Wall mounted pictures

This may not be the best forum for posting this inquiry but it appears the most appropriate. Thanks to those who have posted the invaluable information on how Second Life handles textures when uploading. It does make for some interesting mathematical calculations. Basically I am taking photographs in sl and saving them to my computer. After editing and setting the picture size I upload the final texture to sl.

Searching inventory for a suitable frame, I have found Pictureboard 2.0, which works fine for mounting. First question, which may tie into my primary question below, is: What do other people use for mounting textures that works well for wall-mounted pictures? I really would like to find a frame with a thin wooden border but only 1 prim.

Having added the texture (picture) to Pictureboard 2.0, I move it against the wall at a suitable height. In this particular case I am covering a window. I can sight along the wall and move the picture so it is just off of and not part of the wall. Now I step back to admire my work and a funny thing happens. Standing about ten feet from the picture and looking straight at it, everything is fine. If I rotate my avitar on its vertical axis to look out of the corner of my eye so to speak, the picture jumps into the wall. I can see pieces of the picture in the panes of the window. Moving my avitar around the room, the picture jumps in and out of the wall. I tried adjusting the depth of the picture but that appears to have no effect. I have checked to see that the picture is vertical in world. I also have checked by eye to see it is parallel to the wall. I do not know if this caused by the “frame” I am using or something else. Any help would be appreciated.

Off topic question: Why when I rez a rug down on the floor does it lie on the floor? Can a picture be designed so that when rezed it is on the wall?

This is caused by something evil.. Alpha sorting glitches. If you have any level of transparency, or any 32 bit texture, directly in line with another, it will do that 'flicker and disappear' effect. The only way around this is to not have them in difrect line, or not use them.

Its evil, and so far noone has come up with a proper solution. This particular problem is not unique to SL, and if you search this forum, you'll find lots of threads about it.

Next, the rug rezzes on the floor because that is how it was made - down, flat on the floor. A picture will be on the wall, properly angled, only if that wall is facing the same direction as the original wall it was on when made, if that makes sense. Objects keep their rotation through owner changes, so its just that really.

To create a 1 prim picture frame the best thing to do would be to save the photo to your hard drive and then put it together with a photo frame texture in a graphics editor. Thats what I do to create my 1 prim framed photos in my home. You can find some pretty good frame creating tutorials by doing a basic google search.

Allow me to sort of pick away at your response and see if I understand:

“transparency” – I assume that is under the “Edit” function somewhere and as such I should be able to set transparency to zero, which is what I would want anyways.

“32 bit texture” – Is that a function of Windows? I use a simple version of Paint. Is there a way to change the picture (texture) to something else? Perhaps a different file format would help.

“directly in line with another” – Say I take the picture and move it one degree off vertical, would that solve it? In other words just make it not parallel to the wall.

I see what you are saying about the rug. It would make sense that all floors are planes perpendicular to a line running through the center of the world. If I am a new owner of a rug, how does it know the height of the floor? Maybe it measures it by where my feet are standing.

Thanks for the frame idea, good idea!

If any part of an object is see-through at all, this will happen. Even some that aren't will because they were saved as the wrong file type. In the edit menu, go to 'more' then the textures tab. If transparency there is set to 0, then there is nothing you can do to get rid of transparency in it unfortunately.

32 bit means it can handle alpha channels and transparencies essentially. Unless you own the texture, you can't fix it, and if it's say.. a wall with a window, that window will no longer be see-through. So I wouldn't really recomend editing it =/

The two file types used in SL that can handle transparency are targa (.tga) and png (.png). More info in the texturing forum

Nopers.. might change the angle at which it has problems, but not by much. By directly in line I meant you could see past it to the next 32 bit or transparent texture, even if angled oddly.

Doesnt quite no.. when you drag it to the floor, it simply rezzes directly on top of that is all ^_^

Not measuring or anything, just being dropped onto the item or ground.

Hope I'm being helpful =P

2 Stupid comments about picture frames in general:

>> The world's simplest picture frame is a cube cut so as to be a trapezoid, with the top (smaller end of trapezoid) face textured with the "framed" picture, and the sides to whatever wood you want. Bizarrely, tho it obviously is the opposite of the way a picture frame is, it kind of works visually. At least pre-Windlight (haven't looked in Windlight). (/me ducks before the gods of texturing bury her in how stupid this is).

>> Crystal Gadgets has a free framemaker script that has 12 or so frames built in that actually look like frames . I don't remember how many prims the result ends up being, but it's a cool little thing.

It works in windlight too ^_^

I normally just use a second prim.

Prim 1 is 2x2x.1 and the frame is prim 2 at 2.1 x 2.1 x .15, and hollowed to 95

hehe i do too ... but then i am the creator of a 45-prim footbridge, a rehab-resistant prim hog.

I'd like to see that foot bridge o.o

It's extremely simple to make a texture for a picture frame in Photoshop (or whatever editor).
1. Start with a rectangular area on layer #1 (and unlock it, if that's your background layer), select All, then fill it with color (black is nice).
2. Use Select>Modify>contract and decrease the selection by a few (2 to 4) pixels.
3. Edit>Clear the selection, thus leaving a narrow line of color around the rectangle. Do NOT Deselect.
4. Create a new layer and fill the selection with a different color.
5. Again, Select>modify>contract and decrease the selection by a rather large amount, like 40 pixels. Do NOT Edit>Clear the selection this time. This gives you wide band of color in layer #2. Do NOT Deselect.
6. Make a new layer and repeat steps 1-3. I like to use a dark color (black?) again. This step gives you a third, narrow band of color on layer #3.
7. Create yet another layer (#4) and fill it with white. This will be the matte for your framed artwork when you are finished.
8. Now, go back to layer #1. Select all pixels, and use Layer>Layer Style>Bevel and Emboss. Set the Direction button to UP the make the Size of the bevel the width of your color band on that layer. You should now have a raised bead of color on layer #1.
9. Move on to layer #2 and do the same thing, only THIS time set the Direction button in the Bevel/Emboss controls to Down and adjust the Size parameter to some visually pleasing value. This should have embossed the color band on layer #2 so that it appears to curve down toward the center of the work.
10. Moving on to layer #3, repeat step 8. This will give you another narrow bead of color that should be beveled UP.

