Harper's Big Closet Includes a Pendant Box Ceiling Lamp From Mission Home Store

Monday, February 15, 2016

MHS Booth @ Home and Garden Expo 2013 in Second Life

Friday, May 24, 2013
Home and Garden Expo in Second Life that benefits Relay for Life for American Cancer Socienty has opened its door today on April 24th 2013!.

Please visit the expo, explore, shop and donate. It is all for a great cause!

This year I wanted to participate but did not want to phrase my participating in the form of a store or sales booth. Instead I created a conceptual build. This is my own personal choice and no better than what others did with their lots. At the Expo we all do our thing and enjoy sharing and working for a good cause.

My building is called Post-Architecture. I tried to envision what might happen to architecture if we no longer needed shelter, we no longer needed the typical rooms in our homes (bedroom, bathroom, kitchen etc.), in a world where gravity did not really pull objects down, a life where people could fly and never slept or exercised. When architecture loses all the functions it serves, what does it become? A vanity? A whim? Or perhaps an entity that never materializes or takes solid concrete shape...

In a way, I wanted to communicate that perhaps the building would be stuck in a state of flux between the blueprint and the reality -- it would perhaps fold in on itself like an accordion. Or perhaps build and rebuild itself creating wrinkles and folds.

The concept is undoubtedly influenced by some of the ideas of Jorn Utson, the architect of the Sydney Opera House and Lebbeus Wood whose work I first encountered as a teen and to this stay plays a strong influence in my artwork. I also wanted to depart from my usual very traditional style builds and explore and share the results.

In the midst of my excitement to do something new, I forgot that our theme this year was Greek Villages from the Mediterranean. When it came time to install my booth, I felt it was my duty to tie my area to the rest of the theme. So you will notice a little Greek neighborhood and a little outside living area as a part of my build. In the end I think it all fit well together.

Please visit the Home Expo and make donations or purchases. All proceeds go to the American Cancer Society.

If you would like to visit my booth, specifically, the slurl is:

MHS Stall at Home And Garden Expo 2013

Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013
Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013
Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013
Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013_021Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013_022Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013_023Mission Home Store Home Expo Stall 2013_024

Hiatus

Monday, August 27, 2012
Hello everyone.

After doing several events back to back between March and July, I needed to take some time off and rest and spend some time away from SL.

I also used to this time to think what the next steps are for me as a creator in SL. Do I want to continue running the Mission Home Store? I actually keep it open these days more as a public service than a profit generator as the sales do not really warrant such a large store. I do not however feel comfortable abandoning my followers and leave them without a source for great furniture.

I am currently working on creating a classroom simulation for a client. It is going to take most of my time during September. If it all goes as planned, look for a link to the project here on this blog at the end of September.

Until then I will be back to being quiet and working on my own.

Thanks for staying with me. Let's see what interesting projects the rest of this year and 2013 will bring -- that is if the universe does not end :-)

RFL Designer Sim Award

Sunday, July 15, 2012

I am a much humbled recipient of the Designer Sim Award at this year's Relay for Life. What a treat it's been working on this project with such wonderful organizers and participants.

I am speechless but much honored and thankful that my build came out well and it was well received.

Go Relay!

Relay for Life Exhibit: July 14-July 18th 2012

Friday, July 13, 2012


My latest contribution to the Second Life community comes in the form of a half simulator build for Relay for Life 2012.

The Concept of the Build:

I have a half sim exhibit that's dedicated to my grandmother and her fight with cancer in the early eighties. This year is the thirtieth anniversary of her passing. I wanted to build an exhibit that not only was a monument of sorts but a storytelling device that builds awareness of what cancer patients and families of cancer patients go through.

The story is told from the point of view of a child, an 8 year old who probably was younger still at heart when he lost his grandmother.

The eight vignettes are enveloped in Greco Roman Columns and niches that provide a noble frame for what's going on inside each vignette. This signifies the demi god like characteristics of cancer patients -- fighting forces of nature, time and pain.

The vignettes also elevate and separate what's happening in each vignette from the surroundings without completely disconnecting it all from each other. This signifies the basic truth of how we lead these insular lives and experiences as individuals and families but we are all in this together and no matter what happens in that vignette (life), it all fits into something bigger and beautiful.

The larger build in red signifies this bigger world around us, the universe, an envelope, a cache, it ends where it begins and thefore is endless. It could be tiled on forever and so is the nature of my design.

The two globes with light shining out from them signify this world and the nonphysical world spinning to their own beat but mirroring each other perhaps in reverence much like two dancers sharing the same dance floor.

