Introducing "Ion," Fabb's first and tiniest home for sale

Yes, yes, I know, I've been terrible this summer at keeping up with my Second Life promises; I keep sporadically jumping on here to announce that things are back in swing, just to never update again for another month or two, just to announce yet again that things are back in swing. But seriously, things are back in swing again! For real this time! And that's because, unfortunately, my other Mac here at home finally fatally crashed; not my main Mini I use every day, but my old G3, which unfortunately was the only computer I had with Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, InDesign, Flash Professional, etc), so losing all that software means me having to shut down my arts center's proposed new publishing program and virtual photography gallery, for now at least, which were the projects mainly stealing my time away from Fabb here, my proposed Second Life prefabricated housing company. So anyway, my promise to myself this week is to get enough work done in SL each day to at least justify a new blog entry here, so I can start building up an audience again here, i.e. a potential customer base, and start heavily promoting the upcoming line of Fabb homes that will soon (I promise!) be for sale.





I've been spending the year so far futzing around on various housing designs and ideas, but never getting any finally finished and ready to sell; so recently I decided screw it, that pointedly for the purpose of finally starting to generate some revenue, I'd tackle the very most basic, simple, cheap idea for a prefab home I have, something designed specifically for tiny starter plots that owners wish to heavily landscape. It's called the "Ion," and you're seeing just the roughest beginning version of it in the photos above and below; as you can see, it's not much more than a gazebo with walls and a roof, its footprint the same 10 by 10 meters that is the largest a single prim can be stretched within the Grid, so that I can save on as many prims as possible when actually constructing it.






After all, if you're just some individual beginning player of Second Life, not a business owner or club manager or anything even close to the sort, the only thing you need on your land to be truly happy is at least one central meeting space with the option to provide total privacy if you want (to lock the doors and dim the windows to black, that is, as well as have a roof and four walls). In fact, you can very much think of owning a beginner's 512-square-meter plot of land in the Grid just like owning a profile page at Facebook or MySpace; how it is a central gathering place for yourself of course, while you're actually there doing work, as well as a place where you and your friends can live-chat while you're all online, not to mention a place you can customize/decorate, to show to the world a little bit of yourself. The Ion provides exactly one central meeting space like I'm talking about, seen above, plus an ingenious second-story half-loft space that opens onto a grand outdoor vista (stairway coming); given that furniture is virtual and can be swapped at a moment's notice, that space you're currently looking at can be dolled up as a cozy living room, a dancefloor, an IKEA sex dungeon, an indoor/outdoor pool/spa, a one-person freelance office building, etc etc etc. That's exactly what the Ion is, nothing else and nothing more, offers no more than that, and will cost an inexpensive amount that reflects this (6 dollars/3 pounds/4 euros).





So why put up a tiny little half-house like this in the first place, you might be thinking (the Ion, for those who don't know, takes up only about half the space of a beginner's 512-m2 plot), when you could instead construct an entire house containing one separate room for each of the purposes just mentioned? Well, let's just take my long-owned space in the Grid, for example, seen here above, on the eastern side of the southern continent, inside a massive cove full of upper-class residences I like to call Linden's Vineyard. This is one of the massive temptations behind the Grid, and a big motivation behind owning land there, is to have your own permanent little slice of view like the above, to be able to build on that space and decorate it any way you want, to really feel like a "citizen" of that massive virtual world there. (In fact, if I can be digressive for a moment....All that water you see off in the distance? That's all part of a responsive, persistent environment; if I was on a decent home gaming computer, I could literally log in one night, rez up a sailboat, go sailing off into that nighttime water in the distance, sightsee and meander and hit rapids for two hours straight, and literally reach the north continent at the end, just like the persistent 3D "real" environment the Grid is. It's why Second Life is often called the "middle-ager's Grand Theft Auto," meant usually as an insult when said but I think quite reflective of what's so nice about a place like the Grid, and why so many people want to own permanent virtual land there. Okay, digression over!)

My point is -- if you happened to own a beginner's 512-m2 plot here in Linden's Vineyard, overlooking the scene we're seeing above, you might be tempted as many are to use as much of that small space as possible for maybe some underwater landscaping or merely some breathing room, and to use the extra prim allowance of a tiny building to be able to rez up a sailboat whenever you want (for example). A lot of people find this a much nicer idea than simply trying to enjoy the above view from essentially a big brick, taking up every square inch of their 512 plot and allowing only the roof for a sense of space. I'm willing to bet that for the price, there are a lot of beginning players of Second Life that will be interested in something like the Ion, especially once I have it constructed and for sale in the five different color/texture combos I've come up with (matching the various common environments within the Grid -- beach, sky, water, urban, and forest).

Anyway, so more and more each day on what you've just seen, with hopefully a daily new update here at the Fabb blog concerning the latest; and maybe in just a week from now, Ion actually finished and starting to be sold? That's the whole idea; try to actually start bringing in real revenue as soon as possible. Sheesh, I need a new computer! That's why I want to get on the ball finally about all this, so I can finally start bringing in some income and maybe finally get a decent gaming computer into my house.

Okay, see you tomorrow, hopefully!

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!

Asimov at night (one possible configuration)

I was logged into the Grid the other night, and thought I'd snap a few photos of my starter home "Asimov" under evening conditions while I was there; after all, I'm about to empty the model home again, so to free up some prims and do some more construction, and figured I'd get some images taken of the set-up as long as it's still set up. And indeed, this is something I want to emphasize over and over here at the blog about these latest batches of images, that the furniture and lights you see are from other companies and do not come with the house itself; in fact, this is something I do deliberately, in that I think one of the most fun things about being in Second Life is all the excuses there are for incidental shopping (for things like furniture, clothing, jewelry, land, etc etc), a simple joy I don't want to take away from customers by loading the prefabs down with premade furniture.

