Biosphere Stage 2

I worked on the inside of the biosphere today which was a lot of fun. I am very happy with the corridor floors which are layered. I may make some special textures with shadows and light to add to that later, but for now it is fine.

The corridor beyond the doors is very wide and suitable for a variety of uses. I haven't decided really what they might be, but I'll figure that out.


The observation pod is close to finished. The new teleporter needs to be installed and tested, but with teleports still causing crashes, the actual use most likely won't be happening soon.

Until then I have the dome up above open and I can of course move the glass globe down if needed.

The biosphere was purposefully placed at a low altitude so there would be more atmosphere. It seemed fairly boring up really high. That may change of course, but for now, I like the clouds and the sun. You can see the ground below and the sky is fairly clear of building platforms at the level I am on.



There are lounge chairs with animations in the observation pod. The stars are lovely at night. The building platform will not be in evidence when I am done of course.

Actually I have a pretty cool plan for the area around the biosphere. Will see if the building tools and I can get it accomplished -- with the help of my graphics program and some particle scripts.

That may be in the works for tomorrow -- or not.

It was good to get back to Fantastic after almost two days. The sandbox is good but there is only so much you can do there. And there is always the chance that you won't be able to get back to retrieve your build if you crash. Linking is handy for partial builds, we know that -- but not so good HERE yet.

Observation Pod

I only spent about an hour in Openlife today, but during that time I enhanced the observation pod at the bottom of the biosphere. With my accent on night as the theme of the build, I took this photo. The stars are lovely there. Click the picture for a larger view - well of course!

Building Big

There is a certain thrill that the building of giant things gives you. There is a new skill set involved -- or a least a modification. Building a 90 meter environmental pod 600 meters above the ground is not the same as building multi-primed high detailed jewelry. Each experience contains its own reward.

I remember the first time I moved a skybox up into the atmosphere. That must be 2.25 virtual years or so. It was HARD. I did the drag it up and fly a bit deal and managed to get it to 250 meters or somewhere around there. Now we can be at 4000. The air seems a bit thin up there for me though. I like being able to look down at the ground if I choose. So the biosphere is about 600 meters up. Not point in keeping that a secret; it's a bit big to hide.


So I added a bit more this morning. That circular finial at the bottom is actually a viewing pod. From the inside it is clear. It is small and it is tricky to work in there. And, if you notice, I don't feel all that secure working without a net so to speak, so I left my building platform up while I am working. Nice to be able to stand on "terra firma" while gazing up at that huge torus - LOL

Wardrobe Renewals

It seems like I've been wearing the same outfit for-e-ver. Today I decided I deserved some newness in my life. After refitting all seven or eight colors of Spectator 2 boots, I was really tired of looking at those. So I spent some time in the new biosphere making some new shuz! And I like them. This are based on the Spectator 2s bottoms but have scuplty tops and the thinnest, tiniest trim details (I so love our nanoprim options).

And with new boots, came new clothes. I uploaded textures from the Downtown set including a new coloring of the sweater. With some sculpty cuffs and collar they are tres chic :D

Woo Hoo!

Biosphere Beginnings

After a productive if boring morning getting the rest of my boots refitted and ALL the vendors filled again -- work courtesy of the December Database Disaster :D -- I really needed a change. I had been thinking about building something in the sky -- something other than a giant building cube - LOL. And, in that quiet place between sleeping and waking I decided I would like to build a biosphere.

In my head I maneuvered prims and cut tori into interesting shapes. Alas, they don't really cut the way I wanted them too. Perhaps someday with Klee's new third cutting option, but not yet. I did manage to get a start however and we'll see where it takes me. The torus is 90 meters by 90 meters and has a glass dome and shiny metal surface. Both insides and out will of course have many more details before I am done.


In truth, I have no real plans for design or use of this space. It feels good though and that is a start. I also noted that you can see the stars through the dome at night. I almost always have my environment turned to day for building, so it was an unusual experience to notice the dark energies. I think I will plan on designing THIS space for the night. It won't be that dark as there will be lights in the halls, particles here and there -- and who knows what else. But I will take note of the night and work with it more than usual.

We'll see.

Easy Chair Heaven

Yesterday was a good day with gold stars in both RL and VR. In the Openlife arena I made new easy chairs. These puppies have NINE ANIMATIONS -- that I made of course -- and NO pose balls. You click on the arms to cycle through the animations. I am patting myself on the back here as I am so proud I got the scripting worked out. Will wonders never cease?

They come in regular and tall sizes. I decided not to be sexist cause I've seen some gals that would definitely need the longer limbs version. Right now they come in four colors. Since I can't sell them anyway, I'm moving on to another arena.

