Roofs and doors: For God's sake, someone help me :D

Lordfly come see me sometime I will show you some of mine in the past. Unfortunately at work no pics available at this time.

Shadow

you can listen to these guys or you can go on google and look at various doors and roofs even rolling doors would work

A roof should be flat for a private residence in my opinion. It ends up being the default building area for most, especially for smaller lots. Flat does not have to mean boring, adding nice railings, columns and other elements to the build.

The roof also ends up being the gathering place for people as it is far simpler to land on a roof than land and manuver into a building through a door.

I make mine out of bear skins.

I just put a glass dome on everything.

I made the roof of my house into three interconnected decks...fun though questionably functional in rl...this isn't so fun! Doors still confuse me and this is only my first big build, but I just put a round door and shutters on something and that was interesting...

vc

This subject is currently very dear to my heart.

I rezzed a little less than a month ago, and almost immediately stumbled across Tiger's wonderful apartment complex.

After living there for awhile, I began to feel the strain of a 45-prim allowance, and started searching for rental property. I lucked into a flat, rectangular lot in Blue, owned by Charlotte Gillespie and offered for rental at what I thought was a very reasonable rate.

After closing the deal, I started noodling around with build ideas immediately, absolutely drunk on the potential of 117 prims. That lasted a whole 24 hours, and the next day, I got the neighboring lot from Charlotte as well. (OK, it might've been 36 hours. The point is, I now know how Property Fever feels )

I've seen some incredible stuff on The Grid, like Seacliff, or the castle on Montmartre...the kind of work that I'd never be able to do in this life. But I've also paid attention to three builders whose work I admire very much: Tiger Crossing, Maxx Monde, and Marcos Fonzarelli...and I think I've culled a a little bag of tricks that they all three use. Namely, (a) "pure" colors, (b) shape with prims and transparency rather than textures, and (c) add just enough intriguing detail to make the build interesting. That looked like something I might be able to do with practice, and so my first private home has become an experiment in those techniques.

Charlotte's one rule for her tenants in Blue is "Gravity works here", so I tried to juice up the house's foundational supports (as shown) with a few extra prims apiece, just to give the eye something to catch. It also gives me the seed for a decorating theme.

The roof (as shown in the other shots) is what I'm trying to finish now. I went with a split design, vaulting the back section of the roof, but you can see where I'm at the point of having to figure out how to close three front-facing surfaces in without spending every last prim in my allowance. I have a couple of ideas using stretched semi-disks over even more glass to break up all the angles, but I don't push myself. As a couple of posters have half-jokingly suggested, I tend to stare for a little while, and then go away for a day before I come back to take the next step. I've been working on the house piecemeal since last weekend.

The two disks inset into the front turn white Light at sunset, which I hope is a reasonably restrained use of the material. My next scripting step will be to set the front door to slide...the two angled panels will completely close from opposite directions, and are set to slightly overlap, rather than to meet on the same plane. After that, I want to copy the way Tiger set his glass areas to cycle transparent/one-way/opaque, but possibly using touch or email rather than chat.

The design on the front roof caught me by surprise. I knew I wanted the house to be interesting from overhead, and I'd come into a build session with the top part pretty thoroughly visualized, but the white hollowed transparent "support" underneath was a little bit of sudden inspiration. I'm pretty happy with the way that turned out.

Right now I'm at 63 prims, and I'd like to finish the roof at 80 prims or under, if I can just think of something that works. After that, I may replace the fireplace with something a little snazzier that Skunken showed me how to do, and that should leave me 130+ prims for furniture and garden. (And, if push comes to shove, I think Charlotte has one lot left I could snag for prim support...sigh...)

I didn't mean to come in here and write a book, but I'm having a ball with this...especially the roofing...and feeling a little pleased with myself

-- judah

Thanks for those screenshots Judah! It's great to see what things look like with shiny mode on, it kills my computer

Highly cool.

Are you building by the numbers?

Thanks, Charlotte!

Prokofy I appreciate it! To answer your question: yes and no. So far, I'm lining up one side of the house more-or-less by sight, and then snapping the mirror-side into place by the numbers.

-- judah

When building roofs, or pretty much anything in SL for that matter, I go outside and drive around and try to find cool stuff. But if you don't feel like finding the keys to your car, Google image search works awesomely. A good example of sweet architecture is the Spanish Mosques:

http://i.cnn.net/cnn/2003/WORLD/europe/07/11/spain.mosque/story.mosque.jpg
(linked because I hate to be an image leech.)

In second life, it's fairly simple to build a roof like that. Just make a 4-sided pyramid prim and then add onto it with things such as those little "razorback" ridges that run down the edges. If you texture or stylize it right, it looks pretty cool. I can't login at the moment to show you my random project right now, but I'll try to ASAP.

I combined the two and put a big cantilevered roof-door on my office tower in Louise (around 228, 192 if I remember). I think it's unlocked at the moment and will open and close for anyone who comes by and clicks on it. If I can remember to get it together I'll post a pic of it here, but basically the idea is it goes from this:

_______


to this:

____/

just by clicking on the roof, and then you fly in through the gap.

Here are the pictures of my big cantilevered roof door machinery thingy:

wow...and he builds, too, this is amazing. Have to go see. WTG, Walker.

aww...... tks Prok!

i /love/ building, maybe a little too much. Hey, maybe i can become SL's first journalist/architect!