Hair Textures

[AndreaHope]

Hello,

I've got some textures for hair from a freebies place and i've tried to use them on a few different hairs but my problem is i'll right click the hair > Edit > texture > .. i will press the new one and have "apply now" ticked but  when i press "ok" it goes back to the old one.

 

what is happening?

[Rolig Loon]

Without knowing anything about your hair, I'm going to guess that either the hair is no-mod or you are trying to apply a texture that was not designed for that hair.

"Texture" is not like the print on a bolt of fabric in RL.  It is more like the pattern pieces that you cut out of a piece of fabric.  If you try to make a skirt out of fabric pieces that you cut out for making a pup tent, it won't work.  Or, if you are sewing a skirt together and you grab the piece that you cut out for the belt loops and try to use it for the front panel, it won't work.  By "it won't work" I mean that (1) sometimes the texture will end up somewhere that you don't expect it or (2) sometimes it just doesn't fit, or (3) sometimes you just can't use it at all.

So, if you want to retexture hair, you need to buy hair that is meant to be retextured and you need to have textures that are designed for that hair.  If you've done that and it's not working, then you ought to contact the merchant or creator and ask for guidance.

[AndreaHope]

5 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

Without knowing anything about your hair, I'm going to guess that either the hair is no-mod or you are trying to apply a texture that was not designed for that hair.

"Texture" is not like the print on a bolt of fabric in RL.  It is more like the pattern pieces that you cut out of a piece of fabric.  If you try to make a skirt out of fabric pieces that you cut out for making a pup tent, it won't work.  Or, if you are sewing a skirt together and you grab the piece that you cut out for the belt loops and try to use it for the front panel, it won't work.  By "it won't work" I mean that (1) sometimes the texture will end up somewhere that you don't expect it or (2) sometimes it just doesn't fit, or (3) sometimes you just can't use it at all.

So, if you want to retexture hair, you need to buy hair that is meant to be retextured and you need to have textures that are designed for that hair.  If you've done that and it's not working, then you ought to contact the merchant or creator and ask for guidance.

Thank you Rolig, Sorry i can't give you much more info.. im very new to editing and making stuff but i'll keep what you said in mind

[Lindal Kidd]

Andrea,

Some things that may help you visualize textures.

Imagine a cube, just a simple prim.  It has six faces.  Each face can have a separate texture.  Or, of course, they can all be textured with the same texture.

Now, consider the "texture repeats" setting in the Edit window.  If your texture is a nice, square 256 x 256 pixel one, it will fit on a face of your cube perfectly, at a repeat setting of 1.

Or, you can increase or decrease both the horizontal and vertical repeat settings.  At a setting of 2 and 2, there will be four copies of the texture on the face of your cube.

You can also "offset" the texture...basically, slide it around on the face of the prim until it's positioned the way you want it.

A lot of prim hair is made up of tapered toruses and flat planes.  These are fairly easy to texture, using a single hair texture plus doing some painting of alpha masks on the flat planes.  Careful inspection of older prim hair styles will quickly give you the idea.

But now, consider a mesh hair object.  This is a complex organic shape consisting of an awful lot of triangles.  To correctly map a texture onto something like this, you need a "UV Map".

A UV map can be thought of as a way of "unwrapping" a 3D object in such a way that it is flattened out.  Then the flat 2D texture you want to apply is painted onto this flattened out version of the object, and it's rolled back up into its 3D form.

If you're making mesh objects, search for some "UV mapping" tutorials for Blender, or whatever modeling program you're using.