Charlie promised to fit my boots for men that were lost in the great database melt down and then I plan to photograph them and get them in vendors AND storage. We can only do what we can do. Then, maybe jewelry or some work on the new store in the village called Nirvana. It's not even noon yet, so I'll see where the day takes me.

Dancin on the Rooftop

I added a dance floor to the lounge this morning along with more trees and some couple's seating.


It will be fun to make some new dances for Debbie's dance machine. On my list but not too close to the top. I need to get my music working. Since the same settings that were working at Phil's are no longer working there either, I am guessing that the web server is down. Hope that is it. You could actually have several machines with different dances for alternate genres of music. What fun.

This was a good break in the project list of the day! I'll probably add some fantasy lights and more details soon, but this works for now.

Waterfalls and Fireflies

It was a long day on the frontier with textures disappearing and reappearing and way too many caches cleared, gray bodies, missing prims and the like. I did finally get back into my OLD clothes (I really was going to change today, but the asset server had different ideas).

AND I made a lovely waterfall environment. It isn't quite done, but almost. This is a photo taken at night with the glow of the waterlily lamps floating on the water and the fireflies in evidence. It's very peaceful and that is how I wanted to end my day.

It is so fun to look at this and look at my waterfall environment from two years ago. I was SO excited making it and it was very nice for the times, and I sold tons of them. This one, however is leaps and bounds ahead of it. It's nice to know we really do improve.

Tomorrow is my two month anniversary in Fantastic. Yeah!

PS. Note to myself. Make a sign for the shops explaining there really is no money yet and hence the things are not available for purchase. A lot of folks seem to thing that "I" am just not ready (wink). I'm pretty sure I will be when the time comes.

Until then, waterfalls work.

All in the Details

I'm a big believer in details. A great mountain cabin is a lovely thing, but without that bearskin (fake of course) rug, cozy plaid couch and hot steaming coffee, it is just a building.

So after finishing up the sectionals today and making a few more animations, I decided to work on some details for the decor - accessories shop and of course for ME.

I love magazines as accessories, but most of the ones floating around Phil's were VERY much copyright infringement. I mean you can't just grab a copy of a cover of "Sunset" or "Sailing" or "Cooking Light" and put it on a prim. A no-no for sure. AND, this is a virtual world so we need virtual magazines :D

So, when my DSL folks called to say they were turning me off for a bit too see if they could really get my speed up to the 13mps they promised, I opened up my graphics program and went to work. I got permission from one of my iheartsl.com sisters and took some pics from her prolific blog and made them into magazine covers. So, no, they aren't really OL magazines. That will come later, but they ARE virtual and they are legal. Both things count in my book. They also have very nice back covers if you flip them over and appropriate spines.

So that's the news of today.

Prim and Proper

It's been a tough day in my real world and now I find the M-W.com (dictionary) is no longer free (sigh). The long list of tiny things going wrong could fill a few screens (well not really but it feels like it). On the PLUS side there was the great hair of the morning :D

I worked in a couple of the shops today adding inventory or props depending on how the currency and permissions issues play out. Either is OK with me I guess. Then late in the afternoon I asked myself what would make me feel BETTER with the day and found that making some jewelry for the heretofore empty cottage would do the trick. It did. It was fun and it was EASY - primarily because of that .001 option in the size parameters. YEAH! BIG YEAH!

So I have three nice pairs of fairly simple loop earrings -- one with amber stones and I'll make some other versions. All that and a couple of coincidences led me to this post. Here's the skinny.

I decided that it would be safer to have items IN world rather than just in my inventory. This from the latest database meltdown which we are still hoping gets rectified. I didn't lose any of my in world objects other than some missing poses in a daybed. So that was good news.

After making up the earrings and placing them on a "black velvet jewelry tray" -- well we can imagine it as that -- I decided some cute little jewelry boxes would add a nice touch to the shop in progress. So, with those .001 measurements ringing in my brain, I made some very delicate boxes. I didn't worry about prims. Prims are not an issue.

Then this eve as I was perusing the fashion feed at Phil's -- an activity that is happening less often these days -- I noticed some VERY cute boxes from Curious Kitty. They were ONE PRIM sculpty boxes for gift giving (or for decoration as I have sold a lot of boxes for that in the past). They are so cute. And then I took a pause and thought, "but prims don't matter here". HOORAY!


So I just wanted to remind myself -- down the road in space and time -- what the thrill of not having to worry about those prims felt like. It felt GOOD!

