With the impending release of my new Sim Surround kits, I wanted to write some pointers to both help customers with using the products and also to explain the limitations and design choices. As well as giving you the tools to work with off-sim building in general.
Sim surrounds and off sim geometry are one of the most effective ways of making your sim feel like it is part of a larger world.
GENERAL PRINCIPLES
First thing to understand is that usable space exists around any sim that is not normally accessible, but can be built on if you know a few tricks.
As you can see here, this is a 1 sim region but we have 8 regions of space around its perimeter. This is the space we will be using to build our off sim landscapes.
There is more space, but placing things outside of this 1 sim perimeter can lead to textures and LOD not loading in correctly as well as other lighting based graphical glitches. So I don't recommend it.
DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
My kits follow in my tradition of modular building, allowing you to move and change them as you wish, creating your own variations and landscapes.
As we are also limited to 1024 textures in SL and OS, these pieces are designed to be viewed at a distance over the default water, as shown at the show rooms. They are not designed to be placed on or close to land, and are not intended to be walked upon. They are a visual illusion designed to give the impression of distant land in the background.
They have been built in this way because designing parts that either come closer to the sim, or partly attach to it requires significantly more geometry and unique textures. It also limits the possibility for modularity and therefore limits customers in what they can build with them.
But if you want to try doing something like that, you can attach and landscape your own off-sim items easily by following the guide below!
BUILDING GUIDE - BASICS
Ok, this all sounds cool, but if you try to drag a simple prim off the boundary of the sim, you wont be able to do it. You will hit an invisible wall. So how do we get stuff out there?
When you rez one of my pre-made sim surrounds that I include with every package, you will notice a few things.
Firstly, you may not be able to select or move it. This is because you will need to turn off "limit select distance" in your viewer options (turn on advanced menu in Firestorm to find that). Turning off camera constraints can also be very useful when working with off sim geometry (also found in the advanced menu).
You will also notice an octahedron in the centre of your sim. This is the "anchor prim" and it serves two functions:
1. As the name implies it ANCHORS the rest of the sim surround to your sim. The trick here is that the ROOT PRIM of the linkset must be on you sim somewhere. You can then push other items linked to it off sim wherever you like. You can literally put anything out there.
2. It holds the sim surrounds textures. This is because when you place geometry off sim, sometimes the textures will not load correctly and get stuck at a blurry stage. I therefore advise selecting the root prim via "edit linkset", place it as close to your landing zone or "central" area of the sim as possible. It is already phantom, make it invisible too and your done.
This way, when visitors arrive, the textures will be in close enough proximity to load correctly without you needing to manually refresh them.
It is an octahedron because 8 is the maximum number of textures 1 prim can support. I try not to use more than 8 textures per sim surround to keep performance good, but there is nothing stopping you mixing and matching parts from different sets. Just add another prim to hold the textures.
To edit your sim surround, simply select it in edit mode, select "edit linked" and click the parts you wish to move (you may need to move your camera closer if you still cant select some things). This is also what you do when you wish to move the root prim.
DO NOT unlink items and then try to move them while they are off sim as they will be returned to your inventory.
If you choose to move a part with trees on it, make sure you select the land AND the trees together.
BUILDING GUIDE - ADVANCED
When building your own off sim land with the parts provided in the kit. There is a best methodology to follow.
1. I have packaged the parts at a smaller scale to make it easier for you to rez them, but you will want to scale them up to maximum size. For parts with trees, you will want to do this BEFORE linking the part to the full linkset.
The included half mountains are intended for the very last row of mountains at the back to save some geometry.
2. When adding new items to the linkset, first select the new item and THEN the root prim of the main linkset before linking them. If you do it the other way around, the new object will become the root prim.
3. With trees - If you want to make your own custom tree arrangements, it is best if you place them in-world with the smaller meshes provided in the set and then export them as a DAE file.
Open the DAE in Blender, save them as an OBJ, delete the current objects and open the OBJ. DAE files do NOT like it when you merge multiple objects, so we do this to avoid any material problems when merging parts. Merge them with Ctrl+J and export the resulting mesh as a DAE and re-upload it.
You CAN use them as provided without exporting and joining them, but it will bump up your prim usage significantly.
Advanced users could also download both parts (land + trees) and bring them into Blender and use a scatter node to procedurally place the tree billboards.
4. If you build too far out, you will notice that either some objects will look like they are cast in permanent shadow (even with shadows off) or get culled completely at certain points when walking around your sim. This is a limitation of SL/OS simulators and can only be avoided by judicious building.
5. Once you finish up, double check that the linksets are set to phantom.
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