Prim Torture

Hello,

I have been here a long time and still have not discovered the majority of the "prim torture" texchniques that allow one to make more organic shapes. I have stumbled on a few but I also know there are quite a few shapes that I have no idea how to make, and the ones I *have* made are almost by accident and not easily reproduceable.

I am looking for someone well versed in this area to give me a tutorial on how to do this so I can finally overcome this last stepping stone in my builidng skills. I am willing to pay actual money or exchange goods or whatever if someone feels they must be compensated for their time and effort.

The big caveat to this request however is that the person offering the tutorial must be aware that I will be telling everyone I know how to do it as soon as I find out myself. My feeling is that these techniques are, or should be, a part of the basic building tool kit and I'm just sick of this being the kind of guarded "secret" it seems to be in a lot of peoples eyes.

I have heard rumours that some such tutorials already exist but every time I have gone looking they are not where they are supposed to be. If people want to just post tips and tricks on this thread or pointers to existing tutorials that would be good, but for me personally I am looking for one builder who "knows them all" to just sit down with me for an hour or so and show me how to do it.

If any older builder that knows these techniques is listening and wants to do the right thing and release this information to the public domain, now is the time to do it. If I manage to gather what I feel is close to complete information on the topic, I will attempt to compile them all into a tutorial myself if no one else wants to.

If Strife Onizuka's listening, I wouldn't hesitate to ask him. He's an indepth master at the form of this art.

I 've made a few custom furry avitars, and one of the things that I try to do when Im building the head is see if I can do the ears as one, maybe two prims, since I tend to go a little hog wild with the hair....hehe. so far I have been able to come up with three different species, cat, horse,squirrel. the best thing I can say for torturing a prim, is get bored, and play. alot.. see how they behave when you do x,y,z and then do more x. hehe and always take notes! lol my .02 $L

People guard these skills as secrets because they believe that it will affect their chances of profiting from it. Plain and simple. I am personally against it, mostly believing that these skills should be available to anyone, since the value of something has more to do with the ammount of effort spent into making it as compared the the number of 'secret techniques' held within the product.

This was the same with the double knot torus thingy, which some has sold singular double knotted prims for profit as well.

I am not sure what organic shapes you are looking for, Diane, but I can certainly research them for you, if you could describe some examples. I say 'research' because I am no expert at this. I'm only using it as an opportunity to learn some myself.

Just one thing though, there is no such thing as the last stepping stone. Every stone you step on only leads to the next few that you never knew existed.

I'll help for free. IM me.

It would take a lot more than an hour, but that's okay.

I also work in Organic Shapes, Dianne.

Feel free to IM me... I'm always happy to help people looking to understand organic geometry.

I've just discovered the Ivory Tower Primitive Library, which looks to have an excellent set of tutorials on building and modifying prims.

Wow, I thought I wasn't going to get anywhere with this thread, but I see some helpful stuff has been added. Thanks for those who offered help, I might be taking you up on it sometime soon.

The analogy I use for this kind of stuff is that of a tradesperson.

If you are training to be a cabinet maker for instance, you would need to learn all the techniques and tools of the trade, you would probably apprentice to a master and they would teach you exactly those things. The "art" if you will, of the cabinet making is not in the techniques or the tools, it is in the ideas in your head. The same is, or should be true of building things in Second Life.

To me, keeping prim torture techniques secret, is similar to taking away half of someones toolbox. When I build something, the very first thing I think of is what kind of prims, and how many of them I will need to make the shape I am thinking of. If my toolbox has just the basic shapes, and another persons toolbox has a bunch more, then it's pretty clear who has the advantage in figureing out how to express that shape in SL terms.

It's also kind of like giving two kits of lego to two people, but one of them has all the motorised robotic bits in it and one doesn't. It gives an unfair advantage to the person who has the extra bits, or in SL's case knows aobut the "other" shapes they can build with.

In short, I think if it it's a trick that has to do with the tools, then its a "technique" and not a personal secret of yours. There is no "art" in it, no great personal insight, or philosophical revelation.

It's just another tool and should be shared with everyone IMO.

Anyway, to get to the meat of it in regards what prim torture actually *is*...

Would it be wrong to say it's mostly about switching the shape type on an object so as to have access to transformations on said object that normally would only apply to a different shape? And that most or all of the time, we are talking about tori?

I've seen the term "prim torture" applied to everything from "using the weird input boxes on the right-hand-side of the build menu" to "using a script to set parameters to values that the input boxes refuse to take" - I have no idea what the canonical definition is. Most of the funky organic shapes seem to be based on torii; the applications of the "transform to sphere & dimple"-trick I have seen were with cube / sphere, tube / sphere or cylinder / sphere. Haven't tried doing that to a torus yet... hm

Lookie what I came across:
http://secondlife.com/badgeo/wakka.php?wakka=libraryprimtorture

Wow.

Thanks for the link, this is really cool and I will certainly be trying these out. I also had soem tortured prims dropped on me last night that are interesting.

One of these is a cylinder of 19.5 metres diameter that is a single (tortured) prim! This is exctly what I meant when I refered to some of us having more building blocks in our arsenals than others and how unfair that can be.

Unfortunately, (in the case of both the cylinder and the scripts), its not always easy to see *how* the thing was made, and of course how it is made and begn able to reproduce that, is almost the entire game of it.