this weekend was a relaxing one with a project that did not take too much concentration – the building of a simple, relatively low-prim skyscraper

i blogged about it last night and completed it today. it only needed minor touches and i splurged with some stylized “gargoyles” like the real Chrysler building has (w00t, 2 prims each) and added elevator doors

while working on it, Micheil Merlin dropped by and visited for a while. Micheil has been a friend for 5 years and was one of the first residents of the iliveisl estate in Second Life. he is one of two scripters for Enclave Harbour and also contributes code to OpenSim

he liked the simplicity of the building and thought i should mention some building tips that he says n00bs can benefit from, like making railings. even with having higher prim limits, you should still use only as many as needed to get your idea across. that “idea” will dictate how many prims you need. like i mentioned last night, this building is about the same number of prims as my espresso machine. the espresso machine is meant to be looked at in detail whereas the building is supposed to look like one of many buildings in a town

since the building is all right angles, the total number of prims can stay low. things like the deck and parking garage railings can simply be big hollowed out cubes – no need to use 4 prims when one will do (you could get into a discussion of whether manipulated prims, like being hollow, take up more resources than unmodified ones)

when you make something like large scale railings, you may want to make them phantom and place an invisible and larger one to act as the physics of the visible railing (so that an avatar can walk right up to the railing). that does add to the prim count and what was one prim taking the place of four is now two prims – still a savings – but had they been the four, you would not need an invisible physics one (past post showing the use of invisible prims for railings)

since the building is solid, prims can be saved by doing things like the image below – four corner square columns can be done as two hollow and cut cubes. what would have been four prims is now two. as far as polygon faces that the viewer has to interpret, it’s still the same number but from a strict prim count it’s half the prims (4 columns from 2 prims with a total of 16 faces versus 4 prim columns with a total of 16 faces)