Texturing megaprims

[Zembel Braham]

Hey,

I am trying to save prims on a build by using megaprims for the long exterior walls (up to 27 meters). I have a problem with textures for these. If a brick or concrete texture has any markings or variations, the repeats make a quilting pattern that is very obvious from a distance. It there are no variations in a tiling texture it looks, well, boring. And this is a grunge build, I really don't want uniformity!

I have tried using 1024 textures, but then with a single repetition the bricks are too big, or the scratches in the concrete are stretched out and funny looking.

What's the best way to tackle this?

Thanks,

Zem

[Dilbert Dilweg]

The way I do it is set the prim at any size at 10 meters max or less. then ad the texture. after that you should be able to make the prim large with one repeat per face

 

Put the texture on before to ever expand the prim past 10 meters

[Zembel Braham]

Thanks Dilbert, I will try that. But it's counterintuitive, since stretching the prim out from 10 to 27 meters will stretch the texture too, right? I hope I'm wrong!

BTW I have already tried taking a (uniform, tileable) brick texture, scaling it down with Gimp and putting multiple copies of it into a larger image. I hoped that would allow me to add the grunge I wanted with Gimp, and get around the quilting that way. Unfortunately the texture came out looking blurry. Maybe I did it wrong.

Zem

[Dilbert Dilweg]

Yea it is a bit of a pain in the arse to have to alter your normal work flow. But the outcome works,

It was upsetting me one day too lol

[Dilbert Dilweg]

You will notice your textures get stretched quite a bit as the prim gets bigger. After you get it to the size that you want. Right click it and Open the edit tools, then click the texture tab. Down below where the Repeats Per Meter spot is, put the value 0.1 in, and then click apply, and it will reform your texture "thats what I do for brick that gets distorted"

After that you should also be able to use planar properties as well

 

It is very limited

[Dilbert Dilweg]

I wonder if it would be more efficient to make a 64 meter prim as mesh in blender or something and create a texture UV map and UVmap it that way I never tried that

[Zembel Braham]

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Dilbert Dilweg wrote:

I wonder if it would be more efficient to make a 64 meter prim as mesh in blender or something and create a texture UV map and UVmap it that way

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Oooh, that sounds great. But Blender is beyond me, I am still learning how to Gimp!

Zem

[Drongle McMahon]

The problem you describe is the unavoidable result of the maximum texture size. You either get visible repeats or the resolution of the texture is too low. You can improve on this with mesh. First, you can use eight textures by putting quads with different materials side-by-side, four on each side of a wall, or all eight on one side if you use another mesh for the other side oof the wall (you can get the same effect by linking separate ordinary prims, but the mesh solution is cheaper in land impact). Then you can use UV mapping to rotate and/or reflect each texture so that the repeats are less obvious. (Here is Maeve Balfour's discussion of this technique.) This will be quite challenging if you don't want a tiled wall.

[Dilbert Dilweg]

Thank you for that . Yea thats kind of what I was thinking. I recently tackled UVmapping and enjoying it. Was a lot to learn but once you wrap your head around it. its not too bad. I just have a lot of experimenting to do As wel as still have a lot to learn. You guys really know your stuff

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Short of the mesh option that Drongle mentioned  I don't see a solution that would work very well.  To get a reasonable size for a brick in a wall to a believable scale you need to figure out how many normal sized bricks will span a wall 27 meters long.  A quick calculation using 39 inches to a meter (I'm American and feet and inches are much easier for me work with........y'all metric types can do it easily enough using metric sizes).  27 meters is 1053 inches.  Guessing at the size of brick's length being 8 inches that gives you about 131 1/2 bricks needed horizontally for the wall........you'd have to do the same calculation for the height to keep the proportions reasonable.  You have a maximum of 1024 pixels that you can use for your texture in one either the horizontal or the vertical dimension so you have to divid that 131 1/2 into 1024 which tells you how large in pixels each brick has to be to span the wall on the megaprim.  That makes each brick 7.8 pixels for the length (no pixel can be smaller than a single pixel.........7 or 8 pixels is what you have to make each brick in length.  That's not enough to have much detail at all.  And the height of each brick is going to have even fewer pixels to define any detail.

