prolem with textures in linked objects

i have made an object with say 10 prims.now when i try putting texture on it,each prim is getting the texture invidually.
how shud i use the texture so that the complete structure gets a single texture ?? (coz i wanted to make it look like a door of car and i arranged many prims to get the curves. now when i put the image of car door on it each prim is getting the texture and it's ruining the thing)

See the "Select Texture" radio button at the top of the Edit window? Click it and then click the face of the particular prim you want to texture. The texture you select will be applied to that face --- ONLY that face. I know it's confusing, but that's what "Select Texture" means.

If I understand the OP, they have a 10-prim door shape and want to spread one texture so part of it is on each prim.

What you need to do is fiddle with the texture repeats.

Let's say, for simplicity's sake, that all 10 pieces are the same height, and they all are the full width of the door. They are stacked atop each other.

So you would want 1/10 of the vertical height of the image showing on each prim. The top one gets the top 1/10th, the second from the top gets the next 1/10th down, etc.

You would do that by texturing all ten of them with the full image, setting the vertical repeat factor to 0.100, and using the vertical offset on each prim to adhysr what part of each one shows.

There is a scripted solution that will work IF all the surfaces are flat, and can accept a planar texture. I think it's called TexFit. But if you used ten prims to make that car door because you wanted gentle flowing curved shapes, then you'll need to adjust the repeats and offsets by hand. The scripted solutions I have seen don't work on curved surfaces, because planar textures don't work on curved surfaces.

Gor blimey, a 10 prim car door?

Your first job is to get that down. Use a sculpty if you must, but you really ought to be able to do a car door with 1 to 5 prims, max. Including the window.

Second: You can scale your texture. Let's say you have a hi-resolution image of a car door, and need to stretch it across two prims, located one above the other.

Apply the texture to the appropriate face of the first prim, using the Select Textures radio button and the mouse to select that face.

Set the Repeats to 1.0 horizontal and 0.5 vertical. Set the vertical offset so that the top half of the texture is showing on the prim.

Repeat for the second prim, but make the offset so that the other half of the texture is showing on that one.

Buy this:

http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=291485

Takes all of about 30 seconds to do what you want, across any number of prims. you can do it by hand, but it takes longer and tends to be less accurate. I highly recommend this tool.

From that product's ad : "So long as it's flat and perpendicular to the world axes, EasyTexture can texture it!"

It only works with planar texturing, and can't do its magic on any of the curved surfaces of a collection of prims. So I doubt this will work for the OP's car door.

On the other paw, it could be very handy for my architectural building efforts, in matching the textures on the wall of a building!

True, I should have mentioned it won't do spheres/toruses or other curved surfaces. It will do the flat side of a cylinder. Thanks for bringing out that point.