How to texture a dome? Or half sphere?

[Aluviel Nakamura]

Hello All

I made a killer texture, a round circle with inner circles going towards the center. Like a bullseye. I cannot get it to lay right on the actual half circle prim. I am trying to create a pretty fairy dome....

I have tried fiddling with the horozontal and vertical offsets etc.. I cannot get the texture to wrap around the half circle straight. Its all wavy and sux!!

Is there a trick to this? I have been a builder and texture person for 7 years and never had to fight so gosh dang much!!

[Madelaine McMasters]

I think you're running into the polygon nature of prim spheres. Your texture is made with the presumption it'll be draped on a sphere, but the SL sphere prim is actually a fairly low poly mesh. Can you post a pic, just in case I'm misunderstanding?

[Aluviel Nakamura]

Sure^^ Here is a photo straight on from the top angle. and here is what it looks like on a flat prim. What I had to do to get it to work even slightly was  lay it on the side of the sphere and then cut it. The rings around the outer design are not going around it straight...its wavy and annoying.

[ObviousAltIsObvious]

http://forums-archive.secondlife.com/109/8c/355702/1.html

some notes because the screen shot in there for the hemispnere example is reduced and blurry:

the sphere is cut in half with dimple, begin 0.5, end 1.0

texture horizontal scale 1.0, vertical scale 2.0, vertical offset 0.5

[Madelaine McMasters]

Well, that was obvious, Obvious!

I hadn't considered the texture wasn't already polar!

Okay, Aluviel! Here's what I did. You decide if that's what you wanted.

First, I pulled your image into Photoshop and cropped down to your flat texture. I didn't get it perfectly centered...

Next I applied Filter->Distort->Polar Coordinates...  and checked "Polar to Rectangular". This warps the texture, with the presumption that it's a polar image with the north pole in the center. If yours were a full spherical map, the south pole would be stretched around the circumference of the image. Since you're texturing a hemisphere, the circumference is the sphere's equator, or the bottom of your dome. Because I didn't get your texture perfectly centered, you see latitude wobble...

Then I brought the texture into SL and applied it do a sphere with Dimple Begin = 0 and Dimple End = 0.5

The texture horizontal scale is one (your texture is for the entire circumference) and the vertical scale is 2.0 (your texture is for only half a sphere... a dome, so we must squish it in half to fit). The rotation is 90 degrees (because that's what worked ;-). And the vertical offset is 0.5 (again, because your texture is for half a sphere, we need to get it into the correct half).

I took the liberty of turning myself into a floor lamp to demonstrate the result...

I hope this fixes your problem!

[Aluviel Nakamura]

I am a business woman and I just knew that you were going to rip my texture into photo shop the minute You asked for it!

You didnt NOT have permission to do this!!!!!!!!YOU should have asked before doing so!!!!!!!

I AM EXtremely angry............Dont you have any respect or common sense? I dont care if you thought you were helping or not........You major stepped over the line by doing what you did.

[LepreKhaun]

---

Aluviel Nakamura wrote:

I am a business woman and I just knew that you were going to rip my texture into photo shop the minute You asked for it!

You didnt NOT have permission to do this!!!!!!!!YOU should have asked before doing so!!!!!!!

I AM EXtremely angry............Dont you have any respect or common sense? I dont care if you thought you were helping or not........You major stepped over the line by doing what you did.

---

That reminds me of a story me Uncle Mick once told.

Seems he was sitting in a pub in the wee hours when a gentleman came limping and stumbling in, moaning and groaning about the pain of his poor feet. Plopping down near Mick, he went on and on how dreadfully hurting his feet were and loudly prayed out for someone to please help him.

So me Uncle Mick, being the kind and generous soul he was, bid his friends pardon as he turned to attend to this distressed stranger. "Place your feet up where I can see them, wouldya'. I know a wee bit 'bout boots and all and mayhaps might be of service."

So the gentleman swung his feet up onto the stool 'twixt the two of them and Mick bent down to study. Took notes and measurements and generally went over every last inch of the pair. After a good while of this, he nodded and then proceeded to unlace the boots, took them off and replaced them right to left and vicee versee.

"There you have it! You'd simply put them on the wrong feet earlier is all" Mickie said as he finished lacing up and tying off with a better knot than what the stranger had worn in.

But Uncle Mick's warm glow of a job well done turned quickly to astonishment when the other fellow suddenly sprang up and began beating all around with his walking stick, in a frenzy like. "You dastardly scallywag! I knew you were up to no good as soon as you asked to see me boots! I'm mortified that you'd dare to touch them with nary a 'by your leave' nor even a 'may I, please' first!" And as he flounced out (with no limp, one might add) he continued ranting of the outlandish abuse he had suffered in the place.

