How do you get the template/uv map

Hi, I am guessing there are tutorials on this but I am new to this and am just not sure exactly what to search for so any help would be appreciated.

I've watched tutorials on how to build and how to add texture. What I want to know is how you can get a template or uv map from what you build in order to apply the texture. I know I've read that it's better to make textures with alpha channels and that rather then multiple prims sometimes, and I know you can link them but I have no idea how to know where to put the stuff in a photoshop texture.

Hi there,

At the top of this forum you will find sticky threads with lots of information and tutorials about texturing, plus a sticky thread about Chip Midnight's templates with a link to where you can downlod these.

Happy reading

I reccommend that you get Chosen Few's test pattern file here
/109/45/214824/1.html and upload it and apply it to various shapes of prims so you can see how textures getwrapped around them.

If you are talking about textures to apply to a prim for building something such as a house or object to place in world or on your avatar then there are no templates that I know of. Simply make your desired texture for what you want to build and apply them to the prim of your choice......and then you can distort or torture the prim to the shape you want. But, it's not necesssarly a good thing to use textures containing an alpha channel if one is not needed. There is a glitch in the Open GL rendering engine that causes textures close to each to appear to swap postitions when each contains an alpha channel. Use only when needed to avoid that little annoyance (such as for windows and such.

If you are talking about clothing that you apply to your avatar then there are templates for that. You need them to know where to locate the textures to cover or uncover parts of the avatar skin beneath the clothing item. A couple places you can download them are available. Get the standard templates put out by Linden Lab at the download link on the main web page........but those are really not good templates for decent clothing. On the stickies above you will find Chip Midnight's templates as mentioned........and they are fantastic templates to use for quality clothes. Robin Sojourner also makes a very good set of templates. Get them both if you are serious about clothing making. You'll be much more satisfied with the results. On clothing the Open GL glitch is not a factor.......but feel free to use as much as necessary to get the desired result. In fact, if you up load a clothing texture at 24 bit (no alpha channel) you won't get a good item to put on your avatar........instead you will get your texture with white on all the places you want your skin to show through on (arms and legs when you wanted short sleeves or shorts, etc).

Hope I've helped a little.......but I'm a rank amateur compared to a few who post here. So keep looking......someone who has much more experience and expertise than I will help you more.

Ok I'm not sure if I explained exactly what I meant. I have the clothes and skin templates. I meant making something in world or even clothing (I assume the flexi stuff was made and not from an original template). So if you made I don't know say a dog for example made out of different prims does that mean you cant make one texture on one texture file withouth totally guessing? Or do you have to project separate textures for each piece? Is there a way to get a larger preview? (bc it looked ok to me on the preview but after i payed to upload it didn't line up right. As for the other texture tutorials and stuff I'm not sure exactly where to look at. I mean I understand how to add the texture to the object. I understand how to do all the stuff in Photoshop. What I'm trying to figure out is if you make this complex shape how do you know how to add the texture? I thought I read somewhere about using a graph? I'm used to when modeling creating the uv maps, etc. so you know exactly where to place parts of the texture, so like you could have a complicated shape with one texture. What I meant with the transparency, is like it said if you have a fence not to make individual pieces. That's the other thing, even with something flat like a fence I don't know how you find out the size to make the texture parts. Does that make more sense? I will try again looking at the stickies but I hadn't found before what I was looking for. I'll look again.

Something flat like a fence is easy, because your texture doesn't have to change from 2-D to fit a 3-D surface. All you need to think of is your relative H x W proportions, so that the texture doesn't have to be stretched too much when you upload and apply it to a flat prim. So, if you're making a section of fence that is going to be about four times as long as it is tall, you make your texture something like 512 x 64. When you apply it to a prim that's, say, 6m x 0.75m, it won't have to distort at all. You don't really have to be picky about it, though. Flat textures can stand a lot of stretch distortion before they look stupid.

When you are drawing the fence texture, draw the pickets proportionally too. You probably want pickets that are no more than about 0.15m wide, with 0.15m spaces between. So in a 6m section of fence, that's 20 pickets, if I do the math right. If your texture is 512 pixels wide, that's not going to come out exactly even, but 26 pixels per picket/hole pair is about right. (If you really want to get obsessive about it, make your canvas 520 pixels wide instead of 512, then resize it to 512 when you are finished.) Make the Fence texture first, then use it as a mask to create your alpha channel so you get blank spaces between the pickets.

