The House That Seth Built

If you read about me you noticed that I said that I build.  Well, I am still learning to build but am quite proud of what I have build so far.

Well, here is an example of one of my early builds;

Now that you done laughing remember that if you have done any building you most likely made one just like it.

Why build?

Before I get the house I wanted to touch on the subject of why I decided to start building in the first place.  Well, that was simple, I was not happy with many of the items I had seen or had bought.  I felt I could do better, and worst case I was sure that I would do no worse than a lot of what I had seen.

So I opened the build menu an dropped down a cube, and then it started.

I was also motivated by another need, I quickly realised that prim count, or more correctly land impact, was the real thing that lay at the foundation of all builds in SL.  After all this is what drove much of the requirement for CPU cycles to handle all those pixels.

I started to look closer at what a build consisted of.  I looked into the differences between prims, sculpties, and mesh objects.  I started to look differently, and yet much more critical, of what everything I saw in a build.

Initially I started by building a simple dungeon sky-box, in the end I was quite happy with my achievement.  Yes, I had purchased a texture pack, but I build the floor, walls, ceiling, what I hoped would become a jail cell once I learned a bit about scripting, but it was a nice dungeon if I say so myself.

I was eager for several of our friends to see my accomplishment and they seemed genuinely impressed with what was in essence my first building attempt.  Of course don't get me wrong it was not perfect but I have seen much worse in several dungeons at a few clubs.

As I played around with building using SL prims I quickly realized that to make anything that looked decent it took quite a few prims in some cases.  In many cases I was not happy that a wall with a doorway and door towards the middle would take a minimum of 4 prims.

You see building in SL is purely an additive process.  You can not simply put up a wall, cut a hole in it and stick a door there.  Instead you had to put down a prim for the wall portion for each side of the door, and another for the wall portion above the door.  So this was 3 prims and you still had to add another prim for the door istelf.

Some of you may read this and say, but it can be done in 2 prims.  And in very specific cases, with some prim torture it is possible to do this in only 2 prims however you must compromise and do not have a lot of control over where the opening will be.

The dungeon also gave me  a good opportunity to play with texturing.  The even nature of the bricks meant I needed to learn how to properly align not only the prims that made up the structure, but also texture them properly so the blended surface appeared as one continuous face and not several discrete prims each with their own texture.

Why build a house?

You say why build a house when you can buy lots of quite nice houses already made.  Well I did just that in the beginning.  And for the most part we were quite happy with the house we had chosen.  It was not perfect, but it was very acceptable.  It was however also 197 prim land impact!


Now some would say why worry, we had enough prims for the house and our furniture so what is wrong.  Well there were two problems; I felt it used more prims than it needed to based on my understanding of building so far, and it had a few things that were not ideal for us.

I am sure when, as a relative noob to not only SL but even more so to building, I announced that I was planning to build us a new house that our friends were perhaps a bit skeptical and unsure of what we would wind up with.

So what kind of house do you build?

I gave that question a lot of thought, had a number of discussions with my partner and all she had to say was that she really liked the house we had but it was really up to me.  Gee, that was a whole lot of help.

But if fact it was help.  It confirmed that we had indeed bought the house we already had because we liked the overall concept and felt it fit well with our property and how we wanted it to look.  So I started to consider building a house, not identical to the one we had bought, but instead one borrowing the basic concept and changes based on how I felt it could better fit my vision for our ideal home.

Our new house

If I recall correctly the build took place over 1 week and I have made a few tweaks here and there over the week that followed.  Since that initial build I did change the stairs, railings, and sliding doors from ones I had bought to ones that I built myself.  As it stands today, this is what I managed to build for our house.  The whole house, including windows, doors, stairs, railings, fireplace, and inner room walls totals to a land impact of only 66.

Now for those of you that may be wondering, the house is almost entirely mesh.  Built using a combination of mesh wall segments from a mesh builders kit, and most other things that started as prim builds and were converted to mesh using Mesh Studio.  This is how the stairs, railings, and doors were done.  The windows for now are mostly purchased although they are slowly being replaced with ones I built myself also.

I do have in on my list (a long one it is) to rebuild the house entirely in mesh from scratch using Blender, but for now we are very happy with the house.