Large builds, houses, etc. Is there a way to keep a build together?

Ooh, I'm famous :) Thanks for the mentions, folks. Here's a SLURL for my store in Eldora: http://slurl.com/secondlife/eldora/144/164//

I'll go ahead and answer some questions I've already gotten from people reading this thread. First of all, the 500L price lets you package an unlimited number of builds, and also gives you the right to sell an unlimited number of copies of your packaged builds. Your customers will be able to use the rez-faux system to rez your structure and move it around.

Rez-faux can be used on no-copy builds you've bought from someone, but it won't give you the ability to make more than one copy of the build. It will let you package the build up ONCE and move it, and rez it once, but it's possible to lose your build, so you have to be very careful. I can't be responsible for losing pieces of a build you don't have copy permissions on. One example of how this can happen is if you rez the build and one of the pieces overlaps land with a very short autoreturn. If a piece gets returned, there won't be any way to automatically align it again.

Similarly, it is possible to sell your packaged build as no-copy by setting all of the pieces no-copy before packaging them, but it is very much not recommended. It's just too possible for your customer to accidentally break their build, and there's no way to enforce "one purchase, one rezzed copy of the build" while still avoiding this potential for damaging their house irreparably. It's a limitation of SL, not rez-faux, and I personally feel that all builders selling any multi-object building should sell it copy/no-transfer.

As to the price, and whether or not it works, of course it works :) I set the price very aggressively for several reasons. First, there are already several products like this out that cost multiple thousands, so there's not room for another. Second, I initially made this because I didn't want to pay thousands for it, so I knew there was a market :)

if u want a free non-scripted way to do it....

it starts when building... don't make any size less than 0.100....
Then when you get done,
link it into as few sections as possible,
select all of it... right click on it an take a copy (to be safe)
now make sure that scale textures is checked
zoom way out
(usually at this point i now shift-drag a copy of the whole thing up but if you are short on prims you may not be able to do that)
hold the ctrl/shift keys down and grab a resize corner...
drag the whole thing smaller until you think it fits within 30 meters
press CTRL-L (or link through menus)
now resize it back to normal size using the white resizers

Presto, a linked building/spaceship/etc... that is beyond the link limits
just watch out if you start trying to edit it now!

Oh, btw.... don't do this if you have any of the new planer (sp?) mapped textures as they don't scale right and you will have to reset those textures when you get done.

Also, beware if you need to take the 'linked' object into inventory using this method. Once you take an object which is linked beyond the link limits, it will rez unlinked. So, there's not much benefit to having it linked beyond limits, since you can't do anything that you can't already do by just selecting all the prims at once (without actually linking them.)

Though I admit, I haven't tested link_messages using this temp-link method.

yes to the unlinked state... What I usually do is keep a copy of the smaller linked version... Then when i want it again, i rez it and stretch back to full size then.

and yes, link messages work

I use Rez Doodler myself, Thaddeus asked me if I needed anything upon purchase and has been very helpful.

As a result of the comments in this thread I purchased Rez-faux and have found it to be a great product.

I have several hugh builds, I'm working on trying to get a sim built. This program is saving me tons of time.

A little trick I've developed is to use brightly colored prims that are not part of the actual build as my root. The yellow highlight in SL is not always easy to see. When the build is done I just delete the extra prims and I'm done.

Thank you Lex.

Bounder's method will work, but it's got a few pitfalls. First of all, shrinking and expanding something like that is bound to introduce relatively large inaccuracies, so if you built by the numbers and your seams are perfect, you'll find they're not perfect when you expand your prims. Rez-faux goes to extreme lengths to avoid losing any accuracy in the position of your prims.

Also, it can be hard to select a giant build and shrink it down, especially if your draw distance is large. If you've built with even a single prim that has a small dimension, you won't be able to shrink your build. Rez-faux lets you package any pieces that are up to 100 meters away from the rez-faux box, and I think you'd be hard pressed to shrink something that large manually.

Then there's the 255 prim link limit. Rez-faux has no theoretical prim limits, so you can conceivably package up 60,000 prims with a single rez-faux (by straddling a four-corners intersection of sims).