'Nother landscaping/building question...

What tools (besides the ones built into your user interface) do you find essential, or even just real handy for building landscapes and structures?

brain, eyes and the alt cam, nothing more needed

For Terraforming and Landscaping, i have Five or Six Simple Home made Measuring and Surveying tools that allow me to create a Contour map in Photoshop, or similar program, Then reproduce it exactly down to a Tenth of a meter accuracy on a Full Sim in SL. I found Preplanning the Finished look of a Sim makes the Over-All terraforming job go Very Quickly. Uninterrupted i did a quarter of a Sim in Under two hours. Time will vary due to complexity of course, But i have it down to a science now. I'm not describing the Tools exactly because i do Terraforming as a Sideline Business, But my measuring tools ARE Indispensible to me.

That was Landscaping, For Building i have One essential Tool that i Will give you freely, and i Guarantee it will make any build you work on Fast and Precise. The Tool is "Whole Numbers" It's easier to work with Positions like 125M, or Sizes like 1.75M than it is to work with Positions like 118.734M and Sizes like .681M The Easier you make the math, the better the parts of your Build will Fit, You will build Faster, and the Outcome will be far more beautiful than if everything is Mismatched, and Odd.

I Hope this helps, If you want some lessons, Contact me In World.

Angel.

Thanks, Angel.

I'd dearly love to know more about your terraforming tools, but I can understand why you want to keep them proprietary!

The "use whole numbers" tip is one of those "obvious, now that someone's told me" things. Thanks for that one, too.

For those who are too lazy to input numbers, has anyone used a product called "Prim Docker"? Their product demo video looked pretty cool.

Take a peak down in the building tips section, there was a thread a few days ago about good tools for builders =)

Angelique's got a good point; if I'm building (and I'm DEFINITELY not a pro, I just do it for fun) I find it much easier to work with whole numbers or at least identifiable decimals, like 2.5 as opposed to 2.465.

Also, when making something, even if you're going to move it later, it's nice to have a clean, uncluttered platform, like a 10 x10 square, flat prim to work on or against. I do some tiny stuff like jewelry, and it's much easier to see when I put it up against a large white expanse.

Also, I work on the polar alignments, i.e. 0 degree rotations, or easily identified rotations, 30, 60, 90, 45, 135, etc. Obviously if stuff needs tweaking, I'll change it, but I start at the cardinal points and rotate from there.