Vlad,
Thank you so much for taking the time to create your 10 Building Tips for Beginners/Intermediates and publishing it on the Real World web. As a SL Noob who hasn’t made it off Orientation Island yet, I really appreciate your abilities and techniques. I’ve heard that many people use Second Life as an environment just to socialize or act out inappropriate agressive behavior. I’ll be sure to visit and subscirbe to the Shiny Life groups as soon as master the basics. It’s good to know of a safe and welcoming community.
Thanks again!

Hi Quasar. I’m so glad that you found this video helpful. You’ll find that Second Life is not all about griefers and dance clubs and that there are plenty of opportunities to express yourself in a creative constructive way. :) SOmetiems it can be hard to sift through all the chaos on the Grid to find what you are really interested – but it is almost certainly in there somewhere.

Great video and fantastic tips …very helpful thanks Vlad !!

hey vlad. just a quick thanks for the fantastic video. i’m relatively new to building in sl and found your tips quite useful and informative. i love how people give back to the community to help others develop those skills to make sl a more enjoyable experience for everyone. kudos to you :)

Why is this NOT a tutorial or at least part of one for Second Life. If I would have found this page sooner, I would have saved three days attempting in frustration to figure it out. I might have not bothered to go back.

Thanks, should be cool now ;)

excellent! Thanks for the positive feedback folks. ;) I always like to hear when someone has found this site or one of my videos helpful.

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[...] http://www.shiny-life.com/2007/10/21/top10-second-life-building-tips/ [...]

Thanks Vlad, these tips are brilliant and so well explained. I tried buiding when I first started in Sl but had all but given up, mostly due to frustrations with aligning things properly. Now, I shall cheerfully give it another go.
Cheers
Dee

Cool, Dee, really glad that this video was useful for ya. I wish I would have known some of this stuff when I first starting building. :) Always something new to learn in SL.If you are going to spend some time learning to build, you might look into attending some free building classes in-world. look up NCI for some good ones.

Thank you very much for the tips. I had just created my first “usable” object. A sorta Egg chair. I knew how to set a part of it for sitting one as the default, etc. One thing that I didn’t know how to do was to make the entire thing a single unit. It was just a collection of parts. Once again, thank you.

You’re welcome, Dason. Psyched that this video is still getting viewed and helping folks along. This is one of the reasons I prefer making tutorial vids now, rather than in-world demonstrations. Much longer shelf life :)

Hi Vlad,

Thanks for the 10 tips. I have been in SL for three months now and have been trying to line up objects without great success. Thanks so much for your clear instruction.

This is great!!! I hope you keep putting these on here. It makes it sooooo easy for someone so novice like myself!!

Hello Vlad, how are u? Dont know if you check this out much anymore but I just ran across your tips and my god are they really very very helpfull! I have been building for months and months now and have been told that my builds are very top notch and people dont know whyI dont sell my items much and the reason is because of all the flaws with my items and these flaws are due to either allignment errors, visable seams and other build “no-no’s” but nowwwwwww I see things differently esepcially with the local versus world in edit mode. But can you run it by me in text if u get a chance about the whole rotate “G” “grid” deal when you were putting those paintings on that big prim and they were very alligned? When U get a chance of course. I have rewound this a few times and for some reason, Im missing on just that one. It would really be greatly apreciate and again, when u get a chance….Im totally on your time. Thanx so so much for these video and for your time…Take Care, be safe in your daily endeavers and have fun building.

thanx very much for the tips. they were very helpful

Vlad. I hope you’re still reading the comments on your Top 10 building tips. They were extremely helpful. I hadn’t realized how much information I was missing in order to build objects in SL. No one I had spoken to explained these basic concepts as well. I can’t thank you enough.

hi…i pride myself at being a good builder, not great, but i can hold my own in SL…but this video blew me away, i wish i had known a ton of this stuff earlier, everything would have been so much easier! i certainly didnt know about the texture on different sides thing, if i wanted to make a basic house with a brick texture on one side, and a wall texture on the inside, i had to copy that prim, and use two…i looked up this video so i could teach a friend how to build, and i learned more than i knew was possible, thank you so much ^-^

~raine

Excellent tips, Vlad!

