MESH FAQ's

New to mesh designing? This page is for you.

*"I am really confused. How do I get the item to look like it is mine and still keep the low impact?"

Make a simple prim; shadow prim works for many people but even a small cube that is transparent will do. Connect that prim to the mesh object making YOUR prim the root prim (last prim clicked before joining). Yes, that is part of the End User License and is perfectly OK. I don't want your customers coming to me; I want them coming to you. :D

HINT: If you turn your -- let's call it "creator prim" into a Convex Hull prim (a choice on the Features tab) then your cube prim will be .5 land impact at any size. You can add that .5 land impact prim to any .5 mesh object and you will get a 1 land impact item.


*"How do I get my textures to look good with all the shadows?"

You can use a graphics program (Photoshop, GIMP, etc.) to layer and meld your texture onto the ambient map and then upload your combined texture into Second life. Here's a step by step example.


Open your ambient file in world and then use the drop down SAVE AS menu to save the file to your computer. I use the png option but either will work.

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I suggest you put the ambient file in an appropriate folder so you can find it easily.

Open the ambient file with your graphics program. Copy and paste your texture (in this case wood) on top of the ambient file. If you have another method that works for you, great. The idea is to get the texture file you want to use layered with the ambient file.

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Open your layers panel. This is how mine looks. Yours may be different. Find the Blend Mode choices.

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I use Multiply in my program to blend the two layers together. Hopefully your program has something similar if not exactly the same.

Save your layered ambient file as a png or tga file (no transparency) and upload into Second Life. If you have a third party viewer that let's you upload temporary textures, you can test easily at no cost.

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Right click on the PORTION of the mesh object that corresponds to the map (in this case the outside of the frame). In EDIT mode, click the SELECT TEXTURES option (radio button), then drag your new textured ambient onto the texture pane or choose it from within the texture choice window. You can also drag the textured ambient map onto your mesh object but sometimes that is a bit trickier.

Repeat the process with the other maps that go with your mesh object and get a finished piece. You can use the Select Face option to tint and shine and bump any of the different materials of your object. See more on materials below.


*"How do I get the different textures on one object to work?"

Each mesh object can have up to eight different textures per "mesh object" (a technical term). You can have two mesh objects or more in a "linkset" (another technical term); pieces -- like prims - that are linked together. So you can have many texture area to work with. This gets tricky.

As of this writing, I have not produced any mesh object that have more than seven material choices. I don't plan on going over eight but that may change. Anyway, materials work much like texture "faces" on a prim, like a cube. The DIFFERENCE is that a material on a mesh object can cover many faces of the mesh object, not just a single face like on a prim.

In the above example, I included one ambient map for the texture on the pot. The three pots to the right have the plain ambient map used along with tinting (red) and shine (low). The pot on the left used the method outlined above to add a pottery texture to the map, upload and use the new combined map on the pot. The dirt inside the pot was textured using a mud texture I had in my inventory. The flowers are a regular plant texture that would use on a sculpt plant base. Just drag your flower texture onto the triple plane area.


*"Where do you get your textures?"

Most often I make them from scratch using one of the many free source archives on the web. Mesh textures generally have no need to be seamless by the way. You want BIG files so that you can downsize them in your graphics program and have them look realistically sized within Second Life. On small items 512 textures may work fine. On full sized complex items like a highboy, 1024 textures will be best.

And, no; unless the textures are included with the mesh object pack, I do not sell my textures.