Playing with Light

Today I visited Paislee Myrtle's Dragon's Teeth site which is a wonderfully lit world as shown here:

This led me to do some lighting in Simone's World. Here is the result which is not nearly as well crafted as her world but I had fun with this.

By the way she is in a group called the Devokan Story Tellers. This link is to her Kitely World Page. http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world/Paislee-Myrtle/Dragons-Teeth

This world is free to visit and lots of the materials are copy-able. In fact I could not resist the group of fern fiddleheads just to the left of where I am in the second picture. 

My Kitely World is still not open for visitors...so you can't see my experiments with OpenSim physics or me accidently donning a giant orchid.

More about the Devokan Story tellers is at Danko's blog: http://journeymetaverse.wordpress.com/devokan-storytellers-page/

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.

Adventures with OpenSim

At various times I have dabbled with OpenSim but in the past kept returning to Second Life but I have been taking a second look now that Open Sim has matured. First of all it is now really possible to have your own private world and I plunked down the $20.00 for NewWorldStudio's OpenSim generator. It has bugs being still in beta, but Hey I have my own private World for 20 bucks with 100,000 or so prims as opposed to my region in SL which costs 40 bucks a month.

I still haven't figured out how to link my private world to other grids-NewWorldStudio's connectivity test shows it as public but since I use this region to experiment with mesh and physics...well maybe I don't want any visitors just yet. But I did learn about OAR files. More on that in a bit.

Speaking of mesh-finally a reason to learn a bit about Blender. I have used sculpties but found trying to do them in Blender a bit temperamental so ended up using one of the SL tools for doing sculpties. So on to mesh. I like doing mesh but one nut that I hadn't cracked in a couple days of scratching was how to how to get the textures to render in the dae files that Blender exports and SL and Open sim support.  I had to grasp the concept of materials and also didn't notice the little check boxes in Blenders .dae export menu relating to exporting textures as well....duh.

One development I really in pleased with the Kitely. I had read about this company and its new business model and really low rates...so I plunked down money for their Bronze plan. Gives me a free region and costs 5 bucks a month. OK 5 bucks a month is definitely better than 40 bucks a month for what, an 8th of a region? Plus getting back to OAR files for just pennies I could upload an OAR file and even better can modify the terrain! How cool is that. That world is private for now. I can go public for 20 bucks a month...still a lot better than SL for the money.

Oh and it gets even better! Imagine my delight when I exported my world's OAR to my home machine and loaded it into OpenSim using NewWorldStudio and was able to watch my NWS World take shape in my viewer. How cool is that!  Now if I could only use a common AV look across all Worlds...At any rate the picture shows me in the NWS version of my Kitely World. One giant sandbox. Presumably I can go the other way as well but haven't tried that yet.