Hexagons

I wanted to create a building that is made up of interconnected hexagons. I am not exactly sure the best way to approach this at the moment. If anyone has experience with this type of shape in SL, I would love to hear some suggestions if any exist.

Thanks in advance.

You'd need to make your hexagons from triangles... (six, equilateral in fact)

You could use texture tricks to cut down on prims, but unfortunately in your hexagon house the one place you need real hexagons is the floor and ceiling, two places where object clipping is very important. So you'll have to make a real hexagon out of three prims.

The magic number to remember is the square root of 3, or 1.732. A hexagon with sides 1 unit long is going to be 1.732 wide between opposide sides. Since you probably want the length of your walls to be a nice number of meters (like 3 or 4) the width of your room (and therefore the x/y position of your walls) will be a nasty number. Again, just use 1.732 in your calculations. Notably the edge of a one-meter hexagon is 0.866 meters away from the center, and the corner of a one-meter hexagon is one meter away from the center. Use this in your calculations when you try to place walls.

To create a hexagon out of three boxes:

Create a box with x size 1.732, y size 1.000, and z size 0.1 (or whatever thickness you desire). Position it on some nice round x and y coordinates.

Create a second box and rotate 90 degrees on the x axis. Set the top size to x=0 and y=1 to get a triangle. x size is still 1.732, y size is 0.1 (your thickness, since you rotated), and z size is 0.5. Line it up so it just touches a long edge of the first box. (It's x coordinate should be 0.75 less than your first box.)

Create a third box in the same way, but with 270 degree rotation, and line it up with the other side of the box.

Now link the three pieces together, making sure to select the big middle box last so it is the center of mass of your completed hexagon.

I left some completed ones in the Ivory Tower Library of Prims, Argent (129,34). IM me in world if someone defaces them before you get there, and I'll send you a copy.

Also attached find a few schematics of hexagons... hopefully the magic numbers in them will help you place walls and tessellate them properly. If you want bigger walls, just multiply all the numbers by the size of one of your walls.

It occurs to me that you could actually make a hexagon out of just two prims, with careful selection of a fractional "top size". But then you would have no middle piece to be the center for rotations and whatnot, and the numbers would get hairier. Constructing one of these is an exercise left for the reader, but if I were you, unless I was in a critical prim shortage, I'd just live with the extra prim-per-hexagon cost.

thank you very kindly for the detailed instructions. This helps out a ton

You can also make a "maximal" size hexagon (20m point to point) with three top-shear'ed boxes that are 10m x 8.66m, then rotated to appropriate orientation. The top shear should be 0.50 (the maximum) in the same axis that has the 10m dimension.

- Neo

Thats a very neat method, nice work