The End.

So we've finished! Here are a few screenshots of our finished city world, I think it looks pretty speccy. At the top is some more work I did on the interior of the Lard Queen.

lard queen sign

The lard queen now has a sign, Kenan is working on finishing the rest of the building.

Here are my finished disgusting food and beverage items.

The gun

Catching up on some work that I missed, here is a gun that shoots ice-skating blades. It was pretty easy to do, just create (or rename) and object to be the 'bullet' and the script on the gun will then use the new object as a bullet. There is a bit in the script which makes the bullets disappear after a while, but if you turn this off, the gun can be used to create a 'forest' of objects quite easily.

After receiving instructions from Sir Johnny, I'm now working on some items to sell at Lard Queen. These include the Lo-Fat Grease shake above, Ratchunks, Polar bear burgers, Chocolate fried pork, Hippo strips, and Deep fried icecream. I'll source a photo for the lid later on.

Textured building instead

Here is the building now, which is a series of cubes, textured to look like an apartment building. It ended up looking a bit housing commission-ish, which is not exactly appropriate for the CBD, but never mind. Below is the pshop texture used, which is an amalgamation of different textures sourced from free texture sites.

Apartment building

I made this apartment building, but didn't realise that it was a waste of prims, seeing no-one would ever go up close to it. Instead, I should have just made a simple box shape and textured it. So that's what I'm going to do now...

I've been assigned some new areas to work on - an apartment building with a Lard Queen outlet underneath (it's a future fast food restaurant in the style of McDonalds. Today I had to leave early, but I made a start on the apartment building and an antenna to go on top. You wont view the antenna up close, so its not important that it's quite simple.

Evil ticket barriers

Today I made a start on the dangerous ticket barriers, which crunch people in their machinery with reckless abandon. I will have to find some scripts for the moving parts, and I think it needs more bits as well. I need to take a picture texture for the arrow sign on the front.

Killex logo

I did up a logo for our evil transportation corporation, which can be used throughout the station. I think the red is a bit much, but everyone else seemed to like it. The red does get lost a bit at this small scale (which is probably similar to the scale it will appear at in our world), so its cool.

Sandwich Board

When visiting other worlds in Second Life, one of the things I find annoying is when you dont know what there is to do, and where to go to do it. I think there should be more signage, and its not hard to do. I've made this sandwich board, which can be used by everybody to explain what they've made and how it all works. Unlike permanent signage, sandwich boards are mobile, and wont look out of place if they're just chucked anywhere. If anyone wants to use one, you make your image and text on a 700 x 1200 canvas (in photoshop or whatever), then resize it to 512x512, making sure the 'constrain proportions' box is unticked. This will give you a stretched image. Save and import into Second Life and attach to the sandwich board as a texture. Making sure the 'Repeats per Face' is set to 1, it will condense back into the correct proportions.

And here's another collage of some of the different street fixtures and utilities to consider in making our city look realistic and complete. It might also help in making it look more coherent, given that there will be lots of different people's work in there. Some of these would be obsolete, like the phone booth (which is pretty much obsolete now!), but then it's interesting to think about what they might be replaced with. Some of them I envisage being exactly the same (the ever-indestructible milk crate, for example, except maybe they'd be used for delivering fermented yak urine or whatever we'll be drinking in the future :) So these are the kinds of objects I will make for our street scenes, updated for the future era.

Here is a collage of some texture references for the area around Flinders Street. Given that our project is leaning toward the dystopian side of things, of a city that's dirty and falling apart, it was interesting to note that you dont have to look hard for reference images for that scenario. Up close, the city looks scungy and in ill-repair, with peeling paint, and sticky greasy marks and stains on everything. I love the tiles in the walkway underneath Flinders Street, with the 'Do Not Spit' signs that are always covered in spit or another disgusting substance, and I think we should include some reference to them in the project. If its been there for 150 years already (ok, so I just made that figure up, but its definately a while), who's to say that it wont be there 50 years from now?

tshirt

I made a snow-themed tshirt to go with my snow boots. It's a photo I took of a ski-lift, which I then manipulated in photoshop (hue, brightness, contrast) and applied to a Second Life tshirt. I put a message on the back but it was hidden by my beautiful blonde hair. I might even make one in First Life, it looks kinda cool, in fact it would probably look better without those abnormally large breasts distorting the image :)

Busy with my First Life

I missed out on the last class, I was busy on a fact-finding mission in New Zealand, researching possible alpine themes for the project :)

I built a little house today, and put a karate mat in there (you can see one of my awesome moves in the top image). This was premade, I didn't code it myself, obviously. Ditto the bubbles. I'm still having trouble lining up the elements of my building, especially when they're at right angles to each other. I think this is because of the registration points of each object maybe, because even when you round off the x,y,z positions, its still all wrong. So at the moment I am lining things up by sight, which is not the best. Today we had heaps of problems with lagging and freezing, I dont know if this was because of bugs in the new version of the application, or because we had so much building going on at once, in the same area. At the top of the application window, it pretty much permanently said (Not Responding), but then half the time it let you move around anyway.

