new to textures

hi everybody,

i have never done anything with textures before and want to create my own.
What i want to create is a set of 6 sided die.
Can i do this inside SL or do i need to create it (ie in word paint) and then upload it?


Thanks for any help you have to offer

You need to create the dice themselves as cubes in-world. You would then need to create 6 textures, one for each face of the die, using your chosen paint software. Then upload the textures, apply them to the faces of each die, and that's it.

Yes but...

Slightly better would be to create one texture with all six sides. Apply that texture to each side of the die, and use offset and scale to adjust it so that only one face appears.

Also possible, but probably pointless, would be to use a prim for each spot.

I agree with Lee. Make one texture, that you mentally divide into six squares, and use the repeats and offsets to apply it to the faces of a cube.

In your paint program, make a 2 inch high by 3 inch wide rectangle. Set up temporary guidelines to divide that into six squares. Make your die spots on these squares, and optionally consider adding some shading at the corners, and edges, so the edges look a bit rounded. Remove/hide the guidelines before you continue.

Now, distort that into a square, 256 pixels by 256 pixels. Don't worry about how it looks. When you apply it in-world and adjust offsets and repeats, it will streach back to square for each face. Save this texture as 24-bit TGA (Targa) if you can, or as JPG if your paint program can't do tga format saves.

Import that texture into SL. It costs L$10 to do that.

Now, make a cube, and apply the texture to it. All six faces will have all six sets of spots...

Click the radio button on the edit dialog for 'select texture', and click on one face of the die. Then bring up the texture tab, and set the repeats to 0.333 horizontal and 0.500 vertical. Use the offset values -0.333, 0.000 and 0.333 for the x-direction, and 0.5 or -0.5 for the y-direction offset. do the process again for each face, and play with the values until the right set of spots appears on the correct faces of the cube (On a real die, opposite sides add up to seven, and I can't recall if the 1,2 and 3 sides go clockwise or counter-clockwise when you are looking at the corner that they all share.)

(Not in-world right now, so can't double-check. The vertical offsets might be 0.25 and -0.25...)

thank you all very much for your help