Making doors,windows and Lightwave

Hi.
I've purchased some land and am learning to build a simple house.

I've been doing 3D work in Lightwave for five years, is there any way to import the .lwo mesh into SL? That would make life so much simpler.

Anyway I've been going through building and texturing video tutorials and I need to cut holes through walls for windows and doors.

I came across this tutorial: VBS Virtual Builder Studio - Window and Door tutorial
and they mention a program called "Windoor" studio and I'm not sure where to get it.

It also looks like he has a number of other programs to work with on his desktop.
It also shows cool pre-fab windows and doors in his inventory. How does one find these, and import them into inventory?

Thank you very much in advance
Steve

there is no way to import any mesh from any program into SL other than as sculpt maps.

I have the VBS studio, it has it's good points and bad points as far as building goes, it's a bit complicated to begin with, but pretty easy after that. I just always found using it as more of a 3d template tool to play around with various shapes and dimentsions before building it by hand.

if you are looking for something to help you build, I strongly suggest prim docker, it's by far the easiest I've seen to use and learn, but, as I'm sure many others here will agree no tool equals or is as accurate as doing it by hand.

if you're just learning, I suggest going to some of the free building classes that are run inworld daily

Yup. Don't invest in a lot of tricky tools. SL has all the building tools you need and they are quite versatile. Visit the Ivory Tower of Prim, work through some tutorials, and then practice. Also, do a quick Search under Events for classes that take place every day in world. When you need to consider the finer points of doors, windows, staircases, and other details, take some time to search through the archives of this forum and the Texture Tips forum. There are literally hundreds of posts with helpful ideas about how to build well with SL's tools.

Thanks for the tips:
I wasn't aware of any in-world classes and turorials- I've been loading up other good video tutorials from around the web. Seems like most everything except building windows and doors!

Anyway I'll do an in-world SL search tonight.
-Steve

i too use lightwave but its best to learn the building tools in sl
lightwave is great for making textures and sculptys
but you dont want to import objects. its possable but uses tons of prims and is just a waste.
it takes time but its much easier to create in SL with prims and it will improve your polygon count in lightwave too when you go back and make things

windows and doors are easy to do. When you are building, you just leave a hole about where you want them. when you get a bit more comfertable with SL's building tools you may wat to play with textured windows which is basically a picture of a window with alpha where the glass is so you can see through.

I went through the entire Ivory Tower of Prim last night and is sure helpful.

Right away I built a "L" shaped floor out of 3 prims and linked them.
Then I created another prim, flattened for a wall and hollowed it out for use of a window.
I created another and hollowed it out, resized and placed it into the wall's hollowed out hole and linked it to the wall for a windowsill.

Then I rotated and placed the wall on my floor and proceeded to copy/paste more walls until all the way around my floor, leaving a space for the door.

I linked all the walls to the floor and went to texturize the interior/exterior, but seemed that I could no longer just select one face of the prim.

I'd spent about an hour doing so as a noob, and at that point set my search for a suitable pre-fab.
After looking over several vender products several times (I took about 2 hours to find the "right" one) purchased a nice beach house for $L 2400.

A wonderful price I thought (time vs money) but I'll still be building things.

Thank you for all the help!
-Zerock

Of course you can select one face of the prim. You have to click the radio button that says "select texture" and then click the face you want to texture. Use your texture tab to add the texturing you want. Obviously you need more tuts!

Check out events, click over to education, and do a search. you'll come up with classes for building various items. TUI for example does classes from beginner on up.