Thin cylinders

Hello. I am trying to create a ring textured inside and outside but transparent at the rims (see attached image). However, since I can only hollow a cylinder up until 95% and no further, I am left with noticeable gaps in the continuity of the texture once you look at it from any angle other than straight on. I figured that if I can reduce the width of the rim--say, by hollowing the cylinder to 99%--these gaps won't be as noticeable. However, I cannot find a way to do it. I also experimented with different prims to try to get to a nice cleanly-textured ring--but no luck. Has anyone figured a way to do this? Any help would be appreciated.

Use a tube instead of a cylinder. Hollow it just 5%. Texture all outer surfaces with a 100% alpha, and texture just the inside of the hollow with your jewelry texture. The result should appear as a paper thin ring.

Nope. That didn't work Chosen. See the picture on the left. I sorta got what I was looking for. I used a ring (to make a ring--duh) with its Hole Size set to 1.00 for X and 0.05 for Y and I got the results that you see on the right. It's better. The gaps are smaller. But they are still there. How do people go about doing rings such as these? Is this how they do it? Are these gaps something that I have to live with?

Not sure why that didn't work for you. Maybe my instructions weren't clear. Here's what it should look like.

Anyway, if this ring is intended as a piece of jewelry, I'm not sure why you're so concerned with texturing both the inside and the outside. All you really need to do is the outside. When the ring is worn, the av will obscure the inside. Also, keep in mind that rings as attachments are problemeatic since there are no finger attachment points, just one for the entire hand. You'll have to use an animation to keep the fingers from moving.

EDIT: I just realized you're using an alpha texture. Not sure how I missed that the first time, but part of the problem you're having is becuase of alpha sorting issues that SL has (as do almost all 3D applications and video games). When two 32-bit textures overlap, they have a tendency to fight with eachother or cancel eachother out. One result of this is that parts of cylinrical and spherical shapes will disappear at the edges where they begin to curve back on themselves. This is (unfortunately) perfectly normal, and there's nothing really that you can do about it. In any case, I'd still go with the tube method. It's going to give you the thinnest possible ring, and the alpha sorting shouldn't be too bad.

Wow. That is a fabulous tip. Thanks Chosen!

Here's another method. Make it out of two cylinders, one for the outside of your ring, one for the inside.

This for example, is two cylinders, both hollow 80%. One is 0.5 wide, the other is 0.5 / 0.8 = 0.625 wide. The 0.8 comes from the 80%.

Then texture the outside of the smaller cylinder and the inside of the larger, to have the two sides of the apparent strip be in precisely the same position.

IIRC, you can actually hollow things to 98% if you type in the number instead of using the mouse. Unless they fixed that.

Chosen, it's probably the 32-bit texture overlap issue that you mention. I do get that thin plywood ring with your method, but then all hell breaks loose when I apply the lace texture (although, honestly, every time I do it, I get different results, so it might be me, not sure). At any rate, it's still a valuable tip for other projects.

Seifert, it worked! Not sure why your method worked and Chosen's didn't given all that alpha sorting and what not, but I'm not complaining. I guess you do have to be a mathematician to figure that 0.5/0.8 part Cool stuff, thanks.

Eggy, I can't hollow things to 98% by typing in the number. Although I was also under the impression that before I could.

Glad it finally worked out for you.

Chosen's technique should also work, though the texture repeats on the inside of hollow prims are counter-intuitive. I think what happens (just tried it with a test pattern) is that the inside of the tube is a single face as far as the texture is concerned, and the amount of the texture that is used to cover the face (without playing about with the repeats per face) is less than you would expect.

Increasing the "repeats per face, vertical" to about 82.0, flipping vertically and putting the vertical offset to 0.515 looks like it might do what you want.

P.S. I'm pretty sure I've never been able to hollow to more than 95%. I would have used it in something if I could have.

Nope, no go. See image. I might be able to do a better job with that black line that goes all around right underneath the lace if I play with the numbers a bit more or use a different texture tile. However, the gaps still remain and the lace appears inverted when you look at its inside part. You can see that in your example too. The numbers look inverted when you look at the inside of the tube. This technique looks like it might be useful for something where texturing is not much of an issue, but I can't see how it can be used in a case such as the one I got here. Anyway, it was a good try but this damn tube is proving to be too unmanageable, lol.