JD Marketing NOW HIRING for builders

Hello. My name is Jon Desmoulins and I'm CEO of JD Marketing. I'm looking for strong-willed, motivated individuals who are interested in a fulltime or part-time position with JD Marketing.

Building experience recommended, but not needed. We do free training. Currently I'm looking for individuals to accomplish tasks and be a motivator as well as motivate yourself, I'm open to ideas as to who you may be.

JD Marketing is one of the fastest-growing Marketing Firms in Second Life. We mean business and business is perky.

So, if you are interested, contact me in game @ Jon Desmoulins. And I can make time for an interview.

///SIGNED///
Jon Desmoulins, CEO, JD Marketing

P.S. I contract my builders and pay you for each prim built.

How about posting this in Classifieds where it belongs?

I am also Hiring for:

Builders
Scripters
Animators
Graphic Design
Clothing Design
Human Resources
&
Executive Administration

Ooops, I apologise. Was unaware of that

pay by the prim...that seems strange. the most talented builders i've seen try to make their builds using the least amount of prims possible. if you want quality builds, i would consider trying a different approach. just my .02.

good luck with the business. but please don't spam us.

Awww. Why did you tell him that. I was looking forward to the "Simple 10x10 Log Cabin... 480 prims".

My reasoning for this payment method is for my builders, and not for my clients. I take care of my own and if the client wants a high-prim, highly detailed _something_ , I believe my builders should be compensated for their work. Don't you?

Besides, you are right, but if the client wants a huge building using 10x10 prims, so be it, but it they want more detail, then my builders get paid anyways.

I hope you see my logic in this.

Sincerely,
Jon Desmoulins, CEO, JD Marketing

I must respectfully disagree with your "logic". In fact, I find what you've said to be highly illogical. Simply put, you've got your reward system totally backwards. Let me explain.

First, for a RL analogy, you don't pay a carpenter one 2x4 and one nail at a time. You tell him what you want built and you ask him for an estimate. His experience allows him to judge how complex a job will be, and by that judgment he gives you a price.

The same is true in SL. Paying by the prim just doesn't make any sense. You shouldn't pay more to a SL builder more because he chooses to use unnecessary prims, any more than you would pay more to a RL carpenter who chooses to use unncessary materials.

In RL, they have laws agains contractors fleecing their builds with extra materials. In SL, they have them too. They're called lag and parcel prim limits. Inefficient builds cause more lag than efficient ones, and they can't fit on as many parcels. Even if someone doesn't care about the former, it would be insane for a business owner in SL not to care a great deal about the latter. Every build you put up for sale that has too many prims in it is a build that can't be sold to as many customers as one that's efficient.

So, by this first point, your "logic" means paying more and earning less. Not logical.

Second, you seem to be under the impression that builds with higher prim counts require more labor than those with less prims. I can assure you that's absolutely not the case. In fact, the opposite is true. Finding the best way to build any object with the fewest amount of prims is always a tremendous mental exercise. It takes a great deal of experience, knowledge, and hard work to find the most efficient way to jigsaw puzzle a complex object into as few components as possible. That process of efficiency is far more difficult and demanding on the buider than is just allowing him to go nuts adding more an more prims. In other words, the more prim-efficient the build, the harder the builder has to work.

So, by this second point, your "logic" means paying the most to the people who work the least smart and the least hard. Again, not logical.

Third, you're completely overlooking the power and the purpose of textures. The fact is a 10 prim house with proper texturing can and usually will look much better and much more realistic than a 50 prim house with mediocre texturing. It's the textures that really make the build, not the prims.

That's what good building in SL, or really in any 3D application, is all about. It's about finding precisely the right balance between 2D and 3D to construct the best looking, most efficient model you possibly can. It's absolutely not about adding as many prims as you like, and then thinking that that means you're doing detailed work.

If you want proof of that, try this some time. Fire up your favorite video game, the one that you think is the most beautiful looking of all the games you have. Now turn off texturing (every game has a setting for this somewhere) and take a look at the objects in the scene. I can guarantee you the majority of items you thought were carefully scuplted are really nothing more than very primitive shapes that have been well textured. Almost none of the details will be present without the textures, even details you probably thought were 3D. Most objects will be very flat, just a few polygons. Once again, it's the textures that make the model, not just the geometry.

So, by this third point, your "logic" means that builders who take the time to meticulously detail their work with carfully crafted texturing would get paid less than those who just slap together a ton of prims, even though the texturing is infinitely more labor intensive and far more mentally challenging than the prim work. Again, not logical.

In summary, what you're proposing is that those builders who are the "best" by all established standards would be less valued and get paid less than the ones who are inefficient and wasteful. That's just not right.

These points that I've mentioned, by the way, are some of the main reasons I volunteer so much time here every day teaching. I want SL to look as good as possible, for it to run as smoothly as possible, and for everyone in it to succeed by learning to work in harmony with its principles.

