Recovery

Recovering from a week of illness. Still congested, but otherwise normal. W helped me through. I haven’t written in a long while and if I want to keep this up, I am going to have to put it on the ipad so I don’t have to be in front of the computer

In SL, we are renting a multi-scene place where I can put any of our houses and change the scenery when I feel like it. Have not been there a whole lot, being too busy with the opengrid 5×5 region parcels. I made a large citadel are in one and it is turning out well. It is 5 sections high. The top is a castle, the 2nd tier down is the houses for the “royals”. Third tier down is working class apartments. The fourth is gardens and a zoo, including steampunk animal statues. The last tier down will be shopping.

I’ve set up a row of stores – at one end is the animal statues store, the other end is furniture (so far). There’s a fishing village; set up with lumber warehouse, blacksmith, docks and other accoutrements. I put back the Tibetan temple in another part and the gardens with the store elsewhere. There are streets to drive on connecting much of the 5×5 there. This is all the “re-do” of Poetic License regions.

The tropical parcels, I left pretty much alone so far except adding back some items that disappeared somehow. Either from errors in backup or over use of “select and delete”. I like the palm trees I put back in better than the ones they included in the model.

Still much to do. I am incorporating Satyrfarm materials and crops into some of the area. On the zoo level I have two elephants I am growing grain to feed, as well as a chicken. Other animals to follow and I have Steampunk animal statues I created with AI. I also took a barbershop photo of W and made it a statue of him getting a haircut. (Long may he wait for another.) 🙂

In order to use less land impact, I have had to use some fake ai buildings just for the look, not for actual living in. Also incorporating lower land impact buildings as I find them. The AI buildings only use one to three land impact per unit.

I also cataloged the trees in inventory by land impact and am making up various “forest” creations, so I don’t have to always use the same trees. I plan on doing the same with flowers. I have some very nice tulips and rose bushes at 1 land impact each.

It’s disappointing, but several Major shopping areas have gone this year. R. Lion seems to have closed it’s doors despite being a major “retailer”. I hear OSgrid is closing it’s doors as well. There will always be new ones opening up and AMV is expecting a land rush due to OSgrid going down – OS grid has been a major staple since Opensimulator first started.

IF worse comes to worse, I can always run DREAMGRID on my own computer and download my OARS to it. I did use Dreamgrid to come up with the land formation on Poetic License (since modified).

Opensimulator is accessed by Firestorm (the OS version) the same as Second Life is. (But keep the Firestorm versions separate). Land is free and much lower cost, so if you like to “create” on a lower budget, it’s perfect. Do do this same landscape and size in SL would cost me probably a thousand dollars a month and I don’t have that kind of cash. Yes there are people in Opensimulator who “rip off” stuff from SL, but it’s not that many and the opportunity to create your own stuff on your own place (and then possibly put it in SL marketplace later) is excellent.

But mostly it’s great to be able to experiment with land formation and texture at low cost. The only other place I could do that would be with Dreamgrid on my own computer, but that is extra work I only do for creation’s sake.

Eventually I want to get into Blender further – at the moment I only use it to “remove” glitches left in by AI models. I was able to create a usable small fishing village house from a photo, and then change the color of the door and window frames by painting over the texture. I have since started using “quads” as those are easier to see what everything is supposed to be painted.

That’s a lot, but most of everything that has been done in this interim between posts. I am still helping with Whimsy Pastures, even though I have my own “farm”. We also have another lovely home for me to decorate. (W is here “on location” until next year so we have a lot to accomplish.)