I also found a fantastic new place called Suffugium (well found it by doing a web search for top second life places), its a dystopian city, and they have scan bots verifying your identity, allows you to dumpster dive (I got a hula hoop and a crack pipe :) and some really great texturing. I didnt take any screenshots, but will take some later and post them. They had a little rave going on, which I'd like to check out again (I didnt have sound on), sounded like some really wicked industrial shit from what the dj was saying.

So this is firstlife me and secondlife me. I haven't really done much to my avatar, most of the stuff I try to attach looks shit, because it doesn't work with what's already there. I seem to have lost my other boot, which is not altogether different to my firstlife. I guess another glaring difference is that I'm sitting in a field of nothing in secondlife, which means there are many possibilities. In firstlife I am in the middle of the city, which has very little oppourtunities for building anything new. I played around with my appearance a bit now, and put my me-cube in.

Canoe

Ok, so this is the canoe I made. I used a sphere (or was it a cylinder) for the main body of the canoe, with hollowness, and slices on. I'm happy with the shape of it, but the texture is crap, it applies as if the canoe is still a round prim, I'm not sure if there's a way around this.

I made a canoe, but blogger is not letting me post images for some reason. Will post from home, hopefully that will work.

Checking out some other places

Magical Forest of Apollonia
I really like the stylized flowers, and the colourful but restful environment they have made. On the downside, there isn't really much to do. I ballroom danced and got an orange soda. I might come back for a romantic afternoon with someone else.

Winter Wonderland Lalinda
I like that there are a couple of fun things to do for free, like snowboarding and iceskating, but I particularly liked walking underwater, it was like scubadiving in an icecave (not that I really know what that's like :). Its funny that the things that I find most enjoyable are not the proscribed activities. I couldn't find any actual runs, and in some areas I didnt seem to be able to fly, which was annoying (but this could have been that I dont have a good grip on the controls yet). I'd go back to explore it some more and do some iceskating, there's something fun about the animation.

Chase Island
This is basically a shop, this dude Chase has made lots of items, such as exercise equipment, foodmaking equipment, really nice fantasy fountains. He was hanging around chatting to people about his wares, which gave it a personal touch, like a real salesman. Even though it seems a bit ridiculous to exercise and feed a virtual character, I enjoyed a little spin on the exercise bike and got some fairy floss (or cotton candy as the Americans insist on calling it). I'd go back to chat to Chase about how he made some of his items.

Gotham City
For a place that purports to be a faithful recreation of Gotham City, I thought it was pretty lame. Some bits of the environment were cool, but it didn't really all fit together into a cohesive whole. Also, it seemed pretty deserted, which is never fun in a city. Basically, I thought they could have had more fun with the concept and made some really imaginative environments. But they didn't. I'd go back to see if there was more that I missed (I think there might have been), and to see if I could find some dudes roleplaying their batman characters, as described in the Rules (that was another thing I didn't like, there was a whole heaps of rules to read at the start, like you are not allowed to be in character in certain areas if you weren't part of the Special Guild Of Nerdery or whatever.

Today I messed around with creating things, and applying textures to them. I learned how to import my own textures (File > Upload Image) and that it cost $L 10 to do so. Using the targa format for images means that transparency is easy to achieve by using Alpha Channels in photoshop. The fishtank pictured utilises transparency. Improvements to this design could include fish that move, and animated water effects, but this is beyond my skills at the moment.

To keep created objects for next time (they will be erased otherwise), link them together (Ctrl + L) and give them a name (General tab), from there you can right click on the object > More... > Take Copy. This stores it in your Inventory for future use.

First Class

Walked around Second Life a bit, learnt how to teleport, naviagate around, and chat with others. I visited the 'other' festival island, which is a perpetual psy rave environment. I got some dance animations, not entirely sure how, I think someone else must have given them to me. It was a nice diversion, but I couldn't figure out how to stop it! I dont want to dance ALL the time.

In terms of modelling, the shortcuts are Ctrl + 4 to open the building window, Ctrl + Shift for resizing, Ctrl for rotating. And thats as far as I got.

For next week I'd like to have come to grips with the building software included in Second Life, made a couple of basic objects, and found out whether you can import models from Max or not.

Will people ever stop wanting to hold something in their hands?