The central tower signifies, eternal light, the singularity of spirit and the majestic perseverance of the soul knowing no boundaries limits or heights in this case as seen by the tower that seems to go forever into the sky and finally explodes out in rings in all directions defying ascent in a single axis and spread in all three instead.

To visit my exhibit, please teleport to the following slurl: 
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/RFL%20Awareness/120/133/23

Be a Part of the Exhibit & Share!
All vignettes except for one, invite the visitors to participate by posing in the display, taking photographs and e mailing them to me at steelskyblue at-sign gmail.com. I will be posting them to the flickr set I dedicated to this event at:
http://www.flickr.com//photos/missionhomestore/sets/72157630549003252/show/



Here's the Slideshow for the Relay for Life Troy Vogel Exhibit Snapshots:
I went ahead and took a few myself to get things started.



It's time to RELAY FOR LIFE!

SL9B: Virtual Learning Spaces @ TXSTATE Booth

Tuesday, June 19, 2012
I am proud to announce that my team at Texas State University - San Marcos has been once again invited to join the Second Life birthday celebrations in 2012! This year it is SL9B -- 9th birthday of Second Life. And what a great time it is to celebrate!

Second Life never looked better, performed better. Lindens chose not to host the event this year. This move sent a mixed message at first but it gave us, the community in SL, a chance to organize our own event and show the world that the residents of SL have a socially sound and strong community -- one robust enough to organize an event of this magnitude.

I must say the organization committee (Doctor Gascoigne. KT Syakumi. Diana Renoir. Honour Macmillan. Marianne McCann. Rails Bailey. Crap Mariner.) and Saffia Widdershins from the Prim Perfect magazine rallied the troops and pulled it all together in perfect timing and harmony. The celebrations exceed 20 sims and the entertainment schedule is jampacked!

The resident exhibits are a beautiful quilt of various backgrounds, artistic points of view and all walks of life that march on in Second Life. The exhibits show us the variety of ways SL can serve its users and how ultimately it is all about connecting and building community.

Here's a clip of the opening ceremony featuring Saffia's address to the SL9B community:






Below are some of the exhibits I have photographed during my explorations.(I am not done yet taking pictures, I will be adding to this set during this week)






Our exhibit features a 3D chart of sorts documenting how our team at Texas State University - San Marcos developed a simulation of a historically significant yet geographically remote village in New Mexico in Google Earth, Second Life, OpenSim and Unity Engine over the course of last few years.
The simulations created were used as a part of a hybrid online course taught at our university and the Second Life sim (txstate ii) was used as the main classroom where students and instructor met for lectures and class activities asynchronously and synchronously.

Below are some screen shots from our exhibit at the SL9B.




To teleport to our display please use the following slurl: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/DreamSeeker%20SL9B%20Devet/143/30/22

Presented at TXDLA and USLA Conference in April 2012

It's been a long time since my last post I apologize. I have been very busy in real life as well second life.

First off I got to present at two conferences in April in TXDLA and USDLA about our virtual learning spaces initiative. It was very exciting and stimulating and we received pretty good feedback on our presentation. Below is a copy of our presentation.







After that storm blew over, I had to work on getting ready for the Home & Garden Expo benefiting Relay for Life 2012.  Most of the work I did involved taking old designs and re-implementing them so they were less resource intensive. The effort paid off, most of my chairs went from 26 land impact to 7 or sometimes even less. Most light fixtures of mine are now 2-3 land impact max and they still look as good as ever.

I sculpted to the degree I considered to be still faithful to the original. I refuse to bend my creations beyond recognition just so that people can cram too many of them on their land. It is good to have houses with few furnishings, I do not want to see over-crowded mission homes.

The Home Expo gave me a chance to have a real deadline to get this work done by and also I was very lucky to get invited to the Prim Perfect Sim at the Expo. Prim Perfect crew were the perfect host and I felt very welcomed and walked away very happy.

This year the Home Expo had an insane number of sims and creators. The amount of content available was astounding and I must admit I did not get to see all of it due to my SL client crashing every 5 minutes ever since mesh was deployed and the last two updates to the Release Client seem to have introduced an infinite loop that maxes out the CPU on Macs and causes a crash. I guess I am going back to Imprudence Client.

Well that's not all. There's more, I will post about it in the next post.

Fashion for Life 2012: It's time!

