The Ivory Tower Library of Primitives, Part III. The Building

Lumiere Noir, Creator of the Ivory Tower Library of Primitives

Written 27 January, 2018

The Ivory Tower is an impressive build, prim-heavy, but elegant. It was made using a recursive building technique. Lumiere didn't invent the method, but certain put it to good use. Here's his description:

Modular building is creating a single, or a set of building elements made up of two or more prims each.

That's it. You can rez a prim, drag copy another and place it a few meters from its parent, and link them.  The root prim will become a pivot and the child prim will move in a circle as you rotate it. By making copies, moving them back to their original location with CTRL-Z, and rotating the linkset a fixed number of degrees with each repetition, you can achieve amazing results.

After the circle is closed, you must unlink and delete all of the central prims-- although for insurance (in the event I need to work on the building in the future) I like to keep one linkset as is. I make the root prim invisible and turn it phantom by using a script that affects only the prim it's in.

Here's an admittedly butt-ugly structure I made using the recursion technique. I used it for the first iteration of my store, Flights of Fancy.

I created one section of wall and one section of floor, linked them to a prim and what would become the center of the building, , and used the recursion technique to square the circle. All the parts fit perfectly, with no prim flicker.

Compare that to this build, which is the site of my new store; it can be found 4000 meters above Whimsy:

The repetition here is created by texture repeats. The entire wall is one huge and hugely tortured 100 x 100 x 100 meter cube. So yeah, there are other ways to create repetition. One uses all the tools in one's toolbox.

Unlike me, Lumiere used the recursion technique to great effect. He could throw up a huge build like the Ivory Tower in only a couple of hours.

Here's an inside view of the roof of the Ivory Tower. Can you see Lumiere's use of the recursion technique? I can.

Lumiere used the technique all through the tower, as in the staircase pictured above, and in this guardrail.

The above photos show the same section of the roof. I have highlighted a single prim in the second photo. Imaging placing just this one prim in correct position and rotation by eye or by calculation-- and the roof has hundreds of prims!

I will leave you with this detail of the windows of the Ivory Tower. Nice effect! Reminds me of  a gothic cathedral.

Teleport to the Ivory Tower