Laying Out the Roads

Now that I know I can wrap the mesas with flat screen panels and completed that proof of concept, I think I am ready to start building the roads. I think that the best way to go about doing this is to lay down mega-prim panels in the village, and then create a road texture in photoshop to lay across the pre-defined panels.

So the first thing I did was to lay out the panels across the village. i tried to keep them around the same size so that when I went to texture them later, they would stretch the image the same and still be lined up. I also tried to use as few prims as possible, so I ended up using pretty big panels.

I then decided to lay down some long, plank like prims (with a gaudy orange color so I could see them well) as a guide for how I should create the large picture in photoshop. There was one little corner that was more of a triangle than a square or rectangle, and that has me completely mystified. I either have to hang a rectangle off the "hilled" terrain or figure out a way to get a flattened prism to fit in there correctly and then correctly texture in order for everything to line up. I decided to go with a one of the flat mega prims, which I changed into a prism using "object type".

I went into Photoshop to try and create the texture for the roads. I used one of Dr. Nostrand's street maps to grab a selection of just the streets, and then I filled that selection with photos of the actual tire tracks in El Cerrito. I filled in the track texture using the cut and paste tools, and then using free transform on the paste, I rotated, flipped, and scaled the tracks into the selection. I filled in the empty spots using the clone tool. Next I masked out anything that wasn't road surface to an alpha channel. I then divided the "big picture" into the same type of panel layout that I had done in Second Life, and copy pasted each panel into it's own 512 X 512 TGA texture file, uploaded into Second Life, and Voila, the prism is still throwing me off. I remain baffled.

Alpha Edges on the Mesa

After finishing the mesa textures yesterday, I was a little disappointed because I could still see what for lack of better word I will call "seams" along the edges of the panels. It wasn't blaringly obvious, but still I knew that it was there, although I had no idea why. I figured it was just one of the limitations of Second Life - or a problem that was beyond my ability to fix. So, I thought that maybe I could try to cover up those seams with some prim tees. That's right, I went shopping!

I needed some trees, and I found some really good ones at a Second Life vendor called Heart Botanicals. Specifically, they had a willow tree, which is one of the natives of El Cerrito. Having learned my shopping lessons from buying the wheat and poppy fields, this time, I made sure that I got full mod and copy permissions on my tree purchases. And they did help hide the seams along the horizontal edges of my mesa flat panels. However, the tops of the mesas still showed edges, and I couldn't put a huge tree at the top of the mesa without ruining the distance perspective. So, I went to Emin to ask him what he thought I could do to get rid of the edges.



He had me off-set the vertical layout of the texture by a tenth of a meter, and that seemed to help. He thought that maybe there was an artifact of some type in the transparency channel ofthe original TARGA files. So I went back into the original texture files and stroked a border of 1 pixel in the alpha channel so that the entire texture was framed with transpparency. I then had to go back into Second LIfe and reapply the textures to the mesa panels, which gets difficult when you have transparent edges stacked onto each other. It took a while, but it cleaned up the seams that I was so worried about. And I learned that any of the flat panel textures that require alpha channels I create in the future, will also be getting transparent frames. You build, you learn!

Las Mesas de Mega-Prims

One of the things that makes El Cerrito unique is that it is secluded, and one of the reasons it feels secluded is that it is surrounded by mesas reaching 5900 feet above sea level. These mesas are a tangled mess of juniper, pinon pine, cacti, jagged rock, dirt and grasses - depending upon where you are in elevation.

I was able to get the shape of the mesas using the height map, and I had the base texture and base color taken care of with the ground textures in the estate tools. What I was worried about was planting a forest of trees without blowing my prim count. So I decided to try my hand at placing textures with alpha channels on mega prims. (Very large prim objects that exceed the normal boundaries of the 10X10 rule.) I had previously had problems getting textures with a;pha channels to look correct on the mega-prims when working with the river tree line, and had given up. So, I faced this task with preconceived notions of how I might be able to get it to work. (Which is how I seem to learn in Second Life: trial and error.)

The first thing I started experimenting with was the texture I wanted to use on El Barranco, a particularly steep and rocky outcrop of the mesa located by the dam. I had taken several interesting pictures of it in real life, and I wanted to see how they might look as textures laid on flat mega-prims. Unfortunately, on a flat prim, the angles just weren't right, and it looked pretty cheesy. The jagged rocks needed to jut out and on flat panel they just don't look right.

