I just tried it projected, might have solved the problem. I have to go to Holland now, be back in a few hours, will let you know. Thanks

Tried it both with and without opening the component - same results.

Well, I used Fredo's Radial Bending, would that make a difference?

Is there any way to bend an object, or just a face, that has a texture on it without the texture either getting weird or going away completely?

I know this probably wouldn't work in most situations, but it did in this simple one. Your method of enlarging the area around the image will probably be what I use in the future.

Actually I just showed the hidden geometry and painted the faces to get rid of the stuff I didn't want. Had to draw a couple lines where the good and the bad stuff shared a face, but it worked fine. My head hurts too much to try what you suggested

Thanks again for sticking with me on this. Much appreciated.

Ok, it seems to work now, although I'm not sure of the whys and wherefores of it, which bothers me. Now, how do I get rid of the "extras" as indicated in attached photo? Thanks for bearing with me.

Here it is.

Ball 4.skp

It did, for whatever reason, seem to stop projecting it onto individual slices

Not quite what I had in mind. But I'm just a noob, so I probably don't know what the hell I'm doing.

@dave r said:

You're not thinking about the model correctly. It isn't really a sphere. It is a hemisphere and you have two of them and one of them has been roteted or flipped (depending upon what you did to invert it) to make something that looks like a sphere. When you open one for editing and apply the material, you apply it to the other instance as well but the material on the other instance will be positioned exactly the same relative to the geometry in the component.

Actually this is not a factor in this particular instance - I only need to apply the texture to the top half (a shift pattern)

@dave r said:

Trying to keep file size down by splitting complex shapes is a good thing but there are times when it isn't helpful. Evidently this is one of those situations when it isn't helpful. Explode the two hemispheres and make a single component of the resulting sphere instead.

I have tried exploding the top sphere half, but it still will only project onto individual "slices" at a time.

Once again it's a case of "yeah, this is a smart modeling practice, but you can't use it here". Or here, or here.....

I guess this is just one more instance in an ever increasing pile of instances where I spend more and more time trying to figure out what SU will and will not do rather than just being able to enjoy the act of modeling. The "will not" pile is growing disappointingly fast.

Yeah, I know - it's free

OK, I'm trying to project a texture onto a sphere. To save file size the sphere is made of a single component, extruded into a half sphere and then that half copied and pasted beneath it to make a complete sphere. Anyhow, when I attempt to project a texture onto it, it tries to copy it to each individual component, which of course gives some very strange (but sometimes interesting) results. So how do I project the texture onto the entire ball, instead of the individual components it's made of?

And if you keep making it unique, it keeps jumping to the right, more and more. It's not a one-time deal. Very strange, I hope someone here has the solution to this problem.

I'm trying to adopt smart modeling practices, and one of those smart practices is to reduce the file size of my textures. To that end I am making textures unique after applying to a face. BUT -- when I do so the texture jumps to the right a bit, not much but enuf to be noticeable. After all the careful positioning of the texture, this is very frustrating and disappointing . Any ideas what might be causing this, and more importantly, how can I stop this from happening?

Course not! I drew on my little sister. And the dog, if I was quick.

Oh would you please?? Mommy won't let me draw anymore, something about me eating the crayons

Gee, could you draw me some pretty pictures? I like bunnies Actually, as I was reading your reply it occurred to me that I had not changed things to be able to view file extensions. It's fine now.
I'll crawl back in my crib, it's time for my nappy. Thanks.

I actually managed to do this once, but failed to write down how I did it, and now I can't do it at all. Today I did manage, once, somehow, to convert it to a zip file, but when I unzip it it just converts it back to a kmz file. I need to be able to see the size of the textures in my model. Could somebody please explain, in a very detailed way (like you are talking to a three year old) exactly, step-by-step, how to do this. Assume I've never actually seen a computer before Thanks

Thanks, this might do the trick. Even if it doesn't, it looks like something that's going to be very useful in other projects.

It's very difficult to know about all these plugins and which ones might be useful to me. There are so many out there, and you can't always go by the plugin name to know if it's what you need to solve a particular problem. Jeez, here I am complaining that there are so many fantastic plugins being created. There's just no pleasing me

A question - whenever I go to a forum site about a new plugin, or at least new to me, I've found that I have to carefully look at all pages of the post (and some of them have quite a few pages), just to make sure that a new version hasn't been created to solve a problem. I've found new versions of plugins buried deep within the post, just a couple of times, but enuf that I can't take the chance of just downloading the initial version at the beginning of the post. Is there any way to make sure the final version is the one at the beginning? Just nitpicking I suppose, but thought I'd ask.

Thanks again.

Thanks for your input. Unfortunately I've tried that, the problem being that real wood grain does not run perfectly straight, and because of that it ends up looking very strange. The grain on one segment does not line up perfectly with the grain on the next segment, etc, etc. I need a way to apply grain to the entire wheel, somehow, and make it look natural and real.

Don't ask much, do I