A Tide Pool in Kansas?

Ocean life has always held a fascination for me, something I suspect is not uncommon among those of us who end up as biologists. My mother gave me some of Rachel Carson's books, the The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea and several trips to Cape Cod imprinted the smells, sites and creatures of the sea. So of course as part exploring Blender and mesh had to make something with tentacles. I didn't think I was ready to tackle squid or octopuses so decided on sea anemones. Easy enough right...well it took 2 days to get something that looked sort of like a sea anemone.

Here are three of my attempts. My first attempt is on the left and my latest attempt is on the right.

 The first attempt was not meant to be realistic and I had all sorts of trouble with painting the seams out. Both the second and third attempts are more realistic, which ironically was easier than what I tried to do in my first attempt.  The tentacles were done using extrude, scale and translate tools in the mesh editor. There are I think other ways to do tentacles but I decided to stick with the the tools I best understood. The last one is still has some seam issues but pretty minor.

Of course I had to make my own little tide pool. Which resides some where in the cloud or mirrored to my home machine, alas in-silico.

Slowly getting the hang of Blender

Last night I learned how to better use the sculpt tool in Blender including showing the edges which makes the grab tool MUCH easier to work with, and also how to do symmetry across an axis so I can do things such as these orchids:

Building is Theraputic

Slowly my Kitely world is taking shape as I get better at using Blender.  Just about very object in in this view except for the blue landing pad is made from mesh. The little purple flowers were actually pretty challenging for me though I am sure more proficient people could probably make these much more easily than I currently can. You can just make out a pink bridge that I threw together yesterday...OK so it did take me an hour to figure this out.

Here is a better view of the bridge:

Framework for a tree

Yesterday I decided to try something a bit more ambitious in mesh-namely to make a tree with blender. So I started with an isododecahedron sphere and uses a series of selects, extrusions, and rotations came up with this framework. I didn't texture it but simply added a reddish material since I was more curious as to how well something like this would be handled in Open Sim. No problem as it turns out.



Here is my tree's framework on my Kitely test site.  Hopefully I can get to the leaves soon.

Morning Glories in Mesh

I've actually managed to figure out enough about Blender and mesh to put these morning glory-ish flowers together today.

A Building Frenzy...

Well not really. But one real nice thing about doing Second Life projects is that there are so many different things to do. So, if you OD on scripting there is always something to build. I like doing both and I decided that maybe when I dream about scripting that it is time to do something else. So last night I played a bit more with Blender and sculpted a pair of very simple guard cells for my photosynthesis project.



This picture shows the result. Probably the sort of thing a master builder would snort at but they are pretty dramatic. Guard cells have a much more complex form than what I show here so for advanced students I might want to show that. Right now these are phantom and the visitor has to walk through them to enter the photosynthesis module. And since Mat Chatnoir has already asked about this...yes eventually they will be scripted to open and close: eventually ;-).

I have also redone the sky box* that my photosynthesis module is in. Originally it was built like the lab where I do my scripting and prototyping as a 20m x 20m x 10m box made from 10 x 10 x .1M prims, plus extra prims for window framing and entrances. My lab module bare bones has 16 prims. But since I currently do my work on my own private region on the mainland I need to watch prim count. You can visit the photosynthesis module in world at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Carmine/118/142/296

In my inventory I have the infamous mega prim package from Alberto Linden, so decided to play with them. Generally I avoid mega prims because the big ones are really intrusive. In fact one of my neighbors has rezzed a big one for some weird reason and it goes right up to my property line...but that is another issue. My neighbor seems to only speak Japanese and while I typically wear a Kimono, I do not. Fortunately my neighbor did blend it so it is textured the same as the region's ground. A few eucalyptus trees and that mega prim is hidden.



At any rate I put together a barebones box, the same size as my SL lab/office but uses only 4 prims rather than 16. Astute biologists will recognise that it is textured with a scanning electron micrograph of the upper epidermis for a leaf. In fact both the inside and the outside were originally textured the same way which is really cool and immersive but maybe over kill. So I retextured the inside with the same sorts of window textures I use in my lab/office and the result is basically what you see in the first picture showing the guard cells at the entrance to the photosynthesis module.

Also this weekend, worked a bit more on the Caminalcule menuing system so that it is a bit more sensible; I was making things way to complex to follow and so I am having to reorganize the scripting a bit.

You're also welcome to stop by my lab/office at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Carmine/174/217/137 You can also TP there from the photosynthesis landing spot.

* Generally I loathe skyboxes..but creatively textured they do have their uses.

Playing with Light

Visiting Soror inspired me to get back to Blender which I had struggled with last summer and found it very difficult. Part of the problem is that the tutorials are often times confusing especially when it comes to exporting sculptie textures. Fortunately there is new stuff out there. Now there is a site called Second Life Artist which gives a really clear explanation of how to export sculpted prim textures to Second Life using a set of Python scripts developed by Dominodesigns.

It works great! No more editing meshes by hand and voodoo baking. Soror suggested a good place to start with Blender is with a sphere and use the Sculpting tool.

So here are a few things I did today after the inauguration.

This is a shot showing some of my sculpties. The star was made with Blender, the other glowing sculpties where made earlier as part of an installation for a video.




I thought cactuses would be easy...but I can't get fine enough detail to do spines, but I think these are cute.

Experimental Flora

When I was in grade school I got into trouble when we had to do one of those infamous class murals. What could possibly have gotten me in trouble? Well my job was paint tree trunks and I painted them as I saw them, not brown but various other shades and encrusted with lichens like this.

Now I wonder what my class mates and teacher would have done if I painted trees looking like this gem?



This bit of experimental flora was created by Soror Nishi who does some of the most inspired objects I have seen in Second Life. Soror has a really keen eye and a wonderful organic sense-organic in the meaning related to life.

All around, one sees cellular shapes, tissues, flowers and seeds that pay homage to evolutionary exuberance. I must confess I spent way too much time last night going from one plant to another, and snapping pictures. So here is a sampling from my Flickr Stream.

This one echoes either a palm or maybe an extreme split leaved philodendron with aerial roots.



Soror titles this one "Bog Lily" but it is really more like a Calla lily complete with spathe.



Everything is fantastic maybe the biologist equivalent of magical realism such as these jeweled mushrooms. In some universes they probably would be down right illegal.



These lily pads are clearly inspired by the real thing.



There is attention to botanical detail everywhere. Consider these wonderful hanging legume pods:



Soror has a clear grasp of the importance of small things too, that the average visitor to a tropical rain forest might miss such as these wonderful beach flowers instantly recognisable to me as a morning glory echoing some I have seen in Florida.



So if you want to visit a great site to see just what you can do with SL...maybe wow first time visitors, check out Soror at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Lifstaen/20/52/228

Soror is currently having a show at LALALALA Gallery at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Avendale/51/76/22

If you send up teleporting to the Avendale town square, let everything rez and click on the Gallery's sign on the sign post for a teleport.

In the artist information notecard Soror says:

"The extensive attempts some make to populate this new world with "realistic" copies of the Old World show a colonial tendency to ignore the native culture and superimpose a pre-formed visual style on this new medium. This medium (SL) has more in common with stained glass than with photography, and failure to recognise this results in poor copies of boring everyday objects, architecture, flora and fauna."

And I think this is an interesting point for someone such as myself who tends to import photos for textures.

I see Soror works with Blender...wonder what tips she has for a novice?

Soror's blog is at http://sorornishi.blogspot.com/.