Castles in the sky...

(Yes i know im a lazy Noob, but i really cant be bothered to flick thru every last thread.)

Before i make my way into the world and splash out on some turf to call my very own, id just like to know:
a) Is it possible to construct a building that floats in the air, or does it have to be tethered to a solid surface?

...on which note:
b) Can i construct a 'natural' residence, eg. tree house etc.


Toasty

There are only two constraints:

How many prims you have

The rating of the land (No mature stuff in PG land)

Beyond that, no limits. Treehouse, floating castle, starships, skyscrapers, hobbit holes, abstract art, whatever.

Ah, super.

Now prims are something else im a little confused about:
I get that they are effectively building blocks, but does the number affect the complexity of the build? Would 2 prims for example, mean 2 walls and so on...?

More prims does not equal a complex structure. If you take a hundred block prims and stack them together to form a wall that would be pretty simple. You could take ONE prim block and hollow, resize, path cut, skew it, etc and form a more complex structure of several walls.

As far as a tree house is concerned... I think sculpted prims are the way to go. They would work great for making branches and tree trunks. The only problem I see is that sculpted prims have weird bounding boxes so you can't really move around them normally.

Iv been browsing thru the land menus and i notice the max prims double up with each increment of land, does this mean there's a limit on the area a single prim can cover?
'Cos however large the area i really fail to see the need for 15000 prims, if u can make a multi walled structure from a single prim!!!

Without cheating, prims max out at 10x10x10 meters

The "one square prim, four walls" trick works, but its far from optimal for a number of reasons, and even with the best textures looks flat and somewhat lifeless.

15000 prims is what a full sim has - and trust me, you *can* use them all. It's not even all that difficult, with the right project.

Google slexchange. In the Categories select Building Components, then Structures, then Residential Structures. They list the number of prims and sometines the size of a lot of buildings and houses and possible Castles in the sky. Gives a good idea of the building scene in SL.

Ah ok, i'll take your word for it. I'll no doubt find out for myself in the course of my explorations and experimentations.

Anyways thanx for the sage answers and advice guys ;D

Toasty, you might like to take some of the free building classes at ASL, TUI or NCI.

Under Search, go to Events and choose Educational.

Learning to build by doing will answer your questions the fastest way possible. Prims seem so simple at first but the more you know about them, the more there is to know.

I like the Castle in the Sky reference.

The only constraints are that you must own the land directly below the structure, without the sky build hanging over into someone eles's airspace, and you must have enough land to support the number of prims you want to use. 512 M2 of land gets you 117 prims. A whole region (A private island sim or a 256 by 256 meter area - all the land in a single sim), gets you 15,000 prims.

The smallest nice house I have been able to make, a tiny Tudor corrage, was only 9 prims, and had a working door and a window, and a peaked roof with cathedral ceilings inside.

A typical "nice" house is 100 to 200 prims.

I just finished building an Chinese Imperial Palace, and the 50 M wide by 70 M long structure, with a walled compound and 9 buildings, used 935 prims.

As a rule of thumb, try not to use more than half your prim allocation on the building itself. You'll need the rest for furniture and otehr stuff to make the home more than an empty box.

The only way to increase prim count is to own more land in the same sim.

At most i figure i could afford 4096m2 of land. Now my maths skillz are a tad under par (oO), could anyone tell how that measures out (a)x(b)x(c)?

Land can be all sorts of shapes... its not like 512 meters is always X meters on one side and Y meters on another. It can be square, rectangular, l-shaped, U-shaped, you name it.

Ah, well that makes it all the more interesting then.
I understand theres no real restriction on flight height, does the same apply to build height (as in how far off the ground u can start building, as opposed to the height of the building)?

You know, I'm sure there HAS to be a FAQ around that answers most of this, but...

You can build up to 768 meters. Beyond that, everything gets returned on a 24 hour interval (IIRC), and much past 4000 meters things get returned almost instantly. Most builds aren't really "physical" in the sense that SL thinks about it... gravity doesn't effect them, for example. So you can build whatever, wherever, within the above limitations.

If the parcel was square, 4096 M2 would be 64 M by 64 M.

Regardless of shape, a 4096 M2 parcel will have an allocation of 936 prims in a normal sim. That is enough for a very comfortable 2-story home, fully furnished, plus a slimiarly large and well-furnished skybox above it.

There are some private island sims and an extremely small number of Linden-owned Mainland regions where they set aside half the land in the sim and sell the rest as double-prim land. Usually those sims are half water, or half open area with very little in it. You pay more per M2, but get more prims to use, which is handy if you want to do a high-prim/high-detail build that doesn't need to sprawl much land-wise.

Great questions, Toasty!
And some great advice and answers from some of SL's great builders!
/me adds two Lindens worth of advice:
Search on the "Ivory Tower" of Prims. Its a really great (and famous) self guided hands on 'course' that will get you started on the basics of SL building.
Toward the end of the Ivory Tower tour, you'll see Landmarks for a similar course on Texturing.

Finally, I learned an awful lot by demolishing Freebie houses! Rez one on the ground, then take it apart to see how it was built.

Im sure im being extremely ignorant, but what is a skybox?

A skybox is just a generic term for a building "floating" in the sky. Some of which are indeed box shaped.

Kewl, well i think thats all my main queries covered, but out of curiosity is it possible to construct an entire building with completely transparent walls and floors(just visible enough to look like glass)?
It would be so nifty to live in a huge crystal!!!

- non-physical movement (768m)
- permanent build (2,000m) anything above disappears on a sim reboot.
- absolute object (4,096m) objects above are destroyed almost instantly.
- avatar existence (1,000,000m)

Yes, you could. Any prim can be textured to be 90% transparent, using the edit tools. Give it a slightly blue tint, and you have a crystal, more or less. There is a texture in the Library section of your inventory that looks like very pale pink silk. At high transparency and with other colors applied as a tint, it makes a good distortion effect for glass.

One issue though is that a lot of building in SL relies on being able to overlap prims or stick parts of prims into other prims. So a building made of transparent parts will tend to show all those seams.

Less crystalline rather than more I think ; much of the beauty of crystal (and water) has to do with refraction and reflection, of which there is none in SL.
Transparent building materials are more 'misty' then 'crystal', but you can play with shiny and with textures that have simulated highlights on them to get a better effect.

Hmmmm... Methinks i'll have to rethink my building strategy a tad.
Perhaps an opaque roof with a hole in the middle, but transparent floors so u can see straight through without seeing icky joins (nice masculine word - 'icky').

One more question (dunno whether i should post it here or not), is it possible to animate a building in so far as to be able, for example, to swing an entire wing of a house 'hinge style' to a different position on the same axis or slide it out?
It would be like a giant inhabitable wooden puzzle.

Of course it's possible, but it would take some scripting to do it. Houses are just objects or collections of objects and can be just as crazily animate as any of the moving objects you've seen.