Lights in Second Life: They're not as hard as you think

Okay, so I finally sat down this weekend and taught myself the basics of artificial lighting in Second Life; and it turns out, in fact, that the subject is not that difficult to understand, with there basically being some very basic controls that work very intuitively that make all artificial lights in SL work. In fact, about the only basic thing to be aware of at the start of the process is what you're seeing above; that flipping on a prim's "full bright" option is a different thing than turning on its "lights," with the first just making the object itself look like it's glowing but the second actually providing the glow. Other than that, though, it's just a basic menu in the "more" section of any prim; once there, you'll see a series of controls for such things as light color, intensity, falloff distance and more.





Just like a lot of things in Second Life, then, the truly complicated part of artificial lighting is in the finessing of the numbers and colors, to achieve the exact right look you want for that exact right space. Here above, for example, is the same light seen from the same angle in two scenarios, one with its intensity at maximum and the other at minimum.



As you can see, then, after stumbling across an appropriate texture in some back folder of my inventory, in literally thirty seconds I was able to make a pretty decent-looking simple Asian lantern; this is the exact same kind of lamp you see selling all over the Grid for usually around a quarter or so, something that's just ridiculously easy to put together yourself on a Saturday afternoon.







As you can see above, then, when I gave myself just a little more time (around 20 minutes in this case), I was able to crank out a pretty nice little floor lamp, the same kind you see sold elsewhere for 50 cents or a dollar or whatever. Dedicate an entire Saturday to something like this, then, and you can easily put together a whole house full of basic furniture, stuff that will never sell for much money on their own but that continually adds to the "long tail" of your operation, an absolute must for making money within an economy of virtual merchandise like the Grid.









In just another twenty or so minutes, then, I was also able to whip together a pretty nice little chandelier thingie for this particular home's main aerie; and this is with each lamp only using two prims, too. Granted, this is a fairly simple look, and a lot more can be done regarding the subject; considering, though, that I was able to do this in twenty minutes on my very first day of learning about lights, I think is a pretty impressive thing about the ease of the light system there.







As you can see here, then, the layout of this particular house means that such a chandelier ends up providing the majority of lighting the homeowner needs for a nighttime situation, requiring only a few floor lamps and candles to finish it all. This essentially gives a homeowner most of the lighting they need using as few prims as possible, something I'm always trying to keep in mind with Fabb's starter homes.



By the way, it's not just "lamps" that can have lighting effects added to them; any prim, in fact, can have its lighting effects turned on at any time. Check out here, for example, my Jackson Pollock print that generates its own lighting; pretty cool.



Anyway, hope this entry has been of some help to those who have been a little intimidated by the idea of artificial lights in the Grid and how to properly create them; as you can see, the basics of the subject really are a lot simpler than you'd expect. By the way, I got a lot of other stuff done this weekend as well, including finally teaching myself how to create my own waterfalls (versus using commercial ones I've purchased in the past, like I've been doing so far); it means that with a little work, I should finally have my first fully-finished house finished up sometime this week, and will be ready to start making the versions for all the other color schemes available. (For those who don't know, all Fabb buildings will eventually come in a variety of color and texture schemes, inspired by the different environments found int the Grid; Urban, Forest, Noir, Sky, Sand, and more.) See you later!

First look: Fabb Asimov, furnished, part 1

So although I hope for Fabb to eventually offer all kinds of different prefabricated buildings for sale, from starter homes to mansions and even retail environments, I've decided at first to start on the smaller side of things; that's who constitutes the majority of prefab home buyers, after all, are beginning players with beginning plots who don't know enough yet about building to create their own home, who are willing to spend maybe US$5 to 10 for a nicely-done house but not much more than that. I've decided, then, to get a total of three small homes finished before declaring Fabb open for business; today's entry concerns the largest of these three initial homes, the one I'm calling the "Asimov."


