Nice fireplace shortcut

...trying to save prims on a fireplace for a build I'm working on, I grabbed a flame prim (the standard 0.01 x 1 x 2 or similar) and started messing with it, trying to see if I could get an effect with a single prim to replace the normal two prims.

Tried hollowing, skew, different shapes ... nothing impressive.

Then I tried the default sculpty shape (the apple). Woah! The flame wraps around nicely, like you'd always hoped the sphere would but wouldn't, and is the perfect height. Its even more realistic then the standard cross-section. I haven't compared it against a "one prim plant" sculpt, but for a single prim you have full permissions over - very nice! And you don't have to worry about the alpha sorting bug either.

hi Soen what is a fire prim? and where do u get one. or how do u make one? i am building a house and also gonna need a fire place but dont want to buy one cause everything in the house i want to be build be me.. i have seen ppl making fire but dont know how its done

I believe Soen is talking about the flat animated flame texture prim you usuallt find in prim fireplaces. It's normally a box prim made very thin, transparent on the top, bottom and thin sides, and on the two flat sides it has an animated texture that cycles through an 8-frame or 16 frame animation, or something similar.

I *think* if you look in the Library section of inventory, you can find a candle or a fireplace that has that piece in it. If not, send me an IM in-world, and I'll send you a "Fire for fireplace" freebie that has it as part of it.

Thanks, Soen -- great tip! I can't wait to try it.

Interesting! I just tried this. It does give a more curved and 3-dimensional shape to the flames. The down side is that at least with no other changes, the flame is just visible from one side. So you would need to either play with repeats and such, or make two of these and rotate one 180 degrees on Z.

Worth experimenting with though, certainly!

can't do hollow with sculpty?

Oh, I think I misunderstood -- the flame only goes halfway around ... repeats should fix that.

Yes, when I took a flame prim from one of my fireplaces, and applied the apple sculpt shape to it, the flames only appeared on one side of the invisible Apple shape. Making it hollow might allow it to have that section of flame visible from the other side. Didn't try that.

in a camp fire i can see this as a issue but in a fireplace with a back on it and sides it wouldnt really matter maybe

you're back to two prims again but you can use 2 sculptie apples, one inside the other and simply tick th 'inside out' checkbox on the object properties for one of them.

That is because sculpties don't have a surface to texture on the 'inside.

Right Jack, for a campfire or any place where you have more than a narrow viewing angle, this is a good trick. For a recessed fireplace, it might still look better than a 2-prim flame, but not as clear an obvious win in saving prims.