Windows with panes

[datasmithfc]

Can someone explain to me a good, prim-conserving method of creating windows that have individual panes of glass in them, like one would see in an old leaded glass window (as in a Thomas Kinkade style cottage?

 

I stuck this question here in Technical because I do not see Building and Texturing as an available option in the dropdown list.

My guess is that the wood framing around each pane would have to be non-transparent, while each pane itself would be transparent.

 

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

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datasmithfc wrote:

Can someone explain to me a good, prim-conserving method of creating windows that have individual panes of glass in them, like one would see in an old leaded glass window (as in a Thomas Kinkade style cottage?

 

I stuck this question here in Technical because I do not see Building and Texturing as an available option in the dropdown list.

My guess is that the wood framing around each pane would have to be non-transparent, while each pane itself would be transparent.

 

 

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You should be able to get good ideas by posting in the "Building and Texturing" section of the general forum:

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Building-and-Texturing-Forum/bd-p/buildingandtexturing

[Nalates Urriah]

The Creation section would probably have been better...

The lowest Land Impact cost can be achived with mesh rather than prims. The window panes and wood framing would all be one piece and use multiple materials... or not.

One could use two materials, one for wood another for glass. Or the actual texture could be a combined texture... with wood mapped to part of the texture and glass to another part. Or it could all be one material and one texture with the UVMap controling what looks like glass and wood...

There are possibilities. But, mesh is by far the lowest Land Impact method for building. I have made a sofa that would take 26 prims. Using mesh I have it down to a LI of 4.

 If you really want to use prims, rather than making each pane a prim make all the glass one prim. Make the wood thicker and it will mask the glass making it look like individual prims.

[Madelaine McMasters]

While mesh is the best way to get a realistic paned window, the easiest way may be to cheat. Here's a window I built in my early days in SL, using just two prims (LI of one if link them and set Physics to convex hull or none, as Lindal suggests). The frame is a hollowed cube and the window is an alpha texture. It's not 3D accurate, but it gets the job done. Alpha textures contain an additional channel (beyond red/green/blue) to specify the opacity of each pixel. In this window, the mutton bars are white (or gray for shadowed areas) and opaque and the panes are white and almost completely transparent...

The door you see through the window has a segmented arch window. The door is one prim, again done with an alpha texture. I've done versions of the window with dirty glass, snow in the corners, cracks, etc. The sort of patina you'd expect from Thomas Kinkade would be difficult to impossible to create without alpha textures.

So, it's worth mastering the creation of alpha textures, even if you do learn mesh.

Google "create alpha texture" and you'll get links to lots of tutorials.

Good luck, have fun!

[Lindal Kidd]

There are TONS of ways to make windows, some of them more realistic than others, and some of them with lower land impact than others.  Here are a few of your options:

1. Make a solid wall, and then create a texture that has transparency where the window is to go.  Land impact = ZERO.  Realism = LOW.  Drawback -- the entire wall is subject to alpha channel conflict with other objects, most notably nearby trees which can appear to be "inside" the building.
2. Make a window opening in the wall.  Create a window frame and mullions using regular prims, but link them and set their Physics Type to Convex Hull, or None.  Make a single window prim that fills the frame, penetrating the mullions.  Land Impact = approximately 1/2 the number of prims used.  Realism = High.
3. Proceed as in #2, but make the window frame and mullions a sculpted prim.  This can be done even by someone unskilled in sculpties by using a tool like the "Prim Generator" to make a sculpted prim texture from a prototype made from ordinary prims.  Land impact will be similar to to #2.
4. Make a complete window and frame object in Blender or another 3D modeling program, and upload it as a Mesh object.  Land Impact will depend on number of polygons, physics type, and size.

No matter how you create your window, if you are planning on putting in any sort of window tinting system to control transparency, your glass should be separate from your frame or wall object(s).  For example, if I put a window tinter into a "window" made with Option #1, the whole wall would be affected by the transparency control.  Eeek! :matte-motes-oh-rly: