Frustrated Modeler, needs your input

Hi All,

I'm new to SL but am a heavy modeler with S3D max, C4D, Lightwave, and Rhinocerous in RL and am already frustrated with the building tools. This was to be expected though, you can't have a professional grade of modeling tools in a game, it just isnt feasible.

One thing I've run into and don't know if I'm just a dummy or what, but making windows out of a wall is just not very smart. I mean, where are the Boolean operations?? Even if they just did a boolean difference and left out Union & Intersect that'd be fine!

I realize you can use the hollow tool but that means:
1) The window is *always* centered in that prim
2) You can't have more than one window in a prim

Am I off track here or have I summed it up correctly?

Thanks!

Yes, thats right. But, you can do windows creatively with texturing. My apartment at the Brownstone in Grignano has multiple windows on a single prim wall, and its all alpha texture work.

Thanks for responding Loki

Ok, so if you want your window to not be a 100% transparent surface (e.g. a colored window that you can still see through) how do you pull that off in Photoshop when preparing the alpha mask?

If this works I could probably do a whole building out of a single cube prim lol

The tools can be frustrating, I agree. But if you play with it they do get better.

SL is great, but there are so many things you can do, all of them arent top notch. You can fly planes or fight, but the games that are geared for that are much better. I guess its a trade off. SL is still an infant really, just over a year old. Things will probably continue to get better down the road.

Im not sure exactly. I only rent the apartment there. I am sure someone with that sort of texturing experience will chime in, just be patient.

There are some really talented texturers out there. And your right, you could do the whole building out of a single cube with creative texturing.

I restored the building that Loki is speaking of in Grignano. The exterior wall is an alpha texture, just the window portion is transparent (100%). The exterior walls and interior walls with windows share the same prim, when editing them choose "Select Texture" to apply textures to an individual prim face. That allows maximum flexability in how an individual prim can be customized.

In PhotoShop, the portion of the alpha mask representing the clear window was 100% black. If you want a tinted window, make the transparent area of the alpha mask a shade of gray -- not 100% black.

Check out the tinted windows in the front of CAFE JACK on the ground floor of The Brownstone West buiding in Grignano. The large windows are simply prims that have been tinted blue green and then made partially transparent. The smaller segmented windows above (that spell out CAFE JACK) are alpha textures made in PhotoShop. Working on a transparent layer, I made the windows the color I wanted then I made a corresponding alpha mask that was dark gray, to allow for a mostly transparent glass effect.

Notice how the "CAFE JACK" texture was flipped horizontally on the inside prim surface to realistically represent how the window would look from the inside.

The file was save as a 32 bit .tga and then uploaded to Second Life.

Salazar Jack

(Edited to include info on texturing individual prim surfaces.)

Also, there is an excellent inworld building reference... Lumiere Noir's Ivory Tower Library of Primitives in Noyo. Every possible way of wrangling a prim is visually represented there. Definately check it out!

Salazar Jack

Awesome folks! Thanks!

Thanks for the plug, Sal, you beat me to it.

Lumi

While i'm on the building and whining mode lol ....

What's with the prims that won't delete? I have to tele out of the area & come back to get them to go away. How annoying is that!?!

This world is not as stable as some would lead us to believe.

There are many people you will encounter in your travels that will tell you stories of ghost prims. Prims that appear solid, some made by your own hand, that when deleted seem to persist for a spell and then are gone.

Others will tell you tales of prims that seem to move on their own. Resizing and repositioning themselves as if manipulated by an unseen force.

Then there are the more serious incidences involving months of work done in vain, when one's build partially or completely vanishes and the afterasures that follow.

Is there intelligence there, just beyond our perception? Or is the world that we can see barely able to support itself on the jerry-rigged infrastructure built by Linden Lab?

Maybe the area outside The Grid is too volatile to support life and we see hints of that in our attempts to rebuild a world...

Salazar

oooo k, thanks there Stephen Hawkings.

Anyone have the actual answer?

Though I'm no expert, others with more of a programming bent have stated that there are some problems with the Second Life software (server side or client side, I can't remember) updating the environment properly when an object is removed. They also explain ghosted people the same way.

I still have my doubts. If there are others with more info on that please help us out here.

Salazar

Thanks salazar, if it's a bug then it's not just me and I'm ok with that lol

My understanding of ghosting is that it is usually a result of cache discrepency. The process happens something like this:

You press delete, thereby sending a command to the system to remove the item from the server. The server complies, but then it also has to send a command back to your machine, telling your computer to likewise remove the item from your cache. Sometimes that return signal either gets lost or does not get sent and your chache remains unaffected until you restart SL. You view of the world is always a result of the real time streaming data sent to you from the server and the data stored in your cache. If the two do not match, you can end up seeing all sorts of strange anomolies.

I like Sal's "mysterious forces" answer better, but you asked for a technical explanation so there it is. I could be off on the exact details of the sequence of events, as I'm not a programmer, but you get the idea.

Anyway, if you haven't noticed already, a good way to verify that an object is ghosted and not real is the "Lock" option box will be grayed out on a ghost. I've found the best solution for dealing with them is just to send them under ground so they are out of your way. You might not be able to make a ghost disappear without restarting, but you can still move it.

The inside of a hollow cube is one face. To do this you will need to prepare a single texture with multiple faces to accomodate it. What I did for my store is use a hollow cube cut so it was 3 sided and repeated the inside texture to be the walls only. I then used seperate prims for the ceiling & floor. & front where the door was. A prim-friendly compromise.