After the telling of this tale, I had to ask me Uncle Mick how this had affected him. He paused in thought for a moment and then replied,

"Well, me Nephew... In a pub, in the wee hours, one can only forgive a fool drunk. But truth be told, if he ever comes back to get those boots resoled, that gent might best be passing me by."

[Madelaine McMasters]

... ties your shoelaces together.

;-)

[Marigold Devin]

... and then she turned herself into a table lamp and hid in the corner of the room until the shouty woman had gone .... and they all lived happily ever after.

I love a bedtime story with a happy ending. :matte-motes-big-grin:

[Deaf3279]

You should not angry. It's not their fault. It's your fault. for not make clear about do not use texture and photoshop make it work for you. If you made it very clear about to not taking your texture. They wont do that. 

"I am a business woman and I just knew that you were going to rip my texture into photo shop the minute You asked for it!" 

How can they know you dont want them taking your texture if you didnt tell them that you dont want them taking texture? They're simple try help you. If you dont want them taking texture. Just put waterprint all over texture or use different texture.

[Sassy Romano]

---

Aluviel Nakamura wrote:

I am a business woman and I just knew that you were going to rip my texture into photo shop the minute You asked for it!

---

If you knew what was probably, it does beg the question, why did you post it and not watermarked or of a different texture completely which would have illustrated the same?

However, that aside, what "bad" do you feel has actually happened here other than a fluffed up sense of self importance and grandeur over a texture that anyone can copy with a simple "right click, save as", hardly a RIP.

As a business person, you didn't know better about how to handle your own IP?  Now you do, there's usually a lesson somewhere, none of us are perfect.

 

[Casiopa Xue]

I for one want to take a moment to thank you for this post. I had really been struggling with this issue and your post was clear and precise.  It also helped me that you included visuals.  

The woman who asked the question has major issues.  She certainly does not act like any "business woman" I have known and I have known many. And if she were a business woman of any worth, she would already know how to protect her intellectual property.  Please don't let her total lack of manners and business decorum get you down.  

I for one am very thankful.

[Madelaine McMasters]

---

Casiopa Xue wrote:

I for one want to take a moment to thank you for this post. I had really been struggling with this issue and your post was clear and precise.  It also helped me that you included visuals.  

The woman who asked the question has major issues.  She certainly does not act like any "business woman" I have known and I have known many. And if she were a business woman of any worth, she would already know how to protect her intellectual property.  Please don't let her total lack of manners and business decorum get you down.  

I for one am very thankful.

---

Casiopa, as one who sometimes exhibits a total lack of manners, little gets me down. I'm glad you found my explanation useful and you're quite welcome.

;-).

[Izzabella Alexandre]

Madelaine McMasters

  I would like to "THANK YOU" for your explanation ... it's very difficult for new people to understand a lot and I am fresh into working with mega prims and about to texture my very first sphere dome.  Your kindness in taking 'your time' to help them is appreciated by many I'm sure.  I know I am thankful.  I found this post by a google search.  This is exactly the help I was looking for.... 

[Madelaine McMasters]

6 hours ago, Izzabella Alexandre said:

Madelaine McMasters

  I would like to "THANK YOU" for your explanation ... it's very difficult for new people to understand a lot and I am fresh into working with mega prims and about to texture my very first sphere dome.  Your kindness in taking 'your time' to help them is appreciated by many I'm sure.  I know I am thankful.  I found this post by a google search.  This is exactly the help I was looking for.... 

You're welcome Izzabella. SL has a pretty steep learning curve and I'm not going to have as much interesting stuff to look at around here if I don't help people climb it!

[carley Greymoon]

that was insane.

[Love Zhaoying]

On 2/23/2014 at 12:11 PM, Aluviel Nakamura said:

I am a business woman and I just knew that you were going to rip my texture into photo shop the minute You asked for it!

You didnt NOT have permission to do this!!!!!!!!YOU should have asked before doing so!!!!!!!

I AM EXtremely angry............Dont you have any respect or common sense? I dont care if you thought you were helping or not........You major stepped over the line by doing what you did.

Wow

[Rolig Loon]

4 hours ago, carley Greymoon said:

that was insane.

And a necropost too.

[Anna Nova]

I love sexy lamps.

[Love Zhaoying]

Just now, anna2358 said:

I love sexy lamps.

They're almost like sexy lady lamps!