As you can see, the Asimov will technically fit on a starter plot of 512 square meters (or 30 x 15), but is realistically designed more for estates of the 1000- to 2000-m2 size; it's a 70-prim building, after all, taking up over half the prim count of a 512-m2 plot but only a third of a 1024 one. (For those who don't know, you can only erect a maximum amount of "prims," or primitive shapes such as boxes and cylinders, on any given piece of land, 117 prims per 512 square meters; this is how Linden Lab makes sure that no particular piece of land there is overtaxing the physical server it's located on.) This is the constant battle that SL land owners are going through, then, of how much of their prim count to devote to a house, how much to landscaping, how much to furniture, how much to a vehicle, etc etc etc. And that's why this will be the largest of the first three homes as well, so as with the other ones to give land owners as many prims as possible for other things; the smallest of the three, for example, will consist of no more than 30 or so prims, which on a 512-m2 plot would leave almost 90 prims left for landscaping and furniture.


In these photos, for example, I have rezzed the house on a 1,536-m2 plot, not an unusual size at all for someone who plays SL daily and takes the environment seriously; between the home and the furniture you're seeing, I have almost all the 350 prims allowed on this space maxxed out, or in other words around 280 prims' worth of furniture alone. It's important to understand that as you look at these photos; that even though this house will technically fit on a 512-m2 plot, you wouldn't nearly have the prim count left over to rez the amount of furniture seen here. (With a larger estate, though, it's not only possible but easy.) Of course, there's also the danger of using images illegally, like I am here with this Jackson Pollock painting adorning the front patio of the house; that's why the Pollock painting doesn't come with the house itself, but is merely a decoration on the model home to show an example of what can be done with the space.


So then here's what you see to your right when you first come in the home -- the main living space, that is, around 150 square meters in size, where a person can put together a main living-room set of furniture like you're seeing here. This is an important part of owning a home in SL, I've found; having at least one space within it where you and your friends can sit around "looking" at each other while chatting, versus your avatars standing around and blankly staring into space. It's the small things, really, that most transport all the niceties and details of real life into an SL environment.


And then here's what you see at the front door if you look left; the door to the back porch, the stairs to the second floor, and of course the signature indoor landscaping space, something I'm hoping along with elaborate waterfalls to make an ongoing feature of Fabb constructions. But more on all that in a bit.






All right, so here we are in the living-room space! Like I said, this is an extremely important space to have in a prefabricated home within SL; a 3D equivalent of a chat room, that is, where you and your friends can gather your avatars when having a group chat, something that gives the physical semblance of you all sitting around and actually having a conversation, since that's what you're precisely doing at the time through text and voice. It's just one of the things I've noticed about the Grid after being there myself for almost two years, that there are certain simple elements that come up as important time and time again with all kinds of different residents; and this is definitely one of them, a central gathering space, something I encourage all virtual architects to build into their creations there.






All right, so out the back door of the house we go, and onto the back patio. And here you can see a good example of something else I hope to make a signature detail of Fabb buildings, is a complex interplay between "outdoor" and "indoor" space within finished homes; note, for example, how the roof of the second floor creates a natural cavern-like patio space here in the back of the house, an intimacy as if the space were enclosed but with it not actually being enclosed, and in fact with the option to remove the wall-sized windows if you want and make the entire first floor a breezy exotic indoor/outdoor space simultaneously. I'm hoping to build such elements into all eventual Fabb creations, something I hope especially useful for those installing such homes in forest environments as elaborate treehouses.




And then here, yet another detail that I hope to make a signature element of Fabb homes; a complex waterfall, like I said, that I'm hoping in the future to get even more complex as far as it winding in and out of the house itself, one I finally take some classes on waterfall creation and get a lot better at building them. Why waterfalls? Why not? They're just as cheap to install as anything else in a digital environment, look impressive to the easily tricked human eye (who automatically thinks of waterfalls in private homes as flashy and expensive), and are animated so even look cool within SL itself.


