Large Pyramids

Is there a tool to make it easy to build a large pyramid? I've been playing with doing it myself, and it's kind of a pain. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Charlie

10,000 slaves ?

sorry couldn't resist

bwahahahahaha
/wave @ Lauk

Absent a tool, the easiest way to build anything big that has a regular structure is to build a piece of it, link that together, then drag copy it, rotate, resize, and put it into position. Then, select the two linked pieces and drag copy. Then, select the 4 pieces and drag copy. Each time that you do this, you're doubling the number of prims that are being copied.

This can be much faster than doing it a prim at a time.

AutoCAD, Math. Trigonometry. If you can calculate how high your layers are from using their hypontenuse and the angle you have them sat from being straight upright, you can get a very good estimate of how to position your triangles or blocks or whatever you are using. Or if you are using boxes or rectangular blocks, then you could take the trianglular slope and figure out where to put things at -- although that's making things overly complicated, lol.

Of course, I'm not sure if you are having trouble while trying to build a tool to make large pyramids, or if you are just having trouble designing and building the pyramid itself.

Um.. what ARE you trying to do?

I'm trying to build a large pyramid, and am having trouble with the corners of it.

Check out the large pyramid in the sky in Shona, can't miss it, see how they did it.

One of my first builds in SL was a large pyramid. At that time, 2+ years ago, it was one the largest buildings in the world. If I remember right, it was 80x100 at the base, and 60M tall, not exacty gargantuan by today's standards, but it was a giant then.

Anyway, I made all the slopes out of hollowed, cut cubes, with tops shrunk. This made it really easy to make sure all sides had the same slope, and that they would meet perfectly at the corners. No XY angular rotation was required. Every piece was rotated 0,0,0, or 0,0,180. The cuts' starting and ending points were different, depending on what side of the pyramid a given piece was on, but the amount of the cuts was always the same. All side pieces were cut by 75% so that just one side (25% of the cube) remained, and all corner peices were cut by 50% so that they would have 2 sides.

If I remember correctly, the indivicual blocks were each 10x10x8, with tops shrunk to 50%, and skewed accordingly, providing a slope of about 30 degrees. Needless to say, lining up 4 individual triangular sloping sides would be difficult, but by using the shrunken tops and skews, it was simple.

In the attached image, which shows a couple of differet versions of the construction, you can see that the pyramid was stepped, but that's not relevant. Whether you're doing a stepped pyramid or a true pyramid, the principle is the same. The easiest way to do it with top-skrinks and skews. I would stongly recommend against doing it any other way.

I'll drop you some pyramid components, Charlie. Later, when I get back from work. Its part of a simsized pyramid I did for fun.

Sim-sized pyramid? Cool. If it had a 30 degree slope like most traditional pyramids, that would have made it what, about 200M tall? Nice. Sure beats my lil' ol' 1/8 sim pyramid.

Out of curiosity, was it in a sandbox, or did you actually have somebody's blank sim to work with?

Where else do you put a pyramid, but a sand. . . box? I can't remember what the angle was, but its easily adjustable by changing the height of each coursing. For the traditionalist, I'd go for the regular 51d51m angle at Gizeh. Those were used to point at the three stars on Orion's belt, but have now shifted a little. Probably the folks who taught them how to build came from there?

The size of pyramids don't really matter. They're just stacked prims anyway. I'll try a 4 simsized one, when they eventually introduce more sandboxes. I'll drop you a copy of the components.

By the way, its a common myth in the western world that anything of any greatness or heavy effort was always built using forced labour.

Thanks a lot, that helped me greatly! I was actually able to make a largish pyramid, well not super large, however I can make a huge one from it now. Again thanks!