Is there a primitive "cut" function?

for instance, a way to cut chunks out of a primitive? No i do not mean "hollow" or "cut path", i mean a custom cut anywhere on the primitive.

the Maya, you do this by inserting a primitive into another one, and setting that primitive to "subtract" from the larger one.

SL does not support union, intersection or difference operations on two or more distinct prims.

Well, I suppose linking can be considered a form of prim union... but it is not a true geometric union.

you have no idea how lame that is.

>_<

Lame maybe but adding those features would not be easy and would be extremely detrimental to performance.

Oh, I think we all know precisely how "lame that is". Anyway, the term you're looking for is Boolean operations. Due to the nature of how SL's modeling engine works, Booleans are not possible. To add them would require a pretty fundamental overhall of the entire system. Linden Lab has been talking about the possibility of adding "negative prims", which would yield similar looking results to Booleans, but they've never announced any sort of ETA on when we should expect to see them.

So you know, it's common for those with prior 3D modeling experience to pine for missing features when they first start building in SL. Things here do work a little differently than in more traditional 3D modeling programs.

Success in SL requires a little bit of retraining of your brain, but once you do that, you'll find the specific sort of problem-solving that you need to use in SL will be of tremendous benefit to you outside of SL as well as in. I often mention in these kinds of discussions that once I started getting good in SL, I found that my average poly counts per model in Maya were going way down while the quality was actually going up, and my texturing skills increased a hundred fold. Give it a little time and practice, and I'm sure you'll say the same thing.

There are, in point of fact, times when I get to *missing* the SL prims when I'm doing something in a more conventional 3D package. The ability to create some of the shapes you can with prims parametrically would be a big time saver. I miss hollow, cut, and twist when I'm working elsewhere. Yeah, you can do all of that in other ways, but its still convenient.

Yeah, there are times I'd give my left leg for booleans. Particularly when working with spheres. But given you can transmit a model in a couple of K of data that could easily be a few hundred times that if stored as pure vertex data, I can see why they did it.

I hear ya, Reitsuki. There are a few things SL has that I really wish Maya had. Id love it, for example, if Maya had SL's ruler tools. Sure, Maya's grid and measurement functionality kick's SL's grid's ass up and down the street both ways all week and twice on Sundays, but still, it would benefit greatly from SL-style rulers to snap things into place more quicky. Also, I love SL's planar movement constraints. You can achieve the same effect in Maya by using orthographic views, of course, but it would be a big improvement if it had planar constraints right in the perspective view too.

For all its shortcomings in various parts of the UI, there are a handful of areas where SL really has some gems.

You know.. I sorta felt the same when when I first found second life, as I was used to having union, intersection and difference fucntions, but you get used to it over time.. dont think that certain things are "impossible" just because those functions are not there. There are ways around it... for example, texturing using alpha channels can effectively "cut" away at a face of a prim... so dont give up, you'll get used to the limitations of the modeling tools in SL... look around there's a endless supply of examples all around you to look at. If you had a specific thing you were doing, post it here, and perhaps some of us can suggest ways around what you're trying to do. You just have to change your approach a bit...