Inserting Windows in House Walls

I'm trying to get my mind straight for an attempt to build a house. I have reverse engineered some freebies to see how they are put together. I'm puzzled by the windows which are inserted into a wall. When I do a select on the wall, I not only see the window opening outlined, but invariably there is a diagonal line from the corner of the window opening to the corner of the wall. Is this an artifact of the technique used in forming the opening for the window? Ummm and just what is that technique?

Brad,

What you see it the effect of hollwing, which is simply the hollowing of a prim to put the window in, when a prim is hollowed it shows the cut line of where a prim would start being cut if you used the cut option...

to experiment with it just open edit on a prim and on the options tab you will see a choice to hollow something in percentage and once you have started hollowing it you can choose what shape the hollowed out form takes.

Marak Coral

Most windows in my builds are driven by alpha textures vs physical object properties. I usually create one solid version of the wall texture (for adjacent prims) and another version with windows as 15% opaque or as pure alpha TGAs. You might give that a try, as well.

The diagonal line represents the 0.00/1.00 position in the Cut: Begin and End boxes in the edit panel. So to cut something in half along that line you could make it begin at 0 and end at 0.5. Or to cut something in half along a line that's probably more perpendicular to the ground or a wall, depending on your rotations, you can begin at 0.125 and end at 0.625, etc.

But anyway, you're probably not cutting when you're making a window, you're probably just hollowing. Unless it's an especially cool window.

I think that that line appears because the prim is not allowed to be a topological donut shape. So, instead of connecting the two ends, and then having a hole in the shape, it make it very nearly a donut, but doesn't technically connect the ends, so that it remains a solid, un-holed shape. So, the lines are there because there is a teeny-tiny space between the ends.

Hi Brad
There are several techniques for building windows.

The first and simplest is to use an alpha - or transparent - texture for the walls. Or to use any texture, and add transparency using the setting on the texture page of the edit menu. This would give big glass walls. You could use transparent texture on the inside and an opaque texture on the outside as a variation. You would use select texture and then select which face of the prim you want to make transparent, and then either choose an alpha texture, or add transparency.

The second is to use a texture which includes alpha sections. It's what I think of as the film set technique of building: the texture includes all the detail such as window bars or leading, windowsill, possibly curtains too. Sometimes the textures come with an exterior and interior version, to enable you to have wall on the outside and wallpaper on the inside, but it means that you lack choices for those things, have to go with the ones you have textures for. Some people use a non-window texture outside and a window texture on the inside, but that depends upon whether you want the outside the reflect what's inside. These two are probably the lowest prim count versions for features like windows.

I prefer to use real windows, by hollowing out prims and inserting a working window. If you make a cube, then experiment with the hollow setting which appears on the object page of the edit menu. You can choose how much to hollow the cube, and then using the drop down menu below, can choose for the hollow to be square, round, or triangular. Usually you will want it to be square. You have lots of options though. You could make a wall with a hollow, and then make a thinner wall slightly smaller, and make the second prim transparent, and set it within the first. This will give you a non-opening window in the wall, showing on both sides. You can add prims for glazing bars etc if required.

You can start with the same hollow in the wall, and then use a free-to-copy door to make an opening window. You can texture the door, and resize it to fit, and use either a proper window texture, incorporating window bars and closings, or just make it transparent.

If you really want to make it VERY lifelike and detailed, you could use the resized door with a transparent texture as the glazing for the window, and then attach to it prims for the glazing bars and fixings.

If you need any help in-world...once we can get in-world...IM me and I would be happy to take you through it step-by-step.
HTH
Cali