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Does anyone build with prims anymore


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I do, all the time, though mostly for my own enjoyment. I use sculpts and prims as my primary mediums.

People aren't all that...umm..I'll go with kind here..when it comes to others doing things they deem "outdated" or, as I have heard countless times since mesh became a thing, "wrong". Sigh

It's ok, I love my prims, and they love me, no matter how long it takes me to complete something, or what anyone else says about my chosen medium. 

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1 hour ago, Trinity Fullstop said:

Wondering if anyone builds with prims anymore. The old fashioned way - inworld , upload textures - all that historic stuff. Just wondering :-)

I used to build a lot some years ago, always for my pleasure and not commercial. I think the downgrading of prims (because that's what it felt like) when mesh came in had an impact on how I enjoyed SL. It's never been quite the same since. I only go online every few months now, just wondering if things had 'calmed' a bit.

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4 minutes ago, Trinity Fullstop said:

I used to build a lot some years ago, always for my pleasure and not commercial. I think the downgrading of prims (because that's what it felt like) when mesh came in had an impact on how I enjoyed SL. It's never been quite the same since. I only go online every few months now, just wondering if things had 'calmed' a bit.

I find some mesh builds have an etherial look to them, like they aren't really there, and that I'm standing in front of a picture of a building.

There's no substitute for a good solid prim.

I've used sculpts for repetitive elements, like stairs or columns, but other than that it's plain old prims stretched and textured inworld.

 

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Yes, I do.  In SL I add a prim or two to a mesh building to suit me, such as windows for a pavilion that looks nice but feels rather breezy in cold weather :)  On another grid I'm currently recreating whole buildings from old floorplans I drew up pre-internet.  They'll probably never be seen but it pleases me.

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I have to admit my favorite way to build is still with old fashioned prims. I miss the social aspect of being in-world and building with friends. These days I mostly build in Blender and then import my models and do the texturing and hud making that goes along with it in-world, but there's just something magical about taking a plywood box and making into something special. 

I recently made this watch completely from prims. It adds about 3k complexity to my avatar, which isn't too bad.

my prim watch.png

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I buy lots of mesh components, such as columns, stairs, windows, etc. to use for mixed mesh/prim builds. Sometimes I want something that I can't find in a reasonable amount of search time, so I build it in-world. For example, in a previous region build I had an underground steampunk-themed harbor with hidden sea doors. It would've taken a custom mesh build to fit the mountain it was in, but I could use mesh components (columns, doors, the cliff face, machinery, etc.) and prims to put it together fairly quickly.

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Our club, Egotherapy, is built entirely from prims, although it was built some years ago.  Any recent additions and modifications are also prim-based although some of the furnishings are mesh..  

Egotherapy 002.jpg

It would be good if LL could bring in some more things we could do to prims, like being able to slice through them or to draw a 2D shape, like a star or something, and extrude it into a 3D shape in 'build'.

Edited by Conifer Dada
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If/when I build anything, I do it with prims. It's my nature to want to produce everything myself rather than pay someone else, so, since I have no desire to spend the amount of time it would take me to learn to make decent mesh objects, prims it is. I don't create much these days, anyway. Just the odd thing for my own use. And, since the LI allowance has increased, there is more reason to opt for prims.

Commercially though, I don't think there's much in the way of prim objects being sold any more.

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I built my house from prims, but would like to be able to convert things like stairs and windows to mesh, to reduce prim count, and also convert my grass area to make it look more "organic". I have started various online courses in Blender, and bought a still-unopened book, but maybe some day I will get the patience to actually stick with it ... :$

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1 minute ago, angeoco said:

but would like to be able to convert things like stairs and windows to mesh

On staircases, I totally agree. That was the one thing that I had in mind that would greatly benefit from being mesh, when writing my post. I hadn't thought of windows though. Certainly some windows would greatly benefit.

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Prims are fine for buildings or for other things where the shape you want can be easily produced with prims.  They're obviously not so good for more complex shapes.  The classic example in SL is cars.  Some creators had made reasonable approximations to RL cars out of prims, for example a VW beetle.  But when mesh came along, people were able to import accurate scale recreations of the same vehicle which were so much more realistic than the prim version.

If you click on my name on the left it will bring up my profile.  On that you'll see a picture at the top of me lying on a lawn admiring a blue* vase.  The vase was one of my first mesh creations, which is why I'm admiring it.  On the other hand, my plaits (or braids) are textured flexiprims, so they can swing about as I move!

*Blue - purple-ish blue or blue-ish purple, it's up to you to decide!

