(JAN 27 2011) NEW LAND! Dark Water Sim
Around the holidays, A bunch of my close friends and I had been discussing the idea of going in on a SIM together.
Around new years we all gave ourselves a month to find a place with the idea of purchasing at the beginning of February.
Well after much research, we decided we could live with the lower prims of a Homestead Sim (3750 Prims), which has a quarter of the number of prims as a Full Sim (which was about 15000 Prims) .
Both types of sims are 256 x 256 meters but you can rezz a lot more stuff on a full size.
Anyhow, we found an estate company and bought a SIM called Dark Water.
There was a LOT of work to be done with terraforming and land texturing.
This is one of the reasons I had not blogged in so long - I was SWAMPED!
It was very very hectic but a LOT of fun!
The first thing I had to do was parcel out the land and sell portions to my fellow resident friends.
Then everyone shared what they had in mind for their parcel terraforming wise, and then began working on their parcels, with an eye toward making each parcel blend naturally into the next.
Sky was new to terraforming so I had to get her parcel terraformed first to her specs, and then she did the finishing work.
A few days into the terraforming, we realized the water level was too low in the one underwater parcel, and we had to raise the land on all the other parcels by about 10 meters so we could raise the water level enough to cover up some of the underwater structures. I raised the land only 1/4 sim at a time, which caused some humps in the land along the seam lines, so more work smoothing those out.
Then we had to deal with finding good terrain textures that did not look like a spinach souffle (That was Sky's wording). It is very tricky picking out a Terrain texture, as often you are only seeing one tile of a repeating texture and it may look completely differnt repeating on the ground. So there was much buying and rezzing of terrain textures for a few days. And we will get to do more research as the seasons change.
We found a good sand for the underwater lagoon at the low elevation, and a freebie daisy terrain texture from Heart Garden Centre served as our mid-level elevation, and a good rocky pattern for the highest hills,
Then we had to calibrate the elevations of each texture in the 4 different quarters of the SIM. Sky actually helped me a lot with this.
Then we had to have different people look at the ground, because everyone's graphics cards reads the textures differently. (I evidently have a sucky graphics card compared to Sky LOL