Windows

*sigh* There must be a better way to do this, but short of being a Photoshop artist, I don't know what it is.

I'm trying to build a house with windows and it seems the options are either (1) to use standalone windows and FIVE ZILLION prims to make the walls surrounding the windows, or (2) to do what makes sense and use single-prim walls with an alpha texture. Except that I can't find any that work. The vendors at SLX want you to pay hundreds of lindens for huge texture packs that may or may not include anything useful, and the texture shops I've tried to visit inworld are too laggy to find anything. I'd happily make my own if I could find a good window texture that I could modify, but they all come with no-modify clauses and I'm not enough of an artist to make a 3D-looking window from scratch. But using standalone windows will take my prim count for one room only from 4 (two sides, two above-door pieces) to at least 15 and require hours and hours trying to get things to align. There's _got_ to be a better way, but what is it?

It true, SL 3D engine not have a 'substrack' function, if you not want too much prism you need textured window, it he only way, I think...

You could rez a box, resize it to a wall and hollow it so that the hollow is the centre of the wall. Shift copy this prim then hit ctrl+z. edit this new prim, set hollow to 0, resize it to the same size of the hollow and make it transparent. im me in world if you need any help

A very limited workaround is to use a hollowed rotated rectangular prim for the wall with a separate "window" prim in the middle. You can only have one window, the window has to be in the centre, and be the same shape as the wall, but it can be effective sometimes.

For the alignment issue (quite separate) I use prim docker, which I highly recommend.
You are so obviously right about the prim/window issue, and I draw the same conclusion as you.
So, well of course there are such things as printscreen, but that would be immoral and typically you don't get what you want anyway.
In any case, you need
1. wall texture
2. window texture, with transparency if so desired
I take photos, and skim websites like yahoo images. These can provide the basic input for the texture. then there's some messing around with photoshop and the magic wand, cutting and pasting. But it is possible!
There's a great tutorial for the alpha channel stuff here:
http://www.sluniverse.com/kb/article.aspx?id=10199

xxTiger

Textures-R-Us now has a portable singles vendor, the TRU Catalog, that you get at the store and can res anywhere, so you can browse the textures and buy just what you need, in a lower-lag area, like on your own land or in a skybox. I'll admit the lag in big texture stores is certainly a problem. I sell textures at TRU, and it's a real pain for me to move around in the store, as I am on a fairly low-end system. And that is in spite of us doing all we can to reduce lag in the store. However, we have over 40,000 textures, and in the long run, it's worth shopping. Turn your draw distance way down, so you're not trying to rez stuff on the far wall, and you'll find the lag isn't as bad.

Another option is to contact a texture artist directly, and have them sell you or make for you just what you require. For example, I sell a lot of window and window/wall textures, and would have no objection to selling a few singles to a builder on a tight budget.

As you surmised, you have only two choices, really, for windows. Make a wall with multiple prims, using a window-only texture on the window prim, or make a one-prim wall with an alpha texture on it. The multi-prim approach seriously works best, as you don't have things showing through the wall at off angles. The alpha texture wall keeps the prim count lower, but as I just said, it doesn't look good at all angles, and sometines you see things through such walls.

Thanks, but I'm using the hollow-prim-and-window-prim technique now, and that was half of what took so long... getting a hollow that was an acceptable shape and size, aligning the window prim with that, and getting the panes of the window texture to align with the new size. (Sorry, Dave, thanks but plate glass isn't my style. *g* Although it would certainly be easier!) The other half was spent trying to align the hollowed prim with the other pieces that make up the wall via stretch, since the hollow means I can't just type in the same width as the rest of the walls.

*sigh* You're telling me there isn't a better way, and I don't want to hear that.

I also spent hours hunting the web for a usable leaded glass window, and couldn't find a one -- lots of lovely stained glass, but nothing simple and clear. I think that drove me crazier than the alignment, because I know perfectly well that I found lots a few years ago when I was doing the same search. I guess because I was looking for ideas rather than textures at the time, I probably didn't make a distinction between pics that could be texturized and ones that couldn't, but I can't even find the same websites.

I couldn't even move more than a few feet when I visited TRU. And she needs to rewrite her visitor's notecard, 'cause it mentioned the singles vendor but didn't say anything about being able to take it home with you and shop there! If that's what it is, it's definitely worth making another attempt. I'm considering calling in sick today anyway, so maybe if I stay home I can find a time when there's fewer than 30,000 online.

I may take you up on that, Ceera, if I can't find something right! I'd really like to stick to the alpha-textured wall if I can. I've been living in a cottage with alpha walls and haven't noticed any problems (of course, they're tinted to opaqueness, so I guess that makes a difference). On the other hand, my window prims that are only partly transparent start vanishing as soon they get anywhere near the hollow cubes that make up the other walls. Is it possible that SL hollows and pathcuts things out by just making them partly transparent, even though the texture itself isn't?

Also, working with a C-shaped hollow cube yesterday, I couldn't for the life of me get one inner wall to take a different texture than the others, although I have no problem with Select Texture in any other case. Does it consider the inner walls of a hollow to be all the same face? That would make sense for a circular hollow, but not a square.

Thanks for all the suggestions, folks!

The new TRU Catalog was just released a couple days ago. The notecard is being re-written. The lag at TRU varries a lot, and yes, it's much worse when lots of people are on line.

