Mesh tutorial: GlassBox

Hello again

Today i start a tutorial that will take again a few posts. But first a few words about what is this tutorial is about.

The mission

One day while playing with design of my product boxes I realized that surrounding a box with a second, decorative one is a pretty nice improvement:

You can imagine making the surrounding box a glass or ice cube, perhaps with logos and transparent areas. This solution has a small disadvantage: It uses two prims. That’s not much but with a box using 2 prims you can sooner run out of prim limits than with a box taking one prim. And imagine you had a quite number of customers who dropped the boxes and forgot about them.

Ok, what to do? By changing the physic shape of prims we can suppress the land impact of two linked boxes to 1.3, but with scripts inside (those that unpack), the land impact increases, so we always stay over 1. The final solution was using a single meshed object instead of two system boxes: A system box (the old wooden box) uses 18 triangles for every face, while a mesh box uses just 2 triangles per face. The fewer triangles a prim has the less land impact it produces.

In this tutorial we will  mesh an object that looks like a box inside another like in a picture above. The object will have land impact below 1, so we can rezz it as often we can do it with old product boxes.

The inner box will have 6 faces taking different textures. As long we not want to cut and hole the prim we should see no difference to using a system box, neither scripts should see any. The outer box will use two remaining faces (a mesh can have at last 8 faces) to display the cover texture.

Content

1. Preparing blender
2. PrimBox
3. MeshBox
   3.1 Mesh cube
   3.2 Attaching UV Map
   3.3 Separating faces
   3.4 Uploading and inworld test
4. GlassBox
   4.1 GlassBox mesh
   4.2 Extending faces
   4.3 Extending UV Map
   4.4 Inworld test
   4.5 Naming system
         4.5.1 Front side view
         4.5.2 Side view
         4.5.3 Box to glass ratio: Numbers in package name
         4.5.4 Mesh depth value, last number in the mesh name
   4.6 Mesh series
5. Texture Repeater
   5.1 Repeater script
   5.2 Script usage
   5.3 Mesh usage
   5.4 GlassBox packages
6. Open glass box
   6.1 Geometry
   6.2 UV Map
   6.3 Face order
   6.4 Inworld test

We will near the goal in stages. First we inspect the faces of a system box. Then we mesh a replacement for the system box. And in last step (later post) we add the decoration box around it. The stages are given in different posts each, I will link them here than.

Release note: 

The tutorial was written over monts now (from november 2012 to januar 2013) so the parts may be not fully n sync, despite my attempts to keep them in sync. Over the writing time i also had to correct uv mapping of the packaged meshes (they are in version 1.2 now, although the 1.0 was not released) so the introduced meshes are not exactelly that was you find in the package but very close. Hovewer, because this tutorial aims the goal to show how you can make your own glass boxes, it must not be in exact sync with the glass boxes i release.

You can find them here on SL Marketplace:

• Package q60c20,
• Package q80c10 and
• Package q90c05

Waving
Jenna