How Low Can You Go?

UPDATE** I'm going mental with this adding-sound-to-my-blog business! I often play tracks obessively if I REALLY like them (i.e. loop them 4-5 times in a row) so I'm sharing my Choon-of-the-Day : Taiyou Ga Arukagiri (feat Hazaed & Daddy Shadow) from DJ Krush's Code 4109

I've had some feedback from customers saying they really liked my low-prim alternative to the Ghetto BeatBlaster - who can blame them, the original is a whopping 89 prims! One customer had to put away his living room set to be able to rez the full-prim GBB! *giggles in a secretly thrilled way*

I don't know if this is a common technique but I thought I'd share it cos it's quite nifty, if I do say so myself! It doesn't work for all objects, but here goes...

What I do is build all the bits and bobs perfectly, then take a close-up of the objects I think can be replaced with textures. So, for the GBB I have a texture of the front panel like this:


Then do a bit of cleaning up in photoshop to make it all neat and puuurrrddy, adding transparent bits so the buttons here can shrink from 15 prims down to.....ONE prim (muahahaha, laughs The Count).


Then I deconstruct the GBB until it's practically naked and replace the bits with textures.

For me, the trick is not to replace everything with textures because that will just look...BLEH. Gotta have some bumpy bits!

Here are the two GBBs side-by-side. Can you tell which is which?

The full-fat version is on the left, and skinny on the right - a 50-prim diff!