ornamenting the outside of a cylinder

When making items that are to be ornamented, let's say a hollowed cylidner as a bracelet. When trying to place studs or jewels etc on it, I find at some point I can no longer move one prim towards the other directly, but it is at 45 degrees within the plane.

To explain this better. lets say we have 2 prims. When we go into move mode you can pull the arrow that points towards the other one. However, in this case, no arrow points toward the other one, however one arrow points tangentlly towards the left and another to the right.

I hope someone even understands what I am asking...

Screenshot? And check what ruler you're using (world, local or reference)...

i understand what you are SAYING but not ASKING.
yes, you will encounter situations where you have to move diagonally to align things, this is the nature of working with prims that are rotated.
now, how may we be of service?

Try switching from local mode to global mode, as Lyn hinted at.

Will try the global/local thing tonight but I am of the opinion that it is more of an rotational issue.... Well I guess knowing how to describe it properly is half the battle.

I think I have come up with a strategy and if it works will make it simple. However, since it sounds too easy I will try it first before bragging abotu it

Thansk for the suggestions!

Here is an easy way to make prims stay tangential to the surface of a cylinder (or a sphere, for that matter). I'll assume the cylinder is upright, like a column.

Make the cylinder, and one prim of the type you hope to distribute around the surface of the cylinder.

Duplicate that decorative prim, flip it 180 degrees on the same axis as the cylinder, and move the copy to the far side of the cylinder. The idea is to position the two decorative prims exactly opposite each other, which in itself is fairly easy.

Now, select BOTH prims. Drag copy, and then undo, which puts the copies overlapping the originals and leaves them selected.

Now, using the mouse, rotate the pair. They will rotate on the center point between them, which is also the centerline of the cylinder!

Have fun!

Oh, Ceera, you FOX, you!
Thats a GREAT trick!

Ceera, this i show I initially made them. Howver, now that I have resized the centeral cylinder, the issue is gettgi them to move back towards the cylidner.

Make a cylidner lets say 1.0 , rez an ornamentation 0.01 place them aroudn it lets say 12 times. then schrink the cyl to .06 now make the ornamentations sit back on the cylidner withotu having to delete and recreate them

for this task you should switch to the local coordinate system. then you should be able to just drag the ornaments to the cylinder surface as they are rotated and at least one local axis will point at the cylinders center.

Cool, I knew if I asked the right question I'd get the answer! I hadn't played with Local for much of anythgin yet. Still gettign the feel for all the aspects of the tool.

Link them to the cylander before resizing it, and shrink the linkset.

If they need to remain the same size, but just need to move inward, scale the prims up before scaling the linkset down. If they can scale smaller but some dimensions are already at min size, increase that dimension before shrinking.


For example, I made a charm bracelet. Each charm is a box prim that I cut to drop its effective thickness to 0.005, when the prim was sized at the mimimum thickness of 0.010. I positioned a pair of these around a bracelet that was a hollowed cylander (which I would later texture as a chain). Using the method in my earlier post, I duplicated the pairs and rotated them to make a total of 16 charms around the bracelet.

Now, let's say I have all that done, but decide the bracelet is 20% too big.

I want the charms to scale down with the bracelet, but they are already at the min allowed thickness.

I have to increase the thickness of each charm to 0.012, before shrinking the bracelet. When the linkset gets scaled down to where the charms are 0.010 again, I won't be able to shrink it further.

Ceera --

It truely is the little things! hehehe, I never though of that but I have something else I just made to fit my AV, that since I am a dude and large as can normally be, and I went for thinness is completely unscalebel to fit either a normal sized male or a female...

Is there a way to make thinner prims for let's say straps? I just built a leather harness and at .010 it is still pretty chunky. I made them from hollowed and cut cylinder but I am sure I have seen someone make stuff that was thinner...

Try hollowing and profile cutting a tube or torus. When you hollow those, the ring becomes hollow, while hole size adjusts the interior diameter. Profile cut allows you to remove part of the inner or outer shell, leaving a flat, convex or concave ring that is thinner than a hollowed cylander can go.

I used hollowed and profile-cut toruses to make bamboo segments recently...

Hmmm, I will try the tube, if I am lucky it may even line up nicely with what I did using the cylinder. Though I don't expect it to do so...

Thanks.