Animated propeller looks wrong from various angles.

First I tried to make a prim propeller - looks good, but didn't spin right.

So then I made a textured prim that spun around. Worked well but didn't work when re-rezzed.

So I finally juts plopped down an animated texture as a propeller. The thing is, my vehicle's propeller is horizontal on the bottom of the aircraft, and since the prim I applied the texture to is flat, looking at it from the side looks odd.

I also tried making and "X" formation where I used a copy of the flat prim and rotated it perpendicular to the original. It made it look funky and cruddy IMO =)

Any ideas as to what can be done?

Thanks =D

Yeah the side of an animated texture prop is a bit of a problem. Simplest fix is to just make it so thin you dont see it... not elegant but...

One possibility once 1.7 comes online would be a rotating AV attachment via llTargetOmega, and if you wanted to get fancy, a fixed version on the plane that goes alpha and an alphaed version on your AV that becomes visible only when you sit on said vehicle

1.7 will also allow some amount of child prim rotation/movement but probably not enough to make it do exactly what you want.

L8r,
UU

Trying to picture this, hopefully as you are making it, but here's a suggestion...

Make an animated texture of the propeller as seen head-on, place it on one end of a flat cylinder. Make the other sides of the cylinder fully alpha. (Set them 100% alpha-ed via a script or give them a full-transparent texture.)

Now, for a rough job, you could also apply your animated texture other end of the cylinder, but there is a minimum thickness required, so that there will be a gap between one side and the other as you move around it.

The solution is to make a second copy of the one-sided cylinder and flip it to face the other direction. Then move it so its textured end buts against the other one.

If you have trouble picturing this, imagine two cylinders stacked one on top of the other. The propeller animated texture is on the faces that are touching, and all the rest are transparent.

That should give you a perfectly thin surface.


If you WANT the propeller to have some thickness, perhaps a second animated texture of a flickering, semi-transparent blur can be placed on the side of a single cylinder, with the animated spin texture on either end. This might be harder to make look RIGHT, however

Tiger, I'll save you a prim.

Make a cylinder and apply your propeller texture to the top and bottom. Use the shape pulldown on the edit window to change the cylinder to a sphere. Dimple it to 0.49 / 0.51 then change it back to a cylinder. Set the Z dimension to 0.01 meters which will now be equivalent to 0.0002 meters. I dare anyone to notice a gap between the faces.

I suggest using Julian's technique here too, it works wonders for making all kinds of super-flat prims!

Well here, my propeller texture is attached.

No wonder you're having trouble. I'd highly recommend losing that texture and going with one that is a head-on view instead of a side view. Something like this would work. Don't use that exact one though since you obviously don't have the owner's permission. Either make your own, get permission to use someone else's, or hire someone to make one for you.

Aw crud