In Second Life, the primary building component is the prim. These are a set of primitive shapes that can be created through the SL Edit window and put together to build cities, hair, clothing, animated creatures, statues and more. They can be cut a number of ways and when we taper, shear and apply other types of deformations, this has come to be known as Prim Torture.
If you go into edit on a prim and choose "Select Face", you can isolate one of the surfaces on a prim and texture it independently from the rest of the faces on the prim. You can shift-left click additional faces to make a grouping that can be textured at the same time.
There are two ways to generate mesh with Mesh Studio. One is to use the "Object-2-Mesh-MS-Node" script in the root of you linkset. This basically treats each prim as a separate prim. When you upload this mesh's Collada .dae file, the meshes are linked and can, therefore, be separated either with "Edit this link" in edit, or you can completely unlink one or more of the links. The advantage is that you retain the texturability of each prim's faces as if you were texturing prims in Second Life. Of course, they are mesh at that point, so you lose the ability to do any further cuts or torture. The downside can sometimes be that the LI can be higher than using the second script included in Mesh Studio.
The second way to generate mesh is with the "Object-2-Joined-Mesh-MS-Node"script. This treats the linkset as one, inseparable mesh object, similar to sculpts, with only one surface.
However, we have the ability to create more than one texturable section on this single surface. One way we do it is by putting a color tint on the face of a prim in our prim linkset.
Here I have tinted several faces with red and blue. Even if the colors are on different prims, as long as they are the same tint, they will all be chosen as if they are a single area to texture or tint when you use "Select Face" on the SL Edit menu.
You can designate up to 8 tint colors total. The joined script will notate them as "Prim Faces" in the hovertext. It is also a good idea to use this hovertext as an indicator as it will tell you if you have ended up with more than eight Prim Faces.
There is one other way to make your Prim Faces and that is with the use of textures.
Take a look at the above image. On the left, I have one area left as white, creating our first Prim Face. The bird's eye maple creates Prim Face 2. The reddish wood creates Prim Face 3. The combination of Burr Maple with Tiger Oak Trin on the lectern's flat face is now Prim Face 4. I used the textures to get the texture and offsets I needed to make the texture look as I wanted (read the post on texturing the prims to texture the mesh from an earlier entry). I can still put other textures on these areas, after I make the mesh, but they will have the same repeats and offsets that were used when I initially prepared the prim linkset. The white area, I've left, will accept both textures and/or tints. Any tints you add, on top of textures, would colorize that whole Prim Face material area on the generated mesh.
Now examine the linkset on the right of the above image. This is the same linkset, but I have added some color tints on some of the faces. These faces all have the bird's eye maple, but some of the faces have blue (making Prim Face 5), pink (making Prim Face 6), and red (making Face Prim 7). Finally, which may be hard to make out on the small image, I added green to the top of the back slats.
Here, above, you see the final result. I used the textures where I had the blue, pink and red tints and added tints more in keeping with the textures on my build. You may have to click on the image for a larger version to see that I added a tint plus low shine and the siding bump to create a pattern on the prim faces that had been left white.
The texture, btw, with the border on the lectern large face, is the 4-in-one texture I used in the previous texturing tutorial. If you create your Prim Face materials (of which you can do eight) and then also use 4-in-one textures, you can really extend how many textures you can use on a single joined mesh.
So the ways to mark your linkset to create Prim Faces (sometimes called just Faces, Materials or Material Faces or Prim Face Material) is to use:
- either a tint color or a texture (or both as explained below).
- the SL Edit menu choices of Blank or Plywood. White would constitute one Prim Face (essentially being a tint) and Plywood would constitute a second (essentially being a texture).
- texture or tint, alone (which would each create a Prim Face material).
- a texture with a tint (which would create a Prim Face material, and be in addition, if the texture is used alone or with an entirely different tint on the same mesh).
Once you have created your mesh, you would use:
- he SL Edit menu, with "Select Face" enabled to select all faces within a Prim Face material (example: texture was used with and without tint; each is its own Prim Face material so even if they share the same texture, there are two separate areas to choose since you could also conceivably put two separate textures on each Prim Face material). This selects the entire area that was designated as one Prim Face material when you prepared your prim linkset. All areas, even if on different parts of the mesh, are selected when one part of that Prim Face material is selected with "Select Face".
- experiment with shine, glow, transparency and bumps from the SL Edit menu in conjunction with your textures and tints. Each Prim Face material can have it's own texture, tint, shine, glow, transparency and bump.
I hope you will find this useful as you continue to explore the world of mesh with your Mesh Studio.
Happy Meshing!
~ele
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