Building Lesson 005: Seats

Simple Seating (Sitting Chairs)

Welcome Dev Trainees, to our new lesson. Some of you who haven't done or passed the test (last lesson) can still read this, but we will be learning different areas of studio in these lessons. For example, the next promotion for you would be Developer, and in order to be ranked a Dev, we need to discuss many things such as aesthetics (making your game "look" good). This edition however, we will discuss how to make a simple seat.

Now seats are obviously very important not just because you don't want to stand on a chair instead of sit, but sitting isn't the only thing you can do with seats. This lesson has an advanced section for those who are used to seats already. For example, let's take a quick look at my showcase "Home Sweet Home".

As you can see from this photo I took, seats can be tilted an therefore can change the appearance of how you are sitting. I have this seat tilted around 50-60 degrees so it looks like I am sleeping on the bed. Luckily however, seats do not always have to be this complex, let's take a look at another room, where a simple stool just sits.

Now let's move into our model making workshop and get building! First we want to make some chair legs. Make them however you like.

Now let's add a seat. Go to your advanced objects and insert a seat into the game. Change FormFactor if you need to, and place the seat over the chair legs like so:

Now the chair legs obviously have to be anchored but seats can NEVER be anchored. This is what it looks like if I sit in an anchored seat. Ugly right?

You may be asking: "If we don't anchor the seat, how come it doesn't fly all over the place?" So what you do is you click on your surface option and put a weld surface on the part of the brick that touches the chair legs. Keep in mind that welds are not as strong as anchors, so if you (for example) blew up the chair, the seat could go flying. This is also why you never put a seat inside of another brick. It would go flying.

Now test your game and see if it works. If your seat is facing the wrong way, you can always edit it so don't worry. Now you have made a simple, working chair. Now let's take things up a notch.

Advanced Seating (Sleep-able beds)

Now you may recall the bed I showed you previously. We are now going to talk about how to do that (believe it or not, it is the number one thing anyone asks me, and now I shall show the world how it's done). So we know that a seat cannot go inside of anything. The blue and grey parts are un-collidable so they do not interfere with the seat. But what is holding the seat in place if it is not anchored or welded? The truth is it is welded.

As you can see from the picture, where I have made seats visible and disected the bed, there is another brick that IS anchored and has the same rotation that is welded to the seat. Now as seen from this next picture, we cannot use the move tool because there would be a small and hard to manage offset.

Instead, you duplicate the brick (not copy and paste) and scale it like so:

Now you go into your new seat's properties and go down to where it says "Disabled" and you want this to become true. This way, you won't be able to sit in the wrong seat. Now anchor this brick, weld it up and you are done.

This is an extremely helpful technique. Especially seen here, where I have another example. The seat on this chair (seen in many Dev offices at HQ) is tilted about 3-5 degrees, then we do the scaling trick to make a part that acts as a backrest but does not go inside of the seat. Once again this is disabled.

Thanks for tuning into this lesson, now you are ready to add tons of seats to your game! Next lesson we will talk about how to make patterns. And by that I mean wooden planks, tiles, etc. It is one of the best skills you will learn in order to become a master at aesthetics.

-Domswolf