building below ground and megaprims

Hello all,

I bought this land and I am trying to build my own house. Why buy when you can do it yourself and learn?


I want a major portion of the house below ground level.

I started experimenting with megaprims to build what I want. Is there some resource that can give advice on using these strangely acting prims?

when I sunk a mega prim below ground I found that I could not rezz onto its surface. I was getting errors about itme not rezzeing inworld.

Also I notice that pysical prims will not stay below ground. Is there a trick to this?


Thanks

hibit

You cannot build below ground. You also can't fet there if you somehow manage it.

The way to do it is use terraforming to 'dig' a big hole, and build into that, bringing the land right up against the build, or creating a false ground with prims.

If you have the time, experience and knowledge of external 2d/3d software design packages yes this is the best way to go. But very time consuming if you don't.You cannot use the Land Tools and Edit menu to build below ground, you can only lower or raise the level of ground 4m either way. This may differ on private estates and islands. To give the effect of the build below ground level you will have to use prims and texture them with your desired effect.
Search the forum for Mega Prims, loads of threads on the subject. I personally have never touched them but I am sure other people will comment on their uses and misuses.

What is fet?

All below ground building involves making an open-topped pit or trench, and covering the top with a building or other prims.

On most mainland sims, you can only change terraforming heights by +/- 4 M from what the Lindens designed it as. So if you raised your parcel to maximum, and then dug a hole in the midle of that hill, you could make an 8M deep "basement" or enough for about two floors worth of "underground home". The transition from your land to your neighbors land would also most likely look terrible...

On most private sims, the sim owner can set the terraform limits. Many have a +/- 100 M limit, though you still can't go lower than zero Meters (20 M below the normal sea level), and can't go higher than 255 Meters, no matter what the terrain is like. In the sim that my home is in, I terraformed the whole sim, and designed the island with several plateaus that are 60 M high, or 40 M above the sea level. So we can dig down as much as 40 M before hitting the water table. And I have, for the basement under my castle.

No matter where you live, if you lower the land below the water level in the sim (typically 20 M elevation), you reach the plane of Linden water that is at that height. You can not remove this water from your hole. It is a flat plane that goes edge to edge in the sim.

Megaprims will never act "normally", because they were created by exploiting a bug in the building system. And that bug no longer exists. One of many faults that they have is that it can be difficult to rez prims on the surface of a megaprim. The easiest work-around is to create a prim elsewhere and place it just above the megaprim surface, like a rug, and rez your prims on the normal prim.

You don't normally need to make prims "Physical", and megaprims especially should not be physical. Making a prim physical is only necessary for vehicle and for moving things that have to be acted on or have an effect on other physical prims or on avatars. For example, the elevator car in an elevator needs to be physical to push avatars up with it as it rises. But a wall or a floor that won't move doesn't need this property.

I think she means "get there"

Well, that answered a question I had, and I don't like the answer. lol Anyone know of a surface mapper that will "only" map the sim you are in based on your own land and that immediately adjacent to it (or, better yet, one that can map a set "area", so if you have a 512m^2 zone, which is like ? Seems to me this would be quite helpful if you had an 8x4 area, to tell something, "give me a surface that is 8x4, plus adjacent edges". This would help two things, #1, you could get a map of the area you have already, so an external program could load it and you could use it to figure out how to lay out things there first. I have an odd one where about 60% is flat, save for one corner, and the rest is sloped, after pushing it down as much as the sim allowed. Its kind of hard to "test" what fits, especially when there is a) no other sandbox area like it, and b) you have a limited number of prims you can res while figuring it out. Second, if you could give it rough coordinates, then you might be able to find the landscape you "do" want, which will fit into that space, map that to a sculpture, then just drop the resulting prim right into the space you have for it.

Trying to make a prim to "fit" so that it look like the land is completely unoccupied, and having a secret entry, like I want, is going to be a serious pain... And not the least since I am not sure the "textures" for the base landscaping is "available" to be applied to prims, so you can blend them into each other. The other issue is, obviously, making the prim/prims to "form" the landscape needed to hide the fact that they are looking at my house, not an empty area.

Oh, and then there is the fun of figuring if I can simplify the stargate I have so it uses fewer prims... Damn thing swallowed like 25% of what I had available... Thinking, the "temporary" one built by Carter's alien visitor in one episode, complete with some particle sparks, and something added to make it so it won't work for 60 second, or something, after someone gates. Should take, in theory, 1-2 sculpted prims, since there are no blasted lights and things to blink, etc.

But yeah. Really wish there was some way to use the "existing" landscape.

Actually, it differs on the mainland, too. It depends primarily on the age of the sim. If your land happens to be on a region that is "new", then +/-4M is what you get. If your region is "medium age", then it's +/-20M. If it's "old", it's +/-40M.

For example, my place is in Indigo, which is among the oldest of all regions in SL. In our "North Coast" neighborhood, we all enjoy our +/-40M of vertical freedom. That was the standard for the first year or so of SL's (post beta) existence, if memory serves. Then, the Lindens got in their heads that +/-20M was somehow better, so for a while all new terraformable regions that were added to the grid had that limit. Then they eventually dropped it to +/-4M, and have stuck with that ever since.

I don't know exactly why they've progressively lowered it over the years. My best guess is it was an effort to make the world look more harmonious. In places where one parcel is raised to 40 meters, and the others are all at 20 or so, it can look pretty ugly. But even so, I personally prefer the freedom.

One idea i tried when doing my "spider hole" type underground build. Before i started building anything i terra-formed the intended area completely flat and level. Then i took several pictures "saved to hard drive" at all different zoom levels, angles and resolutions. This gave me several different pictures i could upload and use as cover prims. Dug a hole, did my build, covered with the uploaded textured prims.

Worked out excellent for me, You can rotate, scale and offset the texture to match practically seamless with the existing landscape.

Very hard to detect. Most people i've talked with since i sold the place said they never even knew there was anything there.
....gD

All of the textures used for terrain on the mainland, and many of the textures used on private sims, can be found in the "Library" section of your inventory, and can be applied to prims.

Ah. Nice to know. Now just have to find an editor I can manage... Tried the scupltypaint, but that doesn't seem to let you "paint" anything, just pick blocks and tweak them up or down, which is frustrating as hell, and imho, doesn't work well (not to mention clicking between the wrong "options" will reset your object, so you lose any progress I did have..) Then tried blender... People do something in this program? lol Tried to follow a tutorial on making an SL vace, just to get a feel for it. Part of the problem was the tutorial, which assumed too much about you knowing where fracking stuff was. But, even after I found it, there seemed to be a disconnect between the RGB UV map texture that was "supposed" to show up on the object and the side window, and what was actually happening. I probably screwed up some step some place.. Editing the object using sculpt mode was also... less than trivial. It didn't seem to work too well, though, I suppose, presuming it didn't mess things up, I could go into one of the other edit modes.

It would be a lot damn easier imho, if you could go into Bryce, generate a normal height field greyscale, then use something to "convert" to the displacement map you need for sculptures. Sure, its wouldn't work on other stuff, with complex shapes, but I am looking for a hammer and chisel, while everyone seems to be going, "Well, so and so seems to do pretty well with a sharpened stick and a wet sponge." I bow to the incomprehensible artistry of the people that manage to actually make these programs do anything useful (especially since I use similar tools in POVRay some times, like path sweeps, and have ***no where near*** this many problems with them..)

---edit---
Ah. For the first time in years Google has given me what I need. Seems Wings 3D has a plugin you can add, so you can export to the 3D map format needed in SL. Yeah!!! Just wish it was one of the 40 programs I have installed. lol