Saving your Bellisseria house designs for re-use with a rezzing system

As we’re all now aware, the new Linden Homes are provided via a rezzing system, allowing their owners to live in any one of four styles of home for each type – and to freely swap between house styles whenever they want. This makes the new Linden Homes both flexible and user-friendly: tired of the house you currently have? Then simply clear it out and replace it with another from your parcel’s mailbox or lifebuoy (or swap the house / houseboat style and re-orient your furnishing to suit).

However, if you do like swapping between house / houseboat styles, manually re-doing things each time can be something of a pain. The most obvious way to avoid this is to use a rezzing system or a scene rezzer. Both sound the same – and some systems may well offer both functions, but for the purposes of this article, I’m going to differentiate them as follows:

• A rezzing system allows you save the furniture and décor (and things like your garden furnishings, any add-ons you’ve purchased / made) for a house / houseboat as a single package, which you can pull from inventory and use to re-rez that particular design / layout whenever you opt to re-use the style of house / houseboat for which it was created. My personal preferences for tools of this type are:
  • Builder’s Buddy, a free system. You can get the raw scripts from the Second Life wiki (just copy / paste the two scripts from the wiki pages into appropriately-named new scripts in your inventory), or via the SL Marketplace.
  • The Rez Faux system by Lex Neva. Primarily intended for creating packages of goods you’ve created and wish to sell, this costs L$600, is available in-world, and works perfectly well with “personal” projects.
  • Note that I am not endorsing these options over other rezzer system products, they are simply the two I personally use.
• A scene rezzer can allow you to save multiple design / décor layouts for multiple homes, and have them all available through a single in-world device.
  • Again, my personal choice for this type of system is the L$250 RF Device / Multi-Scene Rezzer, which I’ve previously written about in another context (see Adding a little vehicle space with a rezzing system), although there are again others on the Marketplace.

Which approach you take is down to you:

• Use of individual rezzers tends to be quicker and easier than using a scene rezzer, and offers greater flexibility when adding or changing things within an individual design.
• Using a scene rezzer means you can quickly access all your layouts at the cost of only 1 or 2 LI without having to fiddle around with the correct placement of the individual rezzer. However, updating a saved design is a lot harder, as it can require re-saving the entire design, rather than just adding / swapping individual items.

However, the most important thing to remember is that, in order to work, the items placed within any rezzing system must be both Modify and Copy. You also need to have a basic understanding of editing objects in Second Life. Also note that due to the way the majority of these systems work, if you opt to physically relocate to another parcel in Bellisseria, you will most likely have to create new rezzers for that parcel. Also, note that I’m not referring to “temp rezzers”; these are both against the Bellisseria covenant, and should in general be avoided as they are horrible resource hogs.

The following notes have been written to help you use the above-named systems.

Builder’s Buddy and Rez Faux – Individual Rezzers for House layouts

Creating the Rezzer and Adding Contents

• Builder’s Buddy: Create a default cube. Drop the Builder’s Buddy Base Script into it. This is now your Base Prim – the rezzer.
• Rez Faux: rez a copy of the Create A New Package object – this is your rezzer for Rez Faux.
• Both:
  • Rename your new rezzer according to your needs (e.g. “Winchester House With Party Add-on” or “Barnacle Houseboat Mango Interior” or some such).
  • Position the rezzer object you’re just created towards the centre of your parcel, then copy the X, Y, Z position coordinates from its Object tab and paste them into the Description field of the General tab.

• Builder’s Buddy:
  • Drop the Component Script into the Contents of each item you want to be able to rez through the rezzer.
  • When all items have the script, touch your rezzer to display the menu, and select Record.
  • A list of recorded parts will be displayed in chat. Check to make sure everything you want to rez is listed.
  • Take a COPY of each item back to inventory, then drag and drop each of them into the Contents of the Bas Prim.
• Rez Faux:
  • Drop the Rez Faux Positioner script into each item you want to store and be able to rez.
  • The item’s name and position will be recorded by the rezzer.
  • Take a COPY of the each item back to inventory and then drop it into the Contents of your rezzer.
• Both: When you are confident you have correctly recorded and placed all the items you wish to be able to rez into your rezzer, take a COPY of the rezzer back to inventory, and go to a sandbox to test it, by:
  • Place the rezzer in-world and touch it.
    • If you are using Builder’s Buddy, select Build from the menu.
    • If you are using Rez Faux, select Rez from the menu.
  • The contents of the rezzer will rez. Make a note of anything that may be missing.
  • Use Clean (Builder’s Buddy) or De-Rez (Rez Faux) to delete the rezzer contents.
  • Delete the rezzer.
• To correct missing items return to your Linden Home and:
  • Drop the required script (Component Script for Builder’s Buddy or Positioner Script for Rez Faux) into the items missing from the rezzer.
  • Rez Faux: when the name and position of each item have been recorded, take a copy of the item back to inventory and then drop in into the Contents of your rezzer.
  • Builder’s Buddy: when you have added the Component Script to all the items missing from the Base Prim:
    • Touch the prim and select Record.
    • Take a copy of each “missing” item back to inventory and then drop these into the Contents of the Base Prim (you do not have to replace everything in the Base Prim).
  • Perform a re-test of the rezzer as described above to make sure you have everything recorded and saved.

