Floor Thickness

I'm building a new tower that will contain several floors of shops and have a couple questions. First off, how thick should a floor be? The defaul thickness is .5. Is say .05 too thin? Also, how tall should each floor be on average? 6m? 8m? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

the short answer is that it's up to you. The long answer is that it really depends on what look your going for, wood flooring would realistically be multi layered with the top layer being thin with a thicker "plywood"/support set of layers below it and similar with tile but with a tile texture on the top layer, if you were doing solid stone blocks on the other hand you'd want to go for thick solid blocks. I can't quote numbers off the top of my head so you'll just have to experiment, that's the best way to figure anything out like this.

Hope that helps a little.

Hi Boq

I believe it all depends on what sort of speeds you expect ppl to jump down on your floor.

The physics engine should run at around 45 frames per second, so that is how often it checks for prim penetration. If the floor was 1 M thick, then that would catch movement up to 45 M/second, which I calculate at 162 km/hr or 100 miles/hour. If it is .1 M thick that would reduce to 10 miles/hour. I generally use .2M for my floors and walls and have gone through my walls a couple of times, maybe because of lag in the physics engine.

Of course, the bounding box that the physics engine uses for each av also adds to the calculation and might change the above to allow higher speed or thinner prims.

If your height is above 5 M, you may as well use 10 as that is the maximum prim size. At that height a .5 M thick floor would not look out of place.

hth

Ed

When building prefabs, I generally leave the bottom floor or "foundation" prims the default thickness of .5 meters, which will allow you to sink the house some to compensate for uneven terrain.

Everything else; the walls, other floors and roof I use .25 meters. It looks good, it's not overly thin or thick and it's easy to calculate when compensating for wall thickness at the corners of your build.

At a minimum, I would suggest a 5 meter ceiling height. Much less than that and you will encounter cam view crunch. Another advantage of using a 5 meter ceiling height is that you can save prims by being able to have two floors and use single 10 meter tall prims for the walls.

.3 for the floors and 7 meters for height whoever said 5 is just insane, a tall av could not walk around and see anything right make it for everyone not just the shorties.

Kinga, my Avatar is 7'-6". I can walk around and still see perfectly in all my builds that use 5 meter ceiling heights. Besides, I said use 5 meters as a minimum, not as a rule.

How thick? If the edge of the floor can be seen, then it matters, mainly for the sake of proportions so that the building looks believable. Paper thin stone floors never look convincing. If you can't see the edge, then any thickness would do. So, ask yourself, are you shoving a staircase or ramp through the floor? Or do you have curtain wall glazing?

For the floor to floor height, you can easily experiment by walking your avatar through varying heights. Remember you can combine tall lofty and short spaces next to each other for variation and interest. You don't need to stick to a prescribed height as long as an avatar can fit through it with the external avatar camera right below the ceiling. Most people stick with a fixed height throughout, and it makes experiencing the spaces very dull and lifeless.

Thanks for all the replies! I think I will go with .5 for floors and .25 for walls just to be safe. Gordon, I admire the realism of what you imply doing; unfortunately I'm trying to build a commercial (stores) tower on First Land...not sure if I'll even have the prims for the building i want to build let alone items to sell lol.

Another consideration on floor thickness is that sometimes when someone lays or sits on the floor, part of their avatar (like tails on furry avatars) may extend through the floor. A thick floor can hide that, while a thin one may leave the people downstairs seeing tails growing from their ceiling on occasion!

As for floor to ceiling distances, 4.5 to 5.0 M is about the minimum, if you want people to be able to accept teleport offers to join others in that room. A 4 M ceiling height will get people teleporting to the roof or the floor above.

Like most everyone else who posted, I usually go with the default .5 for floors as it hides a multitude of sins. I consider 7m a minimum for wall height for my builds, camera angles feel too constrained at less than that (for me anyway) and most SL avatars are very tall.

If you are working with first land prim restrictions, it's also ok to think outside the box...literally. Make yourself an open-air store, skip the extra prims for floors and walls.

Thanks for all the help! I've realized I need to abandon my original idea and build a much smaller single retailer store. I'm going to keep all this advice in mind.