This place I stumbled upon completely by chance, and I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve had at least two hours of non-stop fun in it, teaching myself how to build.

Located in Noyo (241,163), the Ivory Tower of Primitives is a mix between a huge library and a university, which aim is to provide newcomers efficient visual tutorials crafted by Lumiere Noir on how to create and use prims and thus, to a larger extent, on how to build. Elevators will take you to the different floors, each floor being themed with a specific aspect of prims manipulation. The land istelf allows you to build your own prims in order to test what you have learnt – provided you clean after yourself, that is, which after all is only basic curtesy.

Upon entering through the large marble stairs, the visitor is presented with a vast and pleasant hall, from which it’s easy to access the first floor and get started with basic prim manipulation. Nothing very complex here in fact, as the aim is mainly to teach how to create prims, shape them, and move and rotate them in space.

These commands are the ones that can be found in the Create part of the ‘pie’ menu, and anyone having already dealt, even if slightly, with a 3D software such as 3DsMax will easily recognize in there the manipulation of the X, Y and Z axis. There’s a lesson available for each type of prim, as well as for changing objects’ states (physic, ghostly…) and for selecting and linking prims.

The second floor deals with slightly more complex – and interesting – matters, also known as “but what can I really do with these prims”: refining and distorting them. This series of lessons ends up with an actual tutorial explaining how to create a chair, which puts to use all the concepts that have been explained in the previous tutorials.

The tutorials on the third floor bear the charming name of “The Gentle Art of Prim Torture”. Behind this name are actually hidden tutorials on how to twist prims, for instance to use them on avatars or in buildings. Several small ‘exhibitions’ easily allow the visitor to get a preview of what simple results can already look like. The fourth floor is but the logical follow-up to these explanations, showing ways of modifying the different types of prims useable in Second Life. I’ll pass on the floors above though, as they were in the works when I visited them.

If I want to be fully honest, I’m yet to finish all these tutorials, and experiment more with the manipulation of primitives… way more, before I manage to build something worth the name of “construct”, “vehicle” or “furniture”. As it is however, the Ivory Tower has proved to be so far a real treasure, teaching me in one hour or barely more what I’d have likely taken days to discover by myself. An invaluable resource.