That said, I'm hoping as soon as possible to get some furniture and lamps/chandeliers designed on my own, to be able to sell through Fabb; as big a fan as I am of the furniture you've seen, for example, I have to admit that they're complete prim-hogs, clearly designed for giant estates and full of unnecessary flourishes that sometimes add dozens of unneeded prims to a piece. I figure that I can make some stuff almost as nice but at a fraction of the prim count; they can then be marketed at the store and online at the same time as the starter homes themselves, for those looking to optimize on prim-count as much as possible.

Anyway, so I'm off after this entry to the Grid yet again, this time to sit down and finally teach myself everything there is to know about artificial lights in Second Life; that will let me create my own chandeliers that will look like the third-party ones seen in the above images, as well as candles, floor lamps, embedded lights for the rooms themselves, and all kinds of other nice little touches concerning the finished houses. And if I'm feeling like it, I'll even take screenshots along the way and write up everything I learn as a little tutorial for here at the blog! You see what I do for you people!?

First look: Fabb Asimov, furnished, part 2

(This is part two of a report I started yesterday, taking a first look at "Asimov," one of the first prefabricated homes I'll be selling through Fabb, shown fully furnished here as if it were actually on a customer's estate already. Please read part 1 if you'd like today's half to make more sense.)


Okay, so here we finally are at what I'm hoping will be a really striking "signature element" of Fabb buildings; a dedicated space inside the homes themselves, that is, to do traditional-style landscaping, either water- or land-based depending on the model purchased. And why is this so important to me? Well, because of a conversation I had with my friend Jim here in Chicago about six months ago, back when I was tooling around with Fabb's first house designs but not yet serious about starting up an actual business.


Jim mentioned that, although he liked the designs I was coming up with at the time, it also seemed to him that there's an awful lot of Modernist architecture in the Second Life Grid these days, precisely because the building tools in SL promote the use of clean, boxy, Euclidean building blocks in which to create constructions. It's certainly not the only type of architecture you find in the Grid, not by a long shot; just that it's an easy style to pull off, and so therefore populates the low-end section of SL's prefab market like a weed, with the Grid full of cheap cookie-cutter homes that all look at least semi-decent, because of it not taking much under the rules of Modernism for something to look halfway decent.


Jim inspired me to go back and really think again about what exactly landowners are looking for in their prefab housing; of what could be most useful to them, what they would build themselves if they couldn't find it for sale. And I realized, that for a lot of beginning land owners who are in the middle of one of those vast "512 ghettos" you find on the mainland (where an entire suburb's worth of land, that is, is cut into hundreds and hundreds of beginner 512-square-meter rectangular lots in an endless grid), it is simple noise pollution from the neighbors that is the most persistent issue -- of those hundreds and hundreds of other beginner plots directly around you, that is, filled with all manner of 100-foot-high neon-green penises and all the other loveliness you find all over the unzoned, unchecked Grid.


For many beginner land owners, their first home is not so much an aesthetic reflection as it is a simple barrier against the chaotic land around them; a fortress that blocks out all the craziness while they're at home, allowing them to instead blacken the windows and dial down their draw distance and have simple fun parties with their friends. In such an environment, then, any customized landscaping a person does will naturally have to take place outside the actual home, breaking the fortress illusion they're trying so hard to maintain; I figure that what a lot of these types of people would enjoy would be a chance to do some landscaping actually inside their home/fortress, giving them all the fun of making a garden or pond or tiny island or tiny forest, but within their "safe space" where their view is not constantly clashing against the giant green penises and all the rest of the junk found in 512 ghettos. I'm hoping, then, to enmesh such a thing in some way or another in all the buildings I end up creating, which will hopefully make Fabb stand out more; not just another of the hundred Modernist prefab companies out there, but one with a few extra "oomphs" not seen in most of the micro-businesses.


Anyway, enough of that -- let's make our way to the second floor finally, shall we? Here it is from the viewpoint of the top of the stairs, looking sideways along the home's length; as you can see, it contains a lot less floor space than the first floor, a space mostly for overflow from parties, the installation of something small like a dining-room set or bed, etc.


Another shot of the second floor, this time looking in the opposite direction. Notice there on the left, how I'm once again trying to do interesting things with the concept of space and flow within my homes; how while you're in the bottom half of that landscaping area, the space feels very formalist and boxed-in, while by the time you get to the top of the stairs the space blooms into a bright, expansive aerie.


Here, just one of the things a homeowner could do with a space like this -- set up a dining-room set, for interesting-looking views from above during conversations with friends.


And here, yet another option for the second floor, as a bedroom of sorts. Frankly, this is another must-have space for a lot of residents, a bedroom space for animated sexual activities, a big activity among a whole lot of residents. This is where the window-tint feature of Fabb's homes will come into play; by the time this house is for sale to the general public, there will be a button on the wall you can press repeatedly, to dial through various tint shades on the windows from fully transparent to fully opaque.


Yet another shot from the second floor, right at the doorway to the upper patio and looking back towards the interior stairs.




And then here's the upper patio itself, a great place to set one's teleport-landing spot for example, as well as just to hang out and talk with friends. You can't have a SL house, after all, without tons and tons of patios; otherwise what's the point of owning a house in SL in the first place?!


And then finally, a full-length shot of the back of the house, with the camera set up perfectly perpendicular to the home itself. Ahhhh, all my geeky little geometric Modernist wet dreams, suddenly come to life.


Anyway, so that's it for now; what's next, then, is to get a fine-tuned editing done of Asimov's walls and windows, as well as all the scripts installed that will animate it all. Then a tutorial on lights, so I can create some lamps and chandeliers; and then hopefully my first Fabb machinima, showing all the newest crap off in glorious real-time animation. See you!

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!