Tutorial for Skyscrapers or large buildings?

Hi,

I am new to SL and to this forum. I apologize if this is a repeat. However, I have one project in mind and I want to see if it is possible for me to build it.

Is there any tutorial that will help me build a very large building (high seiling floors), open spaces?

Is there any way to increase the number of prims that I can use in a land?

Thank you.

-Homer

Hi Homer. Welcome to SL.


That's a pretty open-ended request. I'm not aware of any tutorial specifically for large buildings as opposed to small ones. Making buildings, regardless of size, can be anywhere from very simple to exceedingly complex, depending on what you want the building to look like, and what features you want it to have. The only real difference between a large building and a small one is the number of prims it takes to complete the structure, since the size of each individual prim has a 10x10x10M limit.

The short answer to your question, "is there any tutorial...", is all of them. To start, I'd recommend you pay a visit to The Ivory Tower of Primitives for a nice visual walk-through of the building tool's capabilities, and browse this forum as well as the texturing form for additional tips.

Generally, a building, even a complex one, is a relatively simple structure compared to, say, an organic sculpture. Put four walls and a ceiling together, and you've got a room. Put a bunch of rooms together, and you've got a building. Stack a whole bunch of clusters of rooms, and you've got a skyscraper. The nice thing about SL is you don't need to allow for plumbing or gravity or ventilation or any of that RL crap that gets in the way of the form. Just build whatever you think looks good, and you're all set.


There's no way to increase the amount of prims allocated to your land. It's always 15,000 per sim (breaks down to 117 per 512 square meters). If you want more prims, you need more land. Land need not be contiguous to add to your prim count, but it does need to all be in the same sim for it all to count at once. In other words if you've got two 512M^2 plots in the same sim, you could put all 224 prims on one of them and leave the other empty, or you could divide between them any way you want, regardless of whether or not the parcels are attached to eachother. If they're in different sims though, then you're stuck with 117 on each.

The key to successful building in SL is to learn to do as much as possible with as little as possible. With good texturing, and clever use of cuts, twists, hollows, tapers, and skews, you can build some very complex looking objects with just a handfull of prims. It just takes practice to get good at it is all.