›–» UV Projection and Transparency
Transparency
Transparency allows you to create translucent effects (i.e. glass or water). You can set an object to be anything from barely visible to practically opaque.
To set transparency, select the paint tool:
Click the top right sphere of these 4 spheres and select 'Plain Transparency' from the small window that appears nearby. Next right click the same sphere and set the value to anything from 0 to 1 (0 being invisible, 1 being opaque e.g. 0.5 for glass or 0.75 for water).
UV Projection
UV Projection allows you to control how a texture is mapped onto an object. It allows you to choose a primitive (e.g. cube, sphere, etc..) and place it around the object. You can then manipulate this primitive to affect how the texture appears on your object. When your done click the 'Apply' button that appears in the UV Projection dialogue and the primitive will disappear and your objects texture wrapping will be updated.
This tool is most useful when you have been re-shaping an object and the texture has become warped. Selecting a similar primitive to the object your working on from the UV projection dialogue will re-map the texture according to the rotation and size of the UV projection primitive.
One example I have found this useful in the past for is, is when splitting an object up into little pieces. A friend of mine was making a phone system in Active Worlds. He needed the bot to reconise clicking of each of the numbers on the dialing pad. So I took the picture of the dialing pad, put it on an object and split the object up so each number would be on a different object, allowing the bot to reconise the clicking of indiviual numbers.
Don't worry if you don't understand, read on :)
Here is the picture the object uses. It needs to be split into 8 pieces. Like so:
So, first I create a plane, rotate it 90 degrees to make it upright and slap the texture on it. I don't need to split the texture into separate images, just the object:
I can do this by duplicating the object, creating a cube, using the cube to cover the part I want to seperate, and another cube to cover the rest. Its important that the two cubes are in exactly the right place so use the Object Properties dialog or Grid Lock.
What we're doing in effect is making two versions of this object, cutting off half of one and half of the other, so the object appears to have been cut into two pieces.
Once you've positioned the cubes, subtract one cube from the first version of the object and subtract the other cube from the duplicate you made. Leaving you with two objects:
I used this method to split the object into all 8 pieces. "What does this have to do with UV Project?" you might ask. Well, now that the object is split up, the textures on each piece are warped. So we need to reset the UV project to complete the slicing the of the object.
For
each object, I clicked on the UV Projection Tool ( 
) and on the dialog that appears selected 'Planar UB Projection'
and open the Object Properties Dialog:
The Blue/Orange shape around the selected object represent the current UV projection setting. To achieve the results that I was aiming for I need the texture to be applied as if it was going once (1x1 rpts) over the entire object (now in 8 pieces) so I set the size and location of the UV project to that of the whole object:
After doing this for all 8 pieces, each piece now acts as if it has its part of the texture applied, as they all are working together like pieces of a puzzle to slot together and create the over all picture, except now in 8 separate parts. All thanks to a simple bit of UV projection:
And so, here you can see, the wireframe compared against the rendered image (which is faded) to create the exact same object as before but in 8 individual objects which will be saved as separate files so the bot can identify a clicking of individual numbers on the pad.
This is just another simple example of an infinitley useful tool in trueSpace. If you play aroudn with this feature you will soon find some other tricks that you can use with it. You will also find UV Porjection a good way to reset warped textures after Object Unioning/Subtraction/Intersection.