Free full perms builder's prim with edit guide diagrams and auto-alignment menus
The "Bright Prim!" is a prim for builders. It offers two advantages which can sometimes make it a handy alternative to the trusty plywood box any avatar can create:
1. Each side is textured with face numbers, coloured X, Y and Z axes, and guides to the effect of the various editor operations. So, you want to narrow your prim towards one end: but do you taper X or Y? And negatively or positively? Which way round *is* your prim? A glance at the diagram will tell you.
2. It comes with a menu driven script which allows it to be automatically positioned and aligned with other prims, or stretched to fill gaps between them, simplifying and speeding up many monotonous building tasks.
The "Bright Prim!" is not designed to compete with somewhat more elaborate automated building systems, of which there are several in Second Life.
It is designed for those of us who prefer something cleaner, quicker, and simpler, which offers the building shortcuts we need most often, without interfering with the business of building itself.
It is also free: so enjoy!
To unpack, drag the "Bright Prim! boxed" from your Inventory onto the ground to rez it, right-click it, and click "Open". A "Contents" window will be displayed: click the "Copy To Inventory" button at the bottom.
This will create a new folder called "Bright Prim! boxed" in your Inventory. Drag the "Bright Prim!" object from this folder onto the ground. It is a white cube with numbered faces and checkered edges.
That's it: you're ready to build!
It's worth taking a quick look at your Bright Prim's faces.
First, note that each is numbered, from 0 to 5, using the numbers recognised by the LSL scripting language:
0 - top (higher on the z-axis)
1 - south (lower on y-axis)
2 - west (higher on x-axis)
3 - north (higher on y-axis)
4 - east (lower on x-axis)
5 - bottom (lower on z-axis)
Now, right-click and click "Edit...", so you can see how the effect of the edit window controls are shown in the diagrams on the side of the prim. Then click the "Object" tab.
The effects of three of the editing controls on this tab are shown on faces 0 and 5 - the top and the bottom of the prim:
PATH CUT BEGIN AND END: a line indicates where the cut will appear when you change these numbers, and in which directions it will widen.
HOLLOW: black squares show where the hole running through the prim will appear as this percentage setting is increased.
TWIST BEGIN AND END: twists begin at the bottom of the prim, and end at the top. Arrows show the direction in which they will be twisted.
The remaining faces, 1 to 4, show the effects of two more controls:
TAPER: narrowing black shapes show the effect of positive and negative tapering along the X and Y axes.
SHEAR: black diamond shapes illustrate the effect of shearing positively and negatively along the X and Y axes.
To build, you will usually need more than one prim. You can simply drag the "Bright Prim!" from your Inventory repeatedly to create as many as you need, but there is another method Second Life provides which you may find useful:
Right-click the prim, and click "Edit...". Red, blue and green arrows will appear through the centre of the cube. Hold down your shift key, and then click and drag the head of the blue arrow upwards. This will create a copy of the prim, while dragging the original above it.
Once you have three or four prims, click one to make it "active". This is very like "selecting" a prim, but we call it "activating" to distinguish it from selecting things with the Second Life editor.
When you click a prim, it will turn GREEN, indicating that it is the FIRST active prim.
Click another. This will turn RED, indicating that it is the LAST active prim. Also, a line of moving dots or particles will flow from the first active prim to the last, connecting them together, like beads on a string.
Now, click a third. This is now the last active prim, and so it will turn red, and the previously red prim will turn YELLOW. Also, another line of dots will join this prim to the previous one.
And so it goes on. You can make any number of prims active. The first will always be green, the last will always be red, all the ones in between will be yellow: and a line of dots will connect them together in the order you clicked them.
Inactive prims are left WHITE, and will not be affected by the "Bright Prim!" menu.
To display the menu, click any active prim. It has these buttons:
[Same size] [Same rot] [DEACTIVATE]
[X] [Y] [Z]
[Snap] [Align] [Spread]
[Stack on] [Stack back] [Fill]
[Same size] will make all active prims the same size as the GREEN prim.
[Same rot] will give all active prims the same rotation as the GREEN prim.