When I had first started this project, Emin (Troy Vogel) had given me some mega-prims, called "vertical terrain," that were sculpties to cap the mesas. I had taken them down because they were bald rocks, and I knew I needed something that had some vegatation and jaggedness to it. I switched out the bald, rocky texture that was originally on the vertical terrain with my photos of El Barranco, and it worked out really well. So then I decided to see what my photos of the mesa would look like as applied textures on the vertical terrain sculpties, thinking that I might have solved my mesa problems! This did not work so well, and as I experimented, I realized that the tree-filled parts of the mesa would need to be flat with alpha channels for transparency.

I ended up laying out flat mega-prims around the shape of the mesa. I tried to keep them all the same size so that I could re-use any textures I created without stretching. Then I went into photoshop with some of the photos I had of the mesa, and created a 1024X512 image of the mesa (one a sloping end and one a middle section) custom built to eventually be applied to the end 2 flat panels. I tried that out and was pleased with the result.

I ended up using 3 textures for the tree-filled part of the mesa, and 1 texture for the El Barranco section of jagged rock. Afterwards I used the landscape tool to pull the ground over the bottom edges of the panels, and started filling in the bottom of the mesas with larger trees to give it some kind of perspective. What I ended up with in Second Life is very similiar to what it looks like in real life. There is some alpha-fighting going on, and a few other problems, but all in all: not bad for someone who isn't sure of what she is doing!

Ditch Day

Serendipitously, Ditch Day in Second Life probably occurred sometime around the actual Ditch Maintenance Day in El Cerrito. As I used the terrain tools to reposition the ditch in Second Life, I couldn't help but wonder if the villagers were out there at the same time maintaining the real-world ditch.

Water is life in an acequia culture, and the irrigation ditch that runs through the village is the probably the most important feature. Every year in March, villagers who own irrigated land gather together to clear the irrigation ditch. The amount of ditch workers you must provide is dictated by the number of irrigated acres you own, and the person who oversees the whole process is the major domo (ditch boss). The ditch is cleared by hand using no motorized machinary and afterwards there is usually a celebration with food and drink.

My ditch project in Second Life was mainly to move the ditch closer to the long lots to illustrate more realistically how it is ised to irrigate the crops. I made a new height map in order to smooth the slope from Terrace Level 2 down to the fields in Terrace Level 1, and drew in the ditch around the village. After uploading it into Second Life, I realized that I needed to fine-tune the location of it to pull it even closer to the long lots using the terrain tool. It took me a while to get used to how the terrain tools work. There is a fine line between working for needless hours because you haven't set the size and the strength of the tool appropriately and just completely over-doing it by setting them too high. And even once I got the idea, it was still pretty slow work and not very accurate.



I eventually got the ditch closer to the lots, but I still haven't achieved the burmed look I was aiming for. For now, what I have works, but I have a feeling I will eventually go back in and try to rework it somehow. Eventually, I would like to have a working animation of the water gates and the irrigation of the fields.

?sdrawkcab gnioG

Here's what I have been doing for the past several days. As I build in Second Life, I realize things that would make a clear difference for the better. Usually, it's something that requires me to go backwards in order to go forward. That being said, the first thing you should always do first when creating an island that needs to "mostly" resemble a place in real life is to complete your height/elevation map and choose your ground textures. The elevation map is more easily changeable as you go along, but the ground textures play a big role in how you want to texture other things, so it is best to get that out of the way, and be fairly satisfied.

I ended up tinkering with the elevation/height map again. I added in the ditch, lowered the rincon to ditch water level (so the whole irrigation thing would make sense), and I sloped terrace level 1 to terrace level 2 more gradually, so the drop off would not be so stark, and the slope down to the river would look more realistic. I also bought a ground texture set in Second Life, called "mud," retinted it in Photoshop, and I finally am fairly satisfied with my ground textures. I can now use these as a part of the textures for the long lots (or any other objects I want to blend into the ground at various elevations).

It was called to my attention that the textured prims I had made for the long lots were very square with sharp edges. It was also brought to my attention how the long lots should look against the ditch. I had been using 10X10 flattened cubes, but I decided to try my hand at adding a texture to a mega prim again.

Using photoshop, I created my fields using my lowest ground texture as a background. I used the smudge tool to soften the corners, and a transparency mask along the edges, hoping it would help them blend into the surface. After placing the textures onto the megaprims, I noticed that everything still looked very square because of the texture on the ends (edges). So I did 'select teture' and used the default transparent texture on them. I made several textures, which can then be retinted in Second Life to add even more variety. I made one long lot texture without any transparency mask so that I could place some of the 1-prim wheatfields on them without causing an alpha channel war (which makes the objects flicker in and out as they fight for dominancy.)