I normally make a window wall with 5 prims. I make one prim for the area above the window, one on elther side of the window, and one below the window, plus the window itself. Adding additional windows the same height to that wall adds 2 prims per window. Yesm you can try to cheat that down a bit more by using cut and hollowed prims, but what you save in prims isn't worth how much more difficult it is to texture.

With a little math and trial and error, you can set the repeats and offsets on the faces of the wall prims so the same texture applied to all of them tiles seamlessly, with the baseboard on the lower prim, the crown molding on the upper one, and the wallpaper stripes flowing across all of them. I apply a 4-color checkerboard grid pattern, with letters on each square, to the wall pieces while I adjust the repeats.

32-bit textures are subject to alpha sort issues, even if you 'tint them to opaque'. So alpha textures on faces of a cut and hollowed cube can fight each other.

The inside of a hollowed cube is all one face, yes. If you check in the LSL WIKI, ther eis a formula for calculating how many horizontal repeats exactly fit, depending on % hollow. For a 95% hollow cube, start at 4 repeats, and tweak the horisontal repeats in small amounts.

Try to catch me in-world some time, and I'll show you some useful tricks for building, and I'll give you that checkerboard pattern for setting the prim repeats.

I have a image that is just a alpha channel that shows up as transparent. I use them for my windows

IM me in world and I'll pass it along. I don't see paying for a pile of textures for something so basic.

You can also do things with hollow plus taper. Insects and weather aren't really a problem in Second life, so you really can forego actual panes if you want to.

IM me in game. My current kick is making low prim houses (you cannot go any lower than one). (Oops, maybe you can. Envisions particle house. hehehe.) I would be willing to give a shot at making textures for you for upload fee after testing on Beta Grid. I have a few sets I've already made for my cut prim homes. I usually have two sets for both inside and out.

I usually have two sets for inside and out. Some of the outside views on small plots are of fields of unattractive futile rotating signs. So I have non-alpha textures I can switch to for nicer scenes looking out -- sunsets and starscapes and so on. And then you may want some pretense at privacy so I have exterior textures that show closed blinds or curtains from the outside.

Using non-alphas in texturing your house frees your use of alphas in decoration or clothing.

The Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a freeware image editor, and it supports alpha channels.

http://www.gimp.org/

I was able to pick up the TRU catalog, and it helps immensely to be able to take it home with me! Still couldn't find a texture that would work for me, though. Ah well, I overdosed on that building project for about a week, so I'm going to let it simmer for a bit before I start texture-hunting again.

Thanks again for the suggestions.

I gave up looking for window textures and made my own.

At first it may seem like figuring out the Alpha channeling may be a pain in the ass, and it can be, but if you plan on building you should get the hang of it. You can make windows very easily using alpha channels, and you can even add tint using the alpha channels.

a good compromise for prim windows is to use a combination of hollow, rotated boxes and solid ones.

you can do a lot with a hollow cube on its side. stretch it, change hollow, cut it, bury it partially underground or in the foundation. then if you still can't get the right shape with one prim as the wall (for example if the window is off-center) use a second solid shape to fill in one side. add a prim as the glass and you have a 2- or 3-prim wall that doesn't rely on textures and has more dimension.

if you have two of these walls on a 90-degree angle you can use one glass prim which is a 90-degree angle (basically a cut, hollow box) that is thin enough to fit inside both walls.

How very odd. There are a whole slew of messages here that are listed above my last reply, but that I could swear weren't here when I wrote that reply. Huh.

Anyway, thanks, but the alpha channeling isn't the problem -- I could do that myself. The part I can't do myself is the actual window -- not the glass, but the frame. I'm not enough of an artist to make it actually look like a 3D window frame as opposed to a flat brown grid. I'm thinking of adding a one-prim sill if I use the wallpaper option, just to improve the three-dimensionality, but that won't help much if the window itself has poor shading and poor perspective.

At this point, I'm planning to do another web search (when I have the patience for it again) to try again to find a window image I can use as a base for making my own interior and exterior wallpapers. If that fails again, I'll look into getting someone to make a custom texture for me, but for now I'm still at the "sick of looking at it" stage. It's not like I don't have enough other half-completed projects to work on instead. *g*

Renee, I'd love to have you look at the cottage when I'm done with it, with an eye toward prim reduction! That's liable to be weeks in the future, though.

Thanks, everyone, for your suggestions.

I did a halfway decent windowframe using the gradient tool. It'll give you kind of a metallic tube look, which may or may not work for you, but I think looks cool.

I use DAZ|Studio and various content packages, plus custom textures and lots of editing in Photoshop, to make my windows that I sell.

You might consider making a very "primmy" window frame in-world, setting up a local light source next to it to get a little shading definition, and then take a snapshot of that, then export it as a starting point.

Or get a 3D building application that can render pictures of your window frame. There are a few free ones out there, if you look hard enough, that could build and light a window frame.

Someone mentioned a catalog from Textures-R-Us. I'm at the store and it isn't obvious where to find it. Would anyone be so kind as to point me at it?

Thanks!

Hi Bob. Unfortunately we had to temporarily pull the TRU Take-Home Catalog from service, because errors in the SL environment were causing it to malfunction. I don't know if that has stabalized yet. If it's available now, it would be upstairs in TRU, near the Singles Vendors.