Water Design Issues

I am building a rather large water feature on my land (river, waterfalls, etc) and am having a pretty good time of it. However, I have a couple of questions.

First, is there any remedy for the "seams" that are visible when two water prims come into contact? These are two large flattened cubes. I was careful to make them the same size, rotation, and to place them exactly aligned. But, I can't get rid of the seam. Any tricks (other than covering with rocks, lol) or am I stuck with this?

Secondly, where I have water flowing over rocks, all seems fine until I add ANY level of transparency to the water. Then the water seems to disappear when viewed from certain angles. It looks fine, and then when I swing the camera around, I can only see the underlying rock. It continually switches back and forth. (The rocks have 0 transparency - I had read there was an issue with two transparent prims in close contact, but this doesn't seem to apply here. Or did I misunderstand that?)

Thanks for any help!
Talynn

The seams sadly is going to be issue to a degree no matter what you do. The common answer (which ya already noted didnt like) is using rocks, mist or otheer coverings. You can diminish the effect somewhat by making the edges that touch invisible. This will only work to a degree though.

The other problem I would have to look at ingame to make sure the effect your talking about.

Thanks, Tere. I was afraid of the seams answer

As to the other issue, if you ever want to come take a look, shoot me an IM whenever you are free; I'd appreciate it!

This won't completey solve the problems with seams but it will help: put a completely clear texture on the prim faces that are touching each other. There should be a LL one in the Library section of your inventory. *reads again*. Oh, wait, that was allready said. ^.^;

The disappearing texture thing you describe does sound like the usual "two alpha textures in front of each other" problem. It's possible that the rock texture you're using mistakenly has an alpha (transparency) channel in it, even though it doesn't look transparent. Try a few different rock textures and see if the problem continues.

Thanks, Elle. I will try some different rock textures. Is there any way to tell if a texture has an alpha channel, short of waiting to see if this problem pops up, then changing textures? I guess I didn't realize that was possible (if the thing doesn't *look* transparent, heh) so I never considered that.

ETA: Yep, Elle, that was the problem. I tried some default Linden rock textures, and it's fine now. Darn, I really LOVED that texture. Would anyone know if it's possible for me to play around with the file myself in paintshop and "fix" it? Or will the alpha always be there? I suppose this would be better in the texture forum, sorry...

You have to choose your textures VERY well for it. Highly shaded ones, ones with light on one side, dark on the other will look great as lake water until they're put in motion. Then their tiling is horribly obvious. Using certain textures, like venous ones, the tiling of which is less obvious, helps eliminate this problem to a certain extent.

If I do fall in love with a very shaded texture however, a texture that looks like a picture of lake water (see me inworld for one)...I make lots of flat boxes and texture them with it. (I set the sides of the boxes to completely transparent, of course, to lessen the appearance of tiling) I change the diagnonal and repeats on all these textures so that the design appears to continue onto the next or all contiguous boxes. This takes time..and is a bit tricky. (Catch me inworld to demo) THESE LAKE TEXTURED PRIMS ARE KEPT MOTIONLESS. Over these, I place a Linden Lab 'ripple 2' prim/flat box usually, moving a bit slowly, as lake water will, about .03. If the horizontal water is a base of a falls, I make it more quickly flowing, about .04 to .05 in the texture anim script. I may place a rock or 2 if there is an area of the design which is still being affected by obvious tiling.


To use venous textures in a great and EASY way to make a lake or pond, Toy Lafollette's technique is the best, and is used by the better spa and lake artists in SL....

Make 3 to 4 flat boxes or flat cylinders (not flat spheres). Texture all of them with a venous/marbelized texture. This, to help lessen the tiling effect and to enhance the look of radiating water.

Give this first prim a transparency of your choice. Put the second prim on top of this one, turning it 70-90 degrees or so and giving it a greater transparency than the first.

Now, place your other prim(s) in like fashion, one atop the other, turning each 70-90 degrees roughly in relation to the previously placed one, and giving each a greater tranparency than the one below it.

I prefer a VERY slow moving water script for this technique to work its best. let's say .02-.03.

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As for the 'disappearing act' I've seem with some of my more delicately textured/alpha textured prims at times, I've found no resolution other that to log off and log back on Even changing their placement does not help. So, if anyone knows how to avoid this particular peculiarity, pls help! )

Good luck and happy building!

If I understand what you mean by "seams", try turning the prim all alpha, then just texturing the top part of the prim with the water texture. If you have a good tiling texture, this should get rid of all the seams for ya, if it's what I think it is you are asking about

Margot, I am pleased to hear from you! I am rather a fan of your water designs, and you have really inspired me to try my own hand. The "dark on one side, light on the other" was an issue I ran into with some of the glass textures you had recommended in your literature. Very beautiful, but some had really obvious tiling. So, I know what you mean, but I am still finding uses for them.

Using motionless tiles that are aligned *just so* under a moving ripple is a great idea! I will definitely try that. I have noticed the tiling is a lot less obvious in the ripple texture.

Using stacked multiple prims with rotated directions in the animations is a super technique, too, which I have used to great effect. And, as I said in an earlier post, changing the texture on the rocks fixed the disappearing act, though another "true" solution would have been nice ... Again, thanks for your input!

Lazink, the seam problem I was referring to isn't so much visible "seams" it's the obvious stop of one animation, and start of another. I can't really see lines, as such, just the skip in animation, if that makes sense. Oh, I just had an idea, dunno why I didn't think of this before.... I wonder if I could correct that with very careful manipulation of the offset. Hmm, have to try that! (ETA: nope, didn't work. I didn't realize that the offset changes constantly with the animation, duh. nm) And, thanks for the tip, Lazink, I am sure it will come in handy.

If seams become a problem, I start increasing transparency levels. If you're making a shallow pond, the texture you use for the bottom of the pond can also help disguise seams.

It depends. If you have full permissions to the texture in SL, then you can open the texture up from your inventory and use File > Save Texture As... to save it to your hard drive as a TGA file, then fix it in Photoshop (Layers > Flatten Image should do the trick? Or you could delete the Alpha channel from the Channels pallate I guess. Then make sure to re-save it in a different file as a 24-bit image.) However if it's not full perms, you're out of luck. (I know there were some freebie rock textures out there that have this problem but no idea if that's what you have.)