Best Building Freebies in SL

This is a list of the best places to get some great building tools and tutorials, for free or almost free (usually $1 if not $0).

The Ivory Tower Library of Primitives, Natoma 207, 170, 25
This is a great place to start with building, for anyone. A free tutorial which can be taken at your own pace, and a great place to meet other people who want to build. This is a private project which is maintained by Lumiere Noir, who must be responsible for many thousands of people making the transition from SL explorer to SL builder.

Along the same lines, The Particle Laboratory, Teal 200,60,21 which is Jopsy Pendragon’s totally fantastic tutorial on the use of particles, complete with fantastical transport balloon from the square below to the various places available to visit.

For texturing, there are two places I’d recommend. The Texture Tutorials by Robin (Sojourner) Wood at Benten 25, 115, 28 and the texture tutorial from Forseti Svarog at Idea City 71, 199, 40, which includes one of the recommended freebies, below.

The list of free building tools is probably very long, so I have tried only to include things which I can find for you to obtain in world, and things which are actually useful!

Cadroe Murphy’s “free” building tools, Mera Pixel and Company, Osterhout 221, 32, 98
Shape Gen.94, Shape maker .91, THX1, Prim Array .91, BezierGen 1.1 all $1 linden each from the tools themselves, displayed in Mera’s shop.

Various building tools and textures, Gnubie store, Indigo 231, 44, 30
Multiple textures, including Jai’s historical building textures, Jai’s builders texture, Forseti Svarog’s tree shadow textures and script, Forseti’s building tutorial carousel, lots of prefabs and other great stuff

Lex Neva’s pipe maker system, Eldora 151, 160, 106
Open source $1 pipe maker, makes bending pipes with torus shapes.

Grid textures by Forseti Svarog, Idea City 63, 198, 40
Great for working out texture problems, these textures show you how textures sit on the prims you have made. Even if you don’t do the texture tutorial here, these reference textures are really worth having.

I went in search of the prim twister tool made by Vlad Bjornson, which was part of a display of free building tools at his gallery once upon a time. It isn’t on display there at the moment, but he kindly allowed me a copy of it, along with some other free-to-copy tools that I hadn’t seen before. The display is currently on Nemesis 54, 243, 22. Vlad tells me he is updating his gallery and the display and will let me have a new one when finished.

I am planning to make this the first in an occasional series. If anyone wants to drop landmarks on me in world for the best clothing and appearance freebies or the best toy freebies, please do!