I’m still very much a beginning ‘builder’ but learned more from your tips than from any of the other resources I’ve managed to find thus far. In fact, I suspect I’ll be watching your video again and again, to pick up everything I missed the first time around. Thanks so much.

yup, still reading the comments. :)

Thanks for all the great input everyone! It’s always great to hear that you are still using and enjoying these videos.

Thank you, thank you, thank you! These videos should replace SL’s tutorials as an educational device (which to me are a complete and utter waste of my time). I can’t believe I gained so much info in such a short span of time…this site should be the #1 stop for everyone in SL with an interest in learning the ins & outs of building. Thank you so much!

This information about building objects in Second Life was quite useful and I really appreciate your taking the time to put it together. I believe I now have enough information to build my studio’s virtual gallery. Thanks!

While the object editor built into Second Life is good, and it’s been getting better, if you have used software with 3D content creation as the primary goal, you would find yourself limited by what you can do in-world. These are great tips, I’ll try to match each one with a SketchUp function (well it’s easy).

Tip 1: Alt+zoom – scroll wheel in SketchUp.
Ctrl+Alt+click – hold+move middle mouse button in SketchUp
Ctrl+Shift+Alt+click – Shift+middle mouse button in SketchUp.
I think that’s much easier to do. I have trouble switching from one to the other, always try to orbit using the middle mouse button in Second Life.

Tip 2: Move objects using the Move tool. In SketchUp, pick a point on a Sketchlife prim, or anything else, click on it, then the prim will move with the mouse. Click on another point anywhere to move your object such that it snaps.
There is also a Rotate tool, and a Scale tool in SketchUp. Hot-keys, such as M, R and S can be assigned to them.

Tip 3: Very easy to position cylinder to be exactly in the centre, in SketchUp you can snap to midpoints.
It’s Ctrl+move to copy in SketchUp.
Tip 3a: Hold down Ctrl when using the Scale tool to resize uniformly about centre.

Tip 4: The grid is not necessary in SketchUp, because snapping takes care of all alignment.
But you can also make guides if you want a grid.
Snapping is much better, because you are not limited to the grid point resolution – you can snap to any point anywhere.
Rotating in SketchUp snaps to 90 degrees, and all common angles.
You can also snap in only one axis, which is great for aligning: you do that by pressing one of the arrow keys on the keyboard while moving an object: the motion will be restricted to one direction.

Tip 5: Rotating in local or global coordinates can be done by placing the Rotate tool on the appropriate surface, picking the axis of rotation.
In general, snapping eliminates the need to switch between coordinate systems: you can snap any point to any other point, which include end-points of objects, mid-points, arbitrary points on edges and faces.

Tip 6: This is done using Rotate and pressing Ctrl in SketchUp.

Tip 7: In SketchUp, you can not only place a different texure on each face, you can also drag the texture on each face, and precisely position it. The texture can also be rotated and scaled. Moreover, you can projectively copy textures from one object to another – for example, putting one texture image over several adjacent prims is easy.

Tip 8: Putting a fully-transparent texture is easy using the paint-bucket tool.
For the tip, I also recommend putting the Transparency to 90, because the fully-transparent texture takes time to load.

Tip 9: Sketchlife links imported sets of prims automatically.

Tip 10: Create-copy is also something covered by using the Move tool + Ctrl in SketchUp. You can clone any number of currently selected objects in SketchUp.
And it is possible to snap it exactly, whatever the dimensions!

So, to summarise, another option for builders, better in many ways than modelling in-world, is Sketchlife, first launched in July 2009. http://vrshed.com/sketchlife/index.html

Fabulous help thanks Vlad

Amazing. I’ve been building for over a year and I never knew about world/local/reference rotation. Can this be applied to attached objects in a way to make them symmetrical with another (such as attaching something to one shoulder then changing the ruler mode to position and rotate the same object on the other shoulder to make it symmetrical with the other)?

I wish I would have found this video sooner. That’s months of frustration this could have saved me!

[...] Top 10 Building Tips from Vlad! This a very informative video.  I learned a lot myself! [...]

[...] followed a link to the best SL building tutorial I have ever come across today. Check out The Shiny Life by Vlad Bjornson. It is a great [...]