Protecting your textures - Method 1

DataMine
by DataMine · 6 posts
10 years ago in Basic Creator Help
Posted 10 years ago · Author
This is a simple tutorial for making your meshes more confusing to the average thief. Shoutout to cysia for sharing it with me.

This method will make your texture(s) un-editable until they are modified


1) Locate the XRF file for your texture. If you have more than 1 texture, do this for every XRF file.
2) Open the XRF file in Notepad (or any other text editor).
3) Find the <map> line.
    Example:
Code
<MAP TYPE="Diffuse Color">worldgen.jpg</MAP>


4) Rename the texture to something.exe.
    Example:
Code
<MAP TYPE="Diffuse Color">nostealing.exe</MAP>


5) Save the XRF file.

Now, whenever you apply a texture to your product in create mode, it will automatically be renamed to whatever you put in the map line. The benefit to this is not only does it make your texture uneditable in a graphics program but it also may scare the thief.

However, this only protects your textures as long as they thief doesn't rename them and change the exe extension to an image extension (jpg/gif/bmp/png etc..) But hey, it's a start. If someone is gonna steal your textures at least make it more time consuming. And I know for a fact a lot of the thieves on IMVU are dumb and this would confuse a lot of them.
Posted 10 years ago · Author
xhynrae wrote:
Thank you for sharing this lil tid bit. Simple enough to do. can this be used to challenge DMCAs as well? as proof that you were original owner protecting your work?

what about mesh itself? Is there a way to add signature?


I'm not sure about the DMCA proof, that's something you'll have to try. As for protecting your mesh, the best way I know of is to use the thief detector parent product like Pandora uses. I know for a fact that many people have no idea how to break a product out of a derive chain. I get asked by my T3DE/MPR customers a lot how to do it.

I'm always look for new techniques though.
Posted 10 years ago
Thank you verry muych for that!
Posted 10 years ago
thank very much to you DM :)
Posted 3 years ago
beautiful, thanks for this tip, I was looking for how to do :)

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