Sizing textures on complex surfaces

I had the day off and finally had the inclination to try my hand at something more complex than a T-shirt and a cone

I created a prim that is actually 4 smaller prims linked together to emulate a ribbon tied in a bow. This will have a lot of handy uses, either as attachments to clothing or just as hair decorations.

After a lot of trial and error I finally got it close to what I was after (though I still need to work on twisting and sheering more to make it look more natural). Then I decided to texture it.

I had 2 lace texture patterns I wanted to add. One was a white/offwhite pattern with no alpha channel, and the other was an antique white lace pattern with transparency/alpha channel.

The large white pattern covered all 4 prims, but the 'grain' of the lace was too large to really see the detail on the prim. It's shown in the JPG below.

So I tried the antique lace. This time, the bows textured ok but the two straight ribbons below it got all blurry. So I found myself puzzled as to how SL applies textures to prims.

Is there a correct direction for a prim in order to be textured? In other words, if my prim is vertical, should I turn it horizontally first to get the texture to work? Or do I just need a better texture that will work regardless?

Here's a shot of what I built:

unsure exactly how you assigned the textures, but you can orient and size them on each prim and on each prim face in the object. since they use the same source, there's no hit.

on the "large white" one, "repeat" the texture to effectively shrink it. hopefully the texture tiles properly.

for the "antique lace" one, without knowing specifics it's difficult to say what the issue is (although i can guess).

i'm no texture guru, but happy to help if i can. IM me if i can be of any help.

IM in game for a "texture tester" I have.. will let you get the desired effect


I should be on tonight after 9pm game time.

-Blueman Steele

Csven, I must have missed the tool that lets me reposition and resize textures -- is it on the window that applies the texture itself?



Blueman, thank you! I hope you mean tonight (Thursday) - I didn't see your message last night I'll be in touch.

Cindy

Cindy,
It's not the texture picker window itself, the settings are in the edit dialog box on the texture tab. If you don't see a texture tab, be sure to click the more >> button. Then go to the texture tab. You will see values for horizontal and vertical repeats, offsets, rotation, etc. Hope this helps.

McW

Ah ok, I know where that is - I guess I didn't pay much attention to the buttons below the actual texture picker.

That kind of explains my bigger question, which was whether there was an optimum size for textures. I generally upload 512x512, sometimes 1024x1024, but on a tiny little lace choker I did last night it looked like the texture got stretched and blurry. At first I wondered if I didn't need to cut a texture to size before uploading it.

So what you're saying is that I only need to fiddle with the repeats and offsets (etc) buttons to see what works?

that's a start. different prims have different UV mapping. a cube is easy because it's like a regular x, y coordinate system on each face. a sphere is trickier and you need to prep the uploaded texture for the distortion you get. one coordinate is going up and down (and meeting at the poles) and the other is wrapping around the equator. that can make life difficult. there's a filter in photoshop to convert a texture to something that will wrap around a sphere properly. can't recall the name atm. if no one offers it up, i'll look it up for ya.

As Csven said, all textures in Second Life are UV Mapped. That means that orientation doesn't matter in the least. (If they weren't UV Mapped, the textures would slide around on the prims as they were moved.)

Briefly, (and I know that you know this Cindy, but this is for others who might not have read the earlier thread, ) all the things in SL are made from polys, that are described by the postions of their vertices, or points, relative to each other in the spatial axes (X, Y and Z.)

They also have positions on the U (horizontal) and V (vertical) axes on a flat texture map. (You will, occasionally, hear people saying U, V, W. But W is only used with volume brushes, since it extends perpendicular to the UV plane, and we don't have them here.)

Think of the map as a sheet of extremely stretchy spandex with a picture on it. The points are like thumbtacks that are used to hold the picture in place on the model. The model can move, and stretch, and twist; but the thumbtack keeps that tiny bit of the map in place, and the rest adjusts between the tacks.

That’s important to remember, because the ONLY place where the map is really fixed is right under a tack, or point. The rest is simply extrapolated between those points.

There aren't many points in some of the shapes here. For instance, the cube has points only on the corners. That's why the textures will distort on those shapes, when you decrease the Top Size. There aren't enough tacks to hold it, so it just kind of folds along the diagonal.

I'm putting together more information about this in the self-paced tutorials I'm putting up at Benten (18,99). It's about half done, if you want to go and take a look at it.

Oh that's super, Robin! I'll be sure to check it out and landmark it!

... which I do with anything 'Robin' I find

I love your tutorials. They've really gotten me off on the right foot with my new copy of Photoshop. I was randomly Googling around the other day and even accidentally stumbled upon an older tutorial you'd done on lace textures, as part of this project I'm doing

Thanks for all your great work. Your site is the first place I look for info now.