When you are confident the rezzer has all of the contents / décor of your house, make sure you’ve recorded its X,Y, Z position coordinates in the Description field for the original version of the rezzer on your parcel. and then take it to inventory.

Using Your Builder’s Buddy or Rez Faux Rezzer

• Delete the contents of your current house.
• Use the Linden House rezzer (mailbox or Lifebuoy) to rez the style of house  / houseboat you want to use.
• Select the rezzer containing the interior design you wish to use and position it according the X, Y, Z coordinates recorded in the rezzer’s description field.
• When you are ready, touch the rezzer and:
  • Builder’s Buddy: touch the Base Prim and select Build.
  • Rez Faux: touch the package object and select Rez option.
• When all the parts have rezzed, you can delete the copy of the rezzer.
• To reduce script overheads, you can also delete the Builders Buddy (Component Pieces) or Rez Faux Position script in each item placed by the rezzer.

RF Device / Multi-Scene Rezzer – Multiple Layouts in a Single Rezzer

Note: scene rezzers like the RF Device / Multi-Scene Rezzer use region (not relative) co-ordinates for object placement. This means  the rezzer can be re-located without affecting where its contents are rezzed, but:

• You cannot easily test-rez the contents.
• All existing objects containing the Device script are, by default, deleted prior to a scene being rezzed (this is actually vital if the scene rezzer is to be useful on Linden Homes parcels). As such, care should be taken to ensure everything should be properly recorded and stored, as per the instructions below.

Creating a Scene

• Place a copy of the RF Device Rezzer Control Panel on your parcel where it is unlikely to be in the way of other items (as I have a Houseboat, I’ve placed mine underwater).
  • Note that you can reduce its LI to 1 by using unlinking the shadow prim and deleting it.
• Determine which item will be the “last” item in the scene and give it a name by which you want the scene to be known (e.g. “Barnacle Houseboat” or “Winchester House Style 1” or something).
• Drop the RF Scene Rezzer – Device script into each item you want to store and be able to rez.
• Check carefully to make sure all items have the Device script in them, then:
  • Shift-select all of them, ending with the item you renamed above.
  • Use Take to return ALL of the items to inventory as a coalesced object.
• Open the contents of your RF Device Rezzer Control Panel and drag and drop the coalesced object into the rezzer.

Using the Rezzer

• Use the Linden Homes rezzer to rez the house / houseboat style you wish to use.
• Touch the RF Device Rezzer Control Panel to display a menu.
  • Note: if you have décor already rezzed, use the Clear All option from the menu to delete them.
• Locate the layout design you wish to use that corresponds to the style of house you have rezzed.
• Click the number button corresponding to the layout. The rezzer will:
  • Automatically remove all the items currently rezzed.
  • Rez the contents of the selected scene.

Adding Further Layouts (Scenes)

• Rez the style of house you wish to use.
• Set-out your furnishings and décor as you  want them laid out.
• Repeat the steps in Creating a Scene to record and create a new scene and add it to the Device rezzer.

Additional Notes

• If you wish to add / change items in a given scene, you must re-save the entire scene again after making any changes.
• If you are using the RF system for rezzing vehicles in association with your Linden Home, make sure the rezzer for your vehicles is set to Pre-Clear Off via the admin menu, otherwise rezzing a vehicle will delete the contents of your house!

Final Notes

Whether you want to use a rezzer system to preserve your Linden Home / Houseboat décor designs is really down to how much you like each layout you create, how complex it might be and / or how often you might be prone to swapping between house / houseboat styles on your parcel. If you are someone who likes tinkering with layouts and experimenting with house styles, then using a rezzer / scene rezzer  – if you’re not already doing so – could be quite handy.

Again, there are several different rezzing systems / scene rezzers available. The three I’ve covered here are simply those with which I’m familiar through my own use. My referencing them here should not be taken as an endorsement of them over any other available systems.