house building questions from a noob

Hello,

I am new to SL, and I have some experience with 3d modelers like sketchup and blender, but I am having some trouble. I did some searching in SL and on these forums, and I have found some very useful information! Unfortunately, I still have a couple questions:

1) Is there a good, free house building tutorial? The one at ITP looks good but is still under construction. Specifically I am hoping to find good tips on framing out doors and windows, and prim efficiency.

2) I am having a terrible time lining up objects like walls. If I want to use an inside and outside texture on a wall I get ugly lines where objects come together. I have tried some of the tips I have found so far but I am not having much luck, and I don't know much geometry.

Thanks in advance for any help!
SJ

I do't know of any good tutorials, but there are a lot of good freebie houses. Take them apart, piece by piece, and put them back together again.

As for lining up walls and such, try entering the coordinates instead of moving them. The position is the center, you know how wide the two prims are, so you should be able to compute the distance between the centers exactly.

Another approach is to use some alignment tool such as Skid Primz (I think it is called). Actually, Skid Primz has a good course, Ithink.

good luck.

I have built 3 houses and a bar. I always start on a corner and give the x,y coordinates a good beginning - such as 100,100, from there, it makes offsets of the prims easier to calculate. I always use the edit position instead of trying to align with mouse. I always try to make prim sizes even numbers because if I need something that is 50% size of prim, but prim is 8.725m long, I will not be able to create 1/2 size prim of 4.3625m because accuracy is to 0.001. If I have angles, use trigonometry. There are internet triangle calculators that make it easy.

Path cuts are useful to make the special shapes, such as an angle on wall.

There are bugs in builder that cause problems! Best to experiment.

For those lines that show, provided prims are correct size and position, it is important that textures are in alignment as well. Even so, the lines, maybe artifacts?, may sometimes still show.

Thanks for the replies!

I use Prim Builder for lining up, aligning etc and have found it very effective once you get to grips with X,y,Z (took me ages duh!).

As to tutorials i found it really useful building scale models to start with - easier to experiment and visualise what you are doing with a manageable size.

Im merely a beginner but feel free to IM if you see me in world and want some help

Zog

The only thing I can add to the above posts is to use an invisible texture on the edges of wall prims. When using a standard texture and the walls are butted up to each other, you'll get an annoying line. If you use an invisible texture on those edges before butting the walls together, there will be no lines. (well, I hate to say "no lines"...but the lines will be decreased dramatically)

Well, thanks to the tips I got here and elsewhere I am doing a much better job! I am starting to get a grip on the necessary math, which helps a lot, though remembering to calculate from the center of a prim is still causing me grief. I should have worked harder in math class. Still, as long as I work with easily divisible sizes I do well enough.

Now I am experimenting to see what I can make using as few prims as possible. I don't plan on getting anything bigger than the basic 512m^2 plot, so I want to be as efficient as possible.

Thanks again for all the help!
SJ

first, forget about building to rl dimensions. build big enough to fit yourself and your camera and your stuff.

for aligning walls and things, it's best to use sizes that work with your grid, and snap everything to the grid. for example, i use 0.125m grid so my prim sizes are dimensions of that and they have no problem lining up. hit "G" to toggle the grid and put the mouse in the lines to snap to it when moving.