ir a principal |
Ir a lateral
I've been so busy working on the project, his is the first chance I have had to add an update to the blog. We've been working on a lot of different stuff and adding interactive teaching tools.
We now have a road leading in from our main campus sim into the field school sim. As avatars walk from campus into the village, there will be a media presentation on the geographical and cultural transition one makes when going from Texas to northern New Mexico, which Dr. Brock Brown is working on.
Emin made a few changes to the interactive media display cones that allows them to work better. They now close automatically when there is no longer an avatar within the vicinity. He also included a script that makes it easy for instructors to load the cones with their own media presentations. They simply copy and paste the URLs into the description box of the display panel, and the new content automatically appears.
We also completed our information booth about the field school project on the main campus sim. It is located at the entrance to the field school and contains information and instructions on how to access the content of the sim, as well as information about the project itself.
The most exciting development for me is the addition of a simulated villager. She is an animated mannequin that looks quite similar to an avatar, and she is loaded with an AIML brain. With the addition of a free text to speech script provided by Second Life User, Fred Gandt, Maria is now able to hold conversations about the village in both text chat and voice. Maria Villager's brain resides here on the web if you would like to try chatting with her. Her knowledge base is limited to the village and she is very new and still learning. The more you talk with her the smarter she gets, so feel free to chat her up.
So that is it for now. Back to work!
No fun photos or screen shots for this post as I have been working on the lesson plans for the field school, getting the interactive pieces together, as well as editing some more video from real life field school to include in the sim.
I made Brock an avatar that looks a lot like him. And I realized that I wanted to make some avatar outfits for students who want to customize their avatars. While this seems silly, I think having a unique avatar correlates with feelings of individuality. And while a good part of field school involves community service, learning about the discipline, etc., I believe that a very important part of the field school process involves learning about yourself. No one goes to field school and leaves unchanged. So, I want the students at field school to have the opportunity to express their own unique individuality.
As I write this I have a dendrochronology video compressing on one machine, and another field school video compressing on a second machine. And now that I am done with this entry, I will be logging into Second Life on this machine. So things are pretty busy around here! It's like a little binary factory of ones and zeros.
I built the western Mesa using 4 layers of prims to achieve proper perspective. First, I used some of the vertical terrain mega-prim sculpties as a base ground layer and textured them with one of the estate textures that looks like dirt. For a contrast, I textured a few with a more rocky texture. I found that it was easier to make elevation changes using these prims, as opposed to trying to build them in the raw terrain file used as the height map in the estate.For my next layer, I used flattened mega prims with the mesa textures from the original build so that as an avatar looks up into the mesas, the trees and such look like they are farther away. I then placed smaller flattened prims textured with larger trees midway and down so that they look closer to the avatar eye. For my last layer, I used actual sculpted trees to hide the fact that most of the mesa is made of flattened panels. I feel this technique helped me keep prim count low, but still gives the illusion of depth and perspective.
After building the western mesa, the rest of the mesas were fairly simple and fast, although it got a little sketchy near the borders, and a few of my mega-prims had to be returned to me because I accidentally placed them on neighboring islands that don't belong to us.Things started going rapidly at this point. I built the dam and the two roads that go in and out of the village. And at this point, I knew that I needed to fill up some of the space with some stuff to make the village feel more authentic. In real life, once something makes its way to the village, it usually stays there and becomes part of someone's yard collection. So there is a lot of old farming equipment, lumber piles, old appliances, etc. laying about in the village. Don't get the wrong idea, it's not a trashy place and there is never really any litter, but there is a lot of what I will call "stuff they may someday use but probably not" hanging around. So Troy Vogel went on a shopping spree for pre-made junk, and we scattered it about.And suddenly, this looks like an isolated village, and I realize that I am finished with the major construction of this virtual field school. It still needs some fine-tuning, but the actual location is ready to go. Also, my prim count is now becoming depleted. I only have @ 500 out of 3,500 prims left to use. (Spreading the junk was prim-costly.) So, next I will be working on the interactivity part of this project, coming up with a lesson plan, adding sounds, and placing the activities. But for now this is what it looks like:
Looking from East to West:
Looking from North to South from bridge going out of village:
Looking from East to West towards the western mesa:
Southwest entrance into village:
Looking east from the school house:
My version of the Canon de Pena:
My version of the dam with some gabion basket examples:
Inheritance in EL Cerrito is based on the Spanish tradition of equal inheritance for both genders. Combining this tradition with the mechanics and physics of irrigation ditches means that the fields tend to be long and narrow, especially as land is divided up amongst siblings. These are called long lots.I was very happy with the long lots that I constructed on the first iteration of this sim, but after showing what I had to some of the geographers, I realized that I originally did not understand how the acequia actually worked. This time around I wanted to make sure that I got them correct, and that at some point we would be able to animate the irrigation of one of these fields.Again, I began from a point of being selfish with the use of prims. I only get so many, so I decided to start with mega prims for the fields. As I tried to build textures for these huge flat rectangles, I started to realize that I might not be able to get the furrowed feel I wanted. One of the problems was the stretching of the textures across such a large surface.. The other problem is that I needed actual furrows for the future animation of the irrigation.
