General questions about Grids and other silly stuff

Kinda (well, not really kinda) new to building.

I have read a lot in here and learned a lot doing. I have a couple questions about grids and floor plans.

I have seen several builders using a GRID that looks like JUST THAT, a Grid that has lines all the way down to mm. Where in the world did they get that?

Also, I have seen (on the SL web site in the tuts area) a video which has a real floor plan laying on the ground, and the builders are building up from it. That would be most helpful. can anyone tell me how they got those into SL? Are they simply Textures?

If they are simply textures, did they import each section at the 512x512 and then put them on full size blocks to make it to scale?

Thanks!

Les Grut

You already figured most of it out yourself. I think you can find the grids in a couple of places. I think I found a basic grid at the 5,000 freebie wherehouse. Some builders tools include more advance grids with 'laser' lines.
Yes the blueprints are simply textures and scaled them on a flatten cube.

I'm not sure what you mean by a grid. You mean an object that you can buy, or an interface feature?

There is a built in grid in the second life building system. (Simply check 'use grid' in the edit window).
It will show a grid centered around the selected object, and objects will snap to the gridlines on move, scale and rotate.
It's default is, I believe, 0.5m, but with the grid options panel, you can set this to any value you like (I prefer working on 0.125m, it requires some skill to quickly snap at such a low value, but gives a nice precision without being too cumbersome to use.). By selecting sub-unit precision, the grid will automatically user smaller units than the set unit when zooming in with camera.

On using architectural drawings. You got most of that correct already. Instead of cutting up a drawing, I tend to usually upload a single texture (highres 1024x1024), then use texture scale/offset to spread it over multiple prims. Ofcourse the best technique depends on the size and detail of your object.