Building a Window

This is probably going to sound like a dumb question to some...but I've looked everywhere I can think of and I can't find any information. I'm hoping someone here can help me.

I used the hollow function on a cube to build a level on a house. I am now wanting to put windows into the house. Is there anyway to make a hole in the hollowed out cube walls to place a window?

If anyone has any techniques they want to share feel free! I have been trying to find info and playing around to try and discover a way of doing this and I can find nothing.

Thank you!
Sir Grathum Seriman.

No, you can't punch an arbitrary hole in the side of your one-prim room. The only hole you can make in a prim is the hollow feature, on the Z-axis of the prim, and exactly centered in the prim, with dimensions proportional to the prim on the Z face.

There are three solutions for you, given here in ascending order for number of prims used, and also in ease of implementation.

1: 1 prim, no possibility of a door on that level. Use 32-bit textures on the outside and inside of the cube prim to create the illusion of a window that you can see through. Easy enough on the outside, but on the inside, it's a single texture covering the entire interior surface, so you need a custom texture that shows all 4 walls, stitched end to end, unless all 4 are to have identical features. You also need to adjust the repeats on the hollowed surface, multiplying 4 x the % hollowed (as a decimal number) to get the number of repeats to specify so it actually comes out as 4 repeats on the inside of the cube. And if the room isn't square, it could be even more difficult to texture the inside precisely.

2: 2 or more prims. Cut the cube that forms your wall, opening it from one corner to the far edge of the desired window. Add more prims to put in the window and the wall between the window and the corner. You could also add a door this way, while still having three of the walls and a fraction of the 4th wall be a single prim.

3: Use more prims. Forget about using a hollowed prim, and simply use one or more prims for each wall. If your prim count allows, you are really far better off using 5 prims to make a wall that has a window in it. Use one for the window, with a 32-bit texture. Use 4 more, with 24-bit textures, for the walls above, below and to either side. This allows you to put the window anywhere you want it, texture easily, and have multiple windows in the wall if desired. It also eliminates alpha-sort glitches, so the plants and trees outside and high heeled shoes inside don't fight with your wall textures.

Or for option 3: use no prim in the window at all.

Otherwise, Ceara is exactly right.

I have seen a one prim sculpty house with windows and doors. However, the different rez rates for people looking at the house make it problematic. Still a fantastic bit of work.

I popped a picture of some landscape (provided by a Canadian friend) behind my window in my 6 prim house. On the smaller houses I've built, there wasn't much good to see out the windows so I at least give some opaque options. This prevents the alpha sorting glitch.

I have offset windows using shear I think.

I've also used a cut/uncut door in a 4 prim house. I just put fake windows on that one because again was building in heavily adfarmed area.

Drop me a line in game and I'll be glad to show you some of the tricks.

Although using a hollow prim to make a room seems like a good idea in terms of saving prims, I have lived to regret my economy in this respect: the camera goes crazy if it is focused on a wall inside one of these pseudo-rooms.

This has been a bug in SL since day one. If your camera is inside the volume of a hollowed prim, the camera does not know the prim is hollow. So when you focus on the surface of the hollowed interior, if there is a visible face of the exterior of the prim on the reverse line of sight, your camera gets moved backwards on that line of sight until it is outside the surface of the prim and aimed at that face. It only affects camera angles where both the chosen line of sight and the reverse vector intersect the hollowed surface of the uncut prim.