Prim Perfect

It might happen that you purchase a piece of furniture that is very nearly - but not quite - what you want. Perhaps the sitting position on that nice chair is a little too lascivious. Perhaps that desk is a little too low. Can you do anything about it?

Actually, it depends what permissions you’ve been given to modify the furniture. If you’ll remember, we looked at permissions in last month’s magazine, and that article is now available on the web here.

Some designers do give permission to modify the furniture. All will allow you to position and rotate (you couldn’t place your furniture without that). Some give limited permissions - you might be able to to resize a table within certain limits, but only as one complete entity. Some furniture will let you edit separate prims to create some very special effects.

There’s no hard and fast rules what different designers will allow, so you just have to try and see. And remember, if you do make this level of change to a piece, think of it as caveat emptor - just because you’ve destroyed a rather nice chair by over the top streching and tweaking, it doesn’t mean the nice creator is going to give you another one! So ... be careful!

In this article we’re going to look at editing linked prims to make a round table rectangular - and we’re going to be using a rather nice table (Figure 2) by Sky Everett to experiment on (gulp).

Sky does give full mod permissions, and she also suppled me with a set of simple and handy instructions, which I’m using here as the base.

Firstly, select your piece (which I shall call ‘a table’ for convenience!). Right click on it to bring up the pinwheel menu (Figure 3).

Open the edit menu (Figure 4).

Now check the linked prims boxes - i.e. make sure it is checked! Note the changed appearance of the table - you can now edit the prims separately (Figure 5).

Make sure you select the table top (Sky also gives instructions on how you can just unlink one prim from a complex set at a time - something we’ll look at in more detail in a later class).

Now make sure that the Object tab on the Edit menu is selected.

Find the Building block type drop down menu on this Object interface and change from Cylinder to Box (see Figure 6). At this point, you should see the table top change shape.

Now you are free to select the stretch menu and start to change the shape of the table top to make it more rectangular (for example).

It will probably need various tweaks before you are fully happy with it! (see Figure 7)

The next stage is to move it to its final position. The How To Guide that came with Issue 3 (available here) will tell you how to do this.

It is very important to make sure you deselect the Edit Linked Prims before you do this, or you could find that you are sliding your table top away from the base or, even worse, grabbing it into your inventory. Believe you me, reuniting the the two is a complete pain!

And now you have your new shaped table, carefully set in the middle of your room. Look at Figure 1, at the head of the article, again. This is my dining room, in my home on Tuscany Island - and I think you’ll agree it looks lovely here!