Robbie Dingo modeling style question

Hi, I have been looking alot at the modeling style that Robbie Dingo used to make Suzanne Vega's guitar. I can get the base of items made and everything else. However, I am a little puzzled as to how he made the texture for the top of the object.

I am guessing that he made a square texture and imported it into SL. He used alpha map areas to filter out the blank spaces. Thus, the rest of the texture is the clean image of the guitar.

Now, what I don't get is how did he figure out the EXACT size of the texture. I mean you can't just take a random guitar image, drop it into SL, and expect it to fit perfectly onto a premade object.

I'm guessing that he took a overhead helicopter shot of what he was making. and took that shot into a program like illustrator. From illustrator he set the boundary areas with the pen tool and placed the textures for the top of the guitar inside this area. Now that he has it all sorted out, he can add the boundary box around the guitar texture and make it the color of his alpha texture. Import into SL, Stretch it into place, and lay it down for a nice perfect fit.

But how the heck would he take a perfect helicopter view shot. O_o Is there a way to set it so that your view is perfectly even to set up such a shot? Cause even a small fraction off would mess up the texture and it wouldn't fit correctly.

Well this is just my idea on the texture style. Anyone have any ideas or assist even ^_^?
Thanks a ton
~Akurus Etzel

Also for anyone who hasn't seen the video of him making the guitar here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQL8_HB1HtQ

You're assuming the prim guitar was premade and the texture applied later. While you can't tell from the video, I'm sure Robbie traced the guitar from somewhere.

You can script the SL camera, but it's not necessary. Just place a snapshot of the guitar down and then trace it with prims.

Use a grid? When texturing complex prim arrangements, I always apply and align a grid to every face -- ensuring all the grid lines match up when texture continuity is required. By looking at my grid on a single prim face, I can then open the same grid file in Illustrator or Photoshop and easily work out *exactly* where I should put the required details.

Disable the grid layer, save to tga, job done.

As others have stated, the simplest thing to do for something like this is just to make the texture first, and then trace the perimeter with prims. However, to answer your question, if you want to do it the other way around, it's not that hard. Here's how:

1. Put the guitar perimeter model against a flat cube, slightly bigger than the model. The cube will serve as the background for the screenshot you're about to take.

2. Press ctrl-0 a few times to set the camera view to be as orthagonal as it can get. (ctrl-8 makes it more fisheyed, ctrl-0 makes it more orthographic, ctl-9 sets it back to default)

3. Zoom the camera in or out so that the cube fills as much of the screen as possible, and try to angle the camera so that the edges of the cube as parellel to the edges of the screen as you can.

4. Take your screenshot, and bring it into Photoshop.

5. Set the Crop tool in Photoshop to perspective mode, draw a box with it on the canvas, and then put the 4 corners of the box precisely on the 4 corners of the cube. Hit Enter to crop the image, and the whole thing will straighten out to be perfectly square, all traces of perspective eliminated.

6. Now just use the image of the guitar model as a template for the shape of the top.


I use this technique all the time for stuff way more complicated than that guitar. For objects with a lot of complexly shaped parts, a great thing to do is to put all the parts in front of a cube, in whatever configuration they best fit, and then use the screenshot template to create a single texture that has all the textures for all the parts built right into it. Think of it kind of like "poor man's UV mapping". With careful use of repeats and offsets on the prims, one single canvas can contain all the textures for dozens of individual surfaces. This won't work for parts that have spheres or toruses in them, but it will work for everything else.

As others have stated, the simplest thing to do for something like this is just to make the texture first, and then trace the perimeter with prims.

I am trying to recreate one of my guitars in SL using this method
Tracing the perimeter with prims is the hard part since the curves of the guitar have complex radiuses. Are there any tips and tricks on hoe to do this?