Pocket Watch

Ok, So I've made this silver pocket watch for my friend for christmas. It looks great, it opens and closes when clicked, I came to try it on and I hit a speed bump.

It is in 2 pieces (a back piece attached to a chain, and a hinged front) I cant link it as a complete item because the hinge script wont work then. Is there anyone out there that can tell me if there is any way of making this work? The only thing I can think of short of removing the front piece (which I really dont want to do as its engraved)
is attaching each piece to 2 parts of the body that are close to each other, but I cant seem to get the 2 pieces to line up properly.

Any advice is apreciated.

One way to do it would be to employ a form of simple animation based on prim transparency.

What you do is you create the watch but with two lids, one in the open position (let's call it Lid-A), one in the closed position (Lid-B). The watch is linked as one object.

You'd then script the watch such that when you want the watch closed, the script turns the prims of Lid-A (open lid) 100% transparent and then turns the prims of Lid-B (closed lid) fully opaque.

When you want the lid open, you reverse the visibility state and make the open lid visible and the closed lid invisible.

Granted, it's not prim-count efficient (but then again it's an attachment) nor does it create a smooth animation but relatively speaking, it's easier to animate since you don't need a complex script that needs to handle things like relative positioning and rotation of child prims and so on...

I haven't really endeavoured to learn LSL so I can't give you the precise script to do it but my scripter friends tell me this is fairly easy to do.

-L

Thank you so much, I never thought of that, I don't even know where to start when it comes to scripting but hopefully I can find one somewhere.

Thanks again.

assuming your face/lid piece is a single prim (say a cut hollowed sphere) you can use a script to rotate and move it w/o it being a separate piece. I'm too tired to right it, but if you post to scripting tips someone will probably show you the code in short order.