Visual reference for building

I think I need to make my question more clearly if I ever want to find some helps. My questions are mainly about measurement system in SL and with other graphic programs. (I'm coming from a 2D graphic background so my questions may sound really dumb):

1) When building in SL, I was looking for visual aid, like a 3D ruler (grid system) or something that I can layout first on the ground to assist designing and building. Is there this kind of tool around?

2) I know pixels but I don't understand how pixels relate to the metric system in SL. So let's say how do I know what size of texture I need to make in order to look good and load fast in SL? (The robot avatar I'm making has many sphere and cylinder prims, which are even more confusing to me when I try to design the texture...)

3) I'm also making the 3D model offline in prim.Blender cuz I will need to export the model to other graphic program later. Will the model look too big/small in other graphic programs, for example Maya?

SOS, even just to tell me that these are questions not to be worried about. Thanx!!!

Well i think I can answer part of your question. As far as textures go, unless you are using an alpha texture the upload a 512x512 in 24bit. If you are uploading a texture with Alpah texture ( see thru parts) then it should be 32bit. If i were you I wouldnt be concerned with pixles. Up load a texture and place on a prim. Go to the textur edit and exsperiment with the settings. Strech, shrink, rotation and repeats per meter. If you are doing a rounded object then there are some templates avail. Lots of diggging around to find though. Sl does have some for download for clothing. There is a grid building assistor avail on SL boutique. I cannot remember the name of it offhand. Maybe some knows the name of it. I will look for when i get the chance. There is also a program in there called prim docker if you want a tool to help line up boards. It is helpful but needs a bit of practice to use. I build by the numbers mostly. Thats the info I can give you. Hope this helps a bit.
Clay

Just so you know, go to Harbinger Sandbox (search for it in Places) and pick up a builders prim box. Inside you'll find a ruler, and a lot of *very* useful things -in meters- to work with.
You'll find a builder's grid, and the correct height and width of a room, for example.

Happy building
Eme

I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for, but I can tell you what I usually do. When I want something to be as accurate as possible, I usually first create a blueprint in Illustrator or Photoshop, with the necessary orthographics (front view, top view, side view, etc). Then I upload those images as textures and apply them to flat cubes to create a life-size template. Then it's pretty easy to just build right on top of the template, and everything comes out the right size.


Now you're stumbling onto what is perhaps the most fundamental difference between 3D graphics and 2D graphics. In 2D graphics, the entire universe can be measured neatly in succinct little units, which we happen to call pixels. If you're operating at 72 pixels per inch, and your image is 6 inches wide, then you know it's gonna be 432 pixels wide. Easy and logical.

In 3D graphics, however, it's totally different. There is no direct correlation between pixels and physical size. For an easy to understand real world analogy, think of it like watching TV. Standard aspect US TV screens are 640 pixels wide. So, when you watch your evening news, and they zoom in on Katie Couric's face, you could say her head is somewhere around 500-600 pixels wide. When they zoom out though, she might be only around a hundred pixels wide. She obviously didn't get any smaller in 3D units; her head is still around 6 inches wide, just like every other average adult human head, but she did get considerably smaller in 2D units.

The same thing happens in SL. Try this. Rez a default cube. It will be half a meter wide. Zoom all the way in on it. If you've got an average size monitor, that cube is probably now somewhere around a thousand pixels wide. Zoom all the way out, and it might be just one or two pixels wide. It's still half a meter though.

See what I mean? There's no correlation between 3D and 2D units at all. So, the answer to the first part youy question, how do pixels relate to the metric system, is quite simply that they don't.

For the answer to the second part, how to choose appropriate texture sizes, see the sticky at the top of the texturing forum, entitled Texture Size, Pixel Counts, Video Memory, and File Formats. I think you'll find it covers everything you need to know on this subject. If it doesn't, ask away.



It may or it may not, depending on at what scale you're building the rest of your scene in Maya. Everything's relative. I'd suggest setting your units in Maya to be meters, and setting your world orientation to Z-up, so that it matches what you're used to in SL, but really it's pretty arbitrary. A unit is a unit, no matter the name.

Things can get a little wonky sometimes when you copy geometry from one scene to another with a different unit type as Maya tries to figure out the difference between, say, a meter an and inch. It's an example or the many ways in which Maya tends to be just a little too smart and a little too dumb all at the same time for it's own good sometimes. If that happens, just put all the components of the model into a group (which is something you should do anyway), and then you can very easily scale the group to match the proportions of your scene.

