Wednesday, February 24, 2010

My building tools

I like to create things in here but I didn't like that the paradise island looks like a junk yard between the building sessions and it is totally boring to clean it up all the time so I decided to do something about it.

 
This building platform is 100 * 50 meters and is made out of just 5 Megaprims. You cant link all that the normal way so I have used a Rez-Faux-mechanism for making it easy to move and build in new places. The textures on the walls are seamless and the building texture on the floor is great for fitting things together. IM me if you interested in a something like this platform.

Below the platform you can see the Art exhibition hall, and the Stardancer exhibit is still going on there and even further down are the islands.



This post will be about some of the tools I often use for building. Some of them comes from the amazing Skidz Tweak. On the first photo above you can see the very useful Robotic Land Laser. You can rez it at any hight and it shows you very precise the borders of your parcel below.... how useful.
Here you can see two of his other tools, The Skidz Primz and the TNT Primz. They are not cheap but so incredible useful. They are both intended for aligning different prims to each other but have a different twitch each of them. You rezz special prims with scripts inside or you can insert those scripts in regular prims. Skidz Primz works with both Mega and scuplty prims while TNT Primz (to the right here) only works on regular prims, but is on the other hand smoother and less prune to lag.
You use them just by clicking on those red dots and you get perfect alignment extremely fast. Every Saturday there is free of cost classes at the main shop en there are lots of great YouTube-videos showing you the usefulness of these tools. I don't build without them any more.



There is also another alternative called PrimDocker. That is very cheap compared to the Skidz tools and works also with Mega prims... but is not that sleek and fast. In PrimDocker you use a hud and click on that for the adjustments and not just but clicking on the prims them selfs. It is a bit less intuitive but when you have learned it you find that it is very fast and low demanding on resources.


Here you see the manual for PrimDocker on my building platform. On the photo you can also see the MegaPrim search tool even though I prefer http://megaprim.sl/ as it is possible to see the rotation and orientation of the Megas there and I find that extremely useful.

Behind that you can see the PrimFinder tool that lets you create normal prims but with an unusual shape very quickly.

 
And so... finally.... here is the gem! SculptCrafter! With sculptcrafter you have a reduced set of prims that you can use in a limited number of ways. To the right here you can see a buoy I have built with 29 of those prims. Then with a twist of the magic wand i can convert those into a single prim sculpt map. Totally incredible and extremely useful.

But it is a rather expensive tool and it has a number of limitation, but if you are aware of those it is the most valuable tool I have. If you accept some pointless script errors I have also discovered that it is possible to insert both PrimDocker and Skidz Primz scripts in the SculptCrafter prims and combine the tools. I just love it!

Go to the creators sandbox and play with the demo:  http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/3DBuildEasy/89/126/500

You can make real sculpty prims that you own with the demo. But you can only build them there in the sandbox and you are limited to 10 prims... but the resulting scultpy is real and can be used anywhere.

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