Wasteful builds always sadden me somewhat. When I see a build where someone has loaded up the prims in order to sculpt what they should have textured, I can't help but think "this guy's got a lot to learn". Not only would a well textured, lower prim version have looked better, but it would have been far less resource intensive as well. Prims are VERY finite. Texture detail is not.

If you really want to "take care of your own" as you put it, then I'd strongly encourage you to rethink this pay scheme. What you should be doing is encouraging people to become efficient builders, and not to become, for lack of a better term, "prim hogs". Keep the prim counts low, the textures small but well made, and, trust me, your customers will be more satisfied, your products will be higher quality, and SL will look better and run smoother.

A customer is always willing to pay more and is much more appreciative of a well textured and highly detailed low prim build than a poorly textured prim heavy build that relies on prims for the detailing the texturing lacks.

There is nothing worse than a prim heavy house that leaves the owner with no prims left for décor let alone having to wait for all those prims to rez.

Yes, I know some people start out equating prims with wealth, the idea that more is better, but when they realize they only have prim room for sofa and a lamp, the idea of prim saving becomes premium and that prim heavy house soon goes into inventory never to see the light of SL again.

To illustrate what Chosen and I are talking about with textures, look at the attached pic. Now, how many prims is it? 500? 1000? 3000?

The answer is 133.

If I were to get paid by the prim I’d go broke. Heck, I probably wouldn’t even recoup my upload fees. Pay for the product, not the prim. And if you find a builder that can do a better version with even less prims, toss them a bonus for then you have a builder you want to keep.

KX

That's about as valid as saying, "It's the prims that really make the build, not the textures."

It's about both, and the degree of importance of textures and prims varies depending on just what you're trying to build and its purpose. Also, some people just have an artistic or stylistic preference for texture-heavy or prim-heavy builds. I personally prefer a primmy look and, like some other folks I know, I am willing to carry extra tier to support my heavy prim habit.

Anyhow, I think paying for a project by the prim (or texture) doesn't make much sense, as there is not necessarily a correlation between the prim count (or number of textures), and the difficulty of a build or the time required to build it. Either work out an hourly fee, or get a quote for the build up front.

The above people have said EXACTLY what I think of pay-by-prim building practices. They just are not rewarding in the needed manner.

Then again, it IS your business. We're just trying to help...

You've taken one sentence out of context and changed its meaning. I guess you missed the part right afterward that said, "It's about finding precisely the right balance between 2D and 3D to construct the best looking, most efficient model you possibly can."

In any case, even if you do prefer your builds be a bit prim-heavier than they technically need to be, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that, you can't deny that they look infinitely better textured than not. Your assertion that textures and geometry carry equal weight would only be true if SL awarded us the same flexibility for 3D that it does for 2D. Given enough geometric freedom, we wouldn't need textures at all. (Michelangelo's sculptures were every bit the same quality as his paintings.) Unfortunately, however, we don't have that freedom, so the scale is not at all equal.

The fact is that SL limits us tremendously as scultpors while it does not limit as painters hardly at all. We can pour such tremendous detail into our images that they can be completely photo-realistic in and of themselves, but we can never acheive anything even close to realism with prims alone. Even the best sculptors in SL will readily admit that. An image can look completely real, but an item sculpted from nothing but prims will always look primitive. Until we're allowed either mesh models or enough prims so that we have one for each molecule, that won't change.

With the system we have at the moment, when you create a textured object, the texture itself loses some of its realism, while the geometry gains some. The result is a compromise between from and function, a combination that incorporates both the benefits and the drawbacks of both components. For example, let's go with a stock texture that we all have, say the stone walkway one. It's a photograph of real stones. When you look at the image all by itself, it as real as anything onscreen can be. Now apply that texture to a cube to make a sidewalk. It becomes readily obvious that those stones are not real at all; they're just painted onto the surface of the cube. However, the cube is now recognizable as a stone sidewalk, whereas before it was just a cube. As I said, the texture has lost some of its realism and the geometry has gained some. It's all about balance.

So, let's talk about that balance. Form and function are what we're after, so what role do the geometry and the texture play in each? Well, without the texture, the cube can function perfectly as a walkway, but it can't look like one. You could add a bunch of little spheres to make it a bit closer, but whether it's 1 prim or 100, it will never look very real without texturing. All those extra prims won't add a thing to the function, and they'll add a little bit to the form. Texturing won't add to the function either, but it will add a tremendous amount to the form. That's why I say the texturing is what makes the build, moreso than the geometry.

I made no such assertion. I said it varies from build to build, depending on what you're trying to build, for what purpose it's intended, and the preference of the client. But thanks for telling me I can put a sidewalk texture on a prim to make it look more real than a plain prim -- I woulda never figured that out!

