Texture map on a object made of several Prims

I have made an object out of several prims. I wanted to texture the object like i did when creating a skin for my avatar. Now i noticed that the texture i have uploaded insnt wraped over the whole object but over every each prim making it look like a rainbow. Is there a way to tell sl it should treat the object as "one" prim like it already does with avatars skins (avatars are also made of several prims and treated as one object). This leads to my secound question: How can i unwrap the surface of an object in order to see which part of the texture goes where. If not, is there any way of maping my texture correct or telling it to go to a sertain place...

thank you so much for your help!

Hi Marta,

Unfortunately there isn't any way to tell SL to treat multiple prims as the same object in terms of texturing - each individual prim will always act as a single object when it takes the texture. The SL Av mesh is unique in that regard.

As for your second question, I think I understand what you're asking but my apologies if I'm off the mark. When you first apply a texture to a prim, the texture will be set once on each face (side) of the prim - if you have a cube, the texture you apply will show up in its entirety once on each side of the cube. You can manually change that by using the repeat and offset values under the Texture tab in the Edit menu. For example, if you only want the top right hand corner of the texture to show on one face of the cube, do the following:
- rez cube
- click the Select Texture radio button, you'll see white "bullseyes" appear on all sides of the prim
- click once on the side of the cube you want to apply the texture to, all the other bullseyes will vanish except for the one on that selected side
- click the Texture Selection box and go through your inventory to find the texture you want to apply
- now that its applied on that one side, type in 0.5 in the Repeats field and -.25 in the Offsets field

If you play around with Repeat and Offset values you'll find a number of different ways to stretch and place your textures, and eventually be able to make texture maps for different types of prims in SL that take advantage of that manual placement. Good luck!

thank you. to bad its not as easy i hoped it would be. i will try and play arround with it. Any other tips are welcome aswell. sorry for my bad spelling.... not my language

Just a note.

The Avatar is actually one mesh (Well, two, with the skirt, I think) with one texture map, split into three parts.

As for texturing a group as one object...

It's not easy. Not incredibly difficult, once you wrap your head around it, but not easy.

A few things to have in your repertoire of tricks are:

- How textures sit on the prims.
With spheres, you have to remember they meet at a point at the top and bottom, so things get skewed as you move away from the centre.
With tori, the texture wraps around the main body. It's basically a bent cylinder. This leads to interesting and infuriating possibilities.
Because of this, you're going to have to pay attention to how you position spheres. If you're using spheres, you may find that you have to spin them around a little to get the texture to work right.

- take a look at the group and figure out a sort of grid over it, so you can have a rough guesstimate of what part of the one big texture goes where. If that little sphere at the bottom corner is about 1/4 of the height of the object, you know you're gonna have to repeat the texture .25 times and offset it so that corner of the texture is shown.

Gah... I suck at are explaining things. Hope this nonsensical babbling helps a little bit.