Seamless prims aligning impossible?

ok.........here is the problem so demoralizing that made me stop building my first house in SL..........i just can't go over those annoying dotted lines between the walls or floor prims........i did learn how to use snap function and i do have a Prim Docker that make those aligns so easy and much more precise than SL editor but still.........no matter how many time i checked the numerical and optical alignment, when rotating the camera around the object those dotted lines will appear somewhere.........especially when changing the environment settings...from midday to sunset.......and vice versa .............i am pretty new in all this .........in SL.........but.........never used 3d editor before.........only having experience with 2d softwares like photoshop or illustrator where anyway there is no room for anything less than perfection.....

PLEASE..............HELP!!!!......... with any suggestion, tutorial, advice, secret approach or idea how to make those walls align seamlessly and with steady appearance no matter what time of day/night or what texture is on them...........

Thanks so much.............

SH.

I'm sure you'll get plenty of good explanations here. But, from me, I suggest asking around the NCI Kuula sandbox. If you run into the right person, you have a good chance of getting a full visual presentation of what can be done. (^_^)y

What exact version of SL are you using?

I recall reading about a bug in which prims are actually moving from perfect alignment to imperfect alignment recently.

Another thing that can affect apparent alignment is how your Prefences, Graphics, Mesh Detail, Objects is set.

I believe it's possible for things to look perfectly aligned to you and not to others.

If you're certain your objects are mathematically aligned, then the dotted lines are simply a visual artifact, caused by aliasing along diagonal lines. If the scene is not anti-aliased, each object will have jagged edges. Where the jags from two adjacent objects don't quite match, you'll get what appears to be a dotted line.

This isn't just an SL thing, by the way. It will happen in any 3D scene to which anti-aliasing has not been applied, in every single 3D application in the world. Anti-aliasing exists to prevent exactly this sort of problem (among other things).

There are two ways to turn on AA (assuming your video card can handle it). One is through the Hardware Settings dialog in your SL preferences. Click on Edit -> Preferences -> Graphics tab -> Hardware Options button. You'll see a dropdown box for anti-aliasing. You'll need to experiment to see how high you can set it before your frame rate drops to unusable levels. If you've got a good video card, you can go all the way up to 16x. If your card isn't that great, you'll have to use a lower setting. You'll find that even a little bit of AA will make a huge difference.

The other way to do it is through your graphics driver's control panel. If you're using an nVidia card, there's a Manage 3D Settings tab in your nVidia Control Panel. Alternatively, you can download a program called nHancer, which does the same thing, but arguably has a better interface. If you're using an ATI card, you can access settings through the Catalyst Control Center. For either one, just assign a profile to secondlife.exe, and apply anti-aliasing in the profile settings.

If you're using Intel graphics, or even a very low end nVidia or ATI card, then anti-aliasing might not be an option for you. In that case, the only way to get rid of those jags will be to get yourself a better video card.

Also, what happens is that because of the way SL is lit, the sun will reflect on different faces of the prims even though they are technically "hidden". If the prim face has a light color texture the effect will be a sparkle along the seam and the if the face has a dark texture it will be more like ants marching along the seam. Making your inside faces transparent will help in some cases, in other cases you just have to learn to live with the effect at sunrise and sunset, when it is most noticable. Building in SL will never be perfect, that's the nature of the beast. You learn to not discard the good in search of the perfect.

another option you might want to try is if you are coloring your floor texture, make the "hidden" sides of the floor prims the same color. If not just use the same texture on the sides as on the surface where you are seeing the "dots". Using the same texture is good practice anyway, because the fewer unique textures to rez the quicker they will rez. Remember even hidden textures are rendered by the viewer.

ok......many thanks to all of you.........i did manage to "kill" most of those dotted lines....BUT......still some of them prevail.........obviously my graphic card is not the fastest one.......actaully is pretty slow and outdated but even with such i saw some houses in sl that do not have a single seam.........so, the conclusion is that those seamless houses are done outside the sl and imported or that there is a way to made them in sl using tools or techniques that i am not aware of.............if the first option is possible at all then i would like to know what is the software (for the mac? version 10.4.11) and how to import the house in sl.........same for the second option........would like to learn those...........i really want to create houses that will be technically perfect so the design can stand out fully ......but accepting anything less than perfect is wasting time to me............

...btw.......will have new graphic card in january and a new mac till summer but still dont think that is the clue to solve that "seam mystery"


please let me know what u think........thanx

sh.