Okay, I'm teasing you (not flaming, but joking). I know you take this stuff seriously, and so do I (heck, it pays my bills, so I had better), but I could swear this is feeling a little argumentative, and I just wanted to participate in plain old discussion.

Technically, you could slap a trees-on-alpha on the side of a prim and call it a forest. In fact, KX has done so, and I have a couple of copies of that screen in use at my parcel (that man is a texturing genius). It's as low on prims as you can get, and great at the edge of my parcel as a backdrop, softening the effect of the neighboring massive stone wall against snowy ground. On the other hand, I recently built one of the primmier trees in our world, and it's got its points, too. It's expensive, primwise, but you can walk around it and it looks just as real from every angle, even zoomed in, and you can hang ornaments on the branches. And that's why it's so primmy . . . because hanging ornaments on a tree of the standard 3-crossed-panels type just ain't the same.

Which is technically better? I don't know . . . hard to compare apples and oranges at all, let alone my friend's apple and my orange. However, I do know that his texturey trees wouldn't serve my primmy purpose, or vice versa. The appropriate balance between texture and prim is both situational and subjective.

I like prims. I think a log cabin built of individual prim logs (as I understand some folks are doing these days) will look better than even KX's lush texture work, but not many people can afford to spend that many prims. Good thing we have KX around, able to make a really great looking cabin where textures stand in for a lot of prim-expensive modeling. And yes, Chosen, you're right, we need some textures. A prim-log cabin wouldn't look so hot if there weren't some textures to put bark on the default-wood logs, etc. But without the prims, heck, you don't have anywhere to put a texture!

I've seen many, many builds that looked GREAT at first glance, because of the magnificent texturing, that I wouldn't have wanted to spend more than five minutes in, because it takes me less time than that to be disillusioned by the unavoidable realization that I'm sitting in a couple of boxes with pictures on the sides, and they're flickering where they overlap, to boot. Now, I know you and KX don't build like that, but a LOT of people here do. And it was to that I was speaking, not to either of you, because you both know how to model.

Personally, given the available prim count and time, if I'm building for myself, I *will* model every rock in my stone sidewalk . . . and I'll put stone textures on them, too. And I won't care which is "more important", the prims or the textures. But hey, I don't spend much time trying to figure out if the chicken's more important than the egg, either, I just know chicken isn't so great for making custard and eggs tend to fall through the BBQ grill.

Your analogy doesn't quite hold up. Both chickens and egges are equally unlimited resources. Therefore neither can possibly outwiegh the other.

With prims and textures, that's not the case at all. Because we're so limited in the amount of prims we can use, there's only so much detail you can add to a build with them, but there's almost unlimited detail available with textures. Therefore it makes sense to use prims as a skeleton, and then flesh out that skeleton with good texturing. This is an age old principle of 3D modeling, especially for realtime applications, and it's doubly imortant in SL since geometry is sooooo restricted.

Anyway, what I'm really talking about when I say "wasteful build" is not those made by someone such as yourself, who simply wants to see real 3D depth in certain details. What I'm talking about are the ones where a new prim is added every time someone needs a color change, like when someone uses 64 individual black & white cubes to make a checkerboard instead of one big cube with a checkerboard texture, or to go with a common example from LL, when a picket fence is made by modeling every single picket instead of simly using one well textured prim. Those things are absolute wastes, whereas what you seem to be describing in your builds is not. That's pretty much what I meant when I said you had taken my one sentence out of context and changed its meaning. We weren't exactly talking about the same things at that point.

Don't forget that a texture-heavy build takes a long time to load, too. The goal should be to build the best with the fewest resources.. whether they're prims, textures, or scripts. Not to mention that using standard instead of custom textures means you're more likely to be hitting the user's cache (well, back when the cache actually worked you were).

Good point Argent, but I'm going to assume that's not aimed at me since I'm the one who's on here screaming every day about proper texture management.

Anyway, remember, every cube has 6 faces, which means every time one is added, there are six more opportuinities for someone to ubuse texture sizes. So, if someone's a poor texture manager (which most people are), they'll be far less damaging if they strive for low prim counts (which most people do) than if they don't.


Yes and no. If you use something very common like blank or plywood, then yes, chances are almost everyone has that texture chached at all times. However, if you use the less common ones like the stone walkway I mentioned before, those don't appear in most builds, so it's unlikely that most visitors to yours would already have them cached. Just because everyone's got the same things in their library in no way means that those things are in the cache.

Good building is definatly a combination of prim work and texture work. There are just certain things you cant do with textures, and certain things that should be done with prims. A good builder uses her/his best judgement, insight, and experiances for this.

So pretty much I agree, payign per prim works to a point, but it discourages using prims conservativly to create a sound, low lag structure.