How can I use sculpties for home builds? Is this practical to save on prims on prefab homes?

[Armani Fallen]

How can sculpties benefit me in building prefab homes?  Can I use them to link to my construction? 

I have so many questions about prefab home building.  Like, are there important building tools I need like HUDs or whatever that I need to have when building? 

I was browsing SL and I don't understand how a prim mirror or a math build calculator could be used.  If there are any building products that you may deem necessary, could you please suggest them to me?

I need really good mentors to help me get started.  I'm Armani Fallen in SL so please add me as friend? 

Thank you and take care.

~Armani Fallen

[Rolig Loon]

Sculpties are prims -- just different ones.  You can use them in building the same way you use any other prims.  They are linkable, texturable, ..... See https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpt and follow the embedded links if you are interested.

You have all the basic building tools you need for 95% of the building you will probably do in SL.  They are built in to your viewer.  Prim mirrors and other gadgets are nice, but rarely necessary. See http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Build-Tools/ta-p/700039 for a start, then visit the Ivory Tower of Prims in world and work with their tutorials... Consider also a free building class at Builder's Brewery or Caledon Oxbridge University.  

[Lindal Kidd]

Sculpties can make a huge savings in prim usage.  There are a couple of things to watch out for.

A sculpty may LOOK like almost anything...but it is a viewer-side effect.  The sculpty's shape, as computed by the server for collision detection, is generally a sphere.  Most sculpties are set to Phantom, so that you don't go bumping into invisible spheres you can't see.

A sculpty of a whole house is very possible to make...but unless you turn it Phantom, you won't be able to walk through the door opening.  And of course, if you DO make it phantom, people can walk in and out through the walls.

Sculpties can be difficult to texture, because of their peculiar shape.

You can avoid both these problems by using Mesh instead...download the free Google Sketchup program and play around with it.

[Amethyst Jetaime]

Choosing which sculpts to use for any particular part of a building is important.  For instance some stair sculpts are made with a large bounding box and must be turned phantom so an avatar can wall up them  But then you have to add an invisible prim laid on the stair so the avatar doesn't sink through them.  So that's at least one extra prim. However some stair sculpts are made so you don't have to do this. The bounding box is so close to the stairs that it is a non issue. So keep this in mind when choose which sculpt maps to buy and use in your builds.

For some sculpted parts, there is no avoiding having to turn them phantom. If you link a phantom prim to a solid one, the link set will turn all solid or phantom depending on the state of your root prim.  So you are then right back to having a problem with the bounding boxes.  So when you link your house,you can choose one of two ways to do it.  The first is to link all the phantom prims together as a link set, with the solid prims as another set. Alternatively you can script your phantom prims so they can be linked to the solid ones without turning the solid ones phantom or the phantom ones solid and have the entire house linked together subject to the number of total prims you can link into one set.  If you have more than the limit you have to have more than one link set per house.