Edited by Conifer Dada
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Il be honest, I love building out of prims. Have done since I joined SL in 2007. If it comes to building a sim I primarily use prims due to the low render impact, with mesh being used for added decoration as needed, and if used correctly with the right textures can look just as good as some mesh buildings. I find mesh to be nice looking but problematic if you use too much of it. Not everyone has the super computer required to be able to exist in and render full mesh regions effectively.

I love mesh but I do think there is a certain sense of pathetic snobbery that has grown out of mesh being introduced. People claiming its "wrong" or "dated" to build in prims or pointlessly claiming "its 2018 not 2007",  when in truth prims have their place just as much now as they did back in 2007. I know of this sim called Liberty City and they have built their sim as mesh upon mesh with more mesh behind it sat on mesh with mesh propping it up and even more mesh thrown in for good measure. Everything is mesh, thousands and thousands of items from the smallest can of coke to the largest city building or bridge and that place.....crashes me like no other sim does because the render impact is just so great.

I will never give up building with prims and if people want to judge me for that then they can do but prims are an integral part of second life whether anyone likes it or not. Mesh is just a nice looking botched add on that came much later.

Edited by PhantomPixel
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I do, build with a combination of prims, sculpts, and mesh.

I wonder how many residents don't want the long learning curve of building in mesh, and would appreciate better inworld building tools? I wonder if this could help save SL (along with making mesh rez better).

Those who build exclusively in mesh and tout it as superior will always say that mesh is best. This is not what many others tell me, nor what I've experienced (even with optimized mesh). Where mesh fails is when 30 people descend upon a club built in mesh (even optimized mesh). I don't know the technical reasons for this, and this is not supposed to be so, but in reality it is. I have had club owner customers insist that absolutely NOTHING can be mesh on their sim. I wanted to include just one pretty mesh flower in a few spots but they forbid it due to bad experiences with all-mesh club scenes in the past.

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Prims have no LOD issues, prims rez much faster (sloppy textures notwithstanding), prims (short for "primitive shape") are easier to build with, prims are built into the viewer so create almost zero frame rate lag. I personally prefer prim builds to mesh even at the cost of a few points of Land Impact for these reasons *if* it looks good enough and feasible to do so. Though I hate sculpties because they are usually the slowest to rez and my impression is that rezzing time seems to be directly related to the final size of the object.

So, based on my own experience, the best sim builds use prims for the most part with *some* mesh dressing in small detail areas and few-as-possible sculpties. These are the best-looking, fastest-rezzing, lowest lag sims I have always experienced, even when full of avatars.

Edited by Alyona Su
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47 minutes ago, Alyona Su said:

Prims have no LOD issues, prims rez much faster (sloppy textures notwithstanding), prims (short for "primitive shape") are easier to build with, prims are built into the viewer so create almost zero frame rate lag. I personally prefer prim builds to mesh even at the cost of a few points of Land Impact for these reasons *if* it looks good enough and feasible to do so. Though I hate sculpties because they are usually the slowest to rez and my impression is that rezzing time seems to be directly related to the final size of the object.

So, based on my own experience, the best sim builds use prims for the most part with *some* mesh dressing in small detail areas and few-as-possible sculpties. These are the best-looking, fastest-rezzing, lowest lag sims I have always experienced, even when full of avatars.

Sculpts can be good tbt. Some of the best and least laggy sims I have seen have been built out of sculpts. Yes they have a slightly longer load time but prims+sculpts= the way to go with sim building. The other neat thing about sculpts is you can size them as you please and they don't increase in land count unlike mesh (unless you add materials to them but I have yet to have a single sculpt jump more than 4 land impact with materials added). One thing I used to love were the low lag mega prim sculpted sim surrounds, all I ever see people using these days for sim surrounds is mesh...mesh.....more mesh and I keep having to defender and blacklist them

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3 minutes ago, PhantomPixel said:

Sculpts can be good tbt. Some of the best and least laggy sims I have seen have been built out of sculpts. Yes they have a slightly longer load time but prims+sculpts= the way to go with sim building. The other neat thing about sculpts is you can size them as you please and they don't increase in land count unlike mesh (unless you add materials to them but I have yet to have a single sculpt jump more than 4 land impact with materials added). One thing I used to love were the low lag mega prim sculpted sim surrounds, all I ever see people using these days for sim surrounds is mesh...mesh.....more mesh and I keep having to defender and blacklist them

That's a great point about sculpties (which is actually a prim sphere) - I have a couple motorboats that are made from sculpties that look every bit as awesome as mesh counterparts and they do rez much, much faster. I suppose it has to do with the resolution of the sculpty map texture? And in the end: textures are the leading cause of lag in SL, hands-down. So, I must admit - as a reflection on it - you're right: I'll have to rearrange my preferred build to be prims first, sculpties second, mesh third in terms of object-type priorities. :)

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