Using my methods, I was able to achieve long and skinny, but the textures and colors just did not look authentic. The colors were too brash and harsh, and of course, there were no furrows, and in fact, it did not even really give the illusion of furrows. So, I got my coworker, Steve Lux, who happened to be working on Maya tutorials anyway, to make me a sculpt map and a texture to use for the fields, and I have to say, they turned out really awesome, complete with a true "furrow" to fill with water.
While Steve perfected the sculpty fields, Emin Saglamer (Troy Vogel), started working on an irrigation gate, and I started to realize how we would be able to animate the watering of a field. Meanwhile, I finished out some of the fields by adding sculpted grass that we purchased a while back to make it look like something was growing on the fields. Next I need to start making some progress on the mesas surrounding the village.
Still unhappy with the road texture, I move on to figuring out how to do the irrigation ditch. I knew that I was going to have to use an animated texture for the ditch due to the way you set up water levels on your estate in the sim. Sea level is a constant height across your parcel of land, and I needed the irrigation ditch to be at a higher elevation than the river, because the ditch works on gravity.So I went shopping at Basic Elements in second life and bought a very nice animated water texture. I really thought the ditch would prove to be problematic, but as it turns out, I slimply layed out a bunch of 10 foot thin rectangles to structure the ditch, and then placed the animated textures on the top face. I used the edit terrain tools in Second Life to pull up the ground on either side of the ditch to give it curves and hide the edges. Serendipitously, some of the "raised" ground will suffice for the way the sides of the ditch look in real life, which is that the dirt gets shoveled up and out of the ditch every year and starts to pile up on the sides.
I built several pipes so that I can build the roads going over the ditch, and well, what can I say, except that I was very happy this turned out to be much easier than I thought it would, and I was able to do it in a day. And interestingly, I can report that having built the roads and the ditch in Second Life has given me a much better understanding of how the same infrastructure works in real life.
So, now that all of the village structures are mostly complete, I have decided that I want to lay out the village floor. In the first version of the build, I had laid out a grid of mega-prims across the village, and then painted one texture for all of the panels to share, but only the roads were visible. Which meant that a large portion of every panel was in an alpha channel, which caused a lot of flickering as I began to lay sculpted prims on top of it.
This time, I used the same idea, but with a few differences. I started out with a grid of 8 megaprims, 2 of them had to be cut in order to make them fit.Cutting them is different than just resizing them, because remember, I am eventually going to wrap one texture around the grid, and for tiling and texture stretching purposes, I need everything to be the same size or it won't look right.
Then, I took a screen shot of the village in Second Life, and plopped that down in a photoshop layer to use as a guide. In another photoshop layer, I just painted in gray where I thought the roads should go and used the sim's ground texture file as the base layer. This was just a test to make sure that the roads would be in the correct place when I tiled them across the prims in the sim.
Which was really difficult to get them to line up. After some suggestions from Troy Vogel, I went back into Photoshop and bordered the entire texture with a hard-to-miss pink color, which allowed me to figure out how I needed to offset the texture across the tiles. (I knew it was correct when I could see a big pink square bordering the village.) Math was involved, so needless to say it took me a while to get it right, but after several curse words and a few minutes of frustration, I had my roads layout correct enough for my satisfaction.
Next came my attempt at the road texture. And it is here that I am still a little stumped. Stretching a flat solid color across megaprims is one thing, trying to get the texture of the road correct is another story. So, anyway, for right now the roads look a little blurry in the sim, but I will come back and fix that later, as my deadline is fast approaching, and there are some other features that are more important to the interactive learning features of the sim than the roads. So for now, smooth blurry road will suffice. 
Finished completing the village buildings today. Thanks goodness, because it was beginning to get tedious constantly doing the same type of textures. But, every structure has its own unique texture, and it's pretty cool to be able to stand in the plaza with the default view and see the sim as an actual town. There are still other important structures to be built, such as the dam, the bridge, the water tower, and most importantly, I need to figure out how I am going to create the ditch. Also on the the list of things to do is to create the road and ground cover for the village, as well as creating the mesas.There are also a few cosmetic things that need to be tweaked, although that will have to wait until later. For instance, Try Vogel found some nice sculpted wall ruins to which I am able to apply some of my own textures. So I want to replace some of the rock walls with the new sculpties because they just look better.
I am also planning our own specific version of orientation that students can quickly go through to learn how to interact and get around on the island. Also in the works is a concrete lesson plan to be included in Dr. Brown's geography class.
Finished up with the east side of the plaza today. There is still some tweaking to do to the paths and steps up to the structures, but it is really starting to look like a village now that there are several blocks completed. I didn't think that I was going to have to rebuild the church, but my my building style has changed so much, you can really see that the church sticks out like a sore thumb, so I am adding it to the rebuild list.