The other parts of your question take more imagination and time to answer, and they aren't in my skill set anyway.

Merlina, unfortunately, objects in SL cannot be custom UV mapped. Every prim has one preset map for each face, which is never anything more grandioise than a simple square or rectangle (always a perfect UV space).

That said, you can make 'pseudo maps' by using the in-world repeat & offset settings. So, for your dog example, let's say you want to use a single texture for the 4 legs and the torso. You might want to use half the canvas for torso, and then 1/8 for each of the legs. In that case, you'd set the repeats to 0.5x1.0 on the torso, and to 0.50x0.25 for each of the legs. Offset as necessary, depending on which section of the canvas you've chosen for each part.

Of course, your dog in actuality is probably way too complicated for such a simple division scheme as the one I just described, but I think you get the idea. I was just trying to keep the example simple so it would be easy to explain the concept.

The repeat/offset thing is not as elegant as real UV mapping, but it works, and it's all we've got. The only real limitation is that, unlike with real UV mapping, each of the offset sections remains square or rectangular. In most cases, you cannot very well divide the canvas into non-rectangular shapes since each prim is looking for a rectangular mapping of its own. Regardless of whether that rectangle happens to fall across a whole canvas or just part of a canvas, it's still a rectangle.

The only exceptions would be when prims have been irregularly cut (a cube can be cut into a pentagonal shape, for example), or when they've been tapered and you're using planar mapping. In either case you could use the portion of the canvas that would have covered the cutaway for other purposes, . But unless you've got a shape, or group of shapes, somewhere else that just happens to fill that cutaway space perfectly, you're going to be wasting pixels no matter how you do it.

Often you'll find that trying to calculate the most efficient possible way to chop up a canvas can get complicated fast if you're trying to cover a lot of differently shaped prims with one texture. For performance reasons, it's obviously always worthwhile, but sometimes (unfortunately) end performance has to take a back seat to ease of application if you want to be able to finish projects in a reasonable amount of time.

All this probably sounds pretty clunky to you right now. Don't worry; that's because it is. You'll get used to it though. As I often say, good building in SL is one of the best ways I know to develop your problem-solving intelligence skills. You end up breaking some of your established habits of 3D modeling, which can be pretty uncomfortable at first, but in the long run, it's well worth it. Habits can be crippling sometimes if they're over relied upon, and more advanced tools can become crutches. If nothing else, SL's little quirks help keep your mind loose, adaptable, and strong. Give it some time, and I'm sure you'll agree.

Ok some of that I admit I don't understand yet lol, but so what I think you are saying is essentially that each part would be mapped separately but reusing the same map? So each part uses one piece of the map rather than one map on the whole thing? Can you select only certain faces or only a whole side (I know you can select just one side of a cube not sure if that is the same thing)

I found a book on content creation that hopeully will help. I'm going to go check it out at B&N

Yes. Essentially each prim surface is a seperate texture. You can do as Chosen recommended and use offsets and repears in less-than-one values to use only part of a texture sheet to color several different surfaces. And you can re-use and flip textures to use on several different surfaces.

Simple example : A wooden chair, with 4 legs and a solid back. 6 cube prims, streached and possibly tapered as needed. 36 prim faces, 5 of which are unseen, because the tops of the legs and the bottom of the back are embedded in the seat prim.

You could apply a single wood-grained texture every prim face in the whole chair, and it might look OK just like that. But in all probability the wider pieces need a different horizontal repeat value than the narrower ones, so the grain looks similar in the wood. Let's say we use 1/4 of the width on each long skinny face of the chair legs, and on the edges of the back, and use the full texture on the larger faces, like the seat and the front and back sides of the chair back.

You could now apply a different texture to the seat of the chair, to make it look like it what upholstered with purple fabric.

You could apply an alpha-mapped texture to the front and back surfaces of the one-prim back, to make it look like the back has open slats.

If you really wanted to, you could put all those textures onto one larger texture, using diferent parts of the texture for the seat, the legs, the edges, and the front and back surfaces of the chair back. I'd use two, however, so you don't have to use alpha-mapped textures anywhere except on the two faces of the chair back, where transparent parts are needed.