And now Sam has some earrings to go with her new hair. It will be lots of fun creating jewelry here. I don't really like super delicate things, but I do like some accessories from time to time. And the real world is a better and happier place with Sam (and Samara) happier too. LOL

Mirroring Two Worlds

We have the ability to make most fantasies come true in Openlife, but sometimes our everyday real lives can be part of our perfect worlds. After an interesting but fairly stressful day out and about, I spent an hour recreating my personal daybed. It's a little different, but very close to where I repose each eve. It's nice to have a piece of "reality" in Fantastic. One copy will go in the next apartment I'll be decorating. It has one animation now, but I am planning on adding two more so there will be choices depending on my mood. Sometimes LAZY can take on new proportions.

It's fun to build outdoors with all the room in the world -- a LOT of fresh air and nice vistas for sure.

Prim Plantings

I spent much of the day making poses. It's sort of a restful pursuit for me and real life was a bit problematic today.

About an hour filling up clothes vendors had me counting gold stars earned and so late this eve I went back over to apartment 9 to add some flowers. I have no plant textures to upload as Phil's database gurus lost a ton of my store products as well as a lot of my textures. Since it has been over a month, it is unlikely I will ever see them again. Oh well.

So with no plant textures to use and prims aplenty, I decided on some botanical prims for the apartments. I took the leaves from earlier flowers, resized and reshaped, added some buds and voila -- indoor greenery.

A version of this -- bigger and more grand -- would look great in the art gallery area. That's another day, however.

The lighting effect is from my graphics program, but who knows? I added track lights the other eve so maybe a spotlight over the plant would be a nice addition. We'll see where the muse leads me.

Drinks Anyone?

I spent the early even working on one of the village apartments. While I, Sam, am a wine drinker, it's important to have all sorts of choices for your guests -- or in this case future renter's guests (smile). So I had a great time making a champagne bucket complete with ICE CUBES as well as some nice sculpty glasses. I also made some track lighting for above the bar and now it isn't so dark in those corners. A floor lamp will give just the right glow for the other side of the room.

AND I even changed clothes finally. YEAH! (Well I changed my shirt anyway -- it's a start.)

Moonlight Fountain

I sprinkled my new tree around and about the sim this morning. So much cheerier and that's always a good thing. Then I decided to work on a fountain for The Village. Now I could have remade a favorite fountain of course, but where's the fun in that? So I started -- once again -- with no plan except that the stone needed to match that already in the courtyard.

Since the fountain was going in the prosperity corner of the sim and since that is tree energy fed by water feng shui wise, I thought, "why not really go for it" and looked up the number that is auspicious for that energy. It was four. Four was simple to incorporate into the fountain and so I did just that.

I tried to make some curved benches to go around the fountain, and while I could DO that trickily, the sit script needed to make my poses work was definitely not doing any good for the sim. So, I abandoned that ideas (stability - stability - stability) and made plain benches and placed them in the grassy area already there. That works. Good to have seating options and nice to have some of my animations and poses around.


Building Tip:

Most of us have learned to "pull a prim" from one already there to keep the alignment. That works very well most of the time. There ARE times however -- like when you have texture and texture rotation and light features and the like already IN your prim -- that simply dragging a copy of the prim you want WITH all those features from another area and then aligning with the POSITION numbers is the easiest plan.

The diagram above shows how I took one of the water prims from the top of one pillar and placed it on top of another by matching the X and Y coordinates. The Z coordinate was the same in this case as the side pillars were all the same height.

I simply clicked on the top ring of the pillar I was headed for and copied those values into the water prim (highlighted in the photo). The alignment is then perfect.

Movement

Today's theme seemed to be about movement. I spent the morning making animations to send into the pool for the new viewer. Then, it dawned on me that the creative commons license was a deal breaker for me as it seems to be an anonymity destroyer. Ah well, I had a great time and have two VERY nice animations. I also learned a few tricks, got some poses made from last night into a multipose stand that WORKS (be still my beating heart I'm on a role with scripts this week) and then -- I made a tree that blows gently in the wind and makes me feel happy.

I also started a Flickr Set for Openlife with some of my favorite pictures.

Here is the text from the tree photo above:

I made a tree today. Sort of "godlike" in one since. It isn't totally mine of course as I don't do sculpties. I took two trees apart, resized, moved, added, retextured and then added leaves a branch at a time. Maybe I really DID make that tree. Anyway, it is just what I want -- very ladylike and gentle. I may make more, this turned out so well. We'll see.



And here is the working pose stand with click through poses. Woot! This is mostly to remind myself that it WAS and DID work the first try. At least it has the "potential" to work again. We'll see. LOL.