There's your frame. Frankly, it looks a little dull if you don't add some texture (like wood grain) to at least the wide band, but that's the fun part. You can embellish on this simple scheme by adding extra color bands, messing with various filters, etc. to make the frame interesting enough to hang. I usually bevel the inside edge of the matte too.

You obviously ought to do some decent planning before you do all of this, so that the frame is proportioned properly for the artwork that you are going to drop on a new layer (#5), and you should choose colors that compliment the artwork.

To create the actual piece for hanging, drop the completed texture on one surface of a flattened rectangular prim. Bingo. A one-prim framed picture that probably took you no more than 5 minutes to make.

BTW, hanging a picture is not hard. Bring the prim-picture close to the wall and rotate it so it is as near to parallel with the wall as you can by eyeball. Then *gently* move it toward the wall until it starts to disappear into it. Now, adjust the horizontal rotation ever so slightly so that the buried edge of the prim rotates back out of the wall again. If you need to, repeat the process again until the picture is in the plane of the wall. Then, if necessary (as it might be if you have a fat-prim frame), gently move the picture away from the wall until it's where you want it.

First, thank you Okiphia Anatine. You are very helpful.

So I took my mounted photos over to a friend’s house and placed them in front of a window. Same thing happens, I get the window in the picture, which made for interesting effects. My friend never got the effect, she thought the picture looked fine. I finally had to take a photograph of what I “saw” and give it to her. We fiddled around for a while and really did not find any solution. One funny thing we did was put a photo on a stairwell with a banister then stand back on ground level. The banister (transparent) ended up in the photograph and this time my friend saw it.

Anyways to solve my problem I ended up doing the following. I created an object from scratch and shaped it into a thin rectangle, which I will call plywood. I then oriented the plywood to be parallel to the window and moved it against the window by eye. Note the size of the plywood overlaps the windowpanes and part of the surrounding wall. I made the plywood exactly the same size as the photograph I want to mount. Then I rezed the photograph in the room (not on the plywood) and using the numbers under edit moved it so that it’s vertical and horizontal position exactly matched the plywood. The distance between the plywood and the photograph is .001. Having done that, I end up with three parallel planes (window, plywood, photograph) and so far it appears to work.

Here are two methods I use for pictures/frames...you should'nt have depth problems, or alpha issues with these two frame methods.

The first one is 3 prims--the frame (hollowed), the picture, and the shadow. This can give the best results, if you have the prim allowance.



The next method is only 2 prims--the picture and the shadow. The picture is 2d, but using inner shadows, drop shadows, and hilighting, it looks 3d...




You may be having alpha problems...if two or more alpha images are atop each other, they will sometimes jump back and forth, fighting for supremacy in render stack order. I'm a bit confused as to what your problem is actually...

And as for your rug question--when you lay a prim on a surface, it automatically sticks to the face you drop it on...whichever faces are closest, they will touch.

If you created an object, rotated it, and then picked it up...it will lay the way you picked it up when dropped. If it's a group object, I'm pretty sure the last prim you selected before linking (the yellow hilighted one) will lay on the surface you place it on...I could be wrong about that one...

For a rug...create the dimensions of the rug, lay the texture (alpha or not), then drag the top face as far down as you can to the floor. For a rug, it's best to first texture the entire prim a fully transparent texture...then only select the top face when applying the rug texture. Then after you've done those things....you can move the prim into the floor, until the top face barely peeks out of the floor.

That will work just fine, yep. The plyswood is a non-32 bit, no-alpha opaque texture. So yeah, that is one way to solve, that many people don't even think about. Another thing yu can do for one less prim, is set the picture prim to hollow 95%, and tilt it up so the hollow is running up and down. Then texture the inside (In the edit menu, click select texture to edit only one at a time) with plywood, or some other opaque texture. That will work for all but the very edges of it, which are often covered by frame anyway.

For more information about the whole Alpha Sorting thing, you might find this article interesting.

http://www.opengl.org/wiki/index.php/Alpha_Blending

Of course, there's no knowing which Depth Sorting algorithm SL is using for sure; but I'm guessing it's the Center Point one.

and I've found a partial solution to the alpha issue, at least in the use of making some furniture....

2 prims, one hollow, one set inside of it... the inner one textured on the outsid, the outer on textured on the inside, both with matching partial alpha textures, eseentially facing each other... as you rotate around the object, the alphas sort correctly...

it's a variation on the centered objects trick used for some trees, where you texture 3 objects and center them all (at different angles) to mimic volume... if the objects are centered on each other they sort correctly

The end result is a single prim. The script just reshapes the prim to give the appearance of a frame so doesnt involve extra prims. Handy if prim allocation is tight. This is easy enough to do manually, but I wrote Frame Wizard (the tool you're referring to) as a fast way to add a frame to a 1-prim vendor without losing the prim contents (your product) and prim settings (price) etc.

It handles the reshaping of the prim, takes a best guess of the side involved based on your avatar location in relation to the prim, moves that texture to the required side of the prim, rotates as needed, textures the frame etc, and comes with a few settings for frame size/texture and ability to switch between textures if it didn't guess right. I wrote it some time ago but it's still available at Crystal Gadgets for free.