The struggle for organic shapes..

I am very new to building in SL, and so far I have found it very fun and interesting. However, I am constantly frustrated by my inability to make natural, irregular, uneven, organic shapes. I'm so sick of perfect prims I could tear my hair out. I'm not sure If I'm just too inexperienced to do what I'm trying to do, or if it is just due to limitations of the functions we have available.

Do any more experienced builders have any insight to this issue, or any suggestions on how to make a nice lumpy blob?

I struggle with this too, but I can say a few things.

1) often more than one prim can be overlapped to form something more irregular than the individual prims. e.g., I have created large irregular rock formations simply by taking the 3 rocks in the Library and combining multiple copies of them in various rotations and sizes.

2) Torus is your friend. I've got a long way to go with this, but I've seen some absolutely wonderful things done with torus prims. Also, note that torus, tube, and ring are complementary in that their parameters are the same.

3) textures are your friend. I'm no expert here either, but textures can go a long way to making things look more natural.

4) trees are your friend. Trees can be used to great advantage to hide seams and to draw attention away from aspects of a build that are not as good as you'd like.

Hope this helps and that others will post additional information.

If you're sick of "perfect prims" -- vote! Prop: 318 - Prim Tools: Merging, Subdivision, Extruding, Lathe, Fractals, n-gon, etc. needs you!

This would give us many new shapes by increasing the effects we can apply to prims, rather than increasing the base prim types. This proposal would subsume other "rounded prim" proposals like #49 and #202. It would also add "metaball" functionality such as I think is intended by proposal #148. I would like to suggest that while we are looking at ways to manipulate prims and groups of prims, we also consider being able to extrude texture masks to create flat or rounded shapes (essentially the same technique, but prim rounding is applied to the latter), or spin a mask texture as on a lathe. For the ultimate in organic objects, it would be cool to be able to generate prim fractals: see /13/74/36035/1.html for ideas. Finally, let's be able to define the number of sides an n-hedral prim has, rather than specifically adding octahedron, dodecohedron, or icosihedron prims. It might be best to do this with subdivision algorithms, but it would be great to be able to use something like this: http://web.ukonline.co.uk/polyhedra/hedron.html

Rounded prim edges already has a bunch of votes, but if you want to go beyond rounded prims, Prop 318 is for you.

Thanks,

neko

Allready voted for it.

Wow, thanks for the suggestions. That prop sounds like a great idea, and I'm on my way to check it out now!

Monsoon, you can use twisted, unevenly tapered cylinders to do a bunch of fun stuff. Contact me in world if you want to see examples.

I'd love to see more lumpy, irregular stuff in SL!

So says the queen of lumpy, irregular stuff in SL

Shack is right on the money here.


Yes.
Put a rocklike texture on a cube, twist it a bit, fiddle with the topsize and other settings and you have yourself a decent rock.


I'm requoting this because it's a good point in general for generating organic (and pleasing to look at) things. Expiriment with aranging multiple coppies of item A, where each item varies slightly from the original

Amen. A good sandbox excersize- rez a torus and start expirimenting with it. For example, twist it, copy it by hitting the shift button and moving it to the side, hollow out the copy, copy that, and so on. You'll end up with an interesting set of weird shapes, and will be able to save any ones you particularly like. Another expirement with your mutant tori- turn 'em into rings, tubes and spheres to see what you get. You can turn them into boxes and cylendars too, but the shapes are usually less organic looking.

Yes.
Another tip- when you color something, avoid the default colors from the picker, particulary the bright ones. Few things in nature are pure neon red, blue, green or yellow. Save the bright stuff for details.
To be fair, much of what I make is brightly colored, but most of my builds are more cartoony and toylike


This is true.
Be forewarned that they can only be created on land you own, and you can't link them to your objects. This isn't a problem if you want something on your own land.

That's the essence of fractals. Multiple copies of the same shape, shifted a bit and/or made a bit smaller and/or rotated. Given that the whole process can be controlled by an algorithm, it would be much less expensive computationally and bandwidth-wise to let us use fractal algorithms to create them, and not charge for all the prims. We'd be able to make all kinds of really cool objects that way.

neko

Torley, the randomizer function already exists, sort of. Go create some trees, you get a different one everytime. Just apply that to random shapes and its good to go.

Kind of like this? (It's fun making these sorts of things.)

Or these shapes? (I'm a fan of Seacliff.)

I think I ordered their 13 song debut 45 from maximum Rocknroll in 1985....

Something more like this I think, Seth.

You bring it into play, Jeffrey, and I'll happily play with it.

For now, that's largely what's possible, although people like Fallingwater and Eddie Escher have far more experience than I.

Seth, those are so pretty! Where's your land? Or better yet, can you drop me a landmark?

Actually what I was thinking was more like the stacked cylinders in the picture. Also, I've layered twisted, tapered cylinders to give tree trunks a natural effect. But it's all good.
Shack and Olympia gave really good advice. The cylinder trick is just another thing to add to the repertoire.

It's a threshhold I think we'll cross at some point - either when the software goes open or the Lindens find the time to give rendering technology more priority.

As for what's possible now, organics are a mixed bag. Largely, minimizing visible "seams" and making smooth transitions appears to be the key. As does using smooth curves.

This is such a *great* thread!

Talking about trees...



I'm putting together a proposal here to ask that trees behave more like other prims.

Any suggestions or support there would be appreciated. I'll submit the proposal in a couple of days after I get some more feedback.

--Shack

Oh yes, very very beautiful Seth, hmmm.........and I do love the ship, a spaceship of sorts , Look in his picks Fallingwater, you can tp there. BTW fallingwater, your builds are amazing as well ,

Not sure if these are considered organic....

But I've just started playing with spheres and then changing their "Prim Type" to torus or tube or something else other than sphere....

If you adjust the dimple on a sphere, then change it to a torus or tube you get some funny looking shapes...

Yes, if you change basic shapes through a number of sequences, tweaking a variable each time, you can come up with some interesting things.

Damn, those are so nice.