Tapestry ~ My Parent's Place - Modeling Real Life Structures

Brochure: This home was inspired by my parents RL house, a very well textured design this has one room downstairs, a nice kitchen with lighting and a gorgeous formal upstairs. All of this done with Tru 3d textures.

This house is 25x30 and wieghs in at 47 prims.

Story: So after I finished Sandra's Place I thought it might be interesting to try and model real life houses I was familiar with. In all actuality at this point I was running out of steam and was trying to find inspiration anywhere I could. I had noticed these textures at TRU and really liked them so I used my Parent's new home as a floorplan model for this design. I learned quite a bit about building from this one, stairs were a new process and setting up the flow correctly took quite a bit of work. This is a nicely detailed little home but like most things it looks almost nothing like it's real world counterpart. Making the transition from Real Life to Second Life is actually quite difficult.

The kitchen in this unit was actually quite an experiment for me, using a commercial lighting script. I'm not entirely happy with it but it did teach me even more about scripting and the effect of lighting on good design. The scripts themselves are no modify so I can't learn exactly what he did to create them, although I've reverse engineered it since. I can understand why he did that but it took alot of effort to get those hanging bulbs to look right and I've not used the script since in any of my builds.

One major problem I see alot of new designers make is not making rooms big enough. The biggest Prim building block you can make in Second Life is 10 meters square. This seems big enough and so many builders make their rooms exactly that size. The problem is that the camera bumps into walls at that size, the adjustment level is enough to drive most people crazy. A small adjustment to 12 meters square seems to solve all camera related problems, but it means you have to use more prims. I've gotten into the habit of making large open rooms, and if someone wants to make them smaller then they will. I believe that's why you see so many open or studio floorplans in Second Life. Then again, we buy houses with roofs and it never rains, so maybe it's just genetic. Or maybe we don't want those flying avatars to see what we're up to.