I ended up using 25 prims and a total of 10 different textures for the long lots (9 field images and 1 dirt texture for the edges that couldn't be transparent). The next thing on my list will be to match the irrigation ditch to the long lots so that they make some kind of realistic sense, then I am going to try to mega-prim the mesas.

Above is a before and after shot. (Please disregard the roads in the second photo, they are just teporary place-holders.)

The Beauty of Being Able to Go Back

Starting over was a mistake. I re-mapped the whole island to be flat, before getting some semi-transparent objects picked up, which meant I spent precious minutes trying to collect them all back again into my inventory. After deleting all of those, I began to mega-prim the island with what I would call scenery flats. First off, texturing mega-prims is something I have not yet mastered, and they are harder to texture than your normal 10X10 panels because of stretching. I spent yesterday trying to get away with using only mega-prims for tree breaks, and it just didn't look very good. After laying out all those megaprims to texture the western mesa, I began to feel overwhelmed. My island was naked and it didn't look good. Why oh why did I ever even try to change?

Happily, I had remembered to save out a copy of the raw file of the height map that I liked, so I was able to load it back in. Then I spent the rest of the day adding in the ditch that goes through the long lots, becuase I realized that feature needed to be done first so that the prims making up the long lots wouldn't cover the water when I aded the ditch in later.

The lesson here, I think is always remember to save out the raw terrain file before replacing it with a new one, so you can go back if you need to.

The Zen of Starting Over

I decided that mapping out the long lots exactly as they are in real life is important. And I think it could be done using mega-prims as flats, which would solve a lot of issues. Starting over would also allow me to fix some of the things that have been nagging at the corners of my mind. So, I am re-doing the terrain today, and starting over.

OK, Now What?

Since this project began, I have learned by trail, error and hints from Emin (Troy Vogel). I am fairly sure that I know how I want to do the fully-functional buildings, such as the school house, and after laying out the long lots in SL, I realized I really needed to landscape, and several things became clear as I contemplated this last night. Earlier in the day, I had been trying to fill in the landscape around the second life long lots with "one-prim" juniper trees. In real-life El Cerrito, cottonwoods, willows, and sycamores line the pecos river, while juniper and pinon pine grow in the upper elevations. I started to realize how many "one-prim" trees I would end up using, and decided I needed to do something differently to keep my prim-count low. I have always been a Photoshop noodler, and I came across this "instructable" on how to do textures with transparencies for Second Life. (http://tinyurl.com/5w5vv2) So I decided to try and make some scenery flats with trees and bushes painted on them. That way, I could get 4 trees for the price of one prim. I was pretty sketchy about how this might turn out. It's hard to mask out all the spaces between trees for transparency. But as it turned out, I was pretty happy with the results. The flats stack and line up nicely if you keep the same color pallet.



And I throw in a few "one-prim" trees to fill in the flats. So I started putting these textures on 10 X 10 and 6 X 10 fattened, vertical cubes. I realize now that it would be good for the ground in the sim ground texture for the estate to match any textures I want to put in the flats. Hopefully I can do that without too much pain of undoing. I also realized that I want to use gigantic prims to do the surrounding mesas. That way when you are "in El Cerrito" you are surrounded by mountains and mesas. Other islands looking in could just see a nice ocean view. The use of gigantic prim flats would also allow me to map out the village more truly, and use more of my space for the village and fields, and take up less space with the surrounding mesas. Time start over again!

Laying Out the Long Lots

As I traveled to Big Bend National Park in West Texas for Spring Break, I paid a lot of attention to agricultural fields, and thought about how I might build fields in Second Life using a minimal number of prims and textures. Agriculture is an important part of El Cerrito's geography and is very distinctive in style, and therefore, one of the elements important to the build.



The agricultural fields in El Cerrito are mainly subdivided into ribbon-like fields known as long lots. One short end of each long lot fronts on the irrigation ditch, allowing each land-owner access to water. By arranging long lots in contiguous rows and without fences, villagers made maximum use of their precious arable bottom land. In a society that practices equal inheritance, when long lots are left to heirs, the parcels can easily be subdivided into even thinner lots.

My first idea was to go shopping in Second Life to see if anyone was building and selling pre-made agriculture fields, and I stumbled upon KIDD Creation one-prim wheat fields. They had several varieties of fields made of grasses, wheat, poppies, etc. They looked pretty good and had the advantage of using only one prim, which helps me keep my prim count low. (You can only have a certain number of prims per land parcel in Second Life.) So I bought some boxes of them and went back to the island.

