Building in the small

Hi folks,
I just started Second Life less than a week ago, and am thoroughly enjoying it, especially learning how to build things.

As an exercise I tried to make some glasses by using 5 cylinders (two lenses, two earpieces, one nosepiece). The problem was that the smallest I could make any dimension was 0.01. 1 cm thick lenses are regular coke bottles...

Aha! Well I'll just build it in a larger scale with thin parts, then scale it down. The second attempt doing it this way didn't work: you can't scale it down (perhaps because some of the prims were already 0.01 thick?).

A third idea I've not tried yet is to simply use three planes (or even one hollow rectangle) with good texturing to create the glasses. This is certainly the most economical w.r.t. prim count.


So is it possible to build with dimensions smaller than 0.01? If so, how? On the other hand, is it ever really necessary to build that small? Is another technique perferable (like texturing)?

Hi Brent Welcome to Second Life and to the joys of building small!

You are right; you cannot directly build any object less than 0.01 meters in size. And, as you suspected, if you have a set of linked prim, you cannot make the object smaller if any one prim is already 0.01 meters in size.

That being said, there are ways to make things smaller. Creative cutting, hollowing, and dimpling can yield objects smaller than 1 cm. Also, I recommend you search the forums for threads dealing with "prim torturing" which can also be helpful.

Good luck Brent, and please let us know what you build!

Okay, to get thinner lenses you'll want to do this:

1. Set prim type to sphere
2. Set dimple to .49/.51 (for the thinest you can go - other values work too)
3. Set prim type back to cylinder

There's lots of other tricks too, some involving using scripts an' stuff, it's possible to make all sorts of odd things - one of my favorites is the prim that's so small you have to zoom in really close to it to get it to light up even one pixel on the screen.

Oh yeah, wiki page on prim torture: http://secondlife.com/badgeo/wakka.php?wakka=libraryprimtorture

Thanks for the answers, Persephone and AJ. Experimenting with these other techniques should be fun.

Have a look at this thread,. with a lot of nifty tips & tricks for making small prims.

That was the motherlode! great examples.
The wiki page is more for programmatically torturing prims vs. interactively.

Thanks again, all.

Yeah, I prefer doing it by hand too. I've been told there some things you have to use the scripts to achieve though, so thought I should include it.