Sculpty/Mesh texture maker?

[Kobalt Bigbear]

Ok, so with the advent of inworld programs like Mesh Studio and Prim Generator (that allow you to create meshes or sculpties out of prims, inworld), I wonder why no one has created a program that will allow you to create a texture for your mesh/sculpties inworld aswell. I do realize creating a direct texture from prims textured inworld could amount to theiving. However, what about a program that allowed you to color the surfaces of individual white prims, then export an overall texture of those colored surfaces to use as a guide?

...Or is that just not possible?

 

Just curious,

Kobalt Bigbear

[Hp Xenobuilder]

I'm sure with the steam integration a very nice tool set is on it's way !!

 

[Kobalt Bigbear]

Cool, I didn't even know about the Steam intergration. That'll be interesting, thank you.

 

Anywho, my thought was: and I will be the first to state I know very very very little about meshes and sculptures, and how the inworld builders works. But from my ignorant beliefs I just thought maybe....

If sculpties and meshes are essentially made of little tiny triangles. And the inworld script producing one has to send information to an external source to translate the information into either a .dae file or a sculpt map. Then couldn't the same priciple be used to send the current color. Meaning if it's sending information that essentially says "triangle one is like this, triangle two like this, and triangle three is like this" couldn't it also send information that says "traingle one is red, traingle two is blue, triangle three is blue too".. and generate a texture(map) instead of a sculpt map?

That was just my ignorant theory, I guess.

[Chosen Few]

Kobalt, you're making some assumptions that don't necessarily jive with how it really works.

Yes, surfaces are made of triangles, but that's got nothing directly to do with texturing. Your main assumption seems to be that every triangle must be a single color.  That's almost never the case.

It might help to explain by example.  To put it in the most uncomplicated terms, let's go with one of the easiest surfaces to understand, a simple rectangular plane.  It's made of just two triangles.  If I were to just say, "Triangle 1 is red, and Triangle 2 is blue," then all I could get would be a texture that is half red, and half blue (divided diagonally, from corner to corner).  Needless to say, that doesn't make for a very interesting texture.

Now let's say I want to apply a fairly small texture to the plane, say 256x256 pixels.  Each one of those pixels is itself rectangular.  With that in mind, to apply your "Triangle 1 is red, Triangle 2 is blue..." methodology, I'd need two triangles to describe every one pixel.  Do the simple math, and that comes out to a total of 131,072 triangles!  That's an absolutely insane amount of overhead, when all I really need in order to create a plane is just 2 triangles. 

And that's just for a 256x256.  If the texture were 1024x1024, your method would require well over two million triangles!

This is why the texturing of a surface and the actual topology of a surface come from two distinctly different processes.  There's never any direct correlation between the pixels that make up a texture, and the triangles that make up a surface.  They are separate entities, period. 

The way textures are applied to surfaces is via yet third entity, called a UV map.  The UV map controls what parts of the texture are displayed on what parts of the surface.  Each individual triangle can have any amount of texture pixels mapped onto it, and each texture pixel can be mapped onto any number of triangles.  The relationships are entirely arbitrary.  Rather than saying, "Triangle 1 is red, and Triangle 2 is blue" the UV map essentially says, "Triangle 1 occupies this particular area of the texture canvas, and Triangle 2 occupies that particular area."  The area can be literally any portion of the canvas you might want, from as small as a single pixel, or even smaller than a single pixel, to the entire canvas, or even larger than the entire canvas.  It's entirely open ended.

Because it works this way, we can put any size texture we want on any shape surface we want.  If it actually worked the way you suggested, the options would be extremely limited, and the resource overhead would be completely unmanageable.

 

Speaking of limited options, this, by the way, is why sculpties require specific topology, and specific UV layout.  The mapped relationship between the pixels of a sculpt map, and the triangles of the sculpty model surface, are predetermined.  Sculpties are mapped to work in just one way, out of the countless millions of possible ways these things technically can work.  They should not be looked to as any sort of example from which to learn or extrapolate the larger principles upon which 3D modeling and texturing are based.

[Kobalt Bigbear]

Wow, thank you Chosen, that was very informative.

 

I think I just did a very very poor job at explaining my idea. I'll take a day or two to plot out my thoughts a little better, and post them later.