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Rosie Barthelmess

Okay so, I have taken up what seems to currently be a hobby but could be moving in a more serious direction, of some jewelry making.

For now, I am just getting ideas in my head and seeing if I can make them.

Can someone explain the difference to me between "tiny prims" and "nanoprims", and if there are any resources available for creating some standard, teensy weensy, shapes like very tiny rings, or very tiny spheres? I know there's a way, using the whole prim torture thing, to make some of these standard shapes on a scale smaller than actually 0.01x0.01x0.01, but I'm spending hours fiddling with them and not coming up with very much.

I just want to start building a little library of some of these standard, use over-and-over-again, little prims.

Any suggestions would be very appreciated!

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Aki Shichiroji

This is a good place to start

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Aki Shichiroji

By the way... it's very easy to misread the title of this thread!

Rosie Barthelmess

I knew there was one out there and for some reason I couldn't find it. Thank you, the video definitely helps. LOL!

I'll also take any other ideas anyone has. I'm shameless.

Miriel Enfield

There's no difference. "Nanoprims" is just another term for teensy prims.

I can't stand video tutorials, so I don't know how much is covered by the video Aki linked to, but here's how I do my tiny prims, in short.

Tiny Spheres

Rez a sphere. Hollow it, with the hollow shape set to circle or default. Make the outside surface transparent. Twist the sphere to 180, 180. A smaller hollow amount produces a smaller sphere.

Tiny Cylinders and Squares

Rez a tube, torus, or ring -- it doesn't matter which. Profile cut it to 0.95, 0.97. (You can make the first number smaller and the second larger, but this will produce a final result that's longer and more visibly tapered.) Go up to the building block type dropdown menu and change the prim to a cylinder or square. Taper the object to make it smaller.

If you turn the prim into a cylinder and hollow it, you can make a tiny ring. However, it will have a small bit of visible taper to it, so depending on what you're doing, it may be better to use a different method.

You can probably use this technique with a prism, too, but I've never bothered, because... well, it's the prism. How many times have you used it?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Tiny Rings, the Better Version

Rez a tube. Hollow it to 95. For starters, set the X hole size to 0.2 and the Y hole size to 0.45. Profile cut it to 0.63, 0.65.

Lowering the hollow amount will thicken the ring. Lowering the Y hole size will thin the ring and make the hole in the middle bigger (the ring will be hair thin if you take it down to 0.05). Raising the Y hole size to 0.5 will get rid of the hole entirely. Raising the X hole size will make the ring taller.

You can do this with a torus, too, but the profile cut numbers are different and there's no real reason to. Using tori seems to up the polygon count, too, even when the prim is all sliced up like this. You can probably do it with a ring, but I've never tried (see above, re: prisms).

Even with a tube, the itty bitty ring you'll get will have more polygons than a teensy hollowed cylinder. Don't use it unless hollowed cylinders won't work.

Tiny Sculpted Prims

There are a few ways to do this. The one that's easiest for me (and easiest to explain) requires an image editing program. Yeah, sorry.

The quick and dirty way is to open your sculpt map, lower the contrast, and save. The more the contrast goes down, the smaller the resulting sculpt will be. But be warned: this will mess up your sculpt, making it wrinkly. The more you lower the contrast, the worse this will get.

To get around this, you may want to try making each dimension only as small as you need it. For instance, if you want something that's flat and thin, but tall, you can try lowering the contrast a lot along the X and Y axes, but not so much along the Z. To do this, split the sculpt map into red, green, and blue channels. (Red is the X axis, green is Y, blue is Z.) Lower the contrast for each channel individually, recombine the channels to form a single sculpt map, and save.

A Note on 0.01

Don't do it. If even one prim in your object is 0.01 meters along even one dimension, your object cannot be shrunk. Anyway, with the above techniques, you're highly unlikely to ever need to make anything that small in the first place.

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Miriel: Jewelry, eyes, shapes, and a couple of hairstyles. Oh, and a pretty forest. And a treasure hunt.
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"Blender is the Pai Mae of 3d programs. It hates newbies, despises windows users, and has nothing but contempt for English speakers. It will let you learn, but mostly because doing so will give Blender a chance to amuse itself by making you suffer."
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Daman

I already sent you the notecard from that tiny-prims class, right?

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Rosie Barthelmess

you know what, Daman, I forgot I had that. I'm going to have to make sure I still have it. *sheepish look*

And Miriel, thank you so much for all that information. <3 <3

Chalice Yao

The scary thing is, you can make prims so small with prim torturing, that they are not visible to the naked eye anymore, no matter how close you zoom in.

At least in 1.20 they made them select-box selectable, no matter the size :3 You could literally lose em before that.

Oh, and the sculpted nanoprims are awesome. To get a very small sphere before, you had to resort to a few tricks, like turning it inside-out, setting a small hollow, and texturing what would have been the 'inside' before..which also looked somewhat awkward. With sculpted nanospheres, they actually look right, while being tiny :> It's a great idea.

Cincia Singh

Details please?

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Cincia Singh

Miriel ... that's a great example of technical writing! I copy/pasted it and emailed it to myself!