Newbie texture question.

Can anyone tell me how to apply a texture to only one surface of a prim or object? Also, I've tried to colour wood and metal white, but without success. Thank you in advance for any advice you can offer.

Hi Saxby. Welcome to SL.

To apply a texture to just one surface, turn on the "Select Texture" radio button on the editor. Then click on the surface you want to affect (shift-click to additional surfaces to add them to the selection if you wish), and apply the texture with the editor. Alternatively, you can also just drag a texture from inventory onto a surface.

As for coloring things white, that depends on your definition of "white". It could be defined as showing the texture as it is, or it could be defined as bleaching the color out, making the image lighter. The system's definition is the former.

Think of it kind of like a slide projector. If you shine white light through a color slide, you get a color image, an exact reproduction of the slide. The white light doesn't make the image "whiter". It makes it the same. If you use colored light, you get a tinted version of the image, but if you use white light, you get the regular version. In other words, coloring a texture white in SL simply means showing it as is.

If your definition is the second one, meaning you want to bleach out the existing color, that's not something you can do inworld. You'll have to use a 3rd party program like Photoshop to lighten the image and then upload it to SL in that state.

If you've got modify permissions on the image, open it in the viewer by double clicking it in inventory, and then go File -> Save Texture As. Give it a name, click OK, and it will download to your hard drive in TGA format. Open it in Photoshop, lighten it, grayscale it, do whatever you want to it, and then save it and re-upload it to SL. It'll cost you L$10 for the new upload. The download will have been free.

When you are editing an object there is an option on the dialog box that says Select Texture. Click that and then click on the part of the object that you want to change. You should see that 'face' of the object highlighted with a crosshair/circular pattern. Now when you select a texture or a color it will change only that face of the object.

You can also change more than one face at a time by cholding down the Shift key while you click on each face that you want to change.

That one had me stumped for a few days when I started building, too.

Selecting the face of a texture puzzled me lots when I was a new Resi... there was a guy who tried to scam me, and he didn't even send me back a moddable version of my own object. Ugh--I didn't cough up the L$ tho, an' found it rewarding to learn myself.

Strange we can tint things and make them darker, but there's no basic brightness+contrast controls for textures. Would that be very intensive, computationally? Seems very simple but would allow for a lot of additional variations.

You can't really change the color of a texture, but you can darken/tint a texture by changing the color of the face of the object. So if you make a default cube and choose A light red color the wood will look slightly darker and reddish. Useful in certain situations or just to add a bit of variety to a teture that is being used more than once.

I surely like doing this with all sorts of things... especially with the "Torlifier Screensaver" script that Francis Chung made--it turns everything into my fave pink+green!

Tinting is nice for subtle details too as you pointed out.

I agree. If there were different blending modes for the Color, it would make all the difference in the world. (I'd also like a separate Alpha channel, so you could upload one Alpha, and apply it to lots of different textures. And Bump maps would be really nice, too. And, and and... )

Ah well, we work with what we have.

Oh, by the way, you need full permissions (Mod, Copy, and Transfer) to save a texture to your hard drive. Which makes perfect sense, since once you save it and upload it yourself you have full permissions, and are even credited as the creator.