Building Houses with 10x10 prims?

So I've only recently started messing around in SL again but I've noticed that there is now a 10x10 limit on prims you can create--from what I understand, this is a recent limitation. For those of you who build objects with a large floor plan (like houses) how has it affected the way you build a house?

It seems previously if I wanted a basic house at 15x15 (we'll say just a plain square), I'd need 6 prims to do it... a floor prim, a ceiling prim, and 4 wall prims. Now that the 10x10 limit is in place, do you effectively need 4 prims just to build the *floor* of a house with a 15x15 footprint? I'm assuming you'd need a 10x10 with a 5x5 on top, to the right, and diagonally. Given the extreme prim limits (117 for First Land) this seems like it really eats into your prim count.

It gets worse with walls--again, if you're limited to 10x10, you'd need a minimum of 2 prims for single wall on a 15x15 house (a 10x10 and 5x10). Is there any good way around this? Or are builders of larger objects (such as houses) simply eating the extra prim counts now?

Also, I know there are lots of houses that were created some time ago--can these still be rezzed with prims that are bigger than 10x10? (I saw one great looking house that was done with 12 prims and lots of clever texturing... I'm wondering if that would be possible to do now with the prim size limits).

Just curious for thoughts on this. I may start building things in SL again (I managed to build a decent looking Battlebot last time I was playing around with stuff) but I'm wondering what it's like when working with 10x10 limits.

I've been ISL for 15 months now and 10 meters has been the limit the whole time. What do you mean by recent?

For cutting the number of prims, you can look at using a cut and hollowed cube for some of your walls, floors, and ceilings. You can do a 20 x 20 x 10 boxy house in 8 prims or so, but that's going to be just a plain cube with some odd cuts, and it's going to need clever texturing and a way in and out of the house

I could swear that I was creating prims larger than 10x10 a month ago. But then again, I have played SL for like... a week or so at a time... separated by long months of not doing anything in it. So, maybe I'm simply misremembering. I did see someone advertising 'huge prims' and got the impression they were bigger than the 10x10 limit and that was for some reason unusual.

So, I suppose regardless, creating a floor or wall bigger than 10x10 would require multiple prims?

EDIT: Nevermind, just read your comment on using hollow prims. I'll need to learn a bit more about that.

Yes, there are larger prims for sale - made way back in beta, I think? I know they can't be made now and LL doesn't want them used, probably for a variety of reasons like the amount of overlap on land between sim borders. I don't know if LL actively deletes them when they find them, but I have seen them in world.

Any flat surface bigger than 10 meters in one direction has to be multiple prims. However, if you want a 10 x 20 x 5 box "house", you can do that in four prims with cut cubes. Again, it's going to be plain and a bit odd looking with the cuts, but it's doable. You can also taper and squash prims to get a nearly flat surface in some shapes.

I would have to agree, easiest way to cut down on prims is to use hollowed and cut prims.

I have used a sort of U shaped (where i have cut off one side only, 95 hollow) and made it into the end of a house where you dont plan on putting a wall w/o a window or door, and they make aligned corners a snap. Also used it in conjunction w/ a transparent texture for a glass wall for a sunroom type area.

The odd angles at the ends can be embbeded into connecting prims, or can covered by colums. or artfull decorating or clever texturing.

Only thing that I don't care for is that the interior surface of the cut/hollowed prims are mapped as all the same texture so there is no option to color or texture different sections.
the texture you pick is the texture you get.

Play with em and see what you can do

10M has been the max prim dimension for well over a year, thouth there have, at times, been cheats that temporarily allowed you to circumbvent that.

For a low prim room: Take 4 cubes. Hollow them and cut them to make two planes that are joined at right angles, both up to 10 M on a side. There you have walls for a 20 x 20 room, with just 4 prims. Just position them at the corners of the 20 x 20 area. Not much you can do about the floors. It would take 4 prims for any floor size between 10M and 20M on both sides.

Well, sort of...

If the floor doesn't need to have any thickness, you can take a 10M x 10M x 10M cube, skew it severely, and can get a flat 10M x 15M panel, if I recall right.

Check the tutorials at the Ivory Tower, and also look up "Prim Torture" in the forums.

Good luck on learning low prim building!

I hate that too.



But those same four prims can also make the flat roof. You hollow them and cut them so one side is missing instead of two sides missing like the walls. Then rotate them so that one side is on top and another is on the bottom. Place them so the remaining side is embedded inside the wall cube. Or build your walls, ceilings, and floors with 4 of these three sided cubes. This will leave you with four open walls. You can them make these four with regular cubes, and so you can have windows or whatever in those walls and they can be textured differently.

i ben in SL 3 years, always been like tht.,..

Morgana makes a good point. In some cases one can male use of a U shape made by hollowing a cube and removing one side with a 0.250 cut. But bear in mind that if you use that to make two walls and a ceiling or floor, all three inside surfaces have to be the same texture, in the same orientation. OK, I suppose, if you are making a stone lined dungeon corridor. Not so good if you wanted normal looking walls and ceiling for a home.

I made a small cottage where I used a cut and hollowed cube to make two and a half of the surrounding walls, then used another cut and hollowed cube to make one and a quarter walls. That allowed me to place an alpha-mapped window in the shorter section, have the others opaque, and leave an opening for a door into the room. The completed cottage, with a working door, a peaked roof with overhanging eaves, and a nice foundation, came to 9 prims, for a 7M x 7M cottage.

