Color graduation on a prim

[CajunMaster]

I'm fairly new to building so forgive me if this is too much of a newbie question, or if it has been asked before.

I'd like to build a prim without textures and have the color change along the prim's height, lighter at the top than at the bottom.

 

Is this doable?

 

 

[Ackley Bing]

Simply, it is done with a texture.

Why are you trying to do it without a texture?

[CajunMaster]

Because I didn't know a texture was required, foolish me.

 

I assume I need a texture that goes from light to dark?  Is there something appropriate in the library?

[Ackley Bing]

You can find those kind of transitional texture in some of the texture freebie packs out there.

I'm not sure if there is something like that in the Library. The Library content keeps changing over the years.

[Madelaine McMasters]

Welcome to the forums, CajunMaster:

I don't think you can get the effect you want without at least applying a greyscale gradient texture to the prim, then using llSetColor to obtain your desired hue.

Under controlled circumstances, a local light could provide gradient illumination to a prim, but the falloff would be circular and other light sources would interfere.

[Rolig Loon]

It's very easy to make a graded texture in Photoshop, GIMP, or your favorite graphics program.  Takes about 10 seconds.  That way you won't have to accept the random color choices you'll find among the freebies too.

[Madelaine McMasters]

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CajunMaster wrote:

Because I didn't know a texture was required, foolish me.

 

I assume I need a texture that goes from light to dark?  Is there something appropriate in the library?

---

Most drawing programs have the ability to create a gradient. You'll want one that goes from black to white (or between two shades of grey to your liking). I'm sure there is something like that for sale in SL, but I've no idea where you'd find it. Learning to create and import textures is one of the most rewarding things a new creator can learn, so I encourage you to try!

[CajunMaster]

Sounds good.  I'll do some experimenting and see what I can come up with.

 

Thanks for the help, I'm sure there will be more questions to come.

[GuyverxCobalt]

You'll need a texture that will cover the whole prim. Afterwords use the repeating faces to move it into a single face image on the prim so its the way you wanted it. If if its facing the wrong way you can use the rotation for the texturing on the build menu for the texture tab.

 

Hope this helps!

[Geldsbard Freck]

 ... exactly what everyone here said except, make your gradient texture a grey scale rather than any particular color. Once applied to the prim you can now select the color from the prim color selector and it will display as you want with the gradation. The advantage is you only need one texture but have selection of any color.

[Rolig Loon]

So long as the only gradation you are interested in is tonal, light to dark, as the OP is.  :smileywink:

[Qie Niangao]

There's a gradient texture in the LDPW Zindra Building Textures pack available in the "Port of Kama City" on Mosh. It's called "Gradient 1 - black edges, lt gray center", UUID "ba2ad60c-6fed-9813-474e-cb46ce665c06". The virtue of using a pre-existing texture is that viewers might have it cached, although that's fairly unlikely, really.

Also, two drawbacks of that texture. First, it's 512x512, which is huge. (In the bad old days, for no good reason, it took forever to download textures with non-square dimensions.) Instead, a 256x4 texture would be fine for a simple gradient, yet uses two orders of magnitude less download bandwidth and texture memory.

That "256x4"--as opposed to "4x256"--is the second drawback of the Zindra gradient: it varies in the vertical dimension.  Either orientation is fine for painting a texture on a prim, but only the short wide one puts the gradient on the horizontal dimension, and that's necessary if you ever want to use the gradient for texture animation--a handy, zero-sim-lag way of varying surface color or brightness over time.

[Geldsbard Freck]

Yes , correct, ... if the idea is to have a color variation also, say, dark blue at the bottom to light yellow at the top, well  you will have to make the texture specifically for those colors.