Playing with Shapes

Cubes, spheres and pyramids are all great shapes to use for building. By now, you’ve probably looked at amazing and unusual shapes and wondered, “How did they DO that?” In this section, you will learn how to edit these basic shapes to make fantastic new building blocks to use in your builds.

TERMS:

Taper: Decreasing the size of one end of an object.
Shear: Cutting the end off an object at an angle.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this module, you will have the following skills:

  • Rezzing different shapes in different ways
  • Cutting and hollowing prims
  • Tapering and shearing prims
  • Twisting prims

You will demonstrate your new skills by creating amazing new shapes to use in your own creative builds.

Different Ways to Rez Basic Shapes

All building starts with putting together basic shapes. Just like a real set of wooden building blocks, or legos, different shapes can be stacked and put together to form new shapes. However, in OpenSimulator, you can start with a basic shape and change it into something very different.

Instruction

There are two main ways you can rez a basic shape. You can use the Edit window to create a basic shape or you can create a default cube and then change its shape.

Practice

Step 1: Changing a cube to another basic shape

Begin by rezzing the default cube and then changing it to another basic shape. With a cube in Edit mode, open the Edit window to the Object tab.

[image – intro2build.05.a]

In the Edit window, on the left side of the Object tab, is a dropdown menu: Building Block Type. Click on the down arrow to see a menu of basic shapes. Clicking on one of those shapes will change the cube to that shape!

[image – intro2build.05.b]

Right-click (Cmd-click) on the ground, choose Create from the pie menu and rez a cube. With the Edit window open to the Object tab, choose the Building Block Type drop-down menu and choose another shape. Now click through the other shapes to see what happens. If you try to go back to your original shape, you may find it has changed. Try clicking back on the Box shape to see what it looks like now. Note: A Sculpted prim shape is a special kind of prim that will be covered in a later building module. For now, just explore the basic shapes.

Make sure you take the time to play around with all the shapes. Spending some time now will make you a better and more creative builder in the long run.

If you are using the PRIMLAND Tutorial game, stop here and continue on the path!