Darb Dabney’s OpenSim Blog

Much detail has taken shape inside Berkurodam BART satation these past two weeks, even as class projects grow in the parcel across the street. I worked with some of my (un-permitted) in-station shots to create photoreal textures, and realized that some of what was not working quite well had to do with transparency. Thanks to site-focused Google searches such as

site:http://forums.secondlife.com transparency

I have become familiar with the sticky posts by Chosen Few and Robin Sojourner, and I’m getting much better use of my Photoshop skills thanks to their clear and to-purpose Howtos. My self-generated texture quality grows slowly through experience. I’ve bumped up against the awkward challenge of transparent texture rendering order (on my X1300Pro graphics card) but I’m sticking with what I’ve done for now. There are just so many features in the BART station that require transparency for completeness.

Thanks to the friendly communications from the group “RL Architects in SL”, I feel a part of a much larger community-within-a-community now. It’s like good Berkeley kharma is rubbing off onto the soles of my avatar’s stubby little feet.

There will soon be some new aerial photos as part of a survey conducted by Alameda county that should enhance the RL site mapping beneath which Berkurodam station is being constructed. I’ve also gained a few anecdotal insights about some of the underground commodities that I will be placing under the streets. My time is getting very tight for the conference presentation, and I must get done with some of the textures that I have sunk loads of time into, and in several cases this constraint is helping me to converge to a level of build quality that is, from among the universe of possible choices, the best that I can do in the time that I have.

Finally, though, I feel that I must comment on my experience of seeing ever more detail in the RL BART station. Every day that I pass through it at lunch, it seems I notice new details that I had never noticed in decades of previous visits. I notice them now because the SL Berkurodam model has acquired enough accuracy to be able to use these details. For example, under the cupola is a ring of brick trim that is four or five feet high. The part of this ring that one faces going down the escalator is nearly vertical, but there is progressively more taper back away from the opening on the parts of the ring near the tops of the escalators. (This surely must read wierdly) Fact is, this detail mattered enough that it made it possible to fit my avatar down the escalator where he got stuck before.

On the underside of this brick-faced ring there is a two-to-three foot space with lights underneath before another lower ring, one that is white and textured like all the arched beams in the mezzanine. As it turns out, I built that lower ring in the correct proportion to avoid the Av interference that I mentioned before. Days later, on one of my walks through the RL station, I realized that it was actually built that way although I hadn’t noted that in my sketches and I hadn’t photographed it for reference either. Despite whatever this tells me about my stunning lack of observational acuity when it comes to architectural interior space, I felt a deep realization that there is something inherenty practical in the level of accuracy that is taking shape in my SL build. It’s not about my build skills, but rather about the potential for detail in the current SL set of prims [attributed 3-d points constrained by Havok Physics engine, version 1].

-=Darb

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