Windows?

As a newbie I hope I don't sound too ignorant, but how can I cut windows and doors into a wall. I created wall panels from a cube, but can't seem to figure out how to cut holes in them. If I am going about it all wrong, but advise as to the correct way to build walls with windows and doorways in them. Thanks!

There are three ways to make windows and doors. Each has advantages and disadvantages.

You can't arbitrarily place one or more openings in the surfaces of a prim. The only thing you can do is to place a hollow on the Z-axis of a prim, centered on that axis, from zero to 95% of the prim size. The hollow can be square, round or triangular. So if you wanted a 5M high, 10 M wide wall with a picture window in it, and didn't mind centering that rectangular opening in the height and width of the wall, you could, with limited success, turn a prim on its side and do just that.

While you can't make that opening be anywhere other than in the center of the prim, you can cut the prim in half, using the path cut begin and end settings. That is how most arches are made, and that method can be used to make some types of door openings.

Most builders will just use more prims, and will stack them as needed to make openings - like making a house out of a child's building block set. If you align the prims carefully and texture them well, you get real openings wherever you want, and it looks like a single wall. This method also has the advantage that the opaque parts of the wall can really be opaque, with 24-bit textures, while a window can use transparent 32-bit textures. This keeps nearby trees and bushes from appearing through your walls, because of alpha sorting issues.

The last way is to use a wall texture that is 32-bit textures, and that has apparent window and door openings in it. This is great for low-prim building, especially if there are no doors in it - just windows. As mentioned before, a 32-bit texture will allow other nearby 32-bit textures to show through it, when viewed from some angles. And if the wall needs to have a door made in it this way, then the whole wall needs to be phantom, so the door can be used. And a phantom prim can't be linked to the rest of the house.

Try each of these methods. You'll find good reasons to use all of them at various times, depending on the requirements for the build.

For doors - use "path cut". For windows use "hollow".

Clarifying that, you certainly can make a simple doorway in a hollowed prim by leaving the prim in it's default orientation, with the Z-axis vertical, and using path cut. For example, start with a 10M x 10M x 5M high cube. Hollow it 90%. Path Cut 0.125 start, and you open the wall from one corner. This "doorway" is the entire height of the wall, and will have beveled edges on the ends of the wall. Meaning the two ends of the wall with both slope towards the center point of the prim. The path cut values that stop or start the cut exactly at the mid-point of a wall (0.325 or 0.875, for example) will have square ends, simply because a line drawn from that edge to the center of the prim happens to be a 90 degree angle to the side.