Thursday, March 15, 2012

I am proud to tell you all that I participated in this year's Fashion for Life event by building the sim named Volta hosted by the wonderful designer Sonatta Morales. Harper Beresford was the host and organizer of Fashion for Life in 2012 and she relied on a team of many others who made this event possible. Please look for a list of the organizers at the bottom of this post and links to the Fashion for Life Event Blog and Info pages.

First off, I was a little scared by the size of the project, a whole sim build that needs to be completed in less than two weeks and a space that will house a big store and twenty four other smaller stores all built according to pre-determined standards and specs. It all seemed too limiting and stressful at first. However I believe it is good to challenge one's self from time to time and see what you're made off. So I jumped in and accepted Harper's kind invitation.

They placed me on the Future wing of the 9 sims arranged in the shape of a plus sign. Sonatta Morales with her vintage fashions seemed a strange pick for the future and I think she too wondered when she found out... until I saw her work and she saw mine. I do believe that Sonatta and I are a match made in heaven. I rezzed my heart out to make her the fashion temple she was worthy of and she did an incredible job adapting to the building and bringing her own flair, details, props and of course brand new designs for Fashion for Life 2012. I have never worked with another creative soul with so much happy cooperation and mutual understanding and respect. She is wonderful.

Now the other designers were also wonderful. I never had one designer complain. They all moved in quietly, set up their own presence in the shells I created for them and the outcomes -- the stores are just lovely. I will post the stores with designers moved in onto my flickr account shortly and have them displayed here. For today, I am only posting the slideshow with the empty stores ready for designers.

The concept of the sim was future as I said above. However I did not imagine an all metal, sterile or worse dirty and post apocalyptic future. I imagined a neo deco future ripe with details, proportions -- a medley of everything I consider to be good from the past.

The moon in the background is the planet Melancholia veering close to our planet but we never know whether it just grazed past us giving us wonderful views or if it is going to collide with this world of beauty. The earth's crust has become unstable, revealing ashes, magma glowing through under the walkways and around the edges of the sim. Who knows what the future of this planet will be but in the meantime it's a lovely place to be. That's what I had in my mind when I built Volta.

Fashion for life is about Fashion so ultimately this event is not about my build, it is about the stores within the build and the wonderful creative designers that give us the purpose for the build. So with no further ado here's the sim layout and designer list:


Dream Seeker Volta for Fashion For Life 2012 Designer List:
1. Virtual Impressions
2. Madison’s Creations
3. SIGMA Jewels
4. Sascha’s Designs
5. Kunglers
6. Eclectica
7. G Field
8. My Precious Fashion House
9. Mohna Lisa Couture
10. Akeruka
11. BAIASTICE
12. Miamai
13. Sonatta Morales
14. Kakia Designs
15. Styles of Edo
16. EarthStones
17. Orage Creations
18. Xen’s Hats
19. Felicia’s Fashions
20. Blacklace Lingerie
21. Donna Flora
22. ::je suis…::
23. J.H. Couture
24. Alpha Auer
25. Jador Fashion



Here is the slurl to teleport to Volta:
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/DreamSeeker%20Volta/246/128/24

Here's a slideshow of the Volta sim in FLickr:

Here's a youtube clip of me flying around in Volta just before designers moved in:



Finally here's the credits for all the wonderful people that worked on this project:

Lead:
Harper Beresford (harperberesford at gmail.com)

Designer Liaison:
Bonadea Avedon
Designer Liaison and Raffle Coordinator:
Anne Daumig


Building Lead:
Syngen Sohmers (syngensohmers at gmail.com)


Builders:
Cory Edo
DB Bailey
Grace Loudon
Anoron Hanson
Frederick Lancaster
Cierra Anatine
Nigel Riel
Rathmeous Dagger
Roscko Cobalt
Troy Vogel


Interpreter:
Cameron69 Resident
Dream Seeker Estates Liaison:
Samantha Ohrberg


ACS/RFL liaison:
Stingray9798 Raymaker (stingray9798 at gmail.com)


Webmistress:
Harper Beresford (harperberesford at gmail.com)
Efforts and funds committed to FFL go to support American Cancer Society’s Relay For Life.  We are entirely volunteer driven and 100% of the funds raised are presented as a charitable donation to ACS from the residents of Second Life.


Full information about Fashion for Life 2012 can be accessed at:
 http://www.fashionforlifesl.org/

Nepenthe House at Dunes of Costa Del Mar Estate is Complete

Sunday, February 26, 2012

A few months back Farris Fargis, a good friend of mine, approached me for building him a large house on his new island. I was honored that he thought of me though he had owned a copy of my Odaesan House and used it as his estate house for some time before packing it up and selling his island in 2010.

I accepted the project with some reservation as I find it more and more difficult to build large homes in SL, due to the fact that I think it's hard to make these large scale projects look real and/or sensible to the eye.

To some degree what I did with Odaesan House was in my mind a fluke, as in I got lucky back in 2006 when I built it. It somehow worked despite it's rambling size and the length of its front and rear facades.

This time Farris wanted something of a cross between the general style I build and the Hearst Castle. I started the project by first defining the outline of the landscape and topography as no one house can stand on its own without the land and setting it reciprocates. Once the island was better defined, it was time to "mass" the house into place. This is an exercise where I estimate the size, placement and volume of main living areas of the building using simple blocks. This allows me to get the sense of scale and helps me establish a balanced relationship with the setting I am working in -- namely the island.

After the massing stage, I started building small components of the house. At first I was a little stifled by all the freedom given to me by Farris as he pretty much had said, "oh do the fab job you always do, be creative, there are no boundaries". Any creative person that's worked on a big project knows that utmost freedom brings utmost pain as the project becomes a battle of wills with one's own creative side. On one hand you want to finish and hand over the project to the owner, on the other, your creative side wants to explore further and see if there's a better solution to the problem at hand.

As part of the house started to take shape, I rolled back the project at least once if not more times to remove some of the elements. My fear always was that due to the large size of the house, the building would look like a mosque or temple. I did not want to build a mausoleum, I wanted to build a house.

Finally in November and December the house started to move forward at a pretty steady pace and I worked about 1-2 hours a day on it slowly chipping at the problem from various angles. In late December and early January I completed the house and handed it to the owner -- furnished and decorated.

Farris wanted to use his own furniture as well as the furnishings I placed in the house. It was an interesting exercise in design as I had to let go off of having absolute control over everything. Nevertheless, we worked together seamlessly and got along great and I would like to think that the end result is to Farris' liking.

Below are some snapshots of the house. The house is open to the public for visiting but if you do visit please remember that this is someone else's house and be courteous please.

The SLURL for the house is:
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Dunes/184/181/37

Cyber Bullied

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

I have been the target of a vicious cyber bully famous for her ornate lengthy posts about fake-crises most of which revolve around how she is tormented in SL. This person has had an axe to grind since I posted some tongue in cheek rebuttals on a now discontinued online forum about SL.

I just would like to say that anything you may have read about me on this person's awful blog is just a fabrication of her disturbed and sick mind. There little if any connection with real facts and that was just last year's posts.

Furthermore this year, she has moved on to claiming that I attacked her estate and caused her sims damage etc. I do not have time to go and set some time aside to create an alt account and spend hours ruining the landscape of her already awful looking sims terraforming them beyond recognition. She has gone too far in this latest bout of drama and pulled in my real life info from google, and reported me to Linden Labs as an attacker.

I have reported her to Linden Lab as a cyber bully, a perpetrator of drama and lies and worse a person who divulges real life info about SL avatars -- a crime punished severely by LL in most cases -- except hers. I also have a cease and desist letter ready for her next attack and am in touch with attorneys in her state to serve her in her own state as well as my own. I have contacted the company that hosts her blog and Linden Lab informing them of my intention to serve them both for hosting content that's disparaging to my person and invading my privacy online. So all the weapons have been drawn, I just do not wish to fire them as I feel getting into a legal battle is exactly what this attention whore of a person would love to have -- I can see the blog posts already.

This person's so called estate -- an amalgam of ugly shaped plots with buildings and "landscaping" dating back to 2006 is an eye sore for the mainland and has maintained its status as such since its founding. Her estate requires no giefer attack to look like it's been griefed, it's already abhorrent looking and an opportunity for innocent passersby to experience the wonderful Sudden SL Blindness Syndrome, luckily curable by some offline time and rest.

This blogger is the closest thing we have to a cyber bully in SL and it boggles my mind that Linden Lab has continued to enable this sick disturbed and certifiable person who has poisoned anything and everything that has had the misfortune of falling into her radar. She has written reams of bad publicity generating material that makes SL look like a joke online to all that may stumble upon her well indexed pages from google.