It's the latter. Importation of externally created models is extremely limited, and follows all the same mathematical rules as building in-world. Anything that would cause a visible seam in an in-world-built model would cause the exact same seam in externally built one, as soon as it's reassembled in-world. The numbers are the numbers are the numbers.



There are scripts and plugins available for Blender, 3DS Max, Maya, AutoCAD, and others. But I would not suggest trying to use any of them until you've first mastered building with the in-world tools. For any model to be compatible with SL, it needs to be built with SL in mind, exactly as if it had been built in-world from the start. If you don't know what you're doing in SL, that's not going to be possible.



Practice, practice, practice. There's really no other answer.

One tip I'll give you is get good with the on-screen rulers. They're tremendous time-savers, and are amazingly accurate. Learn what all three ruler modes do. Once you've gotten used to them, you'll find yourself switching between all three constantly as you build.

Here's one quick example. Say you want two prims to be flush. The quickest way to that is to use the reference ruler, and then the local ruler. Here's how:

1. Make sure Use Grid is enabled in the editor window.

1. Grab the first object, and press shift-G (with chat closed). This will reference the object, so that the on-screen rulers align with it. The units will become multiples of the object's size, and the rotation will match the object's rotation.

2. Grab the second object, and move it so that its center point aligns with the first object's edge. Drag the mouse over the ruler ledger lines as you're moving the object, to snap the object in place.

3. Switch the ruler mode to Local, and move the second object over by half its own width. Again, make sure to drag over the ledger lines, to snap the object perfectly into place.

The two objects will now be perfectly flush with each other. You can repeat the process along another axis, if you want them to be flush in two dimensions. Master this technique, and you'll never have seams between objects (graphics artifacts, and prim drift notwithstanding).


Another tip is you'd be surprised how far good texturing will go. A badly textured build can look chock full of ugly seams. The exact same build, with a "fresh coat of paint" can look entirely seamless. If you want to be a good modeler, learn to texture, and if you want to be a good texture artist, learn to model. The two go hand in hand. You cannot master either one without first getting good at the other.



I admire that sort of perfectionist spirit, but I'd argue against the "wasting time" concept. If you learn from the process, there's absolutely no such thing as wasting time.

The old saying, "Anything worth doing is worth doing right," is dreadfully incomplete. A much better way to put it is, "Anything worth doing is worth doing wrong, until you learn how to do it right."

No one, absolutely no one, is good at modeling in SL right off the bat. There are specific techniques and tricks to it that take time to discover. There's no way around that.

/109/45/214824/1.html

That thread contains Chosen Few's wonderful texture alignment texture, and explains how to use it.

Between snapping to grid (which Chosen explained in the post before mine) and aligning textures perfectly (using the alignment texture), you will have the tools to do the job right.

After that, it's the old joke.

"How do you get to Carnegie Hall?"
"Practice, man, practice."


That said, the Ivory Tower of Primitives has a set of self-paced building lessons, and NCI (New Citizens Inc) has some with teachers. http://nci-sl.org/ is the address for the latter.


(BTW Chosen: THANK YOU! Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you. That alignment grid has been my single most useful texturing tool EVER. I'm very glad I stumbled upon that thread.)

sl is inaccurate, using base2floats for positioning.
you see it rounded in the editor, but any movement or rotation adds to inaccuracy.
dont waste time to accuracy in sl. spend time playing with your build.

Ditto what poster said above.

The bug is also there with prim drift too - so you may align perfectly and then on linksets get drift...after re-rez....

I see the same thing but only with certain textures. Some textures are perfect and others leave the dotted lines.. I do find using anti-aliasing helps. I bought some really nice wall textures for my latest builds but they have those lines on the seams worst than any other wall textures I have used... Either just have to deal with it or find textures that minimize it. In some builds I add a vertical post between each seam to hide it but not all builds look right like that and wastes primes...

How did you create the aligned prims? There is a function in the build tool that lets you create perfectly aligned prims with one click:

1. Select prim you want to duplicate
2. go to the CREATE tab in the build menu (the magic wand)
3. check COPY SELECTION and KEEP TOOL SELECTED
4. Click the surface you want to new objects to be attached to

And bam you get perfectly aligned prims with NO seams.

ROTATE COPY lets you create circular sets.

Works also with multiple prims and linksets.

one thing I've realized is that prisms don't line up properly. Neither do rings. You can line up three cubes perfectly, turn the middle one into a prism, and suddenly they're not lined up.