Prim allignment

Hello, I probably have posted a lot of building help posts here before, but i am a crappy builder so get used to it hehe

Anyway I am trying to rebuild my store once again, and it's so frustrating. I know I need to take the time to practice and learn how to allign prims correctly, and a friend showed me the correct ways to do it (using numbers/cords under objects tab, matching them up, etc.) but I am often trying to carry on with my designs and try to spend not too much time on building my store. I've built it over and over again, but I just can never seem to get the alligning of walls and floors just right (as well as the textures to line up correctly). I started from scratch and at first it was all perfect, but as I tried to hollow out the floors and make a basement underneath, things got out of whack.

I have gone over all the walls and floors several times and tried to line them up using the cordinates, but it never seems to work. I'm still a newbie at building so I am not quite sure how to fix it.

But anyway getting onto the important part, I was looking for a building expert or someone who can at least line up boxes/textures correctly so that there arent any seams/cracks showing in the walls and floors. If anyone can help me with this I would very much appreciate it, and am willing to pay.

Thankyou and if you wanna help, please IM me in-game, or you can post here.

... and when you're done there, can you swoop past my house of cracks and seams, please.

Oh my.

For what it is worth, I've noticed that if you create a cube (sometimes) you don't get alignments even when you calculate it properly.

so if my cube is X:10m Y:10m Z:10m, and I want to copy it, but have the edge butt up precisely to the other, I'd just take the axis I want to move it in and add 10m to the coordinates, right?

Yeah, I thought so too, but it turns out that you have to 'fudge' it a bit, because you get a 'gap' of 0.001 sometimes between prims. It really drives me nuts sometimes. So, if you calc it out, just knock off a 0.001 and see if it is aligned that way.

All I can offer in the way of advice.

Hmm after tryin to fix it for awhile I kinda figured that too. I thought it was just a problem with the SL building options, which I guess it is, and hopefully they'll fix it soon..Would love to be able to make more accurate buildings an easier way!

Maxx was explaining some of this stuff earlier to me, and the details behind the laborious builds he puts together. Unfortunately, the SL grid doesn't work exactly at smaller increments (i.e. 0.010), nor can one Stretch-To or Rotate-To grid (specified in angles for the latter). It makes building a chore, but looking at the wonders people have created even with these problems, it makes me wonder what further promise lies ahead.

In the end, it seems to come down to eyeballing everything with multiple cam angles and zooming in really closely, if you're going to really scrutinize your build. Best of hope.

My best tip is to set your grid to 0.125 (Tools menu -> Grid Options) and turn on Align to Grid in the Edit window. Make most of your building peices at 1/4 meter sizes (0.25, 0.5, 1, 10, etc) and they will all snap together.

This makes building aligned objects very fast.

Snap can work, and does when you start out that way. What kills me is making a decorative piece and it not quite falling where it should due to snap...then I have to turn it off and do it manually...I have found that eyeballing it, I'm accurate to a 0.001, so not too bad

Whew ok I finally did it. All of the walls/floors/etc. have no cracks or if they do they are very hard to see. It took 2 hours but I am finally crack-free! Lol

I have no idea how to use snap or grids nor do i want to even try it right now..but i used a whole bunch of calculations (and a calculator) and got all the walls to be alligned straight. I can't remember what I did now, but I used the thing with the subtracting .001 and had to subract a little more than that one some of them.

Wow i never knew building required so much math. =x

Sometimes it also helps to play with the textures for the faces that are "kissing" each other. Eventhough you shouldn't be able to see these textures at all, if you set them to have either a total alpha (transparent) texture or to a solid color that closely matches the color of the textures that you can see, this will sometimes make the tiny cracks either vanish or significantly less obvious.

Recently, I've started trying to design my builds to avoid prims needing to be lined up perfectly end to end as much as possible. Otherwise I do it by the numbers... so that the pieces should theoretically line up flush and then when I get done texturing, I go back through and use various methods (texturing the inside surfaces, the .001 fudge, etc) to get rid of as many of the cracks as possible.

I hardly ever use the snap to grid method bc I too often use strange angles and measurements in my builds.

OH one other thing... this drives me nuts... sometimes if there's a crack that just won't go away and you don't know why it's there, check the rotation on the prims. Often, one or two of the rotation fields will drift by 0.01 degrees and cause a crack.

-Meiyo

Snap to Grid is only reliable at certain settings, 0.250 is generally the best - and almost no setting under 0.125 will align reliably. Add to that, the known issues of linked sets 'drifting' and the rotate bug it can be no surprise that there are so many seams in SL builds.

If you're building anything ornate or detailed you will inevitably end up turning Snap To Grid off and manually sizing/positioning. As Maxx says, you can achieve a high degree of accuracy this way.


Jai Nomad

I'm with Tiger on this one. I'm somewhat new but have really dove into building. I Have found its best to stick with waht I call "easy numbers" when it comes to creating a seamless structure. I first make sure the starting pieces (in my case I usualy make a base or foundation) are on even coordinates, usualy all whole numbers (ex. 196.000, 35.000, 12.000) Then use the 1/8th numbers (.000, .125, .250, .375, .500, .625, .750, .875, ) for all my sizes and if you do that all your coordinates should also come out as numbers such as those. Instead of trying to do the math and figure out where it should be I just eye-ball it then check the coordinates, usualy I'm very close and just have to adjust the coordinates a little bit. Also for floors I usualy just use the copy/center selection and it does a good job of it.

Is it 100% acurate? Like Maxx pointed out it doesn't always work! But It makes an fairly seemless structure. Also, with textures this makes them easier to line up with offsets and repeats per meter.

On the other hand for more free form non-mathematical designs its near impossible to use all 'easy' numbers. Recently I have been experimanting with making smaller items like sunglasses etc and you just have to zoom in really close, squint your eyes, put your nose against the screen and do your best

comments: yeah, the Build environment is pretty lame, but remember that the whole SL universe hinges on the whole prim thing, it was the ONLY way they could get SL to exist in a useable state so we're all willing to overlook some of our own cracks for the sake of sanity. Especially when you spend the extra 10 minutes lining it up only to be rewarded with the "slipping textures" thing fighting eachother into view. ever see this?

~Lefty

You mean texture overlap? I rarely see it, due to my building style.

THe trick? Build by the numbers.

Don't drag pieces into place. Don't use the grid. Use the XYZ coordinates in the edit window, and round down. IE if the position of your flooring is 104.405x, 107.583y, 23.450z, round it to within either .125 or .25.

IE those coordinates become 104.5x, 107.5y, 23.5z. From there, it's a simple task of aligning evrything else, as long as they're exact sizes as well (ie the dimensions aren't some wacky floating point number).

Makes building a lot easier, plus everything is perfectly aligned.

LF

Yeah! This drives me nuts! I have 7 cubes for my box house. I carefully zoom up and butt them against each other, then step back and look and there's a big crack! Then I try again and now they're overlapped and the texture kinda flickers. They seem to move be themselves when you move the camera around. It's annoying!

Hmm. THAT sounds like a level of detail issue.

Go into preferences and change the "object detail" slider to max.

LF

If you build to the grid, you also get the added benifit of using SHIFT-X to snap any selected object to the X/Y grid point. (Unfortunately, it does not alter Z, which still has to be wiggled by hand to make an object conform.)