If mesh is not an option for you then you're going to have to settle on the "boring uniform" look or the "quilted" look.  The option I just mentioned about making the texture fit the prim would not look good at all in my opinion.

[Drongle McMahon]

You can also use five textures side-by-side by making a 5-panel prism prim - set path cut to 0.2 - 0.8, hollow to 66.7%. Then flatten on the x axis. You will have five equally wide texture panels on one side, but only one on the other. To get one unit of texture width on each panel, the texture horizontal texture repeats need to be set to 2.5, 1.0, 15.0, 1.0, 2.5, and the horizontal offsets to -0.25, 0, 0 , 0, +0.25. Then flip the middle texture horixontally. Now you can put a different texture on each and see them tile properly. Unfortunately, the back will still be all one face.

Here's an example, using the same texture to show the tiling and tintying to show the five faces. Of course you would use five different faces for the real thing, but they would still have to tile with each other properly.

ETA - I'll give a Kudos to anyone who first offers a plausible explanation explain of why the texture repeats needed on the centre panel (it's the inside of the hollow) is 15. I had to discover it experimentally.

[Zembel Braham]

Wow Drongle, that looks awesome! I can hardly wait to try it at home.

I can use five copies of a nicely tiling texture, and Gimp some grunge onto each so they won't be identical.What I want in this case is the look of cinder blocks, painted over and then grunged. Some graffiti too. Wow!

Zem

[Amethyst Jetaime]

The repeaty quilted look is more noticeable with some textures and less noticeable with others.  If you can't find one that looks good without being too uniform, you can download the one your using and alter it in a graphics program and make a custom texture for the wall.  Tile it to the correct brick size in your program then edit it to take out the repeaty parts but leave some variation in to avoid the uniform look.  If your wall is say 10x27m make your texture high resolution (1024) in the proportions of w 2.7 to h 1 . Save it as 1024 pixels x 777pixels.  When you  upload it into SL it will look distorted but wont when you apply it to the prim.

[Zembel Braham]

Thanks, Amethyst, I will try that too. I love hunting for textures, but I am also feeling a need to get on with the build. Unluckily, I have an eye that seeks out patterns, maybe more than other people, so what looks quilty to me might not be obnoxious to others. I suppose I can finish the build with "good enough" and then go on my hunt for the impeccable texture.

Zem

[Tigger Genira]

There are a couple of problems with that 5 face shape. To use it for building it will have to be a paper-thin wall, or the nature of the underlying prim shape starts to come out. The shape itself kind of folds in under itself in places (make one, and before you flatten it you will see what I mean) and once its been flattened for use this can result in texture flash when you view it from a distance.

You could do something similar with just a path cut cube to get 2 faces, but still have some thickness to it and no texture-flash issues, although of course 2 faces is no where near so handy as 5.

In the end though, whatever you are building, be it prims, sculpts or mesh, you end up having to compromise somewhere, maximum detail costs maximum prim counts or land impact or whatever we call it now. You have to come to a level of detail that works for you within the resources you have available. It's always a challenge.

[Drongle McMahon]

Yes. It has limited practical uses. It has to have minimum thickness and that leaves the textures imperfectly registered anyway when looked at from a narrow angle. There's really no point in using it now that we have mesh which can have four independent textures on each side. More an interesting object for people to play with than a rerally useful object.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Drongle McMahon wrote:

 

ETA - I'll give a Kudos to anyone who first offers a plausible explanation explain of why the texture repeats needed on the centre panel (it's the inside of the hollow) is 15. I had to discover it experimentally.

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Never looked into it and the numbers on at least a cubes inner surface never made sense to me. This one however seems to be pretty straight forward. The panel is one 5th of the entire thing as you see it and it's one third of the entire hole...3 times 5 is...

[Drongle McMahon]

Ah yes. I was forgetting the hole was a triangle?  :matte-motes-sour: