Hello, all you lovely fellow avatars. How is your building going? You really need to know the basics before you play with the tutorial below, so if you are a real nOUbie check them out on my previous pages.
Today I thought we’d take a more detailed look at texturing and ‘prim torturing’ (mucking around with the basic shapes, basically)
In this tutorial you will learn these skills through making a 2 prim coffee table. (If you wanted four individual legs you could put four cylinders under the table top, but this would mean using five prims, and this seems a bit wasteful to me)
Anyway, here are the instructions.
- Rez a cube, and make the dimensions
X .2
Y .5
Z 1
Then hollow it by 95, and Path Cut B by .250 (these controls are under the ‘Object’ tab)
You will see that the table needs rotating to set it upright.
Rotate on the X axis by 90
Voilà. You have a plywood table.
Now Texture it. We’ve done this before. Click on Texture, type ‘Brazilian Rosewood’ in the search box and select this. (Or choose any texture you want!)
Now we’re going to make the table top. You could just rez another cube slightly smaller than the original one you made and squash it really flat. ( .05 on the z axis)
If you do this you need to take note of the table’s position and give your table top the same dimensions. Then move the new slab so it rests on top.
I’m going to tell you another way, which is more complicated, but teaches you a new skill which is very useful to know.
You select the table, hold down shift, and drag the table upwards. This creates a duplicate.
You obviously don’t want the legs on, so go to Path Cut and get rid of those legs.
(Path Cut B .500 E .750)
Now let’s choose a texture for the top. Find a nice tile in your Library. I chose Floor Tile 19.
You can change the appearance of the tile top by changing the number of times the pattern repeats.
If you choose Floor Tile 19 the square tile will fill the rectangular table top, and will be a bit elongated. You might want to play around with the numbers. Sorry, I’m not a mathematician, but if the table ratio is 2 to 1 set your pattern to 2 to 1. I just set the repeats to 4 by 3 and it looks okay to me.
Next, shrink the table top a bit. Make sure ‘stretch both sides’ is selected (at the top left of the black box) Pull in one of the white handles on the top of the shape.
Next we need to link the two objects. Make sure the top is just touching the base, and select them both by holding down the shift key and touching them both.
(Alternatively, you could drag a box round them both)
Go to the top toolbar and select Tools – Link (Or if you like keyboard short cuts – Ctrl L)
Mmm. Looks a bit boring. Let’s change the base.
- table base and top
The two prims are linked, so we need to unlink them (This is all good practice) Go to Tools, ………. and select ‘Edit Linked Prims’. There should be a cross to the left to show it’s been selected. Now click on the base. Go to Objects, Hollow and change the hollow shape to circle. There. That looks better. And no extra prims involved. I’ve changed the top bit as well. I still had ‘Edit linked parts’ selected, and clicked on the top. I chose a new texture and set it to ‘Glow’ a little. It looked a bit bright, so I coloured it slightly and set the ‘shininess’ to ‘high’. I don’t know why, but the higher the shininess the darker the texture becomes.
Well, there you are. A 2 prim coffee table. Have fun building, and please let me know if you have any special requests.
