Even the simplest things need to be brought down to prim components. So let’s take a look at the baby pacifier I made the other night. There are seven regular prims in Second Life. The box, cylinder, prism, sphere, torus, tube, and ring.
Each of these prims can be cut, pressed and twisted to create a variety of shapes which when used with other “tortured” prims, can yield a wide range of objects with a little vision and practice.
The exploded version at the left shows the pieces that were utilized for the pacifier. The handle needed a half-round ring type…that could be a torus. The mouth guard, upon which the nipple sits, could be done with a flattened cylinder. The nipple, itself, requires a shape not entirely available: round at the top, conish and tapered at the bottom. I used a combination of a cylinder and a sphere.
Then it’s a matter of playing with the sizes and shapes, flattening, elongating, tapering, and path cutting (kind of like making a wedge cut). Fit the shapes and enlarge, rotate and assemble until it resembles what you are trying to make. This is rather simple and necessitated only four pieces. Other things may require many more.
In the end, when I was texturing the prims, I wanted some translucency on the nipple and realized in order to do that I would need to rotate and do another special function on the sphere called dimpling which I will explain in future segments.
Ultimately, it’s important to have fun and just play with the prims to see what can be done with them and keep at it because there are always mores ways to do the same things and techniques you learn from one piece can be applied to more and more as you grow your building skills.
~elfa and namaste
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