Tahoe - Aspen railing help

[Andy Greenstein]

Hello everyone!  I recently became a member and I opted for the Aspen Linden Home.  I have been working on putting a small loft in but I am having trouble making a railing.  I know the best way to do this would be to just place a flat prim up and texture is with some sort of "railing texture".  The problem I am having is "cutting" the railing prim at an angle to meet the A-frame shape of the roof.

 

Here is a picture of the loft floor and the angled roof I am trying to butt a prim up next to.  [Imgur](http://i.imgur.com/J97a88z.jpg)

 

I have tried using a box prim and the pyramid prim.  I just really have no idea where to start, could someone help me out?

 

Thanks in advance!

[Rolig Loon]

Make a box, taper the top to a point in Y (or X, but not both), and slice off 99% of the top, removing all but the part you need as a railing.  Flatten that, as appropriate, in X.  When you apply the texture, you'll have to use the Planar mapping option so that your texture isn't angled in to follow the roof line instead of being undistorted.

EDITED to add the texture note.

[Madelaine McMasters]

Hi Andy,

I'm sure you understand that erecting a railing will make it more difficult for you to push people off the second floor to their deaths, so I won't belabor that issue.

I can't think of a way to do this that won't require either accepting some tilt in the ballusters, making a solid wall, or creating a custom texture:

• You can taper a box so it'll mate to the walls of the a-frame, but that will also distort the textures on the tapered faces. As a result, the balusters in the middle will be vertical, and those at the ends will slope with the walls. In RL, that would look very cool, and show that someone spent a lot of time to achieve the effect. In SL, it's just the opposite, it'll look like a quick hack. You don't have to match the angle of the walls exactly, as they have some thickness and you can bury the ends of the railing inside that thickness. That will lessen the tilt of the endmost balusters.
  
  
• A solid texture on a tapered box avoids the tilted balusters. It also avoids looking nice.
  
  
• A custom texture works best, allowing you to draw a railing exactly as you want it to appear, then applying it to the faces of an untapered cube, streched to fit. The ends of the railing would protrude through the roof, but they'd be transparent and therefore unseen. To make such a texture, you would need a graphics editing program like GIMP or Photoshop, and have familiarity with drawing with transparency, either via an explicit alpha channel, or by drawing on a transparent background. You'd then save the image in an alpha supporting format such as .png or .tga and upload it to SL.

If you enjoy building in Second Life, you'll eventually want to learn to create and apply your own textures. For that reason I recommend the last of my suggestions. SL creation has a pretty steep learning curve, so it's never too early to start climbing.

Good luck!

[Andy Greenstein]

Hey thanks for the replies!  I have decided I should try messing with Blender if I am going to be modeling more in the future anyways.  I do have a question though.  If I were to create several mesh objects in Blender then link them together, how many prims would it be in SL?

 

Let's say I make a railing with a top hand rail and 5 posts.  That's 6 objects in Blender total.  Once imported would it be 6 prims or 1 prim?

 

Thanks again.

 

 

Oh and Madelaine McMasters, I guess I can always push them down the stairs!

[Rolig Loon]

You can't calculate L.I. ahead of time reliably, so there's no way to tell.  My guess would be that you can make a simple railing like that and easily get it to a L.I. of less than 1.0.  It doesn't need to have a very complicated model with a ton of tris, and you can use a simple box as the physics model.

Read this >>> http://www.lokieliot.com/blog/?p=1193

[Andy Greenstein]

Wow, what a great tutorial, thank you.  So what you are saying is I can make a nice detailed railing but give it no physics to keep the LI down, then just link a transparent wall to it in game to stop avatars from walking through it?

 

I wonder if this would work for stairs as well.  Just use a ramp of sorts, although the animation may look slightly funny.

 

Thanks again, that was a huge help.

[Rolig Loon]

It's not a matter if giving the railing NO physics.  If you did that, people would just walk through it and over the edge, Maddy style.  You could beat that, as you say, by linking a transparent box prim to a mesh model with its physics shape type set to None.  The easier way, though, is to just upload the mesh railing with a separate physics model that is a simple box.  Then set the whole thing to physics shape type Convex Hull.  The point is that your railing's physics shape doesn't have to follow all the ins and outs of the railing itself.  It's merely a barrier to define the physical limits of the thing.  The limiting factor in determining the L.I. of your model, in the end, is likely to be its LOD, not its physics.

And yes, you can use a physics model for your stairs that is just a ramp.  I find it easiest to make my physics model in that case as a collection of mesh planes instead of boxes, to make it even simpler.  You av will never know the difference between walking up "real" stairs and a ramp.  :smileywink:

[Drongle McMahon]

"That's 6 objects in Blender total"

Made that way, yes, although the LI would be 3*, because eacj would have the minimum 0.5 (server weight). If byou make it all one mesh, then it will be 1. You might need to learn about materials so that you can pu a different texture on the posts and the handrail.

*as long as you don't waste polygons.

[Andy Greenstein]

Ok thanks for the replies.  I got the railing working great yesterday, and got it installed and everything.  After several more hours of work I've completed the flooring and the stairs.

 

 

 

 

 

Now that I have pretty much everything installed, I figured I better extend the railing 90 degrees along the floor parallel to the stairs.  I created the model in Blender and it came out great.  Well it came out great except for one thing.

 

 

Invisible box of death!!!  Clearly a physics issue, so I enabled the physics render and saw this:

 

 

Since finding this, I've tried everything.  Every quality physics including "From File" using the mesh physics and it still comes out like this.  I have no idea why this is happening.  In the upload preview, the physics looks completely fine.

 

I know I can just give it no physics and attach an invisible object for the collision, but I'd like to figure this out anyways.

[Drongle McMahon]

That is the default convex hull physics shape. You need to set the physics shape type on the Features tab of the edit dialog to "Prim". That will use the shape set up on the physics tab of the upload dialog. You may need to work on that, especially to keep the phyics weight (ang thence LI) low. For your railing, it could be a new mesh file (dae) containing just two non-overlapping cubes adjusted to fit the two parts of the railing - then click "Analyze". If you still have two objects, then the physics file needs to be two objects as well, and they need to be in the same order as in the dae files. If you play around with the settings on the physics tab, you might be able to get the same effect using one of the LODs for the starting point for the physics shape, but once you know how to do it, it's usually better to make a physics model.

[Andy Greenstein]

Well my god that was simple.  I actually ran across this feature a couple days ago but completely forgot about it.  Well that's 3 hours I'll never get back, but at least it's resolved, haha.

 

Thanks so much!

 

Oh an by the way, keeping the Level of Detail on Low keeps it down to 1 prim as well.

[Drongle McMahon]

...keeping the Level of Detail on Low keeps it down to 1 prim as well.

You mean for the physics shape? Yes, it depends on the model. Sometimes the low LOD is too distorted to produce a satisfactory physics shapel sometimes it's OK.