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Tad Carlucci · (This post was last modified: 10-02-2012 09:04 PM by Tad Carlucci.)

My posting got messed up doubled and lost it the bowels of the web server for a couple hours.

I meant to post just two. but two copies of each made it there.

The little one with just four colors is "your texture". I made it four colors and chose those because I knew they'd get smooshed in the next one and wanted the blending to be as visible as possible.

The larger one .. notice the colors are in a different pattern. The White at the top-left of it is the bottom-right corner. The texture is repeated and the center is where the repeats meet. That is Offset (0,0), and it lies on the very corner of the texture ("your texture") which I am painting onto my prim's face. A repeat of (0,0) means "repeat NONE of this texture across the face of the prim".

What happens is it finds it's BETWEEN the pixels, so it takes a bit of this and a bit of that from the four corners, smooshes and .. for the four colors I chose .. ends up with a medium grey.

Now, since I'm doing this on *my* prim and not the collar, I can wiggle the Offset values around in the Edit Panel's Texture tab. By doing that, I'm moving the point from dead center off to the sides. As you can see, I get different colors because it's using a different bit of this and a that.

This is the EXACT same process which is causing that bit of black to smear over to the other edge on that Zebra textured color I found in-world and posted a bit earlier. It's because Second Life does not just paint pixels and be done with it. It has to deal with all sorts of sizes, shapes, and view angles. So your nice, pretty texture gets stretched, and squished, and your nice, clean, clear colors you see in Photoshop get smoosh and smashes together as Second Life tries to come up with "what should have been between those two pixels" in your image. Or find it has two colors from different parts of your pretty picture and only one place to put them.

The question is: knowing all this, how can I use it to try to work around the problems it causes when I make a collar?

For the long edges, like I showed with the Zebra pattern, the solution is simple: If it bothers you, try a thin stripe of solid color along the edges and use the same color for both the top and bottom edges.

If that works, that color will also be the color of the prim sides.

But, say you don't mind, or can't notice the problems at the top and bottom edges, but you get a horrible, ugly color on the sides? There are two ways to proceed.

First, since you don't want a solid color along the edges, you could try putting a tiny dot of color at all four corners of your picture. That color will be the edge of the prim. And those dots might be so small, or blend in so well, nobody will notice them on the outer face.

Second, you could look at your image. Maybe you can find some place where there is a bit of color which is the same at the top and bottom, Go into Photoshop or The GIMP and shift/wrap your image around a bit so they fall on a corner instead of somewhere in the middle. In The GIMP, this is Image (or Layer), Transform, and check the box to be sure it Wraps instead of discards the part shifted off the side.

Something else I'd do which *effect* the severity of these problems is .. I don't particularly like how Second Life will smash stuff together (up/down on the collar) and stretch it out (right/left around the collar outer face). And, of course, I want the clearest picture possible. So I do NOT use square pictures. Most of you probably know this already, but some might not: textures to NOT need to be square. They can be any of 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, or 1024 on each side, and the sides don't need to be the same.

Yes, you don't really need to use those numbers. But, personally, I don't like how Linden Labs fiddles with my images, so I *ALWAYS* scale them in The GIMP (or Photoshop) so they're one of those numbers high, by one of those numbers wide BEFORE I upload. That stops Linden Labs from changing my work on me. I just choose sizes which look good when smooshed and stretched. Firestorm Temporary Textures are good for checking before paying for an upload; or go to the Beta Grid and check there on a "live" Linden Labs grid paying with funny money.