Prim Budgets for Residential Builds?

This is a continuation of my post from yesterday asking about terraforming classes.

With a prim budget on the land of over 1800 p, you'd think I had it made. But the plan for the place in my head includes the house, the yacht, the swimming pool, the waterfall, the basement with an underwater view of the reef...and then there's all the rocks, and trees, and flowers, and reef fish, and lawn furniture. OMG, I forgot the indoor furniture!

So, my question is...do y'all just start building away, or do you set some sort of prim budget for each part of your little paradise? How much planning do you do in advance?

And please don't suggest that I just get a zero prim rezzer and forget about it. I know about them, would use one if I simply HAD to, but would greatly prefer not to employ such...well, cheats.

I've got 3072sqm for my current home parcel at the moment, which gives me about 700ish prims. I've set out three seperate areas - home, a garden area, and a gathering place for friends - with the thought of keeping about 100-150 prims open for personal building projects. This has been intermittently successfull, though I will be the first to admit that one can never have too many prims to work with

In general, I will build simple, and expand based on the needs of the rooms and what custom texturing will allow me to do. I tend to stay away from furniture with excessive prim counts - it's possible to make great looking furniture for 5-15 prims. Have seen some tables and office chairs verging on 50 (!?!)

When I do find i need to cut back on prims, I will typically look at areas of high primmage - usually objects I didn't build - and try to reproduce the effect with fewer prims. If that doesn't work, I try to find alternatives to the object in question, or I start removing mid-high prim trees from the land.

I tend to sort of look at prim allowance as groups of prims; i.e. your yacht would be a bunch of prims. If prims get tight, I'd rather delete an entire group than skimp on everything.

Normally, I budget 40-50% for structures, 20% for landscaping, and 20% for furniture. Leaving 10% for emergencies and rezzable items such as boat, jetskis, etc. You don't have to have a prim heavy environment to make it nice. The key is in your texturing.

I'm not sure what you mean by a 'zero prim rezzer'. However, I just revived a month-old thread on temp rezzers, /327/3e/193413/1.html , asking about rez-on-demand gadgets. Part of the problem is that there is no lexicon by which we can figure out the correct, common names for these things, and their meanings.

A rez-on-demand gadget, as I describe in the other thread, seems perfectly reasonable for a home with a limited prim budget.

The temp-on-rez variant is the one I was talking about. Everything comes at a cost. In this case, the cost seems to be that by introducing a lot of extra prims, the gadget can affect sim performance.

I don't follow the technospeak, but as I understand it, it's sort of like boosting a car's power with a turbocharger or nitrous...you get lots more power, but do it too much and you'll blow up the engine.

'Druther not do that to my nice landlord.

I haven't seen a "rez on demand" gadget like you describe. Sounds kind of like the idea of changing outfits, but applied to a room or a house. Interesting...you could have a twenty room mansion squeezed into a one-room shack.

If I understand the above comments correctly, the confusion lies in the difference between Temp-on-rez and rez-on-demand.

Temp on rez = a scripted object that frequently rezzes and rerezzes objects marked temporary in an effort to get around prim budgets.

Rez on demand = scripted objects that rez the contents (usually for larger builds that are not completely linkable) in preset positions for easy placement. They are not, to my knowledge, intended to get around prim budgets.

Make use of space in your constructions. It will help create low-prim intensity areas that will allow you more prims where you need them, and everything looks better when you make use of space. Resist the urge to fill every bit of your land with something. Less is more etc. Using this basic principle I've never run out of prims before completing what I'm trying to achieve.

If I'm doing a landscaping/terraforming project for someone, I find out what's most important to him or her, and build that first (usually the house/castle/storefront or the waterfall), and do the terraforming at the same time. Good terraforming can help reduce prim count. I'd suggest starting with the things that can be built without many prims (if you're a good builder/texture artist) - the waterfall, the house, swimming pool, the basement/reef, in whichever order is important to you. A few well-chosen prim plants and fish, mixed with Linden trees and grasses, looks good and cuts down on landscaping prims. I don't think you have enough prims for all that and a detailed yacht, as well. But if the yacht is what you really want, then start with that. If you're buying furniture, make sure you know the prim counts before you buy. You don't have to have all your furniture out all the time - one way to handle that is to keep sets of furniture linked to an invisible prim that has x,y,z location in the description, so you can set it out and remove it easily.

Since you're learning, yeah, just go for it. Tearing it all down and starting over is how you figure it out, and is a lot of fun.

Thanks, Ada...can you give a couple of examples of how you use terraforming to reduce prim count?

The good thing is that parcel prim limits will be irrelevant in a few months
Just wait until people start realizing the true potential of sculpts.

If you use them by derezzing one build and rezzing the next, they effectively get around prim budgets, in the sense that you can have ten different rooms, only one of which is rezzed at any given time.

Temp on rez is just a prim attribute or state, not an object.

