by Domino Marama
Copyright 2007 Domino Designs Limited
When building in Second Life the first thing we need is a plan. Sometimes just knowing what you want to build is enough and you can let it evolve as you work on it. While there is a lot to be said for letting your imagination run freely like this, having a solid plan can save you a lot of time. That's what this part of the tutorial is about, the plan!
At first all I had was a vague idea of doing a tutorial about making and texturing sculpties with Blender. After some thought it began to make sense to do it about creating a vehicle. With vehicles in Second Life you have 4 options.
1) Stick to the physics engine limit and only use 30 prims for a single seat vehicle (each additional passenger decreases prim count by 1)
2) Work past the limit by having a combination of a physical vehicle frame plus avatar attachments with the prims that make the rest of the vehicle
3) Use non physical scripted movement of a larger prim set to get past the limit
4) Make a show vehicle that can't be driven
As some of you are sure to know, I make the racing system which is used at many tracks in Second Life. So when I'm designing vehicles I always have racing in mind. This eliminates options 2 and 3 for lag issues and option 4 is a non-starter so we are left with option 1.
I'm happy with a single seat vehicle to race in, but you may want to take a passenger for a ride to show off your new creation. That limits us to just 29 prims for our tutorial vehicle. Sounds like an ideal project for a few sculpties to get more detail with those prims.
To keep things familiar for everyone following along, I decided a car would be the ideal vehicle type to do. This means there are a few parts we know we need so let's check our prim count.
There are 4 wheels, 2 seats, and the steering wheel so that leaves us just 22 prims to do the rest of the car. It is possible to do an axle with 2 wheels from a single cylinder prim, but that causes problems with texture animation. We could also do the rear axle and wheels as a single sculptie but that's pushing the LOD too far. Many racers have the Second Life graphics settings on minimum to keep their frame rates as high as possible. So for now we'll say it's two prims for the rear wheels, we can always change our mind later on.
What we need next is a body design for a two seater car that looks like it could be done in 22 prims. Time to visit:
http://www.the-blueprints.com/index.php?blueprints/cars/
I look forward to seeing what you choose and I'll reveal my choice in part 2
