Internal textures

I've been trying to build a house cheaply (i.e. with as few prims as possible) so I've been making rooms out of parts of hollow cubes rather than creating individual walls. However, I'm having trouble decorating my rooms because, while I can texture each external face of a cube seperately, I cannot do the same with the internal faces as they are treated as a single face: each inside wall of my room must have the same texture. This presents great difficulties if I need a texture to be on only one interior wall, e.g. a window.

Does anyone have any solutions to this? Have I missed a way to add textures to interior faces individually, or will I have to create my rooms using separate wall objects rather than parts of hollow cubes?

Thanks,
Jon.

You are correct.... The inside of a hollowed cube is, indeed, a single face.

The only way you could create different textures on different walls when using this approach would be to construct a texture with Gimp or PSP or whatever your favorite graphics manipulation tool is, and have that texture contain the 4 different images you want for the 4 walls.

That's probably more hassle than its worth, so I'd suggest you just build your house the old-fashioned way, and use a single prim per surface.

- Ace

I build this way all the time. You are correct that it is a tremedous prim saver. Depending on the size of your build you can cut your prim count by 25-50% in most cases. (For examples, see my giant pyramid in Argent or my space ships in Indigo. They are constructed almost entirely of hollowed prims.)

Here's the thing to know about how interior faces work. As far as SL knows, a hole is always round. It may be bent into the shape of a square or a triangle or whatever for display purposes, but to the system it always behaves as a cylinder. In other words, it has only one face.

The size of the hole's face is roughly 4 times the width of a normal face. You'll therefore need to set Repeats Per Face Horizontal to 4 times whatever it would be on an exterior face in order to get the texture to look "normal". In other words, for a square hole, setting the texture to repeat 4 times per face horizontally will cause it to show the full texture on each side (you may need to offset it a bit horizontally to get it centered, but it's no big deal).

Now, if you want each side of the hole to have a different texture, it starts to get trickier. As Ace said, you will need to make single texture in Photoshop which contains all the imagery you will want for the total. Bear iin mind that SL is going to stretch the texture to 4 times its actual width, so you will need to squish your images in photoshop to compensate. In other words, if your texture is 512 x 512 (which it pretty much always should be for best results), then the image for each side should be scaled to a width of 128 (I suggest putting guides at 128, 256, and 384.) That way putting 4 images side by side will fill the 512 pixel canvas. When you apply this type of texture to your interior surface, make sure the repeat is set to one (not 4 this time) and your squished images will unsquish as the texture wraps around the entire face. Again, you may need to adjust the horizontal offset a bit to center everything, but this is a very minor task.

I strongly disagree with Ace that this technique is more trouble than it's worth. Making a texture is a one-time effort which costs nothing (except the insignificant L$10 upload fee) and lasts forever. Using more prims than you need to is an unnecessary expense and lasting pain in the arse. The only reason not to do this is if you don't have Photoshop, Paintshop, or a comparable program for making images. Even if that is the case, you can probably hire someone to do it for you. Assuming the 4 textures you want already exist, combining them takes less than 30 seconds if you are proficient with image editing.

Anyway, if you are still confused, find me in world some tiime and I'll walk you through it. You can usually find me in Indigo.

Thanks Chosen and Ace, that's a great help, I think I can make it work now.