About building houses...

Got a question for you:

Can I build a house in a sandbox, pack it away for later, and then set it on property when I get some?

Was kind of curious of how it worked...

Yes you can.

Keep in mind that your first land will likely be... well, first land. That's a 512 meter plot, and it supports 117 prims.

I figure the basic structure will take about... 50 prims.

That will leave 67 for furniture and other scructures.

Should I take it that items are the sum of their prims, and not just a prim to themselves?

Hmnn.. I can cut that by a few more...

A bit tricky, there...

Ah well... I'll get it...

You've have fun building your first house in the sandbox, Frost! Highly recommended.

The way to pack it away for later is to link all the prims in your house, then do a Take. You'll end up with the entire thing in your inventory as a single object with an 'active selection' label. The label might just say Object, but you can rename it so you can find your house later, and rez it on your own land.

Good luck : )

definitely rename them unless you like having what-is-this-one parties hehehehe

l.

Try attaching it to your head in the welcome area.

Thanks for the thoughts.

By the way, what do you all recommend the house prims vs other prims ratio to be?

I was figuring if I work with 117, then I should try to keep it down to 1/3 to 1/4, or about 30 - 40 prims. What do you think?

totally up to you and what you want to use the place for. if you're making a replacement irl house then you'll need alot of furniture. if you're making a SL hang out you could get away with no furniture. if you use built in stuff you could make the house and the furniture with the same prims and save all around. no rules.

Foolish,

Bit of advice: Go to prim university. In an hour or two of self-study and practice you can learn some valuable techniques that are SL-specific. I think on average I use half the number of prims to make things from what I did before I went there.

You can find prim university in "find". I'd send you a landmark but I'm not in-world.

Buster

Already did, friend.

I may be new, but I'm a quick study.

Hi Foolish..

I usually try to allocate 1/4 to 1/3 of the prims on smaller parcels for the build and leave the remainder for furnishings, etc.

Small plots are difficult to allocate for, as you're working with a relatively small number of prims, so building a nice home and furnishing it can be a challenge.

Here's a table I made that illustrates some prim usage - of course the % reserved for the build varies (10-15%) - but it shows how many prims would be leftover after the build:

One more note.. I started a thread on this subject a while back, it might be worth browsing through to see some others opinions: clickey

A house of only 40-46 prims sounds like a lot when you have a 512 with 117 prims -- that sounds like 71.

But by the time you count maybe a few trees and bushes, that takes maybe 10, and you put in some furniture, you can find whoops, you're all out. Some of the free furniture out there are real prim hogs, like those Dutch table and chairs by Jai Nomad, I love them, but I just make sure I put them on a giant lot of 5000 plus where they won't be noticed sucking prims LOL.

I think you need to figure triple prims for what your house is, against the lot, and not double, as some builders have been doing, just because people like to decorate, and once you get started, you keep adding more.

But then that's why you move to a 1024 LOL.

Or rent, so you can have somebody else besides yourself count prims

Well, I've upgraded for land use, and now need a good 1024 land plot.

I was hoping for one near a community, with the option of building a stonework tower/dome. Anybody have any thoughts?

Pssst... get your first land first and resell it... You can practice a small bit on it with the terraforming and land tools until it sells. (and make a lil profit)

That's a good idea if you never intend to own land in SL. A mistake a lot of newbies make is to buy the first land, sell for profit - but still under the larket value, only to later realise they cannot afford land elsewhere at market value.

to append Traxx's note: when you link prims, the last one selected is the "master" (or parent) prim. It has the name, and it controls the rotation of the group. To make rezzing and placement easier, i like to have a parent prim that is rotated on the 90 degree plane (can be 0,0,0... or 0,90,0... or 180,270,90...)

the way to always make sure you select the same prim last -- well, I select everything with a drag-select (in edit mode, click on ground or sky and drag) and then i hold the shift key down and click on the parent prim (this un-selects it), then still holding shift down, I re-select it. Thus this is now the last prim and when you link, it becomes the parent.

Good append, Forseti. My turn. : D

Frost, it's sometimes useful to add an extra prim specifically to be the root prim. For example, a structure might be stored as three objects in your inventory: platform, tower and roofdeck. When you rez these on your lot you'll want to align them or tweak their position/rotation to fit the contours of your land.

Ideally the coordinates of your root prim work as a convenient handle for moving, say, the roofdeck to the top of the tower, and getting those sections perfectly aligned. In practice you might find that your root prim turns out to be some not very helpful off-center prim. But while you're still in the sandbox you can always add a centered prim to be the root. Then when you rez you've got a convenient handle, and you can delete it when you're happy with the placement of your structural components.

This is a place? I search for 'prim university' and 'university' and didn't get anything

A search for 'prim' returned loads of stuff but nothing that seemed like prim university.

Cass is a nice sim with inexpensive land and lots of houses, real community feel.

And thats why God made GOM. Well either God or that Zippi dude, I get them mixed up sometimes.

You may be looking for the Ivory Tower of Primitives . . . look for it by that name, or simply a keyword like "Ivory" alone. 99 1/4 pure? (Joking about that last part... maybe.)

Thanks. That was exactly what I was looking for.