Ok we have x, y and z planes. Why not a and b?

You have your x, y, and z planes to build with which is fair enough. They work just fine, providing you want to build at those angles.
But me, I've not been in the game long and already I am trying to build on a near cliff face that is on an diagonal angle angle (not x, y, or z) so placing objects onto it is very difficult to allign. It also makes building very difficult as you have to keep rotating it onto the xyz planes and back!
Is there not some diagonal (ie a and b) planes that I can switch on to make my life alot easier?
If not, why not!? I want them now!

Mr Steptoe esq

This is an easy one. Let's assume for a minute that you want to build a brick wall at a 45 degree angle so that it faces NE instead of North. Make your first brick, and manually rotate it to 45 degrees. Now look at the editor window and towards the right you'll see a pull-down menu with 3 options in it, World, Local, and Reference. Select Local, and now when you select your brick you'll see that the manipulator tool has turned 45 degrees to orient itself with the brick's local rotation.

All you need to do from here is shift-drag the first brick to create the others. This is the fastest way to ensure that they all share the same rotation. From here you can move them into place, resize them, reshape them however you want, and you'll be working at 45 degrees the whole time.



If you're asking about global axes at angles other than zero, 90, mark 90, these are not accessable in SL's tool set. In fact I'm not aware of any 3D program that has these available by default. In a fairly robust program like Maya you can add as many axes as you want if you really like tinkering, but most people don't. XYZ is standard, and it's very important to keep your work standardized if you want other people to be able to use it. Keep in mind SL is designed for the layman.

Sure, other axes can serve as shortcuts, but I don't think I have to tell you there's absolutely nothing in 3D space that connot be described easily with XYZ. It would be nice to have a fully customizable set of tools like in Maya, but we don't exactly need it. Constant switching between local and global orientation becomes second nature after you've been building for a little while. You'll pretty quickly find youself adapting to SL's tools, as they really are incredibly simple. Habitualizing the processes involved doesn't take long at all. Within a couple weeks you'll wonder why you ever thought anything in SL was difficult.

Thanks for the advice, the "local" setting will save me many hours of building