Complex Objects

Maybe I'm just missing something or am horrible at searching, but I'm trying to find some info about creating complex objects. Such as an animal. I saw in a thread someone mentioned creating a pet (Celerity?) but they had given up. My question isn't about the scripting, I've found plenty of info on scripting and being a programmer at heart haven't found any issues with that (yet). My question is about the actual creation of the object.

I spent a couple of hours recently building a spider out of a couple of spheres and several cylinders. I was just trying to create the simplest creature I could and it turned out decent enough. But the problem arises when I try and actually connect the leg segments together and to the body. After looking through the menus I thought Linking was what I wanted but when I tried linking I started getting errors. Specifically something to the effect of "a link child cannot also be a link parent". So if I have a body and then a leg that has three sections what do I do? Maybe I'm not understanding the linking bit since I can't seem to find any documentation about it. I can't seem to find any documentation about creating things at all beyond the most basic info.

I eventually got to a point where I thought it was done and so I applied physics to it and the thing exploded. Legs went all over and the body went flying off into the ocean. Some of the legs appeared to be linked properly, but none of them were linked to the body.

Anyway, the question comes down to where can I find some info about creating complex objects like what I've described?

at this time, your object (collection of primitives) can have only one parent. hopefully that will change soon!
the last primitive you select (before linking them all into an object) becomes the parent. after you have linked(ctrl-L) them, deselect(click somewhere else) then reselect the object. the parent prim will have a yellow selection, all the child prims will have a blue selection. you should be able to safely apply physics to it at this point.
you will get exploding objects if you apply physics to (unlinked)prims that are interpenetrating other prims, because, as in the real world, 2 objects cannot occupy the same space.
i have built a few animals. feel free to catch me in-world if you want some tips.

bp

I can vouch for that, BP made me a couple of very nice deer.