as promised, some pictures!

I am like so wiped out--I've started a personal training regime that is really taking it out of me. So I'm not going to type much. But I did upload some stuff to Flickr and here is a sample!


Giant tree sort-of-house, more like tree-with-platforms, with me in it. Yes it really is that big!


Oooooh dramatic angles. I totally stole the idea of using Linden trees for foliage from Flea Bussy, who probably pioneered it. Looks kinda cool huh?


Here's the satyr av parts I said I made. They look better now, I've been hammering on them in Blender and making textures in Photoshop and just generally working my lil' hiney off. Man, I always suspected that making avatar parts was harder than making houses, and I was right!


The satyr gazes into the misty distance of the Elf Clan lands.

well that was fast.

Huge rounds of layoffs at Microsoft and eBay yesterday resulted in two close friends and several acquaintances presented with severance packages.

Unfortunately, one of these close friends is splitting the bill for my land on Saint Clair with me.

We're keeping it for another billing cycle, because he's got a couple months before he actually has to stop going to work, but my quarter-sim on Saint Clair has numbered days.

So I'm really not sure where I'll be setting up shop after that--it could be on the 4096 plot on Lower Wythburn that I've had for years. I might be shortly investing a lot of time in learning how to use my HippoTech model rezzer. And I suspect I'm going to be doing a lot of building on Plum.

I can't pretend I'm not bummed about losing Saint Clair. I love land in Second Life, probably more than is strictly healthy, and getting a quarter-sim was a goal met. Sadly I just don't make enough income at this time to support it myself.

But it's definitely worse for my friend, who is losing his job, so I'm not complaining--much. I just need to, uhm, restructure.

In slightly more positive news, I did my research on Second Inventory, got convinced, bought it--via Paypal for the favorable exchange rate!--and it is pretty slick. Totally way better than manually saving to disk and then manually reuploading my textures. I still haven't talked it into rebuilding my trees on Reaction Grid, but I'm working on it.

aaah!

No pictures just yet but have I. Been. Busy. How busy have I been? SO busy.

First off I got mixed up with The Seven Isles, where I did a bunch of underwater merscaping and knocked out a set of broken Doric-esque marble columns for that sunken-Greek-temple look. Gotta do some pictures of that! I also made some super low-prim cave houses for merfolk housing. How low prim? 4 prims each, including a sliding boulder for a door!

I mean to do a one-prim set of light beams, with Sculpt Studio, along with some other stuff--but just as I was about to get into that, Elf Clan announced that they bought four sims on a new OpenSim grid named Reaction. If you don't know anything about OpenSim, it's the open-source version of the Second Life sim server, except, it's not code released by the Lindens. It's reverse-engineered and in constant development. So it is both not as ironed out as Second Life, and way more interesting.

One of the really interesting things about OpenSim is that it was tested to instability on the matter of prim count per sim. I believe it gets unstable around 60,000 prims? (Yes, that is SIXTY THOUSAND. All SL sims, of course, can only hold 15,000!) So the default prim count on OpenSim is 45,000.

Another interesting thing for Reaction Grid at least is that there is no arbitrarily-defined prim size limit. 256m prims? Knock yourself out! You can make them right from Edit instead of having to fumble around with megaprims. Wayfinder Wishbringer raised the Elf Clan castle to 200 meters high with a double handful of prims--about 50, I think.

And Elf Clan is renting4096 parcels on Reaction for cheap. Super cheap. 4096 is 1/16th of a sim -> 45,000 divided by 16 -> 2815 prims per parcel. 2815! (For some reason the official number Elf Clan is giving out is 1200 prims per parcel. I'm reluctant to correct Wayfinder on it--he might take away my prims! *cling*) The terrain build height is currently set to +/- 100m. I'm not sure if that will be locked down or not, but for now I'm pretty happy making a rolling little landscape on my parcel.

The major downside to Reaction, aside from the hilarious bugs that crop up, is that SL stuff doesn't come over. Well, there's Second Inventory, which a lot of people like, but I am reluctant to invest in it for a couple of reasons. Primarily, it raises dicey questions of fair use to bring that much content across grids, and I have a lot of stuff from people I personally know and respect. I am a big fan of open source, but most of my personal stuff on SL is exactly that--meant for personal use. It's not like I'm going to distribute it on Reaction! I wouldn't do that. But there's issues of security and how personal such things stay when they cross grids.

So I sat down yesterday and sculpted myself some elf ears and satyr legs and hooves.

Which TOTALLY SHOCKED myself because I have never thought I could do that.

I swear, there'll be pictures!

And that's why I haven't updated.

minor bad news, way good news!

