Trying to build a pyramid using the fewest prim possible.

It's for a business. I am trying to imagine how to build a pyramid with 4 sides and a foundation. Forget the inside structure; I got that handled. But, the geometry of the 4 walls on the outside. How would one do that? What shape would you use? Could you use blocks stacked, then taper them all at the same time? Is that even possible? Please help. Thanks in advance you guys!

You can do it with cubes. Just taper the corner pieces 100% in both x and y, and the side pieces 100% in either x or y depending on the side (or just rotate a flat cube at the appropriate angle if you don't want verticle walls on the inside). For the top taper x and y at 50% so the ends meet at the center, and make it half as tall.

Make a scuplty.

As Soen said, tapered cubes are the way to go. I'd only add that for best results the cubes should be hollowed and cut. You see, the maximum slope depth can only be as great as the depth of the entire prim. So if you want thin walls, then an uncut cube won't taper very far. With a 90% hollow though, and 2 or 3 of the 4 sides cut away (2 sides removed if it's a corner piece, 3 if it's not), you could stretch the cube 10M deep for a slope depth of up to 10 meters.

The only catch is you'll end up with V-shaped channels on the inner surfaces where the pieces meet, due the way cuts work. That's really not a big deal though. With clever texturing it's hardly noticeable, or you could always fill in the gaps with additional prims if you really want to.


You can't taper them all at once, but you can certainly start with a single tapered cube as your first building block, and then simply duplicate that block to form all the other pieces.



If you're proposing making each of the building blocks out of sculpties, that would work, but there are a few things to consider. First, you'll just need to be careful to include enough vertices at every point so that LOD doesn't turn your sharp edges into mush. It would solve the V-shaped channel issue though, so in that sense, it would be advantageous.

However, I've learned the hard way that when an area contains an excessive amount of sculpties, it can take a LONG time for people to download all the sculpt textures. Until they receive them, all they see is a sphere. For something like the vase on your counter, that's not a huge deal. For the walls of your building, it could be a problem though.

Of course, you're only talking about two or three sculpt textures for the different types of building blocks, but still, if you're gonna go the sculptie route, it would be best to place the pyramid in a location where you know there are not a lot of other sculpties around.

Current sculpties would have another problem: a sculptie's bounding box is a sphere, no matter what shape it looks like, so unless you're making a phantom pyramid, it would be really hard to walk in, over, or around.

Oh, wow! Guys, that makes thing soooo much easier than what I was thinking. I got it built and it looks fantastic. Only one problem; it's so big that I can't save it. I built it on a friends sim that was uninhabited. I was going to take it with me, but the thing is about 3/4 the size of the sim!

I am not sure Rez-Faux will do it without any trouble and I can't even get the parts to link together. Well, I can. But, I have to do them 2 or 3 at a time. It keeps saying, "cannot link - prim to far apart". With about 800 prim in the building, that's going to be tough.

I tried hovering up in the air to select them all in my field of view, but to get it all in the view I have to be really high in the air. Because of that fact, I am out of the range of select all. All I can get is the tip and a little bit more. Am I screwed? Right now, I either leave it there or destroy it. I can't take it with me.

Any ideas?

The "too far away to link" thing is perfectly normal. You'll never ever get an object that big all into one linkset, which is why Rez Faux and Rez Foo exist in the first place. The maximum size of a linkset is 32x32x32 meters on center for all the included prims. And that's assuming your prims are 10x10x10. The distance for smaller prims is less.

So, link it into pieces, pack it into Rez Faux/Foo, and call it a day. You're gonna need more than one packager object, given the size you say the building is, so be sure to record the packagers' positons relative to each other before you take them.

Chosen, do you know if you can rez-faux/foo the rez-faux/foo boxes? I'm at work so I can't find out, but that just popped into my head with regards to the build. If they're each within 99M of the next, is it possible to hopscotch the rezzers?

A

I don't know, but it's a good idea. Definitely worth experimenting with.