Build it and they will come…
"We're on the road to nowhere"
Yes, it has been a while, it is not that I have not been busy, just had other priorities than blogging about it I guess. Linear time is an interesting beast – things get in the way of other things and before you know it you have lost touch … neways.
Am puddling away on “Obscura” the Builders sandbox in MyWorld and have started laying out plots for our student builders to use, land subdivision is time consuming, but laying out some order now will help keep it clean later I think.
I have this idea for a builders academy, a sculpture park … more next post on that.
As part of “Year of Sustainability” we are making an eco-disaster “school” in Northern Obscura. I decided that power poles were necessary to feed their voracious need for electricity, so fired up trusty Wings3D and sculpted one (starting with a cylinder and being organised in my mesh warping – very happy with the results. Still have to work out how I might string power lines between them, but that is for another time I guess. The scene to the left reminded me of a Talking Heads song “Road to nowhere” which it feels like when walking that end of Obscura’s northern arterial road.
Neways, Obscura North Middle-School is taking shape, and I thought it high time I reflected on the technique I use to make large buildings. On reflection, as I walk around it reminds me of the old brick building that formed the original precinct of Brisbane State High (which was my reference structure incidentally – only the facts have been changed to protect the innocent :P).
Plan, plan and plan, then, when building, change everything – lol. Sorry, sounds flippant and it is not meant to. I plan the superstructure but often ideas for detailing emerge as you are making structures and sometimes they are good ideas as well, more often however they plung you into a special form of hell where you make a change then all too late realise there is NO undo facility. I have become skilled at caching of structure and trying something different in its place only to decide I hate the new thing and rolling the old back into place, if you understand what I mean.
Meet “Sam” the nominal name for our male cybernaut (“pam” is our girl cybernaut until someone thinks of better names at least that do not breach copyright laws or culturally isolate or offend). He is investigating, cute, hey. More importantly, notice the tyre retaining wall replete with weeds and a looming and gloomy brick monstrosity in the background. Multi-story buildings can be easy – build one floor and clone, raise, align and presto – this all goes pearshaped I noticed if you want to do more interesting shapes – assuming X, Y and Z are constants for geometrical pieces is fraught with difficulty, particularly when you re-use a piece flipped, twirled or mirrored.
Plan of attack ...
So this building was originally one big barn, I decided that sucked, so added a portico which will house reception, headmasters office and a teacher staff room (it is a school, remember). The main building is 2 storeys high and each story consists of 8 classrooms organised into west and east tings surrounding a central rear courtyard, connecting corridors and appropriate doors and a central staircase (although that is a pending challenge).
what a drip ... you know it's going to stain
The devil is in the detail you see. I fired up wings and sculpted a tap (again starting with a cylinder that was extruded, scaled, warped, inset, bevelled, smoothed, extrapolated and a bunch of other multisyllabic transformations that I barely understand) – am quite proud of the results actually – it actually looks like a tap. I will add a particle system to make it drip, and the puddle underneath it is animated ripples, pretty hoopy (that is going to leave a stain).
I have found building (in Activeworlds or Secondlife) is a tension between getting the superstructure done and adding details – a tension I have not fully resolved and am so easily drawn off task looking for (or making) a little detail that probably no one else will notice – I love the fiddly bits (in much the same way Slartybartfast loved the crinkly bits around fijords etc) so I rarely build in a very sequential way but there is an organisation there – the result of this is that visitors often think my early building sites are more like bomb-sites. You get that. An added side effect is that I know where thigns are going, the construction usually goes up pretty quickly when I get to it.
So anyways, I had this idea for nice round edge bits strategically located – well, in honesty it was first a divot in the back of the building to make it sort of “U” shaped, creating 2 wings. Then I thought the outer corners might look good rounded off, which led to an interesting roofing dilemma.
irregular roof shapes are a pain
Enuff said, really, conical sections and pyramid sections, and getting them to seamlessly join up with slanted scaled sections led to some interesting uses of some very rude words, until I devised a scheme that harnedssed the northness, eastness and up-down-ness of nearest neighbours … needless to say however there is a solution and you are looking at it with awe and wonderment, I am sure. That said, the majority of the outside of the building is done, bar finessing and accessorizing – there has gotta be bins, junk, an incinerator (does anyone else besides me remember when schools had these?) and associated broken play equipment and other biohazards.
internals work in progress
Superstructure up, windows glassed and scaled in place, we (well, I do, I am not sure someone else has a more sensible way to do this?) move inside. There are a number of imperatives – floors, then walls, then staircases I think. there will be a slightly raised ground floor, ceiling and top floor levels will differ also – it woudl look odd to have carpeted ceilings. These flats will dock with the concrete beams to make neat edges. This will create discrete spaces that then need to be purposed – enriched with literature, web links and other things, so quite a bit to do.
This stuff, although some would find it mundane, interests me greatly. I am constantly surprised how readily I lose all sense of time when working on this (2.30am last night before I looked up and noticed the time). It is like a jigsaw puzzle from hell, but when it coalesces into something usable it is a satisfying feeling. Scale is large as I want to be able to use this place as a meeting place also later (thinking recycling, a general purpose building that can be re-purposed later is good thinking, surely).
