In this section I’m going to go back to basics and take you through some of the considerations in building a simple one prim door. This is applicable to other areas of building in Second Life, so by examining these fundamental techniques I won’t have to repeat myself when I describe more complicated building ideas.
I find that doors that are 3 meters high, 1.75 meters wide, and .125 meters deep work well. Again, adjust if you feel you have to do so. I’ll use these dimensions in what follows.
Move to someplace on your property or in a sandbox where you will be creating the door. Bring up the Mini-map and turn yourself so you are facing due east. Eventually you’ll understand how to do this anywhere, but for consistency I’m having you point east. Right-click or Cmd-click on the ground in front of you and click Create. In the menu that comes up, you’ll see some geometric shapes along the top. These are the possible shapes for prims. Make sure that the cube is selected, possibly by clicking on it. Now click on the ground in front of you again. You should see a cube there, textured with something like looks like light-colored plywood. Congratulations, you’ve just done the most fundamental operation in building many things in Second Life!
Look at the dialog box on your screen or in the picture. We’re going to first be interested in the numbers toward the bottom and on the left side. Namely, look at the Position and Size values. When building, don’t get these confused!
The position values tell you where the center of the object is relative to the basepoint of the sim you are in, which is the southwest lowest corner. The X value increases as you move from west to east, the Y value from south to north, and the Z value from down to up. If you look at the dialog box in the picture, you’ll see that X = 242.347, Y = 180.856, and Z = 421.000. The X and Y values are pretty normal but my Z number is pretty high. The reason for that is that I moved my property up well above ground level. In any case, the values are what they are, and yours will differ from mine.
The size values should not differ. That is, the basic cube is .5 meters on each side. The maximum value you will be able to insert for any of the X, Y, and Z sizes is 10.0. If you need something bigger, you’ll have to abut and then link multiple prims. More on that in a future entry.
Now let’s make our door the proper dimensions. Changing just the Size values, make X be .125, Y be 1.75, and Z be 3.0. You should see something similar to the picture on the right.
The depth looks right, the width looks right, but what’s going on with part of the door being stuck into the ground? When you change the size of an object, the center stays the same. That is, when we changed the width from .5 to 1.75 meters, the door grew from left to right an equal amount, but the center stayed put. How much did it grow? In total width it went from .5 to 1.75, so it grew 1.25 meters. It grew half of that on each side, namely 0.625 meters. Make sure you understand what just happened here: center stays the same, the size gets adjusted equally on each side. Had we reduced a dimension, as we did the depth, it would shrink equally on each side of center.
Now we can explain why part of the door is stuck in the ground. The original cube was created so that it was resting on the ground. We increased the height from .5 to 3 meters, a total of 2.5 increase. So the door got 1.25 meters longer on top and 1.25 meters longer on the bottom. However, the center remained the same, namely half of .5 = .25 meters, above the ground. To have the door rest on the ground again, we have to raise the center point by the amount we made the door longer on the bottom. So we increase the Z value from 421.000 to 422.250 by adding 1.25. Do that and voila, we’ll have the door on the ground again.
Had we decreased the height, you would have had to lower the door to get it at ground level. If you want to skip the math (something I do not recommend), you can right-click or Cmd-click the door and take it into your Inventory. If you then take it out of your Inventory onto the ground, it will be at the proper height. You need to understand the math if your plan to do more advanced building. Even if you use one of the building tools that does alignment for you, you should know the math. I’m fine if you use a calculator, but know the math.
We have a door now, and it’s something to which you could add a script to make it move. We’ll cover that in a later section. It’s a pretty ugly door. We need to texture it.
Textures are just bitmaps that you apply to objects to give them details. I listed the names of a few places to buy textures in the
Building Resources Inside Second Life section. If you want beautiful doors with windows and lock details, go buy or get some textures at one of the locations mentioned. For now I’m just going to show you how to make your door less plain by applying a texture from your Library. The ideas are the same.
Your Library consists of the free things that Linden gives you when you start out in Second Life. It is parallel to your Inventory and appears as a read-only set of folders. Click on the Inventory button on the lower right of your screen. Now go up to the File menu bar item, click it, then click Close All Folders. Now click on the little triangle next to Library, then the triangle next to Textures, and finally on the triangle next to Wood. You may have to scroll down to see this.
Find Cherry in the list, press down the Shift key, and drag Cherry from the Library on to your door. You should see something similar to the picture. If you did not hold down the Shift key, only one side of your door got the texture. Close the Inventory window.
There are a couple of things to note. First, we’ve been changing the size of the door, and the texture will not be even on all sides. It might look squashed on one side and too spread out on the other. So the texture is not even. Second, the grain looks too big for our cherry wood, so we’re going to have to experiment with something that looks right. This is very dependent on the texture you choose.
Click on the Texture tab in your edit window to bring up something similar to this picture.
Look at the Repeats Per Face values. They are currently set to 1.0 for each of the Horizontal and Vertical directions. If you buy a door texture, this is probably exactly what you want, since the bitmap should exactly lay over the surface of the door. If you changed the Horizontal value to 2.0, you would get copies of the door horizontally next to each other, though they would probably be rather thin (exercise for the reader: what would you change the width in our current example to be if you did in fact want to see two doors next to each other on one prim?).
For now we’ll just adjust the Repeats Per Meter field. Try typing in 1.0 and then hitting the Apply button. You must press the Apply button, not just hit Enter or Return. The result is a bit weird. Try putting in 0.5 and pressing Apply. That looks pretty good. Experiment with other values both larger and small to see the effect. I’ll stick with 0.5 for this door. What we have done is told Second Life to use use half of the texture for every .5 meter of the object in every direction. That is, a 1 meter by 1 meter square will contain the whole texture and then repeat.
I want to emphasize that the Repeats Per Meter changes all sides of a prim unless you click the Select Texture radio box on the top left of the Texture dialog box. Also, after you do Repeats Per Meter, you can manually change the Repeats Per Face fields. In particular, if you enter a value for Rotation (most likely 90 degrees) on the Texture panel, the Repeats Per Face values will be reversed. You will need to manually switch them.
The Offset fields translate the texture percentages left or right or up and down. This will often be important to get the sides of prims to look right. If you use a fancy door texture, you probably want the side of the door to look like wood and not like part of a window. Use the Horizontal offset to shift the texture until it looks right.
One final thing, you may need to rotate your door to fit it into the proper location with the correct orientation. Go back to the Object tab within the Edit dialog box and look at the Rotation X, Y, and Z values on the lower left. These refer to how much the prim is rotated around each axis. In particular, you’ll probably want to rotate the door 90 degrees around the Z axis if you need to rotate it at all. In the picture on the right, I’ve shown it rotated 45 degrees.
As I said above, you’ll probably want a better texture for your door than this plain one. You should now have the tools to apply it successfully. Don’t forget to take this door into your Inventory so you can use it again! Before you do so, go to the General tab of the Edit dialog box and change the name from “Object” to something more useful, like “Door.”
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