Peoples opinions on Building Tools

I love building, i make a living out of it, it's amazing how something so easy to do could be so fun. But i have a friend who usesa building tool, the name of it was Skidz Primz. I'm not asking peoples oinion on THIS tool. But what do people have tools prefer to use? The default building system or using bought building tools?


Do you like using building tools?
Are you against them?
Do you use both?
Do you only use building tools?
Do you only use the default tool. Opinions please.

Until sculpts came along I didnt see any need to use anything more then the SL building tools and some RL texturing software. I dont use any other SL building tools.

*holds his Prim Docker tight* My preciousssss

I use the default building tool, a small calculator and an online triangle calculator for angled things.

I use the inworld tools cause I can't get the blender building tool/script to work properly.
The inworld tools are quite adequate for 93.232% of building work and I have the Skids thing but I only rarely use it to try to join odd angles or cut bits together but that never works because they are odd angle, cut bits. Waste of money in my opinion. (It IS quicker doing it manually. Using Skids Prims, I'd still be there.)
I now use the building grid to the max. Size to grid, snap to grid is all too easy.

Nope, don't use any tools, just use the numbers. And I build pretty fast.

Bought some of the inworld tools, used them one or twice and thats it. I honestly use the standard SL tools and a rl notepad for numbers.

I don't use any either, just a RL calculator when needed and the X,Y,Z Co-ord's.

Once you become accustomed to the X,Y,Z co-ord's and the Horizontal and Vertical setups its much quicker than any script. And theres no adding scripts to prims, no deleting scripts when finished.

I have learnt a few tricks that speeds this process up as well, one way or the other the X,Y,Z co-ords and Hor and Ver numbers relate to each other in one way or another. Be it texturing or alignment.

My only addition was a protractor I designed that fits perfectly onto a 10x10 cube to sort out the issues with angles.

I have Prim Docker and I use it on occassion. For bigger builds that I want to get done in a hurry. For more finese and detail, I'll use the default tools.

yep... spent some money on "Skidz Primz" and now I have some more items in my inventory that I don't use.

i just make my projects in autocad and then get the values in world.

Looks like I'm with the majority, tried a couple of 'Aids' but in the end found it better and quicker to use the numbers and some highschool trig for the more difficult shapes and angles.

I tend to generally start by making my prims in sizes which makes alignment a lot easier. Most need for 'building tools' come from the fact that the originally used prims don't fit well, because they use weird dimensios.

Once you learn to primarily stick to nice values for your prim sizes, most building tools are less necessary, as you can simply use grid and numbers.

I've tried using some building tools, but the inconvenience of having to add scripts to all prims is making using them slower for me, than using the standard UI. Also a lot of the tricks they do, can be done in the interface themselve, but require good knowledge on all the possibilities of the SL building interface.

I am a big user of Skidz Prims and use it a lot for the basic construction of my builds, I don't want to bother to calculate all the simple stuff by hand and then being sure I didn't make a miscalculation somewhere or see an ugly seem.

After I get the basic shape of my build done I will do the more complex stuff by hand where the building aids are insufficient. I prefer to actually spend my effort where it's actually needed.

But tbh I can live without skidz prims but there is another tool I became addicted to. This tool is JeXTone EasyTexture. I found it on slx a few days ago when I was just browsing.

Essentially what it does is it let you texture multiple prims as if they where one. Calculating each texture so they align perfectly while considering smaller prims where you would put say... a door or a window. The end result looks like you made the wall first and after that just sawed out a hole. It will also align textures so well that if you have overlapping prims it will align those that you don't see any flicker at all. Its only limits are that it won't do round faces well or diagonal faces. I found I could work around the diagonal faces by simply rotating the prim temporarily to texture it and round faces by hand.

The reason I love this tool so much is because before I used this tool I was building a house and got this really nice texture for my bedroom wall. So I started texturing the wall but I couldn't align this texture perfectly after two hours, always leaving a seem which I couldn't stand. I was changing offsets and repeats in the milimeter and used a calculator to find the exact values but I just couldn't get rid of the seem. I gave up and used another texture which wasn't exactly what I wanted but was a lot easier to align. This problem was on my mind for quite some time after that and when I saw this tool it sounded exactly what I needed and asked the builder for a demo and was thoroughly impressed.
When I got home I tried to texture the wall with the texture I couldn't get right and had it exactly the way I wanted in two minutes.

I'm not affiliated with the maker of this tool but I'm converted, this has saved me more time and frustration than anything else in SL so I'm recommending it to everyone.

For me, I use build tools to save me the tedium on the more annoying stuff so that I can put my attention in the harder parts of my build.

I use building tools ....called skill and my eyes...

But I have bought various differnt tools in the past and pretty much they lack certain controll or are a little long winded. Its down to what a person feels comfortable using.
I like to use my eyes as I find that sometimes even if the numbers work it still doesnt match up.
I would like to see an inworld sculptie tool though but I have no idea how they would do that as it would change the whole of the SL engine and how it handles building

I pretty much stick with the default tools and hardly mess with numbers....I usually just eyeball my builds into place, and am fairly fast at that.

Hate to jump on the bandwagon but.... default tools are where its at for me. I keep a reg. calculator handy but thats about it. Not that i'm an expert builder or anything - anyway...

Are there any scripts out there that make texturing more powerful? That seems to be my major hangup - textures being applied the wrong way. Feel free to post on my site by the way (i gotta do it, ive got next to no traffic)

I use any style or tool that makes the job easier or more fun.

For buildings and similar constructions I use Skidz Primz for most of the basics.

Some other useful tools I have used are Vertex Triangle Builder, Prim Mirror, TextureAlign script.

They are some other very useful tools out there that fulfill certain needs and I would use them also.

Using the default tools, numbers and visual alignment are necessary at times also.

Good tools and the knowledge to use them is very important in the art of building.