Second Life - Constructing the World

One of the most innovative characteristic on SecondLife is that everything you see in-world has been created by the SecondLife population itself and not the parent company Linden Labs. They simply provide Sims (Simulations) which are actually dedicated server hosting a portion of the map and an array of tools to enable users to created all the content. Everything from house, furniture, vehicles, clothing and even the Avatar's own skin can be created through the SecondLife viewer.

This session was dedicated to the creation of useful objects which can be used for e.g. as furniture. We all teleported to an area called FERMI which is basically a sandbox where all users are allowed to create objects freely.

In SecondLife everything is made up of one or more prims (primitives), even the avatar itself is set of prims together to form a human structure, a prim is just a basic 3D shape such as cube, cone or cylinder. Prims can then be linked together to form more complex structure e.g. the chair below.

The following chair is made up of 4 cylinders (legs and back), and 2 cubes (seat and back), the less prims you use in your object the faster it loads, so if something can be constructed from a single prim do not split it up. e.g. in the image below I could have created the 4 legs as separate prims from the back, but instead I extended the hind legs to form a part of the back. Sims also have a limitation of a couple thousand prims they will allow in that area.

On completion of the structure, just select all objects and link the objects together using the build tool, from that point onward that object will be considered as one.

Any object may be fully customised, for.e.g in the image below I have changed the wood grain texture of the chair to a darker one. (this can all be done through the build tool) 

 All objects in SecondLife have a Sit Here option on right click, this will make your Avatar sit on whatever is selected.

The below image shows my avatar sitting on my newly created chair, luckily the chair's seat orientation was correct on the initial try, buy if the avatar would have sat down facing backwards or some other way all that would need to be done is to rotate the seat to face the correct way (all prims have a pointing direction).

Conclusion
Creating objects in SecondLife was more entertaining than I had initially expected, it only took me a couple of minutes to get to grips with the UI and completed the above structure in less than an hour, granted most of the time was spent on trying to control the camera to get it to show me what I wanted to see and not on the constructing itself. So far the best approach I've found is to roughly align the prims using the on-screen drag-drop functionality and then fine tune each prim's size and position using the parameters in the build tool.