I've run into the teensiest snag with my Thincbook press; namely it doesn't work. I guess I will ping Toneless Tomba today about it and try to get it straightened out. (Update: I reloaded it and it works! I guess the rolling restarts last night did a number on the poor script, but yay, portfolio. Minor bad news changed to good!)

But that is really the minorest of bad news compared to the fact that Lilith Heart referred a client to me.

!!!!!

I asked my client (in fact the one I did the boutique for, in the earlier pictures) where she'd heard of me, and she said, hmmm, she thinks it was Heart Gardens. I said ....are you kidding? She said, no, she was told I was a known landscaper and to contact me. Holy CRAP. So I IM'd Lilith Heart thanking her for it (and checking just to be sure it was her!) and she said it was her pleasure.

!!!!!!!!

I am modestly pleased. By which I mean, omfg.

To celebrate I have wiped clean my home parcel in Lower Wythburn and I'm going to build a giant tree. GIANT.

new projects! new avatar!

Whoo, this weekend was my best friend's wedding (RL) and man am I punchy. The fun never stopped! Now they are off on their honeymoon and I am trying to recuperate.

Meanwhile, though, I did a couple projects for some people and I got a new avatar. I also discovered my new favorite landscaping product--RealWaves.

It looks like Big Sur. Maybe Greece. I bought some on the spot, along with the splashy-crashy particle surges. To say I am in love would not be overexaggerating. In fact, I used them in my latest job.
Regrettably, I can't transfer them to my client, but I've found that if we both pretend (and autoreturn is off, if the land is not set to group), it works out okay. The Objects tab is useful for this; just don't return anything that I own.

This cute and girly little boutique mall had a 100-prim limit for landscaping. Over half wound up being the client's Heart plants! But low-prim building is a passion of mine, so that was very satisfying for me. And the Heart plants look perfect. I got a little excited over the tiny bay in the picture. Mini jaggy breakers, mini crashy wave! Eeeeee!

The other project I did was a Ranch in the Sky, for a guy who was my very first client ever and whose enthusiasm for my work engendered this whole crazy landscaping business. I have, and will put up soon, shots of that first build from 2006. Has it really been that long? Well, I'm a slow learner. Anyway, here's a taste of what I did for him last week.



Mine own hills and mountains that I'm making in Blender, but haven't got around to figuring out how to package and sell. Working on it. I am no good at that part of things.

And finally, my new avatar--the new dragon from Sylver Bu.



Lovely.

I'm working (finally, finally, finally!) on an inworld portfolio, using Thincbook. I bought a Thincpress and everything. Price decided me on Thincbook over Intellibook, although Intellibook is a lot more drop-and-go. Thincbook requires a lot of editing of notecards and copy-pasting and other such minor excitements, but as I only desire one book at this point, that's all right. And now, off to do that!

hello, internets!

I've been thinking and thinking about this blog thing, and now, here goes.

Hi there. My name's Ravenna Soothsayer. I'm an avatar in Second Life, and I want to make your land pretty.

I rezzed into SL in 2005, in the days before sculpties--heck, there weren't even flexies then. Nobody wore skins. Few people wore prim hair. Prim shoes were considered pretty hoity toity. And trees? Fuggedabouddit. We had Linden-made twisted-and-cut-and-skewed cubes for rocks in those days, and we liked it!

A friend and I went in on some First Land together (something else from those bygone days). I spent the next week playing with it. Many peoples' first impulse, upon purchasing land, is to plane it flat. I roughened it. Then raised it. Then sunk it. Then smoothed it. Then covered it with trees (mesh trees, of course). Then--well, you get the idea.

The power of telepresence is what makes Second Life so successful in its own little weird niche. It's also what makes SL strike sour, dischordant notes when we stumble across ad farms or blaring clubs. We know instinctively what is right and what isn't; what has the ring of truth and what is cheap blandishment. I believe this is why we Residents get so furiously up in arms over everything Linden Lab decides. The experience is so compelling and so immediate that unexpected intrusions upon it are terribly disturbing.

My own pleasure in SL is to craft places of alluring natural beauty. Towering, rustling trees. Rushing waterfalls and rivers crossing rugged hillsides. Mountains. Sunlight.

I've been pursuing it for almost three years, with varying degrees of success. Around August of last year I decided to try to learn a 3d program. Blender's price tag made it the only practical choice, and around September I started teaching myself how to use it.

Last month, I finished my first sculpted tree.

I plan to use this blog to talk about my current projects, show off my new products, and discuss the peculiar nature of this experiment we're conducting in Second Life. And I hope you'll stick around to hear what I have to say.

Hello, internets! Let's get started.