Dream within a Dream: 4. The First 5 Days in the Second Life of Mangrovejane Part 4

Day 5. Time to build. What shall I build? Got to start somewhere. Lets start with a box....

Handy Dandy BASIC Informational Interlude while building.....

Prims

The basic building blocks using the in world building tools are called Primitives or prims. They are three dimensional shapes that can be pushed, pulled, stretched, rotated, skewed, sliced...they can be given new textures, made transparent, be made to glow. They can be given physics in order to move in certain ways and each prim has a weight in the world.

Some things are measured in prims. Land for instance, is measured not just in size but also in the amount of weight in prims it can hold. This has been since superseded by the measurement Land Impact (LI), however, a rough rule of thumb here is that 1 prim = 1 LI (unless linked to other prims and then the formula gets a bit complicated and I am still unsure of that so I am certainly not going to try to explain that right now).

In the past few years, mesh has become a really popular way of building, especially with clothes. You will see a lot of mesh furniture and landscaping items as well for a number of reasons but one of the most useful applications when you are watching your LI value, is that you can make very low LI and prim value items with mesh as well as making them more finely detailed and realistic looking. These are usually made using third party programs such as Maya and Blender and uploaded into the world using some sort of computery type magic that once again, I am not knowledgeable enough to talk about at the moment. ;)

And one last thing, there are two really important groups in world that I found who are incredibly helpful and active and do not mind at all if you ask the most basic questions that they have probably heard a million times before (blush) and who also run building classes and games (like Primtionary, a game similar to Pictionary but instead of drawing, you build your word with prims!)...they are Builders Brewery and Ivory Tower of Primitives. If you get in world and you want to build anything at all, do a search for them in groups and JOIN. The SLurls to their sims are listed below in the references.

...4 hours later

Ok I ended up with a MONOLITH . I took photos and then accidentally ripped the base off. Yup. THAT happened. Because of course none of my pieces were actually linked up together like when you build textboxes and clip art together in word in a lovely and artistic way and then have to group them together so they stay together. <sigh> Then I spent a lot of time trying to fiddle it back on.

With a LOT of help from the lovely people in the Builders Brewery Group, I managed to get all my bits linked up and packed away. So now I give you....PRIM AND PROPER! TA DA!!!