You might be able to make one texture work for a floor, wall, and ceiling by splitting it into three sections.

I tried it and it seemed to work ok. Might not be high enough resolution to suit people. SL converted my 256 x 768 texture to 256 x 512. this suggests I don't understand what SL does to texture imports these days. I put a little bordered rectangle in the middle wall portion and masked it, producing a window of sorts to see out of.

What I find irritating is that there also seem to be limits on how many prims you can link. I'm a complete beginner and just started trying to build a dance floor of 40x30, made up of 12 10X10 squares. I can link 9 of them together in a 30x30 square, but when I try to connect a 4th square in any direction, sl complains that the object is "too far away". It seems impossible, then, to make any larger object consisting of linked elements. Is that right or is there a way around?

You can't link an object any larger than 30 meters.

It's related to prim size and distance.For the largest prims,the link distance cannot exceed 30-35m from centre to centre.That distance is reduced if the prims are smaller.

Argh, I hate the word "limit." If I want 40mx40m linked items.. that's what I want. Booo to limits. hahaha.

That's just not true. I have a build that's 40 meters long, where the left and right halves consist of four 10m segments linked together. Worked fine for me...

As Walker said, link distance is measured from prim center. You can link prims that have a total size of more than 40 meters as long as their centers are within link distance. The wiki says that is up to 32 meters, but it depends on prim size. I imagine one tiny prim in with 4 10 x 10 meter cubes would not link, but I haven't tried it. The 4 cubes themselves without any small prims would link.

I was working on a masterpiece skybox. It was a cube of 40m sides. Beautiful waterfalls fell from high on a side wall down a rock outcropping along the back wall then cascaded down a waterfall into a pool surrounded by beautiful swaying ferns.

Beautiful rock projections met and flowed into a large expanse of fresh mown grass. Birds of Paradise competed with other beautiful flowering shrubs for attention. (lip smacking off of fingers noise) A Masterpiece!

A beauty for a beauty. A jewel for the crown of a friend's queen, I tried to package the present and failed. Over and over.

Then I tried a trick. I built red scaffoling 30m wide and 30m high covering the center of the large cube. Surely this would "fill in" the space and allow me to link everything into a beautiful gift package.

Unfortunately I failed miserably. Despondant I began to dissassemble my scaffoling with the goal of using a store bought kit that would allow me to package several linked sets into one complete package.

Suddenly, I noticed that my entire rear section of rock and waterfall wonderland was missing. I had deleted a linked scaffoling that was still attached to 45% of my build. The most important pieces, the hardest to make, the most time consuming pieces.

I cried. Then in a fit of anger I deleted everything else. What use is an empty box without the tiny glimpse of creation which I had been fortunate enough to reveal?

*** The Point *** If I could have one SL wish, it would be that the limit on linking would expand to at least 60m and that it didn't have anything to do with empty spaces or tiny prims or another of those other frustrating restrictions.

(sighs into the wind at the loss of a vision, a dream, a thing of wonderment)

Why is linking so important? Try rezfoo (costs lots of money) or builder's buddy (free) and your build can be as large as you like. With builder's buddy you start with a base. Then you progressively build each object (one prim or a set of linked prims) with a bb ccmponent script, tap "record" in the hud in the base script and then take the piece through your inv and back into the base from where you re-"build" it. You do have to delete all the earlier built pieces as each build rezzes all the objects processed so far.

It does take a little time, and you need to make sure you don't move the base during this process, but the size of your build is unlimited, though all objects need to be within shout distance of the base.

While the rezzed pieces have the component scripts in them you can move the base and all objects will follow. It even has a command to "die" all the rezzed objects. The base is then used to build a new copy whereever you want.

Martin, did you empty your trash folder? If not, did you look in it for your lost waterfall, and now the rest of your build?

As for your linking problem, both the Rez-Faux package (that i used) and Builder's Buddy (that i've tried recently) work fine for any size of build. It may become tricky for structures larger than 200 m, but in any case easier than without them. Both of them can be used to store an existing construction, even if you didn't plan to at first.

Don't hesitate to IM me inworld for a Builder's Buddy package, I got a functionning one from the forum.

The center to center distances on 4 each 10 M x 10 M prims is 30 M, so that still works. But you can't do a 2 high by 4 long array of prims that way, because the center to center distance between the top one on one end and the bottom one on the other end is greater than 30 meters.

Further to this, I am hoping someone can help me make large cylinders. I have read the previous forum posts about this, all the pitfalls about them not actually being round, etc. My problem is all of the solutions are simply above my head. Pi, radius, angle, tangents, etc. There was supposed to be a builder's tool designed by Cadroe Murphy. I read his profile and went to where it said the tools were and couldn't find them.

I would greatly appreciate a kind soul helping me out, either by simply giving the tool to me, or setting me straight on where to get it.

Thanks so much!
Dallas Prudhomme

The tool you mention by Cadroe Murphy is useful, but uses a lot of flat prims, resulting in rather high prim counts. There's a thread about his ShapeGen tool here.

You can more efficiently use sections of a hollowed and flattened cylander to make the walls of larger cylindrical towers. I've used this quite well to make 20M diameter towers. In this thread, we discussed several methods for making large round towers. The posts by Chosen Few are especially useful. On page 2 of that thread is a picture of the first 20M diameter tower that I managed to make uaing Chosen's technique.