Kermes

As I wrote in my previous post: the next house was going to be mesh with custom textures .... so here it is!

Mesh with textures

In my last build I added my first mesh. I tried to texture it ... believe me ... but it didn't work and I decided I didn't need it for that particular one. I know it sounds like an excuse and it probably is, but only a little!

I was determined however to learn this so I spent this weekend playing with Blender, reading up on it and watching tutorials. And it worked :D

I made a mesh window with textures to go with the house I was working on. The house will be released soon, it's finished, but I need to package it, take pictures and do the whole getting-it-on-sale-business and I don't feel like it right now.

Here is an inworld picture though of the window, more transparent from the inside than from the outside.

Jaune

And here it is .... MESH!

I recently partnered in SL and wanted to have a house I built for us and not just for me. I had been thinking about these shapes of windows and doors. 1+1= ... mesh

It's possible to do with prims but it's not quite the same. So I downloaded Blender and started ... believe me, it wasn't easy but I stuck with it and that feeling when you finish something and it looks good ... wow .... worth it :D

Imbue

I'm still not quite sure how this started but I decided I was going to build the house I grew up in. It started as an exact replica, but SL didn't like that, it was too confined. There was two ways to solve it .... make it bigger (didn't want to do that) or lose some rooms (lost some rooms).

This house taught me how to add shading to give proper depth to a texture. I had done it before, but never like I learned when making these textures. Even I have to admit I love the brick texture, but also the texture for the doors inside with the etched glass.

I have showed this house to my family without telling them about it beforehand and they all recognized it, even though the inside isn't quite as it was. So I think I succeeded :D

Hardits

This house was build when I lived on a homestead, I had it floating over the water, it sits on poles. It's one big room around a ... well ... hole in the middle. Through that hole you could see the water underneath the house.

Gossypol

This is the oldest build in my collection, it is the house where I started making custom textures and learned about the problems with transparency in textures. One of many little .... challenges .... in SL :-)

Flavone

This is a play on the Alazarin house. Alazarin was a glass box inside walls where this one is a glass box pushed through the walls. The houses are similar yet different.

Elemi

A friend asked if I could make a beachhouse with a pool and loads of other things. This house here is not that exact house, I have made some changes in textures and amount of doors.

Damar

This was actually an early build, made with ready made textures. A friend liked the lay-out of this house and the textures I had made for the Bister house. So I updated the house with the new textures and added some steps to compensate for height differences.

Ceruse

And then I moved to a nice new bit of land ... a little island, my little paradise. And ofcourse new land means a new house (I just love to move, I need an excuse to build). So a tiki house it was ... on poles ... the ground was very uneven but I liked that and this way it was fixed.

Bister

At some point a friend and I decided to buy some land together. There was a problem though: it wasn't allowed to build two separate houses and we didn't want to "live" together. This house was the solution. It looks like one house, but it has separate entrances. I decided how I wanted to my half to look, so I added a curved deck at the back, my friend decided he wanted a pool downstairs.

Alizarin

I saw a program on tv about people building their own house and how they go about it. This is not an exact replica of that house, far from it even, I just liked the idea of a box in a box with loads of glass.

Starting up

As I have written in my profile already .... I have been building for many years in Second Life. I'm mostly self taught. I am very curious by nature (I know, what woman isn't :p) and love finding out how things work.

So over the years I learned to build and line up prims but using textures made by others. The next logical step was to start making textures as I couldn't find what I was looking for.

Building in Second Life means you will need to script a little as well, I am good at editing open source scripts or scripts I have bought. You wouldn't believe I was trained to be a programmer at times, but in my defense .... that was many, many years ago.

I have my own style, but my style doesn't stop me from building different types of houses. So far my collection has some Japanese themed houses, a tiki house, a Dutch mansion house and now also a Morrocan themed house. I like broadening my horizon.

Anyways, I have thought about opening up a shop for my builds for a long time and now I finally did it!

So here it is: