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!