Prim Texture templates

I am new to SL and building/ texturing in SL. But I am experienced in Poser, DAZ studio and how UV map works.

Are there any texture templates for the different Prims out there? The purpose for it would be to get accurate texture on the prims. I know there has to be some out there since I've seen textured details on prims.

Anyone?

The UV mapping for prims are rather simple affairs, and sadly, aren't very adjustable beyond scale and position for U and V. You can always create a sort of grid texture with numbers or colours on them, then apply them onto the different prims to understand what is going on. After a while, it becomes second nature.

Thanks,

That's kinda what I'm afraid of.

It's a shame we can't export the prims out as an obj and use UVMapper to generate the map..

Hi Kelmar!

The maps for all the prims are simple squares. That's why we can tile, offset, rotate etc. the textures. If they were more complex, we wouldn't be able to do that. We'd just be stuck with what was there, like the UV mapping on the Avatars.

But it's not difficult to get perfect placement when you use a repeat of 1.0 for both the U and V axes.

Just take a grid map (there are several in world, as the one that I have at my texture tutorial,) and apply it to the prim.

Then take the same texture into your graphics program, (you can grab mine here, to save you the trouble of exporting it,) and match up the squares on the pattern with the ones on the prim.

Since each colored square is unique in its combination of color and number, it's not as difficult to do this as you might fear.

Then just use that grid to put things exactly where you want them. You might find it most helpful to take a Snapshot of the prim, and draw right on it, so you can see exactly where things are. You can also see when the map needs to be flipped, for instance on the inside of the Prim, this way.

It's a really, really old technique, from before UV Maps were as common as they are now, but it still serves well.

Hope this helps!

I personally use an old RenderMan shader reference texture for my builds.

Just match the colored areas up with that same texture in Photoshop/PSP/GIMP, and you can do mapping.

I like the colored squares/grid as it gives me an instant idea of where I can paint and where I will have stretchy-UV problems. (Like at the top of spheres with certain texture rotations and such.)

I also figure out my scale/offset/rotations BEFORE I even start painting; Just load that grid up, rotate it to get it to match that grid laid out normally in Photoshop, and I can instantly start working on it, without getting distracted by trying to map the texture on the prim in my brain in unusual angles or whatnot...

As Robin says, pretty much these techniques are old-hat for those who are used to doing simple planar* texture manipulations. (Being an old Lightwaver, we didn't even get UV mapping until version 6! So I know this only too well. ) Tossing 'planar', 'mapping', 'tutorial' into Google will likely garnish you a lot of interesting hits.

*SL mapping isn't ALWAYS pure planar though, due to the way tesselerators work. I notice they've improved texture coordinate generation in the latest preview release (1.9), so we will finally be able to planar-map textures upon things like sheared boxes...

Yep. I don't much like the Render Man texure grid, though, because sometimes you can only see part of a square on the object; and with that map I can't tell which part of a square I'm seeing.

Which is why I made mine, more than a decade ago.

Mapping in SL isn't ever planar, unfortunately. It's all UV Maps, and I can see why it has to be, since planar projections are ... well ... projections; and without a reference object that isn't moving stored somewhere, the textures slide around on them, much the way placing something in front of a slide projector, and then moving it, causes the relative placement of the image on the slide to shift. I remember that problem only too well from the old days!)

But sometimes I wish we could have a stored object, and Planar Projection somewhere!

The reason that we get folds, buckles, and stretching in the texture when we do something like use it on sheared boxes is that there aren't enough points on the box to hold the map in place. I have all of that explained, with images, in the Texture Tutorial.

Fenrir, you're a 'Waver!? Me too! (Robin waves.)

AH! So I see I'm not the only one who uses the colored & numbered Square texture files for texturing prims! Just saw we're getting Planar mapping in 1.9. YAY! NOW if we could only get the ability it actually Unwrap textures & do true texture mapping, bump mapping, That would be Sweet!!

I was very excited to read that too. I haven't played with the demo yet to see how well it works, but it sounds promising.


LL promised in mid 2005 that a material shader system was in the works to replace the current texture system. They described it as "similar to that of Maya and Max", and said that it would be in 2.0. Of course that was in the same breath that they promised Havok 2 and HTML were "defeinitely" going to be in 1.7, and that 2.0 would be coming right after 1.7, without any 1.8 or 1.9, so who knows if we'll ever see it. It sure sounded exciting though.