Working with regular glass prims!

I need a lot of help. I have seen people make some pretty odd shapes with prims that have a glass transparent texture. I personally would like to begin working at designing sunglasses and glasses for SL, and I am stuck with the actual lenses themselves. Heres a few examples of what I am looking for...

This is my design. I want to be able to put glass on this seamlessly. What should I do?


I have also seen stuff like this from my competitors... I was wondering how I could imitate this?


I am aiming for the idea of as much control as I can get over 1 face for various design ideas for glasses...

I think the bottom picture uses a sphere that is hollowed, flattened, dimple cut, and path cut. Or maybe it's a torus?

As far as putting glass in your glasses you might want to use a texture. Basically in a paint program you will have to draw the glass lens and then make everything around the lens transparent using the alpha channel. Then you import that into SL and put that texture on one side of a cube prim while making all the other sides 100% transparent. With these lenses now in SL you can put them into the prim frame of your glasses.

Some glasses are made entirely with alpha textures.

I think you can also try making a sculpty prim that is shaped like the lens.

Yes, Bree is correct. One way to do this is zoom up close on a frame of the glasses...take a snapshot (print screen), export this into PS. Then use the SL image capture as a template layer to fashion your alpha texture you'll be creating for the glasses.

Use this texture on a box prim which is fully transparent--texturing only one side with your new glass texture...you can then set the transparency/opacity of the glass the way you choose.

You could go online and Google Image glasses...and steal a reflect effect. Blend this how you see fit.

Other than that, Bree mentioned Sculptie...which would work if you're savvy...but that doesn't help with the texture...so you might as well do it all in a texture.

I'm mainly just busting on Bree's style here... Lova ya Bree!

The lenses are made of 2 spheres cut in half and flattened. You will need to work closely with the prims to fit them exactly and avoid the line. HINT: use alpha textures on the inside edges.
For unusual shapes, you'll have to use more than 2 pieces to create the correct shape.

You could also try making sculpted prims for the lenses. that way you can make whatever shae you wish. Its not that hard using programs like wings 3d which is free and has a very intuitive UI.

The advantage with this is once made you can distort them in SL using the editor to make more shapes. Also you can give them a gradient texture which looks cool when applied correctly