While working with my group on our project, one of my main jobs has been to build a staircase. Originally I found an explaination online about how to make a spiral staircase and followed the directions until I understood the basic building concepts and then played with the dimensions a bit. After many alterations I was finally able to create a functioning spiral staircase. However, after I completed the staircase and placed it need the building my group was planning to use I decided that the staircase was too large for our purposes and wouldn’t work. I was slightly disappointed because of all the time and hard work I put into creating the staircase but I decided not to give up. I hypothesized that a normal staircase with rectangular stairs would work better for our purposes and decided to apply the knowledge that I had from making the spiral staircase to this new idea.
Here is my methodology:
1. place a box on the ground
2. manipulate the size so that the x: .5, y:1.0, z: .1
3. hold down shift and click on the blue “up” arrow
4. slowly drag the arrow up until you see a second box
5. let go of the shift key and move the new box using the green and red planes until your second step is positioned correctly
6. repeat steps 3-5 until your staircase is complete
After I had completed all these steps (which took me about 10 minutes to come up with and get the measurements correct) I held down shift and clicked on each step. Then I went to “object” under “edit” and locked the pieces together so that I could take them as one unit into my inventory. The staircase is working out fairly well in my building. I still need to work on it a bit more but for the most part it is done. One should note that once and object is locked you will need to unlock it before it can be changed in any way. This primarily what I worked on during Friday’s class and I thought it was interesting how I applied previous Secondlife knowledge and used practical application to create something new.