/sl/ - Second Life

>>47258

When designing a sim, i start with a vague idea and get a off-sim environment according to it. Then i place the big mesh rocks and mountains. And after that, i try to get some more detailed ideas about the shape and where buildings will be. Next is the coastline, and when this is done, i fuck with Terraforming.

My Nr. 1 priority is to create an environment where you do not realize that you can't go any further. And that's also what i am looking for in other sims.

The best sims always make you feel like you are in the middle of a big landscape.

>>47260

Why would you build with majority mesh / prim when you can just terraform everythintg you want and work around that? ie rocks.

>>47262

Because terraforming is awful and i am bad at it.

- The interface is just fucked up and it takes ages to get it like you want it.

- You can't make something that's more than 90 degrees.

- In reality, you can't even make anything steeper than 45 degrees without it looking like shit (a stretched grass texture, transitioning into a stretched stone texture).

- When you have something like a 1/4 sim parcel, you can't choose your ground texture yourself.

- You can't build outside of your sim.

Placing all the big and necessary mesh parts like off-sim environment, coast line, beach, mountains, big rocks first, and doing the terraforming later, when you already know how exactly everything will be placed, is just less work with better outcome.

This here is probably the most popular beach, you can find it in nearly every sim that tries to be photogenic

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/NEW-Tropical-Beach-Building-Set-from-Studio-Skye-100-MESH/5790704

Try to do terraforming first and then place those pieces. You will have to redo most of the terraforming you already done, just to make it fit.

>>47267

It is awful yeah, I never understood how this wasn't a change that higher-ups haven't tried to visit.

Interface is not bad, what do you mean? Takes ages? Not really you just need to know what it is you want and work around bad, unavoidable parts with mesh to fill in the gaps.

True about the degree factor, prims are nice but for me, as a builder, I always notice when a path-way is prim or land straight away, it kind of breaks the cycle for me because i realize how flat that surface is in a heartbeat.

1/4 parcel not really meant for big designs anyway. Have a friend who has a place and three fags have co-op'd to pretty much take over the region and while their build is ugly it's also never gonna look good because they are using joined parcels etc.having to fit ideas into all sort of parcel shapes.

Building outside of sim limited to off-sim prim stuff, ie you link an object to a prim, turn the prim insibile and make it the main-prim or main object whatever it is, you know when it's yellow instead of light blue? Then you can partially move stuff outside of your area as long as the main prim still resides within your bpundaries, not great but yeah, look at SL15B they have roughly 24 regions just for their buiild. Some builds are 4 regions just to make what their idea for one region would be, but they needed 4 to do it, does that make sense? Those LL guys are lucky in that sense that they can just get whatever land or however much they want or need to do what they want to carry out.

As for your beach gimmick it's easy to make that fit in, just raise the land to a certain level, flattern it, put the mesh down, extend that land over the mesh by however much you want, then hit smooth and wait for it to start blending in with the rest of it.