Room with a View

So I logged back in briefly this eve to see if my couch might be working again -- the animations anyway. It's been a tough day on the frontier but I spent some time on the sandbox testing poses and have five new fashion ones so that worked out fine. Meanwhile, the couch is just fine (/me patting couch on the head) and I got Charlie over to see if the animations worked OK for guys. They are almost better except that he of course sinks into the couch more. We can only do so much as animators since avatars come in ALL shapes and sizes -- just as it should be.

So, you may notice a difference in the decor from the last animation picture. "I" didn't make any changes but the disappearing wall thing is happening again and so I took this photo as is. I actually LIKE the extra openness. Since there are curtains when the windows are viewed from the exterior, I think I'll enlarge those windows a bit tomorrow and get some more VISTA here into the room.

A plan, a plan. Oh, and there is a call for animations for the viewer so I will of course participate. Love to have projects. And whoever has their work chosen, it means we will have a sit and ground ANIMATION as the default. Yeah!

Sitting Pretty!

Well I might not be DANCING a happy dance, but my spirits are there. Woot!

I started making the furniture for the apartments today. With that came the desire to actually get some of the animations I have been making INTO the furniture -- and banish those nasty pose balls into the ethers. And "By Jove, I think I have it".

Making a sculpty couch with animations in -- let's call it a mature world (as in time to mellow and work out many of the kinks) -- isn't difficult. But, we have issues here on the frontier. My scripts from Phil's wouldn't work here. The scripts from here wouldn't work for ME. The pose balls of course DISAPPEARED which is not the aim of couch cushions. They sorta like to stick around and keep us comfortable.

So, today, amazingly, it all came together. I fiddled with some scripts, added a long animation I had made awhile back, made a second one and so far (SO FAR) all is going well. I have a very nasty unlinking mishap but that happens. Didn't take long to fix. I have a third animation in the works.

Hopefully this will be complete and textures fine tuned tomorrow. Because TOMORROW is my one month anniversary in Fantastic and I plan to do it up right.

Until then.

Adding the Details

So while things were a bit stressful today at Phil's, all went swimmingly in OL - yeah! I added three more shops (one a new design that opens onto the walkway to eku's) and I have only one more to go.

Now the REAL fun starts -- adding the details.

It doesn't escape me that my neighbors are building UP. The temple next door promises to be grand and definitely tall. Osiris has started what looks like a new spaceship (shiny and new) right next door. And I am all about small and the details.



So I made a coffee cart today complete with name and decals -- even on the cups. Matching napkins and international newspapers add a sense of reality. I have stools with NO POSE balls. True, they only do the basic "sit", but as scripts are VERY problematic at my sim for whatever reason -- simple is better (thanks Gitfinger).

I have coffee swirling in the cup but only saw STEAM for a second and then the texture disappeared into the ugly gray abyss. So I decided to forgo the steam and go for decals instead. Ya just gotta work with what works.

One more building on the end will make 13 so I guess I'll figure out an apartment upstairs building to make 14 in all.

The Village: A Beginning

So what do you do with (almost) unlimited prims. Well ya BUILD of course. And I decided to build a village. I started with a central park as green space is always a good thing. This area is in a "tree" bagua -- feng shui wise so I wanted lots of growing things and trees. I made some circular flexi grasses and added some more of my homemade flowers. A cobblestone walkway adds a bit of an old fashion feel. I've made two shops and an apartment so far. I built the steps you see in the background out of real prims and there are MANY.

I've always been a big believer in details so the the signs hanging for the shops have real chain, the streetlight of course gives real light and the shutters in house number two -- the small one -- are part way open and you can see curtains though the gap. All fun little bits of reality in our not exactly real world.

I have no idea how the village will evolve. That's not really the point. The point is to play and that I am doing. The village adjoins the main park and is bordered on the other side by the huge pond and trees. So it is cozy -- at least as cozy as a village within a "city" with both shops and houses can be.

My First Hair

So I haven't been able to get into Fantastic at all today, but I did late this afternoon make it to the sandbox. The bad news was that I had to start over again on my hair as the part I made earlier went missing. The good news is that it turned out pretty well. I love the texture. I need to add some more curls and things, but it is presentable and it is MINE and that counts. It feels much more "me" as it is patterned after my been-wearing-it for-ages do. No flexi parts yet but a bun is a practical style for the frontier. I am happy with the effort.




While I couldn't get in world -- partly because of a rolling restart -- I could work on animations and poses. The pose above is called "I don't think so" for lack of a better title. I figured out how to ease into static poses and I also made a 12 second looping sit that worked great when I tried it in a couch on Phil's beta grid. So I can use it at SS even if I can't quite use it here. And then again, scripts may get better soon.

That's today's report.