Anyone ever gotten around this?

Take a look at THIS image. You'll all be familliar with what's going on I'm sure. I need to use the DEFAULT mappings ability to squeeze the whole texture onto a non-rectangular face, but without the folding that occurs in the middle, I NEED the whole thing to look neat! If I ever pull it off I'll show you why and I think you'll be impressed!

Anyone got a solution? Planar is of no use to me this time

Cheers guys

personley i would use planar mapping .
The texture would be better of distorted in a paint program before upload.

I use a shape like that as control panel , and is the only way around the problem i that have found.
you will and up with two triangle shaped borders on the sides of you texture

with the default mapping it will always skew to the face of the prim

with planar maping its a projection

trick

make a copy of the prim, scale it down to basicly non existant (really tiny)

attach it to your hud

make a snapshot ... save it to disk

gointo your paint prog, cut out just the hud part you want, resize to a power of 2 and basicly turn it into a mask

now you can paint within that mask when uploaded to SL and used as a planar map it will not be distorted, and your edges will match up to the face (if you need to border the image or whatnot)

Landing, I can't imagine why you wouldn't want to use planar mapping, but since you don't, you can work the way we used to do it before planar mapping existed in SL. Personally, I think you'd be crazy to expend all the extra effort required since planar mapping does the job so much more efficiently, but if you really want to do all the extra work to reverse-distort standard mapping, you certainly can.

Basically what you need to do is create your texture in the shape of the prim, subdivide it along the UV lines into two triangles, and then stretch those two triangles to fill the square canvas. When applied to the prim, it will "unstretch" and become its normal shape.

One half of the texture will always look a bit blurry if you do it this way, just so you know. There's no way around that unless you use planar mapping.

If you don't care to do all the division and stretching by hand, Robin Sojourner created a great action set for Photoshop that will do the work for you. All you need to do is create the texture as it should look on the prim, press one button, and BAM! Photoshop will map it to a square automatically. You can download the actions from Robin's website.

Again, I'd highly recommend using planar mapping, as the results will look much better, and will be much easier to control, much more scalable, and much more flexible, but you can do all this extra work if you really feel the need. Out of curiosity, why are you so averse to using planar mapping?

It is a bit hard for people to give you a clear answer if the reason for avoiding planar mapping is not known.

You have some scripts that only work well with default mapping perhaps?

Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing so I was going to explain. We have ONE texture that is to be mapped to the inside of a dome. We need a single texture because we want to map some, well, I'll call it video to it. It's not a video but it is a QT stream so we'll refer to it as a video eh? Hence, if the edges don't tile up properly to show a single image, we can't get the display to look proper, which is what I need.

Does that make more sense? There will be no image manipulation because even if we could take into account how the default mapping would warp it, we can't go and correct on every frame of the stream unfortunately! If we use planar mapping, the edges disappear and it doesn't tile properly.

I can do it with default mapping no problems, just need to do some serious maths to figure out all the offsets etc, probably more trouble than its worth, but we really want to do this and I need a way around the ridiculously poor implementation of some mapping techniques here. I'm pretty sure a simple way around this with OpenGL is to switch the cubes to quads. That shouldn't make any difference to SL at all, or at least the edges that can't be hollowed.

I think your best bet is to use a geodesic dome constructed from equilateral triangles.

Geodesic dome because this is one of the shapes that allows you to build a sphere cleanly out of a non-variable prim size.

I don't think you want to build the dome out of tapering cubes of variable sizes, since you'd have too much of a fun time figuring out the offsets for all the different sized prims.

Hmm, I was using the Globe Builder to create the dome so it was actually quite simple, and I had thought about a Geodesic, but thinking about it, a Geodesic sphere doesn't split perfectly in half does it? I shall see if I can build the dome from triangles tho, you're right, it should work better!

You can find a tutorial at Robin Sojourner's website (www.robinwood.com) that will show you how to map a square texture onto a trapezoidal 2d surface using adobe photoshop. She even has it automated, and it works pretty well.

Um, thanks, but that's the same as what has already been suggested and thrown out. Mapping onto a trapezoid isn't a problem, it's getting a single texture and video to map over a number of trapezoids that is the problem, but thanks for the effort!

If you have control of the viewers perspective you could tilt a tall thin screen and have it look the same.

I also would like to note that having lots of small pieces of screen will take longer to render and thus you would be better off having people zoom in as needed to one single prim screen.

I know the graphics engine has a distorted stretch blt command that can distort the image as desired, but I don't know of a prim that will stretch an image this way.

Correction: The top part of a sphere distorts the texture this way. you might be able to add part of a squashed sphere just for the texture.

I am thinking you are trying to make an omni-max.

Unfortunately, I don’t know which video distortion plan you are using.
One thought would be to change the video to a "Cone" distortion plan.

Does the video play correctly on the inside of a hollow sphere?

I am guessing it would be distorted since the sphere wedges do not line up well at some lod levels.
The LOD system would wreck chaos on any sphere-based system.

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There is also a cubic-based dome system. I don't remember the exact details, but the simplest version uses one square per side and one square per flat corner then it has triangles to fill in the corners to make a sphere that looks like an octagon from the side.

tares form as you expand the number of squares and you have to stretch the triangles to fill them in until it is complete. I believe you have to increase it in multiples of 8 to get the squares to come out right.

This won't help in your case as the video still is distorted.
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maybe a super sized prim would work.

PLANETARIUM? That would be cool

You might ask the guy who did UBrowser, which can project HTML to a 3d surface (including a sphere). I don't know anything about it other than what's on that page; I happened to see it when looking for something else.

Good luck.