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.
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