Thank you all for the replies. They really helped me to solve part of the puzzle in my head.

1) I found those builder's tools in Harbinger Sandbox and will try them out. Thanks Eme.

Hi Chosen. I made a blueprint of the robot avatar but only front view. I guess I can't be lazy. Do you know if I can also import the blueprint to offline builder like Blender/Maya?

2) This is one of the I-am-afraid-to-ask question. I am now finally super clear on the subject! Happy face here.

I found a texture test pattern. I will experiment with it. Since my robot avatar's body is composed of about 20 prims, I wonder if making one piece of texture then offsetting it is more efficient (in terms of rendering and workflow) than making 20 textures?

3) I see. SL is kind of the first 3D application I've ever tried to learn so far. I really like how there is a community to support you when you're learning everything from scratch. I hope I'll be able to apply the same basic knowledge and skills to other 3D applications.

I am not ready to get a land but want to build in a lag-free environment. If I build in the sky of sandbox, will my build get deleted if I leave them there for a couple days? Do the prims in sky count toward the prim number limits of a sim/island?

Typically, yes. Most sandboxes have either a specific time (like 3:00AM) where everything is returned, or a time interval (say 12 hours).

There are private sandboxes where this may not apply, though, but I cannot give you specific examples. It may be worth asking around

Sky prims count same as prims at ground level, by the way. Doesn't matter where you put 'em.

I personally prefer to build in they sky for better FPS, but it's not the same as lag... If the sim is lagging or there are packet loss issues, they happen in the sky too

Absolutely. In Maya, you can either apply it to a piece of geometry as a texture, just like you would in SL, or you can assign it to a tool called an image plane. Image planes are cool because they don't actually exist as objects in your scene, but are functions of the camera. They're very handy.

I'm not sure if Blender has a similar feature to Maya's image planes, but you can certainly apply your blueprint as a texture to an object, and work that way.


Yes, one texture will be much more economical than 20.


You'll find that most concepts of 3D are universally applicable, so in many ways, anything you learn in SL will help you in other applications. It's like how learning to draw will make you a better sculptor, or how learning graphic design will make you a better painter. It's all related.

However, SL does work quite a bit differently from traditional 3D modeling programs. The other programs have a lot more tools available, and they all have a lot more in common with each other than any of them do with SL.

Basically, SL is to 3D modeling platforms, as "My Cousin Vinny" is to lawyers. Vinny barely posseses the skills necessary to be passable at the actual job of lawyering itself, but because he happens to be entertaining and quite good with people, he succeeds anyway.

SL has pretty much the same story. Strictly speaking, as a 3D modeling application, it's, well, pretty terrible. Its tools are almost childish, it uses this bizarre system of parametric objects instead of standard surface modeling, its visual quality is a decade or two behind the times, etc. However, since it has so much going for it socially, none of that stuff really matters.

In SL, you get not just to build your sand castle, but actually to move into it. In something like Maya, your castle could be a thousand times nicer, but you can't invite all your friends to come hang out in it.

On a side note, it's really pretty amazing just how good people have been able to get things to look in SL over the past three or four years, in spite of the "dummyish" tools. The technology really hasn't changed or improved in any meaningful way, but people's ability to use it effectively has grown almost exponentially.

Anyway, to get back on topic, I'll summarize by saying this. Every 3D application you learn will benefit you. You'll find that they all add to your skillset synergistically. Getting better at one makes you better at all. That doesn't mean that a Maya expert will automatically know how to use 3DS Max, of course, but it does mean that the process of learning Max will make that Maya expert better at Maya as well as at Max. Make sense?


It doesn't matter how high an object is. If it's over the land, it's "on" the land. Yes, your objects will disappear if they're over a sandbox. Whether they're touching the ground or 500 meters up in the sky, it makes no difference.

Wow, thanks everyone for taking time to point me to the light. That's a lot of details that you've given me, Chosen. I'll be working hard on my robot avatar this weekend.

Hi there,
Cant find that sandbox in Search - are you sure that's the right name?
Thanks Duder

The proper full name is actually "Harbinger's Haven - Builders sandbox".

If the in-world search worked sensibly, it would pick up a nice juicy substring like "Harbinger" and return useful results, unfortunately that's not the case. Searching for "Harbinger's" works though.