This blogger is one of the biggest liabilities SL has had. Furthermore although I admit she has been to some degree brutalized and attacked regularly, her fate has been a result of her own behavior in SL towards others. More than likely if you hate everything and everyone, twist the truth, lie, use demagogy and persistence and length monologues to claim you win arguments by bullying people online -- you will find yourself hated, marginalized, ignored or worse attacked and pestered by those who have nothing better to do. Everything she has suffered from in SL is a direct response to the awful person she is and has been to SL and everyone in it.

After 7 years in SL, I must admit, the only way I can explain to myself why this ugly person with an uglier heart has continued to exist in SL despite all the shit she has pulled is that she must have a relative at LL or worse she must have something that could expose Linden Lab in a very unfavorable way. I can not imagine why else this person would still be allowed to have a membership.

While I wish her much healing and wish that she finds peace, I have the feeling she never will until her last breath. I just wish she can find her heart first in her body, and then find in that tiny heart to avoid writing slurs and ugly prose about me and my creations until her last breath.

That's all I have to say...

Finally some references:

Mesh is here, New Light & Shadows are here!

Tuesday, September 13, 2011
We should expect to see a major overhaul of merchandise in SL in the next year or so as the arrival of mesh will no doubt prompt content creators to revisit old creations and revamp them.

Much of the light fixtures etc will also require a redo as the new light and shadow settings set the lights as much brighter than the legacy engine that was only able to render so many lights at a time. I am not sure if the light & shadow code is settled enough to start making the alterations. I went ahead and dulled down some of my "too bright" lights just in case. Redoing the light fixtures was easy as I simply edited the scripts inside them.

Redoing prim items as mesh will be a much longer, much more laborious process and will require me to learn a whole bunch of new skills.

I used sculpts in my furniture due to market pressure but I made few sculpts and bought most of the sculpts I used. I was never happy with the sculpts however as they performed terribly with LOD (level of detail) settings.


TXSTATE OpenSim Virtual Campus Opening Soon

Monday, February 21, 2011
This is what I have been working on for the last couple of months: A new version of the old TXSTATE Bobcat Village campus in SL built in opensim on our own grid at TXSTATE.

The challenge really has been downloading all the buildings despite all the insane TOS requirements that ruined such great apps as Second Inventory.

The hurdles I speak of are:

  • Huge Prims: Creator name does not match mine, and the new TOS forbids the download of blended creator objects.
  • Sculpt Textures: Depending on the whims of the download software these too can be a problem as I did not create them and that makes the object a blended creator object.
  • Door / Window / Sit Scripts: Paskis Doors and Windows and Piero Padar's Perfect sitter are scripts I use every day to make my SL easier as a content creator. Who would have thought that relying on the smarts of these two great coders would come back and bite me in the you know where down the line. Any item that has these scripts needs to be first stripped off of scripts, exported, imported and somehow scripted from scratch using my own scripts or some open source scripts I found on the net.
  • Animations: As I do not create any animations, all the animations I used in my chairs are not impossible to download and re-use.


Don't get me wrong, the things I am trying to download, I own full permission to. I guess the full permission only covers the grid they're in and nothing beyond.

I wish there was a way to invite these builders to the grid we are working on so that they can come in under their own name, be paid, and make their scripts and assets so that their work can keep serving the public.

Clearly TXSTATE grid will not be in the business of selling furniture, but it would be nice if our furniture could have the nice animations my SL furniture has.

In terms of tools I used to export things: I used Second Inventory heavily but it was klugedy to go back and forth between the SL client and SI interfaces. Imprudence offers a much better export function however I noticed that it does a VERY sloppy job of exporting textures --- even those I made myself.

I honestly think LL came up with this new TOS edit just to sabotage the steady migration of SL generated content to other opensim based grids.

But either way, difficult or not, it is happening and here are some snapshots to prove it:


New Items at Mission Home Store

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

This picture does no justice to the amount of work I have done in the past couple of months.

Practically I have retextured, and "touched" almost all of the living room furniture items. I have also made additional new items.

My next steps will be to revisit the Marketplace store and update the MHS offerings there.

Right now the best place to shop for Mission furniture in SL has been and still is the Mission Home Store. I have been in business since 2006 and have been building since 2004.

Come down to the store and see the new items in person, you won't regret it:
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Mission%20Home%20Store/219/135/24

Quick Flythrough of the Mission Home Store Island (Vintage)

Monday, September 13, 2010
This is an old recording I made earlier in 2010 before I left the FLWVM project and Builder's Brewery.

Believe it or not, I shot this with a Flipcam that I was holding with one hand while with the other I navigated my avatar. I had the cam pointed at my Apple Cinema display. It seems the two were in perfect sync and you care barely tell this was shot with a handheld.

If I was going to use this footage professionally, I would probably edit the colors a little bit to cool it all down as things are quite saturated. But you seriously can not beat the frame rate. :-)

New Modern Mission Style Bedroom Set now available at MHS!

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Well I bit the bullet and purchased a mission style sculpt set from a vendor to give this thing a try. I think the end results are quite good. I had to make a custom texture to accentuate the quality of the sculpts but it was overall a lot of fun creating this set. The end result was a more modern take on my design sensibilities. I think this set will offer a more progressive and prim savvy alternative to those who are mission style fans but do not have the means to host some of my furniture in their smaller land lots.

The set is Mod/Transfer permissions with the exception of the bed that's delivered with Mod / Copy permissions. Total number of prims for the set is 19. The suggested retail price of the bedroom set is L$500. The set includes:
1 Bed (4 poses Male / Female with Multisitter functionality)
1 Armoire
1 Dresser
2 Nightstands
1 Vanity with Mirror

Petit Lake House Released

Tuesday, August 24, 2010
As everyone seems to be obsessed with smaller homes and fewer prim counts, I find myself working on smaller and smaller projects and more and more prim efficiency.

Though the new restrictions on size and prim count do provide a lot of inspiration at times. The Petit Lake house is the end result of such restrictions.

The Petit Lake House measures 10x10meters in terms of footprint. It is a single room residence with one sliding door. The structure is one linked object except for the door and comes with a rezzor for convenient placement on desired land lots. It is 37 prims total.

I tried to roll in most of my recent lessons learned into this build and I would like to think that many SL residents will find this little house to be a great addition to their already existent estate or perhaps find it just the right fit for a small residence on its own on their favorite piece of SL.


To visit this house in SL, teleport to:
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Mission%20Home%20Store/186/68/23

Zimmerman Revisited Now Available for Sale!

Friday, August 13, 2010



Well I just have to say, I hope you enjoy this prefab because I sure did put a lot of work into it. It is roughly 220 prims and comes with Paskis Window and Door scripts as well as a keyserver that allows you to give access to controls of windows and doors to just about anyone you desire.

I also included several of the light fixtures I used in staging the house and a few other goodies like planters and such.

I hope that the pictures below inspire new owners in decorating this house with fine furnishings from the Mission Home Store.

You can visit the model home within Second Life at: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Mission%20Home%20Store/145/64/23

Here's a slideshow of pictures from the model home:



Coming Soon: The Zimmerman Prefab

Wednesday, August 11, 2010
I have been absent from the blog for a while working hard at work. I also took the month of July off for vacation. I hope everyone is having a great summer.

I have great news for you all. I am almost done with the Zimmerman Prefab that's based on the RL house called Zimmerman that was designed out of the Frank Lloyd Wright studio. Here's a link to the original house:





And here's a preview of  my version of it adapted for SL:




The house is going to be rougly 220 prims or less. It will have scripted windows and doors and keyserver built in.

I originally built a version of this house in SL for Gayle Cabaret back in 2006. This new version is a complete rebuild. I must have replaced every single prim and repositioned everything else during the rebuild process. I brought the house down from 500+ prims to rougly 200 prims. It took a bit of texture work and some utilization of huge prims here and there as well as some cool uses of sculpties. I think overall it represents the peak of my building abilities.

I hope people will like it as much as I enjoyed building this gem.

MHS Grid Collection: Living, Dining, Study!

Thursday, May 13, 2010



After weeks of design and build work, I am happy to share the MHS Grid Collection with you all. This is a new set of furniture that's truly Troy Vogel but also borrows from all the great design sentiments of the past masters such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

I used all the sculpted prims I could to keep the prim count down to a minimum and if you inspect these pieces you will agree that the prim counts are quite reasonable.

The livingroom seating section is a truly versatile set of items that act as a vocabulary for any willing SL resident to formulate their own space using the building blocks. The seating sections come in 1x1, 1x2, and 1x3 dimensions and also include a corner side table piece. The panels and dividers allow you to define the space better while the round coffee table throws in a surprise in this 90 degree world of the Grid Collection.

The triangular tables and the upholstered armchairs throw in even more variation allowing customers to truly cater the look of their space to their liking using these basic building blocks.

The set also including a new dining table and low prim chairs as well as a rectangular table that can be used as a desk or dining table or even as a console table.

I hope you like these pieces as much as I liked building them for you.

The whole set is available for purchase at the entrance of the Mission Home Store in Second Life.