Aligning corners on a building?

Hello I am trying to build a house and wonder if there is a way to precisely align the corners other than visually.

well, I'd like a fw people to reply to this one as well because i'd like to hear other's thoughts on corners....

My own expirementing brough me to these conclusions:
1. aligning by the numbers (i.e. precisely) will be precise but will give you either tiny little seams, or overlapped portions... your choice of a small seam or a small overlap (blinky) portion.

2. seams are more desireable as long as you are smart to place them on the least-used portions of your space (outer side, inner corner you never look into)

3. sacrificing extra prims to place over each corner as a joint to hide the walls meeting is actually a nice looking effect and adds detail to the structure. A frame, if you will

4. hope others might have other ideas

~Lefty

Personally I haven't been getting seams when aligning things by numbers. Chances are you'll get seams eventually through prim drift though.

There are building tools about (I think they were called builder's tabs or something) that you can use to align your prims for you.

Another way is to have one wall actually intersect the other wall. Have one wall be 0.001m taller or higher or whatnot to avoid "texture fighting"/tearing; you can also cleverly apply clear textures to make one edge invisible and (depending on the precise build) this can also help fight seams.

/me points out that it's better to use a script than a texture for transparancy if a whole side is transparent because it uses less texture memory.

This is so, but on the other hand, a clear texture is a lot quicker to apply (since I never CAN remember which side is what number) and once you use it once, it ain't costing anything extra to keep using it.

interesting side note here.. what is the smallest hit on performance? 50 faces with an identical alpha texture or 50 short scripts?

~Lefty

Quite true, and I usually use a texture myself since I'm rarely ever making anything important, but I thought I'd just anyway just in case it's useful to anyone.

Well, a setalpha script will run once (to... set the alpha...) and then you can delete it.

OTOH, the "clear" texture commonly used is the smallest allowed by Sl (16z16, I think?) and thus isn't really eating up a huge amount of texture memory. The script is probably very slightly better on performance, but as a practical matter there won't be much difference.

problem is that noone really uses the same one all of the time so its 3 or 4 16x16 in a thick area now your using the same amount of memory as a 64x64 texture and so on, The alpha texture given to me back in the day is 256x256 which really eats up some vram (for the unseen edge of a 0.100m thick wall)

I hollow out a block to 95% and set 0-50% cut. Voila, two walls joined neatly at the corner, using 1 prim!

Only problem is the wall is thicker at 10mx10mx10m than the customary 0.1m wall thickness. That's why a lot of us want 99% precision...

For all the reasons already mentioned, I prefer the script route myself.To get around this problem I use a standard "set all sides to 0.0 and delete yourself" script - which I drag-and-drop into the prim before I texture it. Then, using "select texture", you can manually set the visible sides. On a wall, this usually means manually playing around with the 1 or 2 visible sides, rather than having to override the 4 or 5 invisible ones.

As far as the original question is concerned - I use a standard wall thickness of 0.125 - And I build everything snapping to the grid. This makes it child's play to have straight, right-angled walls and floors align perfectly every time.

One interesting aspect of using scripts to set the alpha to 100% transparent, after doing so you can remove the script and the textures remain as the script set them.

I use self deleting scripts also and a missed value to scripted transparency is you don't have to wait for the texture to load for the face to be transparent.

i never heard the answer to why LL decided not to let us set 100% trans in the texture tab.

~Lefty

To force you to learn the face numbers for your transparency script.

default
{
  state_entry()
  {
    llSetAlpha(0,0);
    llSetAlpha(0,2);
  }
}

The Wiki says: