of course, like all houses divided up into many separate prims, and thus when I apply a seamlessly tiling and patterned texture to most any wall or floor or section in the house and on its outside I run into the problem of seam interruptions where the clearly visible lines which divide each prim section cause irregularities in the texture's consistency, in its "flow". The builder of the house even came over and tried to fix things up a bit for me, adjusting "repeats per face" and offsets in the textures themselves in order to get everything to appear as if it blends seamlessly across the whole of, for example, the main floor's...erm, floor. Anyways...while he was able to do a good enough job that made it give at least the *appearance* of consistent flow, the lines are still present, and can be seen in certain lights at certain angles and at certain times in the day clearer than at others. However, I understand that this is something I'll just have to learn to accept, as he said the lines are always going to be noticeable to some degree, and the best anyone can do to make this less noticeable is to adjust the offsets and repeats per face etc. in edit texture mode to get things lined up just right so the seam edges of the prims that make up the structure are barely noticeable.

Okay so I'm only realising now this is probably a whole lot more than I needed to say leading into what I came asking advice for with here. The main thing I was going to ask is well...just how the dickens *do* you adjust the offsets and RPF and such rot to achieve the best possible effects? Might there be anyone here who could give me, or if not so directly then at least point me to a detailled, comprehensive yet simplified tutorial in just this, one that is easy to follow for a complete novice to this with little working knowledge of (and especially skill in) texturing of walls, floors, interior and exterior home design stuff, and in general texturing of most any kind of thing (that includes objects). A video demonstration would be especially helpful, but somehow I doubt there are any out there on this specific subject. For *creating* textures, likely, but for adjusting and applying them for your own home decorating purposes...?

Well, at any rate, sorry I couldn't keep this shorter, and I will *greatly* appreciate if anyone can give me any tips, suggestions, or point me to guides that will be more detailled yet easy to follow.

When trying to get a texture to tile seamlessly across several coplanar prims of varying sizes it's much easier to do using repeats per meter instead of repeats per face. That will give you consistent texture scale across prims of differing dimensions and all you'll have to adjust in most cases is offsets.

The most important thing is to get your prims right in the first place Setting size, position, and rotation so that they line up as nicely as possible with no or minimal gaps between prims.

As for texturing, it is a matter of experimentation and hands-on learning, and lots of tweaking if need be. I can list some tips though:

*If you want to change a prim's size but keep its texture intact, decheck "stretch textures" from the object edit menu. This works best for cubes, especially when you need something such as a piece of wall to fit over a doorframe.

*Numerical entry is your friend. Using numbers you can get a fine precision, much more than with the buttons. I often find myself bumping textures' position by 0.001 even.

*Try planar texturing instead of default. On some faces on some prims it doesn't work, but many times it is a life saver. Remember that most of the time planar texturing will have to be scaled far lower than default to get a 1:1 ratio of texture size to face size.

*Start with good textures in the first place. This is very important. Some textures are not designed for tiling and will have seams. Other textures are designed to take up the full face because they have specific details for a purpose. If the texture has full perms, you can save it to disk, edit it in photoshop and reupload it.

*Use helper textures. These are textures which may be a grid with concentric circles. I made my own, but you can find them in-world also. It is possible and even a good idea to set up everything using such reference textures, and then go into an image editing program to create/edit your textures, choosing sizes and features following the reference textures on the faces.