Riders Stone Garden Bench

This bench is well crafted in appearance, but its design is counterintuitive for typical users. The ideal seat has a simple sit-on-click interface, possibly with separate cushion prims to allow the user to choose from multiple sit spots. This one features a seat rezer that one must get to via a 2-tier menu (Touch > Select Seat > Seat_3 > then sit on it). There are 5 spots to choose from and thus it can seat 5 at a time, though. Because of its large size, I shrunk the bench a bit, but the seat rezer isn't sensitive to this, so seats 1 and 5 hang over the sides for me. Once you've sat and selected an animation, the menus are done. To change your pose, you must touch the now invisible seat pad, which turns out to be quite tricky. If this were a private home, I would just learn the quirks and live with it, but I have it in a public park, where newcomers will surely be confused. In short, I love how this seat looks and what it does, but not the user interface. I would recommend the designer work with a scripter to overhaul it to follow more familiar usage patterns and possibly to offer a help notecard from the menu.

The most important thing I ask of my mesh furniture is it continues to look like that piece of furniture. You can cam out from these benches to vast distances and they will continue to look like a stone bench. The LODs are so subtle you can scarcely perceive it happening. The wireframe of the mesh is nice and efficient and doesn't fall into the trap of overdetailing anything.

The UV map is fitted with a single 1024 texture rather efficiently uses most of its texture space. The textures give you anything from white marble to purple granite (No seriously, purple granite is an option). You have a ton of options in texture color. You can turn off that shadow under the bench, handy if you're someone like me who uses advanced lighting and obsesses over conflicting shadows.

The only sore spot for me is the sitter. To sit on the bench you need to click and select a position which rezzes a pose-pad. You then sit on the pose pad and select the pose you want from the menu. Pose pad lurks around after you rise from the bench a while. If you are at precisely prim limit this might be problematic.

Due to some compulsive scaling twitches I sized my bench down slightly, the sit pad positions didn't respond to that rather well. Long story short, I put on my code hat, rolled up my sleeves, pried out all the sit animations and rebuilt the sit script from scratch. Fortunately these benches were mod.

The sits are kind of odd too, a number of them have the person reclining back with their legs hanging out, unsupported, like their knees were rigid or they were trying to see how long they could hold their legs out at an awkward angle before they grew tired. Though, not all the sits were like that, a number of them seemed natural enough.

Long story short: If you're buying it for a stone bench mesh you'll be delightfully pleased, my compliments to the mesh artist. If you're buying it for the sit system, it might annoy you.

Great job, Very well made. Love the textures. Thank you

Love the bench, the textures are really excellent. I would recommend highly.

This really is an awesome bench. The texture changes mean you have the equivalent of 18 options, the seating is great fun and easy to manage. When you click on a seat area and change your mind, the option times out, so you are not left with any sign of it. I would recommend this bench to any one needing one. I have no complaints with it at all. Seating for men and women, it's perfect.

The sit animation spots that pop up is kinda annoying, but the animations are great and the textures look wonderful.