This building experience has me convinced that it easier to make nice neat square structures. Any kind of decay or ruin is more difficult to create. I am trying to use as few alpha channels as possible because of the weird effect you sometimes get when they conflict with each other, but as far as I can tell, alpha channels are the only way to realistically represent ruins and crumbling walls.My next step is to continue laying out all of the structures, beginning with the north side of the plaza, which is where one of the dendrochronology sites is located. I currently have my avatar's sight preferences set to eagle eye, so in the photos below you can see past the field school island into our neighbors' islands. So if you notice the Old Main building from the Texas State campus, that is not a mistake, you are just seeing BobCat Village, our virtual campus, off in the distance. Hopefully, my scenery "flats" will eventually take care of that.
I've been traveling a lot this summer, and as a result the El Cerrito in Second Life project kind of got put on hold. We have been showing it to some people at higher levels, and as a result of that, the focus of the project has been changed to include more disciplines and impact more people.
While the island construction is still being based on the village of El Cerrito, NM, the purpose of the island is to provide a field school experience across all disciplines, so that the project can impact as many people as possible. We are concentrating our efforts on figuring out ways to make this environment more easily accessible, as well as building "plug and play" type tools that will be easy for any faculty to use. Our intention is that the island include all of the elements that will enable faculty across all disciplines to add their own brand of interactivity to the sim.
I am still tasked with creating the basic village, and at some point during the summer, I flattened the island, tore down all the buildings to begin again with all of the photo texture mapping I did while I was in the actual village this summer.Instead of using a height map raw file to build the mesa's, I decided to use a series of flats to create the illusion of the mesas. This gives me more room for the village and the fields, and hopefully, the outer sides of the flats can be made to look like ocean views for our neighbors' sakes.I have already completed two blocks of the village. It looks a lot different than the original version that I recently flattened. I think my building style has improved, but I also have decided to make all the houses out of blocks to make the prim count low, which means that you can't walk into them. If we ever decide to go that route, we can always redo the building. I also decided yo leave some of the detail that I would normally clone out of a building texture. For instance, I have kept some grass, flowers, etc that stick up from the bottom of a house foundation. I then go back in and put some actual flowers in front of the building, using a layering effect. I think it's working out pretty well.My current plan is to lay out all of the village structures, then I want to add the roads in by using some mega-prim overlays as the actual village ground. Then I will begin to add in the mesas and other natural aspects. Anyway, here's what it looks like as of right now; today I start on the east block. 
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Well, I leave El Cerrito this year with mixed emotions. I was hoping to get more video of interviews with the actual villagers, and while every effort was made to set some of these up, no one in the village was very interested in being interviewed. The older villagers summed it up by saying that they are just very private people. And while over the years they have given interviews and been tape-recorded, video was just a little too much for them. Again, I felt like an outsider, prying into their lives. Regardless of how important I think it is to get this all documented before it all fades way, their wishes must come first. There is a reason that these people have chosen to live a harder life out here in the middle of nowhere under some harsh conditions, and being left alone is probably one of the major ones.
So I leave this place feeling torn between wanting to share the uniqueness of this tiny New Mexican village and on the other hand wanting to hide it away from everyone. I feel split in two by my conflicting feelings. On one hand, I am a Gringa, a stranger to this place. I have no roots here, no family history, no right to document this place and its traditions. A stranger with no voice. On the other hand, something about El Cerrito draws me in and makes me feel protective of the village. While I am not a landowner in the village, is it not still my right to try and learn ab out this place, and in learning be able to teach others. As a US citizen, is it not my right to voice my opinion on the preservation of this village. I am not sure there is really any one correct answer.
So, I am left with packing up and trying to get in as many last shots of the village as I can. On my way out, I plan on visiting some of the scenic over-looks to use for "infinity" back-drops in Second Life. As I pull out over the mesa and the village disappears, I can't help but feel that I am witnessing the death of a village.
During one of his lectures about the ditch, Dr. Nostrand mentions that one of his students theorized in a paper that the physical geography of the area is such that given the right rain conditions, a downpour over the Canon de Pena could potentially aim water runoff directly at the ditch where it is most vulnerable. Five years later, water rushing out of the mouth of the Canon de Pena carried boulders and debris into the Pecos, and while it caused little damage to the ditch, it did weaken the bridge downstream so much, that it was replaced with a new steel bridge. It also prompted the villagers to reinforce the ditch embankment with rock-filled wire mesh gabion baskets.
And it's a good thing, because once again the Canon de Pena flooded and was pouring water at a rapid rate into the Pecos. So when Jeff Roth came running up to base-camp saying that water was rushing from the Canon de Pena, I grabbed my stuff to go take pictures.What had been dry and calm just hours before now looked like a river unto itself. We were lucky to get both still shots and some video of this weather development. We were also lucky that it wasn't as much water as it could have been, the bridge stayed solid and there didn't seem to be any damage to the ditch.
After it stopped raining, Jeff Roth (geography, Stephen F Austin University), noticed that the ditch had stopped running, and all other concerns were sort of put away for a while. No matter what side you happen to fall on in the great development debate, the ditch is still the most important thing in the village. Water is life to the village, and no matter what, the ditch has to be cleared. It seems to be the one thing that can always be agreed upon.
After the rain finally stopped (or at least let up for a bit), I took the camera out to take shots of the river. The Pecos is not the clearest of rivers at any given time, but I had never seen it running as red as it looked on this particular evening.
