can see out - can't see in

Is there a way of doing this? A window for example, that is opaque from the outside, and transparent (or semi) from the inside. I'd like to apply it to a hollow prim if possible....

If there is a way, i'd appreciate a clue or two on how to do it.

aaron

Just put a transparent texture on the inside and an opaque one on the outside.

You could do it with llSetAlpha as well.

Prims can certainly have a transparent texture on one side and a non-transparent one on the other side. A lot of tinted home windows do that, and leave the inside view clear, while the outside opaques for a sense of privacy. (Though anyone can still maneuver a camera right through the wall anyway, even if all sides are textured as opaque lead bricks!)

The hard part here is that a hollow prim, such as you want to use, has only one texture on the inside, streached horizontally across the 4 apparent faces. So if you made a 10 x 10 x 5 M high cube, and hollowed it, you could either repeat the open window 4 times around the inside, and have four opaque-tinted windows on the four outside walls, or you will need to make a texture that is several times wider than it is long, and have each fourth of it different. The latter is possible, but very tricky to pull off well. Especially as the exact repeat rate to fit the inside isn't precisely 4, but rather is based on the % hollowed as well. So at 95% hollowed it is something like 4 times 0.95 for the exact horiontal repeat value that will make 4 actual repeats.

You may want to look at what I did wth a little Tudor cottage that I set up in the Amarin Bei sim. It's off by the NW corner of the sim, by the horse paddocks. The walls of the cottage are two hollowed and cut prims, plus a few small parts to frame the door properly.

In edit mode top left part you can select single faces of a prim.
each face has its own texture, alpha, fullbright and glow value.

the hole of a prim is always one face, even on square holes...

thank you all for your suggestions. i'll try them out.

aaron

ps: one note - the prim i'm intending to use this on is a hollowed sphere. with a dimple. don't know if that makes a difference or not...

Sorry to be dense ollj oh - but i can't find the place in the upper left where it gives me access to the various 'faces' of the sphere - can you try the description of where to find it again?

thanks
aaron

Hi Aaron

I think Ollj ment click select texture in the build window then you click the face you want to texture,

As for the dimpled sphere the only issue you should have is that on the dimpled face you'l find that the texture is stretched in a ring around the center point i.e. the bottom of the texture vanishes down to the center point of the prim and the top runs all the way around the outer edge of the dimple can actualy be quite usefull but it'd depend on the texture your using and wetehr or not you can get away with repeating it.

Also, one issue with doing *anything* inside a hollowed prim - Every time you try to focus your camera at an inside face, the camera will get thrown to the outside of the prim, on the same line of sight behind you. This makes using a hollowed prim as a living space rather problematic as a way to save prims.

So you're inside the sphere, and you want to look at the wall. When you try, by any means other than mouselook, the camera is now positioned as if it was pressed up against the outside of the sphere, behind you.

The bug was reported years ago, and has never yet been fixed. The camera treats a prim as solid, even when it is hollow.

Exact formula for figuring out repeats on a hollowed prim:

<#repeats per face> * <#faces in hollow> / <hollow setting>

that has been an annoyance of mine, apparently it considers the 2*thickness to be textured also (the hidden edge of the cut from the hollow to the outside on even ucut prims)... why this is done I have no idea, but it jives with what I've used of a sigle repeat for each face on the inside of a 95% hollow cube (4.2 vs 4.2105263157894736842105263157895)...

I guess that means the offset to align it to the cut position (corner on a cube) would be be
((<#repeats per face> * <#faces in hollow> / <hollow setting> - (<#repeats per face> * <#faces in hollow> ) / 2

or for my above cube would be
((1 * 4 / .95) - (1* 4)) / 2 = .1 (really 0.10526315789473684210526315789474)

thanks Ceera