Sculptie texturing paradox...

Ok, long story short- after much vertex mashing, I managed to turn a sculptie cylinder template into something that resembles 8 cubes.

Everything was going great until I tried to texture the sculptie- it turns out that, as a result of all the vertex mashing, each cube side only uses a small 8 x 8 pixel region of the scupltie's 256 x 256 pixel UV map.

This obviously presents a bit of a problem as an 8 x 8 pixel texture is not going to look good when each side of the cube is scaled up in world to about 0.75m x 0.75m

My question is: how am I supposed to texture the "sides" of my sculptie when all I have to work with for each side is an 8 x 8 pixel texture?

I'm hugely confused at the mo because apparently it is possible to get a 256 x 256 texture to show clearly on some of the cube sides- I tried applying a default wooden plank texture to the scupltie in world, set the texture repeats to about 20 for U & V and the whole texture showed up very well on some sides of the cubes.

Does repeating the texture many times manage to break out of the 8 x 8 pixel region on the sculptie's UV map and how would I go about using this "magic" effect? (E.g. is the answer to all of this to scale regions of the UV map up or down 20 times in GIMP or the like)?

Many thanks in advance!

Why exactly are you making cubes out of sculpties?

I was simplifying the situation for the sake of my question- I've actually made 8 independent crosses from the sculptie which allows me to build fence sections, windows/doors, garden trellises, bridges etc... the average prim saving from using the sculptie is 15 prims (e.g. take out 15 single beams that are making up a trellis and replace them with a single sculptie).

You need to make a custom uv and paint it, I imagine.

This is one case where using a 1024 x 1024 texture may well be justified. While the sculpt map texture of a sculpty is limited in resolution, the surface texture used on it works like any other prim, except that it's spread out differently. You can import and use as big as a 1024 x 1024 texture.

So, get a good, high-detail 1024 x 1024 texture alignment grid, like the one Chosen Few has posted to the Texture Tips forum. Apply that to the sculpty, and see where the surface texture ends up mapping to.

With the collapsed verticies, you'll end up with some areas that are never seen, and you'll want to texture those parts so the adjacent visible texture fills the gap. Depending on how you collapsed the verticies, you'll also possibly have some faces that distort pretty bad, no matter what you do. Solid colors there help a lot, if you can.

As an example, I have a 12-step carpeted stair texture that I use on a 1-prim sculpted stair tread section. By carefully observing Chosen's alignment grid on the actual sculpted prim, I was able to determine what areas got streached more than others, and what areas of the grid mapped to what surface areas on the sculpted prim. I then used that info as a map for making my texture.

Yes this is what I've been trying to do but only some (very small) sections of it are being used... the majority of the texture is not being used as the faces have been folded into each other or out of sight etc.

I don't want to use a massive texture as it'd peeve everyone off (myself included) and even if I went to a 512 x 512 texture, the parts of the texture that would be showing on the sides of the sculptie would still only be 32 x 32 pixels.

Hmmm... I suppose I could make all the unused area black or white which would cut the file size of a 1024 x 1024 texture down a lot. I'll have a look at Chosen's textures then and see how they go- many thanks Ceera!

I really hate to rain on your parade, but if I were you, I'd think good and hard about whether building a fence in this manner is really a wise thing to do. It lowers your prim count, sure, but it increases your poly count, and as you've already discovered, it makes for an awful lot of texture waste. I wouldn't try to squeeze so many objects out of one little sculpty.


That said, here are the direct answers to your questions.

As much as I hate to suggest using large textures, this is one instance where there's not much choice. If you're absolutely set on building your fence the way you described (which again I'll say is a bad idea), then 1024x1024 is your best option, as Ceera said.

I wouldn't bother with blanking the unused portions, by the way. It will make the file size a little smaller after compression, but it won't change the amount of video memory the texture consumes. If it's 1024x1024, 24-bit, it will always use exactly 3MB of memory, no matter what the file size. It might (and I stress MIGHT) load a slightly faster with the blank parts in it, but it won't have any less of an impact on FPS.

The other option is to repeat a small texture a bunch of times in-world, but that only works if you want the same image on each face. That means no shading, no highlights, no random dirt, none of the things that make a model look real. What you'll have is just a flat, boring, uniform, lifeless collection of polygons. But since 90% of SL is just that anyway, it's obviously a matter of opinion as to whether that's really a problem. I think it is, but not everyone would.

If you're going to do it that way, the magic number is 32x32 repeats, not 20x20. You want one repeat per quad, if you've really got one quad per face on your model.


What you absolutely don't want to do is to try to change the UV map itself. Put that idea out of your head right now. Since there's no way to remap the model inside SL, all that will happen is you'll end up with a texture that doesn't fit.

Cheers for the reply Chosen- it's much appreciated and it all makes sense now (especially about the 32 x 32 repeats thing... duh me).

I only need a wood or painted effect so I've been playing around with a few of the default SL textures and some of them have been working quite well (looks either like a cut face or wood grain). Based on that, I'd say that I'll stick with a 128 x 128 or 512 x 512 texture.

I get what you're saying about squeezing so many polys out of the sculptie but that's what I really need to do. My main reason for doing this is that I bought a house some time ago that's a real prim hog (mainly due to inefficiency and detail rather than size)- it takes up 220 prims on a 1024sqm plot and I just really like its character so I want to try to make it work. I've calculated that using the sculpties could save around 80 prims in total which is basically furniture for the whole house soooo I think it's a case of needs must really.

I understand what you're saying about no shading & dirt etc. but there's always the option of covering a few areas with mostly transparent dirt/shading prims... meh, all part of the learning experience I guess.

Thanks again for the help all!