The Daily Tortured Prim: Djembe Drum

 

 

I've been playing the African Djembe drum for many years and when I first saw this prim in one of the classes I attended way back when I was starting to learn building, I was instantly fascinated. Even though it was just an experimental "press this button and see what happens" - moment, this was the very prim I saved because I was sure, someday, I will make a Djembe drum from it. 

 

Well, I gave it a try rather early in my building career, of course, but it never really turned out as "the thing" - mainly because I was lacking adequate textures for it. Now, with all the knowledge I gained about Gimp and much, much time and dedication, I now am able to create good textures and finally could finish my Djembe project. 

 

But hey, even before I made those fancy textures, I still made my Djembe drum and kept it dear, so if you like playing the Djembe as much as I do, here's the settings for the Djembe prim: 

Djembe Prim Settings:

 

Rezz a Tube. 

Object Tab:

Size: x = 0.5, y = 0.4, z = 0.4

Hole Size: x = 1.0, y = 0.5

Profile Cut: B = 0.225, E = 0.93 (Caution: It's PROFILE Cut, not Path Cut!)

 

And ... tadaa.... here's your Djembe prim! 

It has quite some faces to texture and not all of them are easy.  

The top and bottom face, for example, will project the texture in a circle, so it might be a bit tricky to texture them.  There is an easy fix for this though: 

Set the texture mapping of the top and bottom face to "Planar" in texture tab. This will cause the texture to lay flat on the top and bottom face and thus be displayed correctly.

Please do this ONLY for the top an bottom face. The planar setting really only works on totally flat faces. All rounded faces will look horrible with it.

 

If you care to make a cool Djembe texture for it, it's a pretty demanding project but well worth the effort. 

Here is an example how it looks with the textures I made for it: 

Isn't it beautiful? 

Well, as I can't keep my stuff to myself and always have to share the things I'm proud of, you can pick up these texture sets in my Djembe Drum class. I admit, it's not running very often but I keep repeating it. Just keep an eye on the class schedule. I'm looking forward to see you there for a nice drum session, yay!

 

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Let me know what you think in the comments. I'm looking forward to hear about your thoughts and projects.

Save the prim! 👍

Wolf Song