"Back faces" on prims?

Wow something I forgot back when I asked about vrml features.

If I make a cube environment out of a single prim, is there a way to display textures on the interior faces (which would mean both inside and outside would have them)? If that exists, I wouldnt know what it's called.

Also can sculpties be resized once imported into the world, and would texture and material color settings work on them?

No. The "inside" of a prim only exists when it is hollowed. So for a cube, you can hollow it and texture the single inside face that covers all 4 sides. But it will be open on the top and on the bottom.

You can texture the interior faces of a hollow prim, if that's what you mean. be warned though that SL treats all the interior faces as one face, so repeats etc can get very tricky. You can't put different textures on what appear to be different faces e.g. if you built a corridor out of hollowed cubes, ceiling, floor and walls would all have the same texture.

Sculpties can be resized the same as other prims, and can be textured and coloured in the same way, although textures sometimes look very odd when placed on sculpties, as they appear to be deformed to fit the surface.

Scaling a sculpty is pretty easy. They stretch just like any other prim.

Texturing them can be a pain, if the UV mapping for the sculpty doesn't take texturing into account when it is designed. But it can be done. I've created custom textures for carpeted stair treads on a sculpty, with a different look for the tops and fronts of each step.

The term you're looking for is "back-face culling". When back-face culling is turned on in any 3D application, all polygons appear as single-sided, meaning they are visible only from the "front". When viewed from "behind" they are invisible.

In SL, as in most realtime applications, back-face culling is permanently on. There is no way to turn it off. So the answer to your question, as others have already stated, is no, there is no way to texture the interior faces of a prim.

Even with hollow prims, you're still not seeing any back-faces. The surface of the "hole" is just another front-face.


Yes, absolutely.


Yes. Textures and colors are applied to sculpties the same way they are applied to regular prims.

As Ceera mentioned, creating a texture for a sculpty can be somewhat complicated, depending on how the sculpty was made. But that doesn't change how the application of the texture to the surface works. The texture picker and the repeat/offset settings work exactly the same way for all prims, both regular and sculpted.