Another night

I have wasted a colossal amount of time. Making houses is sooo much more time consuming when compared with tiny dresses.
I have hunted for a nice round brick window texture without success. I have played with getting a texture onto the gable wood texture. Am annoyed.
Lifted the roof, lowered the wall, lowered the roof, lifted the wall and so on... arrggghhh
But I think you will be able to see the movement...

Land, Prims, Southend and Twaddle

Ahhh ! I am a forward thinking Victorian and have built a futuristic home and placed it into Caledon Southend! I showed a few photos of the making of this house some months back but building stalled quite a bit while I played with tiny dresses.

When I sold the railway station plot in Southend to Garnet Psaltry, I had to trim prims. One thing that had to be packed up was the building ledge where the Edwardian was perched.
For the uninitiated- when you own land in SL you have a set number of prims to the area that you own or rent. That is why economically built items are attractive as a concept for they allow you to have more detail in your environment.

By selling one of my plots I was reducing the number of prims I could have placed out on my virtual land. I can keep what I don't have out on display on file or "inventory" but really the reason I own land in SL is because I like to decorate a little bit of the virtual world to my taste.

So I packed up the railway station with regret and The Edwardian. Honestly, getting that turret room sorted was such a brain drain I needed a bit of a break!
I cant believe how many months have passed since then!

For a while, it seemed like too much bother to find the prim allowance to get it back out again. Finally though I had overdosed on tiny and got back to the house. Wow it was so refreshing to lugging big prims around again.

I made some new textures to get what I wanted. Notably the front and back doors. I need to get into my sculpty thing and make some terracotta finials too.

Ti's done-ish now. In place. A few sticks of furniture scattered. I am pleased :)

Progress Report from the Last Day of May

About 5 minutes after the last photo... the roof vanished...
I pressed one of the god keys on my key board.. not delete, mind...by accident.. and the roof was gone. I don't know if it was "Alt + send it to the end of the earth" or "shift+ control + remove all earthly and ether traces" but it was gone.
I know people say to take copies along the way. But I was avoiding linking it... and then it was gone.
So I started almost from scratch.. again... and have worked away ..again.. and here I am so far.

Getting along ok.

As I said to Taz, in some ways the set backs don't bother me too much. I enjoy building. And once the project is over, I go into decline. I mope and wallow. I shop and buy dresses. Slowing down the building process is not so bad really.

Further developments

A little more building to keep my mind busy and my hands from being idle... I have built a cover for some of the wharf to match the Bournville House. Then the moon came up! I was telling a visitor to Southend that I love to watch the moon.. and then we were not able to see it at all! I am so glad to find out I didnt imagine it!

Visit me if you like at
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Caledon%20SouthEnd/195/83/23

Finished-ish

It is now in place in Caledon Southend.
Pretty
Nice
Will fiddle a bit..but done!

and further refinement

Last update for day...

Progress report

Yes.. there has been progress..
Just as I prepared to throw in the towel, I have kinda tumbled onto a way to get this sorted a bit.
I do fear I am going to have trouble with zinging texture flicker, but am preparing to throw some prims at crack covering :))
So, this is what I have come up with so far....

Furnishing a Castle

Happy sighs of business.
When I might spend a night in a blue funk, instead I start to throw prims around and cheer myself up. I am a frightfully shallow person, so easily distracted!
Tonight I spent some time trying to decorate the castle to take photos for its Slexchange listing. That means I need furniture. That means building some and modding some.
And tadah!
A room full of fun for me at least!
I had to run down stairs and do some deleting though as I was down to... 7 prims... ouch!

The Station

A little while ago, Grandma Bates asked if I would like to build with her. Of course!
She has a couple of ideas and one was for a post office. I liked that idea and as I searched Google Images, I came across some pictures of Australian post offices and railway stations.
And so off we go :)

I have been building the structure and today Grandma came and brainstormed some of the scripted fun things we can add... like a fan, cigars smoking, letters fluttering in the wind...lots of fun to come.

Today I spent time making a couple of textures. The ticket windows and the new door are my favourites.

I still need some windows for my walls... but that's fine I need something for tomorrow's fun :)

A blogging fo Jo.. building in SL

Jo hasn't been in SL, though she reads this blog apparently. She was a little impatient today as she said there was nothing new. She also wanted me to explain how the water works in Steelhead.

Well I don't think I have a satisfactory answer for the waters of Steelhead but I thought I would just offer a glimpse of the way SL is assembled.
(Waves at Jo... Hi Jo!)
Right!
Everything in SL is made by the people in it. There is no great god of SL that plonks the buildings, trees and shapes the earth in it. The Lindens keep the power turned on, but we decorate the landscape.
Everything in sl is made from a prim

Behold! The humble prim!

A prim can be manipulated. It can be three basic shapes as shown next or the intriguing ring shape called a torus or the baffling sculptured prim. These basic shapes can be manipulated with twists and tapers and dimples. Making these distortions then reflect what it is you are wanting to reproduce is the challenge and fun of it!

Every prim rezzed begins as plain wood coloured. A pattern can then be placed on them with a texture and the texture can be tinted with a colour.
Different faces of the object can be textured with different textures.

At the moment I am building a castle. I have a brown castle texture that I used for Castle Shapinsay but it wasn't fun building two so much the same so I went to TRU and bought a new castle set.
I have tried a few wall papers inside and I am not happy so it looks like I am off to TRU to find something extra.
Jo... in sl.. you can make your own textures and upload them for a couple of cents or you can go to a business in sl and buy them. Soemtimes you can even find them set out as freebies.

First photo is from outside.

Next shows with the draw bridge shut.

And then through the front door with a little Audrey within.

Jo, the doors open and shut by placing a command (script/program) inside the appropriate prim. That's how the actions in sl are achieved.
A simple rotation script looks like...
default
{
state_entry()
{
llTargetOmega(<0,0,1>,PI,1.0);
}

}
But the door script had about 200 lines in it.

There's so much fun to be had tinkering with colour shape and movement in SL building...
or...
you can just play dress ups...

Definitely girl next door, Jo....see? freckles.. piggy tails...

Jo also has a notion that I am some kind of femme fatale.....but I swear not!

Teaching Taz to Build

Tzaizqan has mentioned a few times that he would like to start building but time in SL can seem to run through your fingers like sand grains. It seems that getting him started just drifted. Finally though he decided that he wanted to build a phone booth. Great! here was an objective. An object actually. Much more fun to aim towards than just "lets rez a cube, shall we?".
An ozzie phone booth is about as attractive as a 1970s shower cubicle. What we wanted to build was a traditional Pommy red Phone booth, so it required a brief time in google images and then I had a mental map of what he wanted to build.
Next was the job of figuring what prims and textures would combine to best represent this. So off we went. Taz rezzing, me nudging. Really very little nudging was required. Intuitive builder, he is. When he saw what I meant and was shown a couple of short cuts... off he went.
There now stands a vintage, if not quite Victorian public phone booth in Caledon Southend.
We are now looking for the next project for the tiger to sink his teeth into :)