markkemp

I've written some guides here: http://www.downloadtexture.com/using-textures-efficiently/ http://www.downloadtexture.com/how-to-use-materials-efficiently/

I have designed a sequins material that some advanced designers are starting to use in their clothing. This will react to the angle of the sun and sparkle just like real sequins: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Sequin-Textures-Full-Perm-DT-Material-Collection/6305288 I've also made a sparkles material: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/16-Sparkles-Textures-Full-Perm-DT-Material-Collection/6210891 I realise you said you were on a budget. But I thought I'd explain some of the posibilities of how they are doing this. Have fun with your wedding :catvery-happy:

I'm not sure I would link your pool water to the build at all. Most professionally built houses come with rezers that rez out various parts of the linkset and allow the owner to move and rotate the house while still unlinked.

1) Make the floor with 4 different linked meshes (or 9, etc). 2) Divide your AO into segments to fit the floor meshes. 3 Overlay your seamless floor texture over your AO in photoshop. 4 Apply textures to each of the segments in turn. And yes, you can get some seamless wood floor textures on the SL marketplace that will tile very well indeed.

Scripts have an event that runs on startup. That event also triggers after a sim restart I believe. If the script contains a "default" texture that is set when that event fires, then the textures will change. It might also be triggered by a timer event. :matte-motes-evil-invert:

It could be said that I know about about textures yes If you're making mesh buildings you'd have to make texture maps that correspond to your UV maps. Yes you can upload images and them apply them to objects. Problem is (I believe) that mesh objects can only have 1 texture of 1024px, so even if you pack your UV islands really well it would be quite low rez if you were texturing a whole room. Better to make seperate meshes for pillars, walls and so forth and then build the actual structure inworld. You can of course have a plan in your 3d software of what you are going to build.

It might be worth considering outsourcing certain things like textures. Then you can concentrate on the building aspect and be more productive with your workflow. Just a suggestion though.

Grunge maps, masks.....and lots and lots of layers....

No, I have built an animated water texture with about 30 frames (each with diffuse, normal, specular). But LSL currently does not support the changing of normal maps. Sadly I think they expect it to be used as a tool for griefers to crash peoples' clients.....:matte-motes-impatient:

I use some invis prims with the material textures already loaded onto their surfaces. That acts as a buffer for that problem. Or is that 1 second buffer a different issue? :matte-motes-smile:

To me it sounds like you're looking for some kind of ambient occlusion effect. You won't achieve this even with advanced materials turned on and the use to the right material textures. You'd need to use materials AND make a model in blender with the ambient occlusion baked in. Sorry to be the bringer of bad news but the "good old way" is not necessarily the "best looking way" anymore :matte-motes-smile:

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Tools-and-Technology/bg-p/blog_technology They have been doing some huge improvements to the technology behind the scenes...nice to see...

Well people are slowly upgrading their PCs so it will become more the normality over time hopefully :matte-motes-smile:

Established norms for your brand + Instinct about the product + How much coffee/alcohol you had this morning......

Yes it is possible to set repeats........but (read on).... No, the animated textures system is lacking in SL to say the least. Plus there is the fact that for every frame of the animation sequence you are effectively dividing the texture resolution by four.....with a 1024px cap it makes it pretty much impossible. Water would require at least 16fps I recon. I have developed a powerful script that will animate textures at 1024px resolution. However, currently there is no LSL support for llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast on normal an specular maps. My script currently displays the diffuse map animated, but refuses to animate the normal and specular maps. They are supposed to be working on enabling scripting of normal and specular maps but nothing new recently. I fear maybe they have moved their focus onto another project. Currently I use a scrolling animation in this product. This type of animation you can set repeats, as I remember..........If you overlap the animated textures and use alpha layering you can effectively get something very close. Of course none of this is really optimum. Ideally they should have provided a proceedural animated water shader for prims. I suspect the shader already exists, because they use it for sim water - the sim water is just a region sized prim anyway!!! But I believe they have not done this specifically because of the performance costs. Everyone would go nuts with 3D water..... That's all there is to know on this topic right now I believe. The water I've made is basically as good as it gets for now sadly. When they broaden their scripting support for materials more will be possible and I'll be updating it to a frame based version!