Building Lessons

I started building the school house. I learned as I went. The first lesson learned was that it is easier to build using the default world orientation and then rotating the entire build later to where you actually want it. This makes lining up walls, etc. much easier than trying to build on the actual spot at the actual angle you will end up using.

For my first school house, I used all prim objects. For instance, if I wanted a transparent window, then I used a hollowed prim, and then bought pre-textured prim windows from a second life vendor. For my actual schoolhouse texture, I sampled a photograph of the actual school house, and used that one image to texture everything. The result was an obvious pattern on the wall. I went back through trying to add repeats to make it look less stretched and more textured, but could never get rid of the obvious pattern. The roof was tough to figure out, and I have to admit that Troy Vogel (Emin) had to build the first one, so I could see how he did it. Even then, it was hard to get the roof just right. We used an in-world texture to make it look like like a metal roof.


After attending a Second Life/NMC conference, I learned how some of the "pro-builders" utilize textures they have made in Photoshop, and I decided that I should try again. I learned so much from this process: transparency channels, masking, how to stretch a texture across several prims, and a lot of other wonderful things. But I still wasn't getting what I wanted. I as trying to use oen texture for two large prims, and the texture would get stretched until it was no longer recognizable. I was using fewer prims, but it just didn't look right. I realized quickly what was happening and abandoned the effort. I didn't even bother trying to do a roof for it.

I finally figured things out enough to have a final version with which I am currently happy. My math skills, my understanding of vectors, my understanding of photoshop masks and alpha channels, and my understanding of how to texture in Second Life have all vastly improved. My final school building uses 6 textures, a set of prim walls that are sized fairly equally so that the texture I applied looks the same across the board. The doors are hollowed cube prims taht you can walk through, but the windows are actually a texture I made in photoshop using an alpha channel for transparency. I later went in and boxed the windows in with hollowed cube prims to get a more 3-D effect. I no longer have texture patterns, there are no repeats in the textures for the server to calculate (which makes it take longer to "rez"), and it is a fully functioning building that can be entered by avatars. Each build becomes easier and easier the more I understand how things work. Still had problems with the roof, though, which Emin helped me out with. Below is an image of the finshed product, as well as an image of the real school building from a photograph.


My next goal is to finish out the 3 other buildings that are "important", and then I will concentrate on terraforming with textures. I have so much to learn.