Sunday, May 24, 2015

Flower Power Day



One day I came online and I found my ALL the textures in my region changed to rainbows, flowers and all kinds of textures...all kinds except those I had intended to use. I panicked and called a friend, but he saw everything normal...so the next panic stage came with the question in my head of whether I had fried my graphic card?! 
Ahhh panic not! - said another friend. Just clear your cache and relog. And so I did...and that gigantic flower building (first photo became normal again with ocre stucco and plaster borders!!

What a relief to see everything come back to its normal (yet unfinished) self!! Wheww!!!

Examining plans, re-examining them...scratching them out and starting over.

It comes to a point where you start putting 'dummies' of the buildings that you want in your sim, just to have an idea of how it's going to be organize and you realize even one basic region (15,000 prims and over 64K square meters of virtual land) is a gigantic project.
I scratched my plans 2 times....here's the second plan that had to be tossed only to start over lol.....
I am in love with a red building (I think it's in Bairro Alto) but....1 red building can break the 'mood' if you want to capture the mostly-pastel, mostly-white and yellow atmosphere of Lisbon. The red roofs are a must, but how to place them on a flat surface when Lisbon is built over 7 hills?

Also...no light posts...how can i capture the golden light of Lisbon nights?

This is when i realized the task of terraforming, stone stairs as roads and lighting had to be more noticeable if i was going to capture the 'flavor' of Lisbon.

Wish I could do a replica but I'm doing this on my own time and money, so that's out of the question...I'll have to capture the spirit!! :)

And destinations require "stuff"!


So yes, I did built a lot of the things in the region, but I also went shopping in the hypergrid...and here I am posing by (or buried within lol) piles of trees, statues, buildings and other things from the hypergrid.

Every road needs a destination

Ahh yes...the road leads to a park!  Benches, jacarandas - with their gorgeous blue flowers - and more trees...and plenty of sunlight like in a great Lisbon spring day. Some things I built, some I gathered from all over the hypergrid :D

Still....at this point the sim is getting the ingredients for a Lisbon atmosphere, but it's a long way to go!

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Yes!! a road!! but to where?

Having found the center of the sim...and planned the first 1/8 of it...I made some roads with prims and textures. The first roads are laid...it still doesn't make sense, because I only have prims where things "will be" but they only exist in my head.
Cobblestones and portuguese rock sidewalk textures, all brushed up in GIMP,  were perfect for the narrow roads where only people can walk...like in Baixa, where there's very few roads where car traffic is allowed. :)

Naming your sim and finding your way around it.

When you order your sim, you have to give it a name. I named mine Lisboa I. And as you saw in an earlier post, I started to draw a plan from a corner but eventually I realized I didn't really have an idea of its dimensions: I knew the numbers, but not really what to do with so much space and so many prims...so I found the very center marked it visually with two 256 long prims crossing at the very center. Then I placed a pedestal there for a Lusitano horse (garanhao! LOL), the horse of Portugal. It was then when I knew where I was...sort of!

The peacocks and the horse were gifts from people that already were in the Great Canadian Grid when I arrived....I believe it was Bonnie who gave it to me. Jayde took me on a trip to the hypergrid omgggg that was crazy how much i got there!

Allure gave me the first tour in the hypergrid. It was surreal to go form world to world seeing the creations of so many people all over the world!

Then came Jayde and gave me another tour specifically looking for building parts...and she helped me get my own portal to the hypergrid...which i eventually rezzed at the sim :)

The kindness and sweetness of the arrival is unforgettable, but there were so many nice people it's hard to tell which one did what for me, You go through a period of fog after getting the magical but gigantic task of building a sim, but eventually...after the fog clears... you get in the same mood and start helping the newcomers. 

Two of my SL friends also came to the Great Canadian Grid: Beliria and Beldara. They're hoping to set up shop there and each has their own sim (or sims!). Other friends followed, like Andy. Xzavia was already there with her mountain of textures!! Hehe.

Anyway...those were the very early days in late April 2015. At that time there were about 20 prims in my huge sim..and I still didn't have the second one.....




My first sim in the Great Canadian Grid yay \o/

Finally!! I found a place full of nice, friendly people with booming development and grids for a very very (very!) reasonable price...the Great Canadian Grid!! I started with one sim...and here are the pics. It's a great chance to make your virtual dreams come true without killing your pockets. I use Firestorm (and sometimes Singularity)...but all the viewers that work in SL will work here. Woohoo 15,000 prims to play with :D (those 15,000 prims would turn to 30,000 only a few days later when i got myself ANOTHER sim lol).


This picture below shows the empty sim in the very first day, with only some huge prims I layed out to hopefully plan my city....I want to make something happen there that has the flavor of Lisbon (Portugal),..but it doesn't show from the initial plan. The prims take only about 1/8 of the whole sim.
Yes it's a joy to have virtual land and make your ideas pop into fruition, but if you want to do it from scratch it's a huge work building everything. I did get some items that helped eventually (you will see in future posts) but I'm trying to do most things from scratch. Anyway...it's a happy day the day i got this...April 26, 2015.