As mentioned, I'm purposely leaving the interior of Fabb houses as blank as possible, specifically because a big part of the fun in SL concerns interior design one you actually have a house built, and of course the subsequent shopping to go find the perfect furniture to begin with. Here, for example, I'm using a simple series of minimalist Asian chairs, envisioning a home where mostly it will be quiet conversations among friends going on out here; but you could easily place a dining-room set out here, a dancefloor, an extension to a pool or garden if you were on land, or all kinds of other things.


And here I guess I will leave things for today, contemplating yet another perfect sunset on the South Continent where I live, and where Fabb's eventual retail store will be. Tomorrow, part 2 of this first look at the furnished Asimov, detailing the second floor and roof. Thanks for coming by!

Fabb: An introduction

Greetings to anyone who's coming across this blog for the first time; my name is Miller Copeland, otherwise known in real life (RL) as Jason Pettus, owner and right now sole employee of the Fabb prefabricated housing company for the videogame Second Life (SL). You've come across the official blog for Fabb, where throughout the year I'll be posting news, photos and videos concerning the latest with the company; and since this is the very first entry of the new blog, I thought I'd take the opportunity to explain a little more about me, my history with SL, and the aims of Fabb in particular.

I've actually been a resident of SL now since spring 2006; what I did for my first year there was actually run an arts-and-culture publication called In The Grid, which covered not the workings of SL itself but rather the activities of its most interesting artists, programmers, sex workers and more. ITG was an extremely fun blog to maintain, and definitely had its share of readers in its heyday (actually being ranked at its height by Technorati.com as the 13th most popular blog about SL on the planet); but unfortunately the game client for SL itself kept getting more and more complex and bloated during that same time period, eventually becoming almost impossible to run on my piddly little Mac Mini here at home in RL Chicago. I was unemployed at the time, so couldn't justify buying a brand-new computer just to play SL, especially when my Mini worked just fine for everything else in my life I do with a computer; and this all happened in spring 2007 as well, at the same time I first opened what has now become my main day job, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (CCLaP). For all these reasons, then, I decided in April of that year to finally shut down ITG probably for good; and it was also then that I got out of the habit of porting into the Grid on a regular basis, the situation that existed all the way to winter 2008.

It was in January of this year, in fact, that for the first time since getting my beginner's plot a year previous, one of my neighbors decided to sell land that was directly adjacent to mine; I ended up buying it off them, raising my total land ownership in the Grid to 1,536 square meters, meaning that I now would have to pay a monthly "property tax" to Linden Lab for the first time. I used this additional expense, then, as an excuse to finally get serious about a small-business idea I've had for awhile now, a prefab housing company specifically inspired by Modernist architecture from the 1950s and '60s, but also containing space-age elements and other physics-defying details one can only accomplish in the Grid. My goals are real simple for now, to merely make at least the US$8 a month I now have to pay as a property tax on my virtual land; and since I enjoy obsessively detailing things, I thought I'd go ahead and get the Fabb blog up before any other aspect of the finished company, so that I can actually share the details of setting up the company itself.

I encourage people to drop me a line if they'd like at ilikejason [at] gmail.com; or just keep coming by the blog, where over the next couple of weeks I will be getting into Fabb's philosophy, posting a ton of photos of the company's first three houses, and explaining more about how for a short time you'll be able to earn a free house if you're interested. For now, though, I welcome you, thank you for coming by from wherever it is you came from, and invite you to come by again on a regular basis (or just subscribe to the RSS feed and be done with it -- I make it a full feed just for that reason). Oh, and if you're curious about the dual-gender portrait seen in this entry, I happen to be what's known as an "omnisexual" in SL; that is, I exist as both genders there, and switch between bodies on a whim depending on my mood, two halves of what should ultimately be considered one person. I mostly exist as a woman in the Grid, to tell you the truth, despite being a male in RL, mostly because women's fashions are a lot cooler and more interesting there than men's; needless to say, the gender reversal has led to all kinds of interesting situations and realizations in my life over the last two years, especially into the ways that men treat women when there are no other men around to see them. Yes, I'm very upfront about my real-life gender while in SL, even when rezzed as a woman; the times I play a female there are strictly for the fun of it, not to pull a fast one over anyone in particular.