Unfortunately, the fields I bought are "no copy" which means once I use them, I have to go buy more, which I knew before I bought them. The real downfall of these prims was that they cannot be modified, which means I couldn't resize them or reshape them. This was quite a problem because the long lots in El Cerrito are NOT uniform rectangles or squares of any particular dimension. And because of the transparency used in the single-prim fields, they are also difficult to see unless you are at the right angle in the sim. You couldn't really see them from an aerial view.

So, I looked at El Cerrito in Google Earth to see what they actually look like from an aerial view, and decided to just lay out some flat prims to represent the long lots. I figured I would go back and texture them with something simple later. The first thing I realized was that there was not room enough in the sim to be totally realistic, which was sad because the long lots in real life have been mapped out, and there are historical/geographical/cultural reasons that they look the way they do in real life. But this is one of the constraints that you work with in Second Life, and I decided that as long as I illustrated "the why" of it for some of the lots, the whole thing didn't need to be an exact replica.



After laying out flattened/stretched cubes to placemark the long lots, I then went into photoshop to make textures for them. I used some of my own photographs of the long lots, and the texture filter in Photoshop to create what I thought looked like fields. Then in Second Life I just placed the textures on top of the flattened cubes and used the color tool in SL to vary them. In the end, I also ended up putting the one-prim fields that I had bought on top of some of my colored and flattened cube fields. Turns out that they are much more visible against different colored backgrounds.



I still wish I had been able to actually map the lots out to match real life, and in working with textures and seeing some of AM Radio's builds, I am thinking that I need to rethink how I shaped the island, and use some textured gigantic prims to create the isolation effect, and therefore be able to make the village and the long lots to scale. I have also learned that you can't just look at someone else's style, and then go trash your island because you "don't know what to do" and could never do anything THAT cool. Second Life is so new, that you just start learning how this type of stuff works, and you start experimenting, and that's when you wind-up doing something no one else has seen. Sometimes you have to just kind of go your own way.

Building Lessons

I started building the school house. I learned as I went. The first lesson learned was that it is easier to build using the default world orientation and then rotating the entire build later to where you actually want it. This makes lining up walls, etc. much easier than trying to build on the actual spot at the actual angle you will end up using.

For my first school house, I used all prim objects. For instance, if I wanted a transparent window, then I used a hollowed prim, and then bought pre-textured prim windows from a second life vendor. For my actual schoolhouse texture, I sampled a photograph of the actual school house, and used that one image to texture everything. The result was an obvious pattern on the wall. I went back through trying to add repeats to make it look less stretched and more textured, but could never get rid of the obvious pattern. The roof was tough to figure out, and I have to admit that Troy Vogel (Emin) had to build the first one, so I could see how he did it. Even then, it was hard to get the roof just right. We used an in-world texture to make it look like like a metal roof.


After attending a Second Life/NMC conference, I learned how some of the "pro-builders" utilize textures they have made in Photoshop, and I decided that I should try again. I learned so much from this process: transparency channels, masking, how to stretch a texture across several prims, and a lot of other wonderful things. But I still wasn't getting what I wanted. I as trying to use oen texture for two large prims, and the texture would get stretched until it was no longer recognizable. I was using fewer prims, but it just didn't look right. I realized quickly what was happening and abandoned the effort. I didn't even bother trying to do a roof for it.

I finally figured things out enough to have a final version with which I am currently happy. My math skills, my understanding of vectors, my understanding of photoshop masks and alpha channels, and my understanding of how to texture in Second Life have all vastly improved. My final school building uses 6 textures, a set of prim walls that are sized fairly equally so that the texture I applied looks the same across the board. The doors are hollowed cube prims taht you can walk through, but the windows are actually a texture I made in photoshop using an alpha channel for transparency. I later went in and boxed the windows in with hollowed cube prims to get a more 3-D effect. I no longer have texture patterns, there are no repeats in the textures for the server to calculate (which makes it take longer to "rez"), and it is a fully functioning building that can be entered by avatars. Each build becomes easier and easier the more I understand how things work. Still had problems with the roof, though, which Emin helped me out with. Below is an image of the finshed product, as well as an image of the real school building from a photograph.


My next goal is to finish out the 3 other buildings that are "important", and then I will concentrate on terraforming with textures. I have so much to learn.