Allocate a maximum of 30% of available prims for your house - go lower if you can.

From there, decide what space is more important: inside, outside, or a balance of both and budget like this:

* Inside is more important than outside: 50% furniture and decorations / 20% garden and other outdoor elements

* Outside is more important than inside: 50% garden and other outdoor elements / 20% furniture and decorations

(lower the 50% number by 10% if you like to change the overall look from time to time - the 10% allow you to experiment with new things without the dreaded parcel full message)

* Balanced: 25% furniture and decorations / 25% garden and other outdoor elements / 20% for variations like fish, plants, rocks, and special occasions.

* Use low prim furnishings, decorations, etc. as much as you can, and as others have said, less is more - fill the space with space.

* Use the Linden plants and trees and use them in interesting ways since you get the best bang for the prim, so to speak, with the Linden plants. While there are some incredible trees around, I cannot justify 30 prims for a tree when I can use the same 30 prims for a nice house.

* Scultpies make a huge difference too. I make my own sculpties and am starting to use them instead of high prim things.

Best of luck!

-2fast

Yep. Even better, they get around *space* limitations. Want a swimming pool and a tennis court, but not both at the same time? neither one uses many prims, but they both take lots of space, so rez-on-demand gives you that choice.

I agree with another poster that sculpties will eventually reduce the prim pressure for many uses, and more residents will find themselves more constrained by space than by prims. For the moment, though there remain huge barriers to sculpties having much impact, pending a lot of extension (and probably rework) to their current implementation. And for scripts, a lot of critical things come one-per-prim, no matter how magically shaped it may be. (Hence the popularity of MLP and its various kludgy counterparts such as SexGen(TM).)

There are "Linden" plants/trees/shrubs etc. out there that look . .. depending on what you are comparing it to, great. All for 1 prim (1 tree=1 prim; 1 fern=1 prim). And there are other things that somehow reduce the number of prims, not sure how (I have "leafy ground cover" on my property that includes several plants grouped together = 2 prims).

Oh, and the original build had something like 100 prims tied up in trees/etc. 1 prim trees, mind you + 2 prim leafy cover. I moved things around, reduced the number of trees, moved trees closer or further apart . . . ended up using less than 100 prims for vaguely the same look.

"Terraforming to reduce prim count" - make very sure you really want to use a 10 prim tree vs an ok 1 prim tree. Have a plan - even with 1 prim trees you can end up using many many prims. Actually, that is all landscaping, eh? Sorry.

Terraforming - want to create a staircase? I have 2 staircases that came with the land - 22 prims total. Instead of a staircase, you can terraform the land to be localized hilly - vaguely natural stairs. 22 prims vs. 0 prims.

Want a moat? A pool, a spot of water? Put in a pool for however many prims, or if you have land near water, lower the land - likely find water under there somewhere (can disable camera restraints to look under land for water). On one of my lands, I created a moat around my castle for 0 prims. Could have done the same with prims - prims that look like water.

Terraforming to reduce prim count:
TY my favorite thing to talk about!

The first thing I do is to open the Edit Terrain window, select the land I want to work on - if it's up to a 2048 lot I select the whole thing. Then select "Revert Land" and keep clicking Apply To Selection, until the land stops moving. Take a good look at it - in most sims, we will be able to raise or lower 4 meters from these points. Then do the same thing with "Raise Land", "Lower Land" and "Flatten Land" - until I have a visual image in my mind of how this piece was configured by LL or the island owner.

If I'm building a waterfall, I raise all the land as much as possible, pick my high spot for the top of the waterfall, sink the bottom of the parcel, and use the Smooth tool to make the transition. Then I dig a channel for the water, add the water prims, and do touch ups to the terraforming - then add rocks and trees. I have saved prims by not using (as many) prim rocks to support the water.

For a building with a basement/cave I dig out the whole parcel, set the house at no more than 8 m above, and raise the foundation around the edges to the house, leaving the basement unfinished - maybe a few prims here and there to fill gaps, but saving a lot on prims by using the land as a building component. Castles can be built into rocky hillsides using the hill as the back wall - just like RL castles.

Walkways also - carve them out of the land rather than using a lot of prims for stairs and paths. This takes more practice - usually I select one 4x4m section at a time, flatten it, move to the next, etc., and use Smooth Land to connect the flattened sections, with some time spent walking my avatar through tweaking it.

I use Smooth Land to fix overstretched textures.

I hope this helps! It's OK to look idiotic while you're doing it, I sure do.

Lindal,

A spreadsheet works great for planning your prim budget. At a glance it will answer most questions that are hard to compute in your head, for example: "If each apartment or house is X prims, and I have Y renters, how many prims will be left for each tenant?" Put in a cell for each category: trees, the underground reef, etc. you can play with the numbers, and end up with a rough plan. Then you can just start building, with realistic expectations of how many prims you can "spend" on each category.