New Builder needs lots of help

I'm attempting to build a store of sorts. I'm finding that it takes FOREVER. Right now I'm just trying to design the walls/ floor/ ceiling.

I'm manually lining everything up and stretching out cubes to essentially boards that I'm linking together. It is a very painstaking process and I'm wondering if there is a faster way to do all this?

Also can someone explain the 30m linking rule thing to me? I'm having the problem where the pieces are touching but I cannot link them..not sure how to get around it.

Hi, Lex! If you want a board floor, an easier (and much less primmy) way is to use flat cubes, stretched out to a large size, and apply a board floor texture. That way, you have the appearance of boards on just one prim. There are tons of images of things like that available on the net, you shouldn't have to search too long.

If you want the look of individual boards, spaced farther apart, you could position a few of them, link those, then copy the whole linked group. That makes it much faster to get a large number of identically shaped and positioned prims.

A good technique I always, which you may know, is that make the board you want, then when it's selected again, shift+click and drag on one of the arrows directions. (red, green, blue arrows) and another board that is exactly the same will appear, much easier to copy prims and you dont have to keep remaking it. Hope i helped!

Hi Lex,

There is a free 'wood floor' texture in your inventory's Library section that will give you floor boards that don't require each board to be a prim on its own. Yiu can change the color to make them darker or otherwise tint them.

As for the linking limits... It's a bit complex. In general, you can link three 10 Meter prims in a row together, or you could even link 9 of them into a 3 x 3 array to make a 30 M x 30 M wall, or could expand on that to link several multi-prim walls into a cube. But if any of the parts are more than 30 Meters apart, it won't link. If you have small parts in the link set, it reduces the linking limit. For example, three 0.5 Meter spheres, spaced 5 M apart, are well within the 30 M limit, but might be unable to link. Placing two more spheres in the spaces between the first three, so you have 5 spheres 2.5 M apart, might be able to link just fine. It's a calculation based on the size of the prims and center to center distances, and sometimes you just have to experiment to see what works.

When you want to build something larger than the linking limits, break it into sections. For example, I made a two-story tavern that was 20 M wide and 20 M deep. It had too many prims to link into a single linkset, and the roof prims at one end were too far away from foundation prims at the other end to allow it to link. So I linked the ground floor and walls as one set, the second floor and walls as a second set, and the second floor ceiling and thatched roof as a third set. Always keep your doors as seperate items. Linking them to the walls makes for messy problems. Like door scripts that cross-talk with each other and fail, or part of the build rotating instead of the door.

As another example, one home that I own has one linkset for the East half of the ground floor, one for the West half of the ground floor, and a third for the second story and roof over the West half.

Hey Lex Congrats on your build!!!

Best Builds are by numbers. So when you line up your floors and walls, make sure you are spacing them correctly with the same number value in X,Y,Z. i.e. 167.452,177.452,187.452 while others are also aligned. for floors the Z always stays the same and walls its X. or Y. Once you master this the rest is easy and yes the shift hold and pull arrow. will duplicate your object so you can pull three out and quickly align them by plugging in numbers.

Have fun, any Q's just IM me in game, i am currently building too

Tou can replace and/or combine this with the 'copy selection' tool. Select a prim, hit the 'copy' tab and 'copy selection, then click the face of the old prim (or anpother) where you want the new copy to be. This way you can line up walls etc end-to-end as close to seamlessly as SL likes to get. For corners, combine with a bit of maths and you're sorted. Windows+R+"calc" will probably become a very familiar shortcut to you

Other than the tips people have given here, nothing speeds up building like familiarity with the tools and processes. Keep it up!

Hi, I found a building program that I find very useful and fast. It's called "Skidz Primz" and is located here http://slurl.com/secondlife/Snow%20Crash/128/128/23

Very easy to learn and use.

Also if you want to save very large builds? First take your smaller linked sections and edit them. While holding down the SHIFT key click on all the other small linked sections one at a time, still holding down the SHIFT key. Once you have everything linked (or outlined) right click on your build and choose TAKE. It will put all into your inventory as 1 object. Although all parts are not actually "LINKED" they will in fact stay together. You can take this new object from your inventory and drag it to the ground. All parts will stay together this way, even though they are not actually linked together. Great for storing large builds. WARNING! Once you rezz this object that contains everything...it will not stay linked...unless you link everythiong again using the SHIFT key. You can also move large builds this way as well.