economic use of Prims?

Hi:

I am completely new to building in SL and just recently assembles a house-Kit I bought on sal. Guess what.. the prim limit exceeds my 521sq land limit. Solutions ofcourse is to either buy more land (which in my neighborhoon is waaaaaay too expensive) or to use prims effectively and build a house myself.

Could anyone tell me what comprises "one prim" and what exactly is economic uise of prims? I mean how do people build "more" with "less" prims? Examples would be of great help.

thanks

Hi bubbli!

You should have a read through the Support Wiki,specifically, the How-to guide. This might answer a few questions and make things a little clearer.

https://secondlife.com/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=How-Tos

The short answer is, when you have the Edit window open(ctrl+4) the shapes you see along the top are primatives(prims). Houses normally comprise of multiple prims all in a linkset.

To save drops, and be prim efficient,many people use clever texturing tecniques for things such as windows.This has its benifits because if you build a window purley out of prims, you would probably use approx 4 prims with having to build the frame aswell.With a texture and an alpha channel, you can make the same window with just one prim.

Unfortunalty,the small amount of prims you get with a 512sqm parcel (117 if i remember correctly) is just not enough in many cases. And as you have found out, more land = more $. I eventually left my 512 parcel for this very reason.

Welcome, Bubbli!

Some advice for would-be low-prim building:

Go to the Ivory Tower of Primitives, and learn everything you can from the tutorials there. You can learn tricks there like how to make both flat panels of a peaked roof out of a single prim (by using a cut and hollowed cube). Many of the lessons there show you how to do more with less.

Read the sticky thread on use of Transparency and Alpha Channels, at the top of the Design and Textures forum. That will teach you how to use things like alpha-mapped windows, to get a window in a one-prim wall.

Textures can also let you make things look much better than they really are. For example, I have a lovely chest of drawers in my bedroom, with 5 drawers. It's only one prim. The details are all textures. Check out the larger texture stores, and see what they offer for 3D Builds. There are ready-made photo-realistic texture sets available that allow you to make walls with windows, roller blinds, and all the details, and just use one prim.

Meet with a builder, like me, who does low-prim building, and see how we do things. I'm working on a two story tall, 20M diameter round atruim for a build right now, which has a glass domed roof, an interior balcony with railing, and scripted doors, and so far it's under 75 prims... People like me can also be hired to build a prim-efficient structure that fits on your lot and still leaves you room for furniture. My most prim-efficient house, a 5M x 5M one-room cottage with a window and a scripted door, uses only 9 prims.

In this case especially - you trade prims for attractiveness. Alpha windows are very hard to get right, and the vast majority of them look like crap. (Not to mention making the house look like a toy because of the need for paper thin walls.)

My preferred solution is to create a hole in the wall, and then place an alpha texture window that contains glass and frame into the hole. You make the insert slightly larger than the hole and and slightly thinner than the wall. With the proper texture applied to the walls of the hole you don't get any 'jaggies' and the wall and window appear more 'real' because both have thickness. The downside of this method is you can end up with oddly placed and proportioned windows because of the singlemindedness of the hole function.