Need to make large irregular shape

Sorry, newbie (dumbo) builder here again!

I want to make a large platform to cover my 512m plot. The plot of course is roughly rectangular, but I don't want to adhere to that too strictly.

My aim is to use a very flattened hemisphere as the base shape, with the the flat face pointing upwards. But I want to make the overall shape neither circular nor rectulangular but a combination of these flattened hemispherical shapes or maybe these shapes stretched in one direction.

Two problems

1) I've hit the 10x10m limit - any way of increasing the individual hemispherical prim to beyond this? I wish they did it by volume, I am after all trying to use very flattened spheres (so as to give a more solid but not blockish appearance to the platform from the side view)

2) I don't know how to link/group them and this obviously will be needed to maintain the cohesiveness of the structure.

Obviously with as few prims as possible!

Many thanks in advance for your super-tips.

My eventual aim is to use these platforms to make a staged "floating garden" (won't be on Babylonian scale though).

Neither rectangular nor spherical. Is it an ellipsoid?
You can try putting 2 stretched quarter spheres on both ends of a half cut cylinder. This should result it a flattish looking dish that looks suitable to serve fish. Following that, just add a couple more spheres along the straight sides if you want it more curvy.

There is no way of going beyond the 10 x 10 limit. You can twist a flattened cube so much that it results in a circle, but this seldom looks nice. There is however a scripted device that can make giganto rings and spheres by Cadroe Murphy. Try and look up his name and see if he has a link to his land. Theres a free copy there.

To link them together, just box select the whole bunch of shift-select the individual prims one by one and then hit ctrl-L.
The function is also available at the menu above.

Try squashed cylinders (height less than length/width). And play around with top shear and top size. Using cylinders or cubes combined with top shear, it is possible to get something larger than 10m. But there can be unpleasant side effects if you make them too thin, such as the whole thing might disappear when you look at it from certain angles.

I'm not saying this will be what you're looking for, but it's worth playing around with. This is a useful thing in general (to just play with the various settings and shapes). You'll often be surprised what happens and every now and then you'll come upon something really useful.

Leo, can you post a drawing of the shape you're trying to make? I'm sure there are several of us who would have some good advice if we could see exactly what you're trying to do.

Cottonteil, for example, who already responded to this thread, is an excellent builder. He and I often have differing points of view on methods and techniques, so I'm sure you could benefit from seeing what each of us might suggest, as well as other people's ideas.

Post a pic and I'll be sure and tell you how I'd go about building it.

OK, not a bad idea Chosen Few, perhaps I was going about it the wrong way, I'll give you the shape and let you tell me what to use to make it since you know what you're doing!

Having said that, I can't actually upload at the moment

I'm aiming for either a kidney sort of shape or maybe a fat boomerang shape. No straight lines please though, very important (aesthetically).

Looking on Google Images (since I can't upload), something like the following was what I had in mind...

http://www.richardsonmonument.com/images/benches/5-Kidneyshapebenchatagolfcourse.jpg

http://www.maverickcreations.com/pix/boomerang.jpg

Try to imagine them as floating platforms!!

We even have differing points of view of what gender I should be referred to as. LOL.

Anyway, I think the shape can be built from two semi-spheres, 1 sphere cut and squashed wide for the back curve, and a cut torus for the concave side. I'll give it a go and forward you a copy if I'm successful with my attempt.

Have fun!

Hehe, sorry Cottonteil. I had no idea you were a girl. It's okay; most people have trouble guessing my RL gender too.

Leo, I'd probably do this a bit differently than Cottonteil suggests. The first pic you linked reminds me of my Guardian of Forever exhibit. If you're a Star Trek fan, I'm sure the Guardian needs no introduction, but suffice it to say it's an irregularly shaped stone ring, not entirely unlike that stone bench in your link.

The way I replicated it for SL was to first make an alpha texture in Photoshop to constitute the front (and back) surface. Then I used a bunch of prims to extrude the outline of the surface to give the shape depth. The result looks like a single slab of stone, cut out out to a peculiar shape.

Another example of this technique would be the Starfleet operations building in Charmonix. It looks like a giant combadge. I started with the cobadnge texture, spread acros a few pims to form the roof, and then extruded the outline with hollowed and cut cylinders to form a hollow building.

Needless to say the Guardian is a bit prim heavy since it has so many nooks and crannies in its outline, but your kidney/boomerang shape is considerably simpler. It needn't be very heavy. You could probably pull it off with just 4 or 5 prims.

Here's a pic of the Guarian exhibit with a breakdown of where some of the extrusion prims are. It should be enough to give you an idea how to do the same thing with your kidney/boomerang shape.