Building Walls

I build..a lot, and I still have not mastered getting the walls even, say if I'm building a house. I make the floors, and then when I start making the walls, the first one always takes forever to line up. Then, as I copy the wall, so where it is flush beside the original wall, if I dont have the first prim lined up correctly, then the whole wall is whacky.

I know it has something to do with the x,y,z coordinates, but I am still unclear as to how it works...I just want things to be lined up! Grrrr

Any help would be most appreciated. I obtained the Ivory Tower notecards, but it really didnt address the issue.

I'm not 100% sure I understand your question, but I will tell you that one thing that made a world of difference for me in building is to always build at 0 rotation. Don't rotate anything until the project is completed and linked. Building this way keeps everything exactly lined up to where you can do most of your work just manipulating numbers rather than using the drag tools and trying to line things up by eye. Precision comes from building by numbers.

^^^^^ what he said. always at zero.

oh and always build with the root in the middle and right side up.
totally kills me when a buildings root is some dinky prim in the lower left hand side, thats at 33x180x97 degrees

And:
- Align your root to the world grid, try to standardize your measure units, so you can calculate and type coordinates real fast as you gain experience. (I like .125, .250 or .500 thick walls with a height of 6.0 for example, while I know some others follow measurements of .160, .240 and .320 for thickness and anywhere between 4.8 and 6.4 for height for example. It's a matter of what works best for you personally.)
- Don't ever let prims overlap one another when they don't have to, this can give most annoying flickering on the overlap.
- Give joining planes a non-textured and non-mapped color that's quite a bit darker then the original (textured) color of the visible side of the joined prims, to get rid of most of the annoying flickering at the joint.
- Planar is your best friend for texturing large flat(!) surfaces like walls.

kind of a simple question.... but do you have "Use Grid" turned on?

I dont mean to steal the thread , but I have seen the comment about Use Grid before, and am unclear how it works?

The grid has never worked for me.

Use the numbers...the numbers are your friends. After a while you find you get allot better a maths as well, which is nice

On the top left of your edit window, there's a checkbox option titled "Use Grid". If you hit the "Options" button next to it, you can change the type of grid and the settings it uses. When you're moving objects inworld with Use Grid on, they will try to position themselves on the grid points.

What do you mean by "planar" ?

I'd like a best_friend_for_texturing

Ok, here goes.

Always have your walls at 90 degree increments to the "world grid" if you can. (Theres a drop down fro selecting either World or Local)

The rotations angles for 90 degrees are (ok, most people know this, but some may not) 0, 90, 180, 270...and after that, you are back to 0 again.
So always have your walls in one of those degrees and you will have straight walls.

Next, when copying a wall or making a new one, note the size of the walls you are working with. To get the walls perfectly next to each other wih no gaps and no overlay "mirror" effects, use the x, y, z coordinates and align them that way. They are color coded to match which one is which.

The walls(prims) are located in the SL world by their centers, so a 10 meter long wall has a center point exactly 5 meters from each edge. (a 9 meter long wall has its center 4.5 meters from its edge)

So if you wanted to align the egdes of a 10 meter long wall to a 9 meter long wall, you would want to have their location 5 meters + 4.5 meters (or 9.5 meters) from each other.
To do this, just look at the coordinate axis color of the direction that you are trying to align, and adjust the new prim coordinate 9.5 meters more then the original prim (or less depending on which direction you want the new prim)

I got a calculator HUD from Yadni's junkyard that makes the addition easier.

What I want is "sticky" edges on prims.

By all means, fo to YouTube and watch the tutorial video by Torley Linden. Watch all of Torley's tutorials.

Now. Go.


...and I used to teach High School math, and I know all you people were in my class asking, "What will we ever use this for??"

I use a 0.125m grid, and object thicknesses of multiples of that mostly, using numbers for fine tuning occasionally.

I was probably that most annoying brat in your class who was always talking and never did her homework, but also never got anything lower then an A- ~~

There are 2 methods for calculating texture sizes on a surface: normal and planar. You will find them on the texture tab, right below the example texture/color.
Normal is used for to calculate texture repeats per face
Planar is used for calculating texture repeats per meter per face.
Now, imagine you have a wall that's 7*6 meters, and a little piece next to it that's 3.757*2 meters. (no idea why you'd do that, maybe a wall or something).

If you texture the first wall with using the normal normal settings and want to show bricks for example, and then want to match that texture on the second piece, then you can either spend an hour sorting out how many repeats per face each wall needs to get them to the same size, and probably mess around with the offset as well.

But you could also get the textures calculated on a planar basis. Entering the same numbers for the textures on both walls would then mean the texture will have the same basesize on both walls, regardless of the size of the wall itself. There's a fair chance that you won't even have to align them then.

Mind you, this goes for flat surfaces. On round surfaces, like spheres and torusses, the planar setting can mess up real bad, the normal setting is often better there.

There are several excellent in world tools that do this for you. I bought Skidz Primz for L$1400 and have never regretted it, click one prim, select corner, click another, select another corner and they line up, it's as easy as that.

There are others which I'm sure are just as good, Prim Docker for example, but I use Skidz most of all.

Who needs maths...

Beady Voom
(ducking from all the maths teachers in here).

Search for the free tool "Builder's Skybox" .... it rezzes a floor (or a whole room) lined up to world grid. It's marked off in 1-meter grid segments. You can rez it at any height. (I work at 700 meters ... no annoying chatter and I don't show up on people's multi-gadgets)

Once you've built your building, take it and then clean up the skybox. Rez your building on the ground and rotate the entire assembly as needed.

quick and easy for making walls that line up to each other pefectly (that is no overlap) use the copy option when building the next prims, make sure the prim you want to copy is the currently active prim in the edit window, then click the side you want it to be next to...

hard for me to explain it easier to show it in world LOL

if you need help just im me and if I am online I will come give you a quicky basics lesson for stuff like that