Tip: Use a Pre-alignment on textures for more freedom

Sometimes when you make something, you may not know what textures you want to use right away.  Or you may want to change them later.  We know that in Mesh Studio, if we texture beforehand, we set the repeats and offsets.  Here's a way to give you a bit of flexibility.

I built a wall with a door and a window.

The yellow shows the box shapes I used to make it.  I next used a texture alignment pattern.  Now you can do this by hand, but I use Skidz Primz' TNT.  With this I aligned the prims.  I used the texture function to align all the textures.  It does a very nice job.  As with any tool in SL, it can have its problems, but overall does a remarkable job without ever using the SL Edit window.

I added a tint to the prims that make the doorway and window inset.

By using this alignment texture, my goal was to even out all the prim texture repeats and offsets so everything would match up.  My goal is to then have a mesh that will be able to accept a texture that I can repeat and offset in SL for varied needs and it would work across all the prims with the same Prim Face material.

What you see here is only the surfaces that will be the interior wall plus the surface you step on as you go through the door.

A note on Physics:  I removed all the back faces on my wall.  I removed the prims for the doorway, except the bottom one which would be stepped on to enter the doorway and then only made that top face visible.  I removed the prims that made up the window and the surrounding prims and extended the one above the window, so that it reached the floor (I don't feel you need to walk through windows).  This left only the actual collision prims I needed and cut down the number of triangles, when I uploaded, to eight.  So I did my LoDs the way I've presented in past posts and used the physics dae for the Physics tab and the wall came in at 3 LI.  Set to prim, you could walk through the door.

Repeats set to one on the left hand mesh; set to 2 horizontal on the right.

Repeats set to one on left; horizontal repeats at two on right (Cottage rosewood wallpaper by Robin Sojourner).

Repeats at one on left; 4 horizontal/2 vertical on right (Tiles by Nicole Stiles).

This should always be tested and planned out ahead of time, but can give you much more freedom in your designing with the ability to choose more textures since they should all line up nicely.

Happy Meshing!
~ele