Difference between revisions of "Building Tools"

Revision as of 23:55, 5 September 2009

The Second Life viewer had built in tools to create and modify objects within the 3D world. Once created, objects can be stored in your personal inventory, shared with other users, or placed somewhere within the 3D world.

Objects are made of one or mare "primitive shapes", or prims, which can linked together to form more complicated items. Each prim may have multiple images called "textures" applied to it's surfaces, and can contain an unlimited number of items inside it, including other objects.

The items placed inside an object can include software scripts, animations, sounds, and additional textures. These can make an object perform an almost unlimited number of actions.

This page discusses the Tools floating windows. For software scripts see X. See also (Other portals related to building).

Land Editor

In world, you can use the land editor to reshape terrain, if you have permission. The surface can be selected and then raised, lowered, smoothed, or roughened by some amount. On a private island, the owner can make really dramatic changes. On the mainland, the limits are usually much lower, such as up or down 4 meters.

If you have permission, you can also change the texture (images) for the surface, such as sand near the water, grass on the plains, or rocky mountain tops.

Plants (Flora) are not part of the land. They are objects that you place on the ground. There are plants in the Inventory Library, and there are many more for free or for sale. Make them using the object editor.

Bull Dozer

The Bull Dozer is a special mode of the Land Editor. Instead of selecting land, you run a small bulldozer over it.

Land Editing scripts

The scripting language has commands that will raise or lower the land. You can create a sort of custom bull dozer that goes around your land and sets the terrain heights to whatever value you want.

External Land Editing Tools

On private islands, the terrain map can be downloaded by the island managers. It is a kind of 2D graphics file, a 13 channel RAW file. Details can be found elsewhere.

You can edit the file in various tools, and upload the result to do a complete remake of your islands.

Object Editor

The main 3D build tool is the in-world object editor. You might be familiar with 3D Max or Sketch-up, but forget them. For various good reasons, the most common way to create objects is when you are logged in to SL.

Basically, you use small building blocks, or "prims", to make a representation of the door or shoe or Harley Davidson you want to build. Then, you cover it with textures from the library, or that you make yourself and upload.

A group called NSS has created one of the better YouTube tutorials for the in-world Object Editor.

2D Graphics

There is no 2D graphics editor inside Second Life. Instead, you use any one of the many editors available outside, such as the GIMP, Photoshop, or even MS Paint.

3D Modeling

See this 3D modeling guide for detailed information.

LSL Scripting Tools

It is easy to edit scripts inside the SL viewer using the built in script tools. However, for larger projects there are several tools for scripting on your local computer, and then uploading to SL. See the LSL Portal for more information.

Popular tools include

LSL-Editor