Unwrapping a prim?

Total noob question:

If I don't want a tiled texture, how can I unwrap a prim?- ie lay out all the surfaces flat so that I can make a custom fitted tex in Photoshop. A simple line guide would be fine.

I know there are ways to do this with Blender & 3DSmax. Is it already in SL, or has anyone made an add-on?

Thanx in advance

Kendo

What you're asking is how to make a full-object UV map. SL has no way to do this inherently, unfortunately. The good news though is that since everything in SL is made from primitives, the UV maps are always totally straight forward, full canvas, completely uniform. There's no need to worry about what arbitrary part of the canvas might correspond to what strange part of the object surface. It's always a 1-1, completely direct relationship.

Still, some people do tend to find certain prim surfaces a bit confusing at first, like spheres and toruses. For some reason, roundish surfaces tend to baffle people. I've never really understood why, but they do. Textures wrap around a sphere the same way a map wraps around a globe, squeezed to a single point at the poles, full size at the equator. Toruses map just like cylinders in 2D. It's just that they're bent in 3D space so the top and bottom meet.

Anyway, I'd recommend you take a look at Robin Sojourner's Inworld Texturing Tutorials for more info on the prim UV's.

Thanks Chosen Few. Yes, a UV map is exactly what I meant.

That way a texture with an alpha mask could be fitted exactly to a 3D object with minimal unwanted distortion, and done all in one paint-&-place operation.

I know the opened-out texture would be bigger on a UV mapped tex, than with separate texs fitted to sufaces. But I'm not sure how else you could, say, paint a circular logo on a 3D cone. Not all surfaces could be opened flat, but a meshed UV map could show contours on curved sufaces.

Maybe its just that I have a 2D brain.

I will check out those tuts though.

Thanks again

BTW- think your link to Robin's tuts goes to wrong post!

As far as I can tell, the tuts are only in-game at benten 25,115,28... I'll go see....

Wow...those tuts look good, I'll take em all...thanks Chosen Few & Robin!