Mesh is here, New Light & Shadows are here!

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

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

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)

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!

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

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!

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

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:

Visit the Great Buildings Online for more info on Zimmerman 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!

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.

Enjoy the Summer

A month ago or so I premiered my first ever outdoor furniture collection. Today, I made color variations for those with different tastes and boxed it all up again for your convenience.

Please check them out at the Mission Home Store...

Enjoy the Summer, every single perfect day of it in Second Life.