Things I learned in school today...

Every now and then I take a class, even when I think I probably know the subject material pretty well already, just in case I can pick up a tip or two. I feel like one little tip that helps me with my travails in SL is well worth an hour of class. That's how I felt going into Jacek Antonelli's Advanced Building Class at NCI. That's her to the left. Even if I learned nothing (which turned out to be quite pleasantly untrue) Jacek's teaching style was entertaining in and of itself and made the time worthwhile all on its own. But I did learn something. In fact, it was a light-going-on moment. Most of the stuff in the class was stuff I knew already. However, she did have a way of explaining the "prim families" that has got me thinking of shapes in a whole new way. This stuff may be old hat to some of you, but to me, since I haven't taken many building classes and have just kind of picked it up as I went along, this was revelatory.


In the picture above, I'm holding a cube and a torus, and that's how I've thought of them ever since I started building. Cut and twist and hollow and all, I've found new shapes by tweaking numbers I didn't really understand. Oh, I sort of got what it was doing, but the behavior, especially on toroids (toruses, rings and tubes), wasn't entirely predictable to me. And I had no idea why the tools worked the way they did. After Jacek's class however, the world changed, just a bit...


Now I no longer see a cube and a torus. To the left is a square that's been stretched along it's z-axis. (Nerdly me originally wrote "a two dimensional quadrilateral extruded along its normal vector" but who talks like that?) To the right is an oval that has been spun around an axis.

Why the distinction? Well, let's use profile cuts as an example. Before when I would do a profile cut of a toroid, I had no idea what it was doing. Now I know that it's really cutting pie slices out of that circle before it gets all extruded. Which makes boatloads more sense. It was one of those "oh, now the gears are starting to mesh..." moments. The same with the horribly named "hole size" which has jack to do with the hole size, really. "Hole Size" has X and Y pieces, which control the X and Y size of the circle. Oh!!!! That makes an ass ton more sense than "hole size" since only the Y changed the hole size. X changed the height. WTF Mate? But now, ah now the clouds have parted.

Not quite "Eureka!" but fantastic nonetheless. I can't wait to go put this new fu to use! I blame all this learnin' on Jacek's teaching abilities. Every bit of it. Yup.

Oh, speaking of Jacek, she had a really useful tool. She uploaded screenshots of the build interface, which was handy, but the part I really liked was the semi-transparent yellow prim she used to highlight the part of the interface she was talking about at any particular moment. Brilliant. I think it'd probably be a tad better with a red outline, to make it really pop, but still! It's given me all kinds of ideas: after all, it's really a great way to highlight all kinds of important things: