How to save a prim? (I know seems simple but)

[Pombokom]

The instructions I've seen leave out a fundamental. Once I've created and edited a prim, how do I save it so I can go do something else and come back to it later? There's nothing lie a Save As anywhere and so far it hasn't magically appeared in my Inventory. Thus, there's something basic that I'm missing and that the instructions I've seen take for granted. Thank you for guidance.

[Rolig Loon]

Oh!   You either leave it right where you created it (if it's on your own land or someplace else where you are allowed to leave things lying around) or you TAKE it into your inventory ( by right -clicking on it and selecting TAKE) or you use TAKE COPY to put a working copy of it in your inventory.  Be sure to give your creation a nice name before you TAKE it,so it doesn't get confused with all of the other Objects in there.

Read helpful articles in the Knowledge Base (top tab on this page), starting with this one

and consider taking a free building class at someplace like Builders Brewery in world.

Edited August 29, 2020 by Rolig Loon
Cleaner wording

[Pombokom]

Perfect. I was wondering if Take was it, but to me that's not intuitive, and net searches resulted in a lot of uses of the verb but no explanations of the command. So thank you for that.

I've read that article but somehow missed where it described how things end up in Inventory. I'll probably want to take a class eventually, but i'm still in the place of just learning by doing the one project I have in mind, and asking as needed. That's the only way I've ever really learned anything anyway. 🙂

[Rolig Loon]

58 minutes ago, Pombokom said:

I'll probably want to take a class eventually, but i'm still in the place of just learning by doing the one project I have in mind, and asking as needed. That's the only way I've ever really learned anything anyway. 🙂

That's the way a lot of us learn.  Fortunately, there are a limited number of ways that you can screw up permanently while you learn how to create things in SL. (There are lots of ways to screw up temporarily, but you will find most of them if you try hard enough.  Failure is a great teacher.)  Be bold, and remember to save backups.

[Lindal Kidd]

It's even simpler, in most cases.

Whenever you create a prim, it will automatically either:

• Stay right where you put it, forever, until you edit it further or delete it, or
• Get returned to your inventory's Lost and Found folder by the land's autoreturn setting, if that has been enabled by the land owner.

Prims are pretty much forever, unless you deliberately delete them, either in world or within your inventory.

[Rolig Loon]

1 minute ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Whenever you create a prim, it will automatically either:

• Stay right where you put it, forever, until you edit it further or delete it, or
• Get returned to your inventory's Lost and Found folder by the land's autoreturn setting, if that has been enabled by the land owner.

That's quite true.  Sadly, as I can tell you after 13 years of building and scripting in SL, those two options potentially invite chaos.  I have a dreadful clutter of dead experiments in "temporary" workspaces all over my region.  Most are on platforms well above the ground and out of view, but that just makes them easier to forget.  Like most long-time creators, I also have a vast graveyard of WIP objects, scripts, textures, and animations in my inventory.  Even organized into folders, they are a nightmare to navigate when I am trying to find something that I need right now.  There's never a convenient time to do proper housekeeping to control all the clutter, so it grows and grows and grows.  Saving things is easy.  Getting rid of them is a real bear.  🙄

[Lindal Kidd]

Tell me about it.  Last night, I needed a climbable ladder, or thought I did.  I searched for "ladder" and got quite a few hits...but none of them suited my particular need.

[Pombokom]

As a designer of some let's say seasoning I've made it a practice to save things in appropriately named folders of whatever depth, but that hasn't saved me from losing things, or reproducing them and saving those versions in a completely different intuitively named folder. I can see how chaos would be super easy to invite into one's SL inventory.

The next thing I want to learn is how to reproduce as prims the things I've created as 3D CAD files. I thought importing as mesh would do it but I haven't got that to work satisfactorily, yet it seems the only way to import files. If I have a specific and not terribly simple shape I want to recreate as a prim, I could redraw it from scratch if I have to, but I haven't yet learned what drawing / modifying tools exist that make up for there not seeming to be such basics as chamfers, for example. Experimentation now commences.

[Rolig Loon]

Ummm.... prims are "primitive shapes," and there are only 4 of them: Cube, Cylinder, Sphere, and Torus.  You can't make any others.  They are part of the fundamental toolkit that SL uses in the absence of imported mesh objects.  You can chop up the basic prims in many ways, but they remain the 4 basic shapes.  What you want to do is import the mesh that you made in your 3D CAD program.  You might be able to build a similar object in world by linking a bunch of chopped up prims together, but that will almost certainly have a higher L.I. than your mesh model.  It's the opposite of what most builders are trying to do.

[Lindal Kidd]

Most people use the free Blender software to create mesh models for SL.  However, most 3D programs that can export a model as a DAE file will work.

For more details on how to upload a model to SL, see: