Building and Texturing Forum

[iCade Member]

Hello! I am a pretty new builder, and I have ran into a problem.

I have bought a few plant textures (grass, trees) but I cannot figure out how to turn the textures into an actual item. I tried dragging the textures onto a prim but that doesn't work well.

Could anyone possibly take the time to explain this to me, please?

[Casper Priestman]

Normally the time honored tradition is to take two or more prims that have your texture and intersect them. For simplicity sake...take your plant texture and apply it to a prim so that the texture takes up an entire face of the prim. Make the prim as thin as possible so basically you have a two sided prim with a plant texture on each side. Now make a copy of the prim and intersect it with the first one ie: make an X or + sign. Some plants obviously use more than two prims but the majority of small prim based plants are like this. Link the two prims and make it flexible for a little added movement based on wind.

[Marcus Hancroft Member]

To add to Casper's post, iCade, you can also get yourself a sculpted plant prim.  They have as few as 4 sides and as many as 64!  The typical sculpt plant prim is 8 sides and looks, for all the world, like an asterick from the top down before you texture it.  The only thing about these sculpted prims is that they cannot be flexi, so they will not "blow in the wind."  The only way to do that is to do just as Casper suggested and use two or three flat prims, intersected and linked.

[Josh Susanto]

You can also get one of my free sculpted alpha plants (NOT the standard technique), study how the textures are put together, and edit your own alphas to put on the sculpt. 

If you're really tricky, you can study the sculpt, itself, and make a few variants of your own.

[LillyBeth Filth Member]

Create 1 prim cube.

Texture it fully in a 100% transparent texture (the SL Library in your inventory will have this type of texture) 

Make it as thin as possible so it look's like a piece flat plane.

One both of the two sides of your flat and fully transparent prim,  apply your plant texture.

**Adding a transparent texture to the entire prim ensures no "edges" are seen on the prim /sculpted plant**

Duplicate the flat prim (now textured with plant texture on 2 sides) and rotate it 90 degrees so you create a star shape if you were to look down on top of the prims. 

Link the 2 prims. 

OR buy a sculpt map and slap your texture on that. Zero texturing or building skills needed.

But: Sculpted things can be ugly until they rez like ugly alien weird shaped blobs until the they "pop" into their desired shape.

 

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

You can also use a mesh for this. That won't have the long loading time or the distorted appearance from a distance. It will also be a lot friendlier in terms of lag. I made one that has 3 planes instead of your 2. It is only one prim by itself. Two linked together is also one prim. If the mesh itself has several of these plants, rather than being a linkset, It should be possible to have a lot more of them for one prim. I haven't tested this (yet) with different amounts of plants or very large sizes.