Better prim alignment?

Mathematically, my prims are aligned correctly and sized right. They don't look right though. I talked to one of my builder friends and he told me he usually aligns by eye. Now I've been trying to do this for the past couple of hours-it sucks. Is there anyway to get that extra variable for position to show up at all? It's really really annoying.

I usually align things via the reference grid. With chat closed, select the first object and press shift-G. The grid units will change to become the size of the referenced object, and the grid's rotation will shift to match the object's orientation. Now you can snap the second object to it with ease.

It's a good idea to be constantly switching between all three ruler modes while you work. World, Local, and Reference each have tremendous individual advantages at various stages of your work flow.

Somebody showed me a building trick a while ago for perfectly aligning copied prims next to each other, but I've forgotten the sequence. Can someone remind me? It's something like:

> SHift-drag to make the copy
> Zoom in on the edge you want the new copy to join with
> Hit 'magic keys'
> Poof ... your copy is exactly next to the original

*now it's driving me crazy, grrrr*

Thank you thank you thank you!!

Just tried this out and it works perfectly. It's funny how I didn't notice it before, because I was playing around with the rulers just yesterday xD



Haven't heard of that one. Let me know if it does work-I'd like to have a few more building tricks up my sleeve :]

While still in edit mode with the prim you want to copy, click on the create tab and put a check in the Copy Selection box as well as the Center Copy box. Now carefully select the face of the prim where you want the copy to sprout from and click on it. When doing walls, or any other thin edge, ZOOM in tight first After creating your copied prim, uncheck the Copy Selection, otherwise things can get interesting if you accidentally click on other objects

YES!!

THAT'S IT!!!

/me loves Casper!

*hug*

Oooh thanks for that tip! Any other tips? Where did you learn this tip? A book or something?

These seem to work, but not on some of my tortured prims. Any suggestions for those?

(I hope someone reads posts on old threads)

Tortured prims can be a pain, because they don't fill out the bounding box the same, and so need special alignment. It all depends on the individual prim at that point, and for once I'd actually recommend just going by eye.. move it VERY slowly, and zoom in as much as you can.

"These seem to work", are you reffering to using an alignement tool, if you can be more specific I may be able to give you an answer.



Okiphia, there is one thing that is seldom mentioned in the building forums and perhaps has been forgotten.
All prims regardless of how they have been tortured will all start out as a Box.
We know this because this is the "Bounding Box" you referred to that we see when selecting the prim in certain modes.
If you remember this golden rule that it is a box, then you can align it very simply after making some adjustments and the help of a calculator.
The common problem here when aligning is that some people forget that when aligning and inputting the numbers manually you must make several calculations as you are aligning what is inside the "Bounding Box", not what you see and therefore you may have to workout its position inside the box in relation to its size. With complexed prim tortures it may be necessary to change its Block type back to a Box to understand and calculate the numbers and zero some of the cuts, rotations etc.

Don't be fooled by what you see, it is actually a box.

So a simple example,
Rez a cube and make it 10x10x10 and set its Y co-ord to a round number, ie;219.00
Drag copy and then set the Y co-ord to 209.00 and then you will now have 2 perfectly aligned cubes on the Y Coord. The Cube on the Y:209.00 co-ord change this to a cylinder and make its path cut B:0.500.
You will now have a Cube and a Half circle but between the 2 is a gap. This gap is 5 metres wide. How do we know this, because it started as 10x10x10 and we cut it in half.
To align we need to add 5 metres to the Y co-ord so that will now be 214.000, now we have both perfectly aligned.

Now I know the example is very simple but the same method will apply to all tortured prims, the input numbers will be more complexed depending on the torture.
In addition, you will definitely need to know "Pythagoras' Theory" for the calculations of triangles to align perfectly.

Everything is possible to align by math. I understand that, know it, live it... I just don't torture prims much so haven't had to figure out the math yet. For a lot of people, doing the math, figuring it out and whatnot, is just too much. Half circles really are pretty simple I can do that. But what about when you torture a torus into a four-leaf ribbon shape, and cut that in half, and want to align part of that? Then the math gets a bit more confusing.

Its possible, but for a lot of people, it becomes too much of a burden... I am adamant about using math to align, and never a tool.. I hate tools. But tortured prims is one of the few times Iw ill actually just eye it often. If it doesn't have to be absolutely, 100% perfect..then I wil eye it. If it does, then Ill take a bit, do the math, and tada.

But often, eying it for tortured prims does pretty good.

When I say eying it, I don't mean dragging on those little arrows. I drag them pretty close.. so tat there is as smal a gap as I can get that way. Then I edit the position by numbers, going VERY slowly (Sometimes one millionth of a meter) untilit looks either perfect or VERY close. I never stop if I can see a line unless I can prove its a texture line or something similar.