Aligning prims using numbers/formulas

I've recently been working on a new riverboat and as I was building I thought aligning prims should be much easier especially if many are the same size. If one of your prims is at x 100 the next should be at x110 (taking for granted that the prim is 10m long) and it should align perfectly. This worked amazingly well except for prims with a path cut because they are now half or whatever the size they were previously.

I was curious if anyone knew of a forumla or better yet, excel spreadsheet that would automatically tell you where the next prim should be based on the xyz of the parallel prim?

What about prims you want to line up at the edge of a prim (i.e. walls), now we have a prim thats say .5 aligning at the very edge of say a 10m prim. It would be wonderful if that calculation could also be found easily (although I suppose it would be .5 less).

Anyway, there still was some fine tuning needed, the numbers were not always apparent to me.

This is best suited for Building Tips.

Cristalle is right, you'll get higher quality answers down there. Although, as long as I'm here and typing...

What I find works for me is combination of techniques. If going prim to prim in the same direction, I use the Copy function, set to Center Copy. That does the best job of anything getting things aligned correctly. When turning a corner, I usually zoom all the way in to the joint and ajust by numbers in the smallest increments to get alignment.

Rotation is strictly by numbers. This is all well and good for working with cube based prims, anything curved is a gazillion times harder. I like to mock up what I'm building first while I'm making architectural decisions and then go back when the design is complete and do a better alignment - but that is what works for me, someone else may do it totally different.

I recently learned what is for me a faster and easier way to do this. Get the prim to be copied in edit mode, hold down the Shift key, then using whichever of the "handles" of the three axes is the direction you want to go, move the object. It leaves behind a perfect copy of itself. Using the grid you can throw up a long, perfectly aligned wall in seconds.

There is a post today in building tips about gaps, which is on the very subject of this thread (alignment). While it does not ask for the same relief (an excel spreadsheet) it is a good read and more robust discussion is already taking place there on the subject.

The "Local" Ruler mode is made for this sort of thing. For rotations, too, if one is working with anything a bit exotic.

I typically do this in my head as long as it is just rectangles. Roof pitch is where the pencel and paper come out. Almost anyting dealing with curves and globes is when I resort to excel. All the math I have done has been one time only type things.

It's hard for me to think what sort of script you are needing but I would be more than willing to try and put something together for you.

eeks! Just say no to numbers.

I have to say roof pitch is about nearly the death of me... and I'm a hater of seams.

I'm sorry for posting in the wrong forum. I use exact copies, rulers and even zooming in to view the minute gab and making small increments. These all can work but still leave a margin for error. Mathematically speaking there should be a way to calculate since everything has an xyz number. Again, if you are placing 10m parallel to each other and the first is at 100 the next would be at 110, 120, etc.

I found it helpful rechecking prims to see if all the numbers corresponded. I just wish the exact calculation was easier to find with prims where the path has been cut or other scenarios.

I don't know about cut prims, but I find that that old high school trigonometry really helps when dealing with rotations.

Yup

Heh, it was quite interesting how easily this stuff started coming back to me. I've had occasion to use polar coordinates to simply things.

This should be the general formula for matching prims mathematically. I'm not sure what you mean by matching up path cut prims.

In the case of a 10x10 sphere with a path cut so that you only seeing 1/4 then dimpled so you have only a corner. I end up with a 5m prim I believe.

Same here. And only a few years ago I was working in a math classroom with teenagers who kept whining, "Why do we have to learn this, we'll never use it!"