Walls vs. Floors/Ceilings ... Who Wins?

I'm curious how people position walls. Do you extend your wall just down to the top of the floor, or all the way to the ground? For ceilings, do they align top to top, or bottom to top?

From what I've seen, having the outside wall go all the way to the ground (or base of the 2nd story floor makes texturing a lot easier on the outside, but steals part of you wall on the inside making it harder to align textures there.

Any tricks, suggestions, tips people havelearned?

Easier to pull walls right into the earth. Makes texturing easier.

If you have more than one floor, a nice trick is to set the upper floor so that a bit of the wall from the lower floor sticks above the floor. Make the walls from the lower floor thicker, so the effect looks like wall skirting. And you save a few prims.


Upper Flr
I____________I
I........................I
I........................I
I........................I
I...Lower Flr.......I
I____________I
I........................I

... provided that you want the lowerfloor walltexture to be the skirtingtexture.

I have walls outside the floor and upper and lower walls meet at the middle of the floor. Since I don't want faces to overlap (causing a texture glitch which isn't really a glitch but just the viewer trying to show 2 different textures at the same pixels on your screen), I have either one wall inset between the other, or use a taper to slant the corner of the walls so they intersect as prims, but don't have overlapping faces. That is actually the best for texturing but is limited due to the course taper resolution in SL.

Something like this (topview):
__________________
[_________________/|
.................................|..|
.................................|..|
.................................|..|
.................................|..|
.................................|_|

Suppose you have a wall that is straight at one and and tapered at the other, the shear would be 0.01 minimum and the taper 0.02 minimum. For a 10m wallprim, a 0.02 taper means the walls need to be at least 0.2 thick for the slanted part to be hidden by the adjacent wall. (I will check these numbers later, don't have SL installed on the computer I'm currently at, but I think those measurements are correct.)

Sometimes you can also use a hollow cube that's cut in half (path cut from 0 to 0.5), giving you 2 walls with 1 prim. Again this limits you in other ways (putting in windows, max. 95 hollow, having the cube not square but rectangular)... It's a matter of trial, error and preference

Lyn

PS: When will this forum support fixed-font blocks for code and drawings?

I sink my floors/ceilings between the walls, and generally allign the top and bottom of the wall to the central horizontal plane of the floor/ceiling. So different textures/colors won't ever show to the higher or lower floor, nor will flickering seams should I not be able to get rid of those.
Oh, and my snapgrid is set to 0.125, while my floors are generally 0.250 or 0.500 thick, so it's not hard to align this.

All interesting solutions. I haven't thought of playing with Sheer yet.

So far, I usually sink the floor into the wall, but have it the full width of the outer wall and fight the seam with transparancy. I'll have to try sinking the floor totally inside.

On a large build that I just made, the outer walls are placed first, and the floors adjusted to embed into the walls. Interior partition walls stop at floor and ceiling height, and may embed partially into adjacent walls. I kept the floor prims relatively thin. Where you go down stairways and may see the edge of a floor, I placed a beam along that edge to mask the actual lack of floor thickness. The walls were textured with a tilable continuous texture. That build had complex sloping exterior walls, so the positioning of the wall prims was far more important than the floor positioning.

I have also done buildings where the floor prims stacked on top of wall edges. In these cases I texture the exposed floor prim edge to match the wall textures outside, forming another row of shingles or another board of clapboard siding, or an exposed beam for a timberframe design. This has the advantage that inside textures can use full-height details, like having floor and ceiling mouldings built into the texture.

At corners, I usually overlap the wall prims, positioning them so the corners are just shy of meeting. This makes a slight notch detail along the edge, and if you texture the edges of the wall prims well, it can either be concealed by texture or emphasized to enhance the edge.

Note that if you do walls with alpha textures, and have two such walls meet, the thickness of the wall can cause an alpha sort glitch at the intersection. I find it best to use a non-alpha texture on a seperate prim at all corners, even if this is just a post prim that the two wall panels butt up against. This minimizes or eliminates the sorting glitch at wall corners.

I use either, depending on what I'm doing.

I generally sit the walls on top of the ground floor "foundation" though, because otherwise it takes more work (and prims) to allow a bit of depth to the foundations for awkward land. That said, I do like to make walls like curtain walls, and often use two storey windows the same way.

Each house is different, and has different needs in terms of flow of the lines.