Tinker Belle was not named Tinkerbell!

Brochure: This lovely waterfall has become a gathering place for the pixies and the fireflies, the particles have to be seen to be believed. The water is brand new custom made sculpty prims so it actually ripples down the rocks. Buy it now.

Story: OK, so SecondLife came out with a new feature called sculpted prims around this time. I was extremely curious about these things as the detail capable in them was something that seemed really amazing. So I set out to mess with them. I started by buying a bunch of sculpt maps on SLX and seeing what people were coming up with. The thing with sculpted prims is that the actual 3d shape is a sphere. But the appearence to people looking at it is determined by a gradient texture map inherent in how you build the prim. So I started looking for ways to design my own sculpted prims.

The programs I used ranged from Blender to Maya to Wings3d, there are serious people who love all of these but for what I wanted to do I found many of them to be too full featured. The idea behind sculpties is that you first build the 3d shape you want the sphere to appear as in a 3d modeling program outside of SecondLife that then spits out the map so you can use it inside. I ended up finding the programs I wanted in Rokuro & Tokoroten. These are free programs that work kind of like the old playdough tools we used to have as kids. The one I used to design the falls was Tokoroten, I made a wavy map that had the backside flat, so it looked like the waves actualy rippled over rough surfaces underneath. From there it was a matter of animating the texture of water so it flowed 'down' the texture. Then I added rocks with my custom firefly particle texture. Again this is just the free particle script from the lsl wiki tweaked to what I want.

I really love this bit of landscape and the model is a dear friend named Arhiya that often runs around as a pixie. By the way, if you want to know about the title, this link will show you, but the applicable quote is, "Remember that Tinker Bell is magic. And when you say she mends the pots and pans -- that's why her name is Tinker -- she does it with pixie dust!"

I think we should all take a lesson from that, "DO IT WITH PIXIE DUST!"


I'm off to find a pixie, next time I'll go through the particle script and show you how I changed it.