In Tent City Intensity

I still need tents. I shopped around in SL for some, but none of the dome tents have mod permissions and they are HUGE (I guess the purpose of their size is so that avatars can actually go inside of them.) So the only tents available are the tee-pee kind, and that just doesn't look right to me. So back to drawing tents.

I decided that I should just try making them out of cylinder prims, and then just texturing each face with a tent-like texture. I want to get the tents out of the way so I can focus on the scripting that my interactive ideas for this area are going to require. We have the showNtell meeting coming up in a couple of days and I want to be able to show an area of the sim that is mostly finished.

While my prim tents were not as sad as my sculpted tents, I still am not satisfied. It's funny how I thought the tents would be so simple, but I would seriously rather build and texture a whole house at this point. So the only thing to do is go to my good buddy Steve and get him to do some "nerb" magic in the Maya application (which someday I hope to learn!)

While Steve was working on the tent sculpts, I started figuring out how I want visitors to interact with our sim. I have a ton of video from past trips to El Cerrito that I used in the Google Earth part of this project, and I would like to reproduce that in Second Life on a higher level. But I don't want big video screens laying around all over the place taking away from the feel of El Cerrito.

By the end of the day, Steve has given me tent sculpt maps and textures, and I have decided to "hide" the video screens in parent objects by making them small until an avatar is detected to being within a certain amount of meters from the object, at which point it will become big and show the videos. I will start working on the scripts next week.




So, my tents or Steve tents?? ......hmmmmm....not a difficult choice. I'm going with Steve Lux's Luxury Tents!