Square/rectangular textures

I'm getting the prim forming down, but now want to add textures to it. Problem is the textures always deform on non-square of rectangular prims. Is there a trick to it? i.e. if I have a tiangle with a widened top, and I put a texture on the side, the bottom portion looks good, but texture distorts towards top (round rivets become oblong etc.). Shoud I make a special texture with smaller top portion in it already, then alpha out the edges? Then I'm completely lost on spherical shapes. A cirlcle in the center of the texture doesnt cover the sphere like I think it should. Please, any help appreciated...maybe some one has some examples I could look at to design my own.


Thanks
Az

Guess I'll make a "test pattern" texture an experiment :/

thanks
Az

Yah, I'd say the best bet is to play with all the various shapes and see how they take textures.

I HATE trying to texture top-sized prims. It can be done with specially formed textures with bits distorted so they get undistorted by the weirdness you're seeing... but what a pain in the tail.

I believe the alpha trick on the triangle you mention will not work.

Other folks may have more info on this.

-Ghoti

For top-sized cubes, see this thread. Lex did an awesome job offsetting the texture to compensate for the distortion.

For spheres, think of it like wrapping a map around a globe. The texture gets shrunk by an increasing degree, proportional to vertical distance from the center. At the poles, the entire width of the map gets condensed to a single point, while at the equator, it doesn't get shrunk at all. Notice how Antarctica, clearly the world's smallest continent on a globe, appears to be the world's biggest continent on a flat map since it spans the entire width of the map. Another example is how Greenland appears on the map to be almost as big as the whole of North America, even though it's actually one of the smallest landmasses on the globe. The further towards the top or bottom you go on the map, the greater the scaling.