Eliminating/Reducing prim seam lines

when building a structure, are there and tips for reducing or eliminating those annoying seam lines that sometimes show up at certain angles?

Even if i use a 'copy selected' and the next prim is exactly lined up with the previous - they can still show. I check to make sure the inner parts are textured, double check the calculations, still, cant get rid of some. And it is usualy that annoying 'white line' - even if the texture in between the prims is a darker color

Are there any tricks at all? I see some buildings and they are near perfect, and i wonder how this is accomplished

I am not a novice at building or texturing, so this is one area that really bugs the hell out of me

Sometimes even when prims are in perfect alignment, they show that odd line. It IS frustrating. Even more frustrating, you can sometimes luck out and get a perfect match, only to see that insidious overnight prim drift has mucked things up by the next time you look at them. The line is less obvious on light-colored walls, so I tend to favor that end of the tonal spectrum unless I can mask the line with some distracting decoration (or a well-placed plant). In the end, though, I have concluded that this "feature" of SL is one that I just have to live with. It's either that or waste a lot of nervous energy that really should be directed to bigger issues.

yes, the perfectionist in me says fix the damn thing, but, i guess, this is just SL and 'seams happen'

Some of them you are never going to get rid of, despite 2k's excellent solution to my earlier problem. The problem is that WindLight reflects off surfaces and depending on the angle of the sun and the angle you are viewing at one surface is going to reflect more than the surrounding surfaces. You'll see this most at Sunset/Sunrise times. I've had some success with "shading" the inner ends of the walls but it's never perfect. I've tried applying a transparent to those faces as well and all it did was make the walls flicker, especially if you have alpha "windows" as your primary wall face textures.

Someone on another forum suggested that if there was a way to make WindLight "see" linked prims as a single object without picking up the hidden faces of individual prims that would solve the problem.

Yes, much like web design, u really can't control what another user will see on their end. So i guess build it is as good and as tight as possible, and hope for the best.

I have on some occasions, where practical, added in a prim above the seam. Like where the lower wall meets the upper wall, on the exterior, i will sometimes add a horizontal prim as a design of the building, adds prims, for sure, but eliminates that seam at least when looking at the exterior

Well I remember that - before "windlight" - YOU USED TO BE ABLE TO

Actually, I wish more people would do that. I add some extra elements like cornices, gutters, soffits, and pilasters to my work as well. I do it partly because, as you say, they cover up some unsightly edges. I do it mostly, though, because I get dreadfully tired of seeing FLAT buildings in SL. Even with a well-done texture, a building with no "extras" looks like a decorated cube. Yes, it increases prim count to put casings on doors and lintels over some windows, but it doesn't take many to really spruce up a structure.

If you are talking about seams that only show when you are at certain angles.. you might have a 32 bit texture .. which will let you look through the surface sometimes and show the inside surfaces.

if that is the case you have to make the inside seams where the 2 pieces meet.. transparent.. best to use a transparent texture.. instead of the edit menu.

my solution is to make sure ALL prim sides are textured, even the ones hidden. the best way is to texture the hidden face with the texture that is the darkest visually seen and add a gray tint, usually one of the two preset percentages. you can still get some flicker but vastly reduced.

Windlight made this effect worse, but the effect was there before, as well.

Windlight has a much higher contrast ratio between a prim face that is flat-on to the light source and one that is almost in line with the rays of light. So at sunset, the side of a cube is far brighter than its top. This is actually more like natural lighting than the way SL handled this before Windlight. But the problem is that unlike real life, light illuminates all faces of prims as if the surrounding prims were not there. So two perfectly mated cube prims will show a brightly lit seam at certain times of day, because the anti-aliasing of the edge, when viewed at any angle, allows a little bit of that much brighter surface to peek through the crack.

When we eventually get real shadows, where one prim will cast a shadow on others, then this issue will be eliminated.

I am in no way an experianced builder, I'm not used to sculptie prims, or mega prims... or much of anything else, but I have dabbled, and have found myself working on building more and more in recent times, so I feel confident enough to say...

There are some building tools you can find in-world and on SLX, they run anywhere from L$500 - L$5000, but most of them do offer a perfect alignment on prims.

They are pretty much perfect, espically for boxy structures or furniture, so, houses... square tables and the like, although the one I use doesn't compensate for local rotation or curved prims.

A shame, but it was on the lower end of that price scale, so I'm not complaining.

No solutions, but the best way I've found to minimize is to take a look at the prims in question. Move the prim out for a moment so you can see those hidden sides. Now, in edit mode use the select texture tool and choose just the hidden face side. Now set it up to use the same texture as the wall faces that avatars will normally see. Rinse and repeat where necessary.

While you can't control how SL displays the prims and whether other avatars see them, but you can minimize the distraction. If the 'hidden sides' are standard plywood, they jump right out. If it's the same texture as the other faces, odds are nobody's going to notice it but you.

Trilo

I use various methods to "cover it up". Sometimes placing an ornamental prim on top of the seam works wonders, sometimes it's just not an option.

So when I can't cover it up with another prim, I make the surfaces that touch each other a bit darker than the surfaces that viewers "should" see. This will still give a visible line, but it is darker, instead of lighter, which means it gives more of a cartoonesq effect instead of a flaw.

Another thing that often works is turning the prims Full Bright. But, that's also not always an option, some builds just look wrong on full bright.

I haven't tested it yet, but I also assume that the glow effect would be a good coverup. But again, this is often not an option. It's just something to keep in mind, in case the glow effect could be applicable.

Another way to do this is actually overlap the prims slightly and stretch the texture perfectly across the two prims. Since the texure is stretched over the two prims there is no annoying z-flutter or flickering you normally see in overlapped prims.

This works best on flat surfaces and is also a way of making non standard shapes with out using sculpties.

If you don't wanna calculate how to stretch the texture there are scripts and resident made applications that can do it for you.