[X], [Y] and [Z] will change the 'live' axis. The buttons below all act along the live axis: so for instance, to move your prims up and down, click [Z] to make the vertical axis live.
[Snap] will move all the active prims to the nearest metre along the live axis. So for instance, if the Z axis is live, and a prim is currently at Z = 82.928, it will be moved to Z = 83.
[Align] will move all the active prims to the same position as the GREEN prim along the live axis. So if X is live, and the green prim is at X = 10.2, all the activate prims will be moved to X = 10.2.
[Spread] will spread out all the YELLOW prims evenly along the live axis between the GREEN and RED prims. For instance, if you have three yellow prims, X is live, the GREEN prim is at X = 10, and the RED prim is at X = 30, the YELLOW prims will be moved to X = 15, X = 20 and X = 25.
[Stack on] and [Stack back] will position the prims side by side along the live axis, starting from the current position of the GREEN prim: forwards and backwards respectively.
[Fill] will spread out all the YELLOW prims along the live axis between the GREEN and RED prims, and then stretch them to fill the gap. Note that it will give them normal or "zero" rotation first, to make sure they are being stretched in the right direction.
Remembering three rules will help you:
1. THE GREEN PRIM NEVER MOVES EXCEPT BY [Snap]. It is a guide or marker for the others: so when you are lining things up, click the prim already in the right place *first*.
2. THE PRIMS ONLY EVER MOVE ALONG ONE AXIS. If Z is live, and you click [Spread], the YELLOW prims will all be spread vertically between the GREEN and RED prim heights, but they still be at their old X and Y positions, so they won't be in a line. If you want them in a line, though, it's easy. Just press [X] [Align] [Y] [Align] to line up the other two coordinates.
3. THE PRIMS WILL BE MOVED IN THE ORDER YOU ACTIVATED THEM. This is why the line of particles joining them together can be useful: think of it as a string, on which the prims are beads. For instance, when [Spread] the YELLOW prim you clicked immediately after the GREEN prim will end up nearest the beginning, and the YELLOW prim you clicked just before the RED prim be nearest the end. To rearrange them, simply [DEACTIVATE], click them in a different order, and click [Spread] again.
Finally, clicking [DEACTIVATE] will make all the prims WHITE.
Each Bright Prim! contains a script to move it around: but you probably won't want to leave these in your build, so once the prims are sized and positioned as you like, click any Bright Prim! and *hold down* the mouse button. After about three seconds, you will see the message...
"Removing scripts from all Bright Prims!"
...and as the scripts disappear, all the prims will revert to the default Second Life plywood texture.
The "Bright Prim!" object shows Shan Bright's name as creator, and most builders will naturally prefer to see their *own* name recorded as the creator of each prim.
To to this, simply create an ordinary prim, and drag the "Bright Prim! script" into it. It will instantly display the "Bright Prim!" textures, and will work exactly as described above.
It's probably a good idea to rename this prim to something like "My Bright Prim!" and right-click and "Take" it back into your Inventory, so that you can use it again.
The scripts, of course, will still show "Shan Bright" as creator, but this does not matter as you will remove these when the build is finished.
* You *can* move or edit your Bright Prims using the Second Life building tools as much as you like, even while they are active, and they'll cope fine. (But deactive before creating or deleting them. If you create new ones, existing ones will be deactivated automatically, but if you delete active prims, you "break the chain", and they may behave oddly. If you do it by accident, just deactivate to reset them.)
* You *can* make the prims different sizes and rotate them to any angle and they will still work. If you stack them, they will be treated as if they were inside a larger unrotated box exactly large enough to contain their furthest corners. This is easier to understand when you see it than when you hear it described :)
* You *can* put the "Bright Prim!" script into other types of prim, like spheres and cylinders, and they will work fine (but ignore the textures as they are designed for boxes).
* You *can even* put the "Bright Prim!" script into the root prim of linked objects, and it will work. (If you put it in a child prim, it will automatically delete itself, and if you link several prims together, it will delete itself from every prim except the root prim.)
* If you like the textures, but don't need the menu system, just drop the script into a prim to add the textures to the sides, and then delete the script. At that point, you might want to take a copy of the empty, textured prim to use again.
Shan Bright
Chief Executive Officer