[Beggar Mayo]

On 23/2/2014 at 8:45 AM, Madelaine McMasters said:

Well, that was obvious, Obvious!

I hadn't considered the texture wasn't already polar!

Okay, Aluviel! Here's what I did. You decide if that's what you wanted.

First, I pulled your image into Photoshop and cropped down to your flat texture. I didn't get it perfectly centered...

Next I applied Filter->Distort->Polar Coordinates...  and checked "Polar to Rectangular". This warps the texture, with the presumption that it's a polar image with the north pole in the center. If yours were a full spherical map, the south pole would be stretched around the circumference of the image. Since you're texturing a hemisphere, the circumference is the sphere's equator, or the bottom of your dome. Because I didn't get your texture perfectly centered, you see latitude wobble...

Then I brought the texture into SL and applied it do a sphere with Dimple Begin = 0 and Dimple End = 0.5

The texture horizontal scale is one (your texture is for the entire circumference) and the vertical scale is 2.0 (your texture is for only half a sphere... a dome, so we must squish it in half to fit). The rotation is 90 degrees (because that's what worked ;-). And the vertical offset is 0.5 (again, because your texture is for half a sphere, we need to get it into the correct half).

I took the liberty of turning myself into a floor lamp to demonstrate the result...

I hope this fixes your problem!

Nice solution, Madelaine. I tried to do the same, following each step but with a landscape. I tried different combinations and it doesn't work. Perhaps or sure I did something wrong. The pics show the landscape I want to show inside the dome. I used a spheric prim like you did, but also a bigger mesh prim uploaded for me. Could you give me some help on this?

[Madelaine McMasters]

Your texture isn't suitable for creating a dome panorama. It contains imagery below the horizon, which shouldn't be visible on your dome and should be cropped out. Your image also doesn't cover the 360° of a full horizon panorama. When you wrap it around a hemisphere, the left and right edges of your image won't mesh. You'll see a horrid transition from the greenery and rising mountain range on the right, and the distant range on the left.

The image also doesn't cover the required 180° of field from the horizon to the zenith. As a result, your mountain range will arch over your head in the dome, reaching 2/3 of the way to the zenith. A realistic sky panorama image will be almost entirely sky.

Here's an example of the kind of sky panoramas I've used in the past.

A similar image depicting mountains would have them occupying probably no more than the bottom 10% of the image.

I obtained that image from https://www.cgskies.com

You'll find many free panoramas there, suitable for use in SL. I'm sure there are websites that have panoramas containing more ground content. I've seen cityscape panoramas, but they probably won't work well on a dome because they often don't contain the sky above. As with your mountain, the buildings of a cityscape will arch over your head, appearing quite unnatural.

I don't get in-world much anymore, and haven't textured a sphere in years, but I recall there are two texture mapping methods, only one of which is suitable for wrapping a horizontal panorama around a sphere. As I recall, you may have to repeat the texture twice vertically, to ensure that the bottom of the texture is at the equator of the sphere (and again at the south pole). You dimple away the bottom half of the sphere, so that repeated texture isn't visible.

[Beggar Mayo]

On 12/5/2018 at 8:29 PM, Madelaine McMasters said:

Your texture isn't suitable for creating a dome panorama. It contains imagery below the horizon, which shouldn't be visible on your dome and should be cropped out. Your image also doesn't cover the 360° of a full horizon panorama. When you wrap it around a hemisphere, the left and right edges of your image won't mesh. You'll see a horrid transition from the greenery and rising mountain range on the right, and the distant range on the left.

The image also doesn't cover the required 180° of field from the horizon to the zenith. As a result, your mountain range will arch over your head in the dome, reaching 2/3 of the way to the zenith. A realistic sky panorama image will be almost entirely sky.

Here's an example of the kind of sky panoramas I've used in the past.

A similar image depicting mountains would have them occupying probably no more than the bottom 10% of the image.

I obtained that image from https://www.cgskies.com

You'll find many free panoramas there, suitable for use in SL. I'm sure there are websites that have panoramas containing more ground content. I've seen cityscape panoramas, but they probably won't work well on a dome because they often don't contain the sky above. As with your mountain, the buildings of a cityscape will arch over your head, appearing quite unnatural.

I don't get in-world much anymore, and haven't textured a sphere in years, but I recall there are two texture mapping methods, only one of which is suitable for wrapping a horizontal panorama around a sphere. As I recall, you may have to repeat the texture twice vertically, to ensure that the bottom of the texture is at the equator of the sphere (and again at the south pole). You dimple away the bottom half of the sphere, so that repeated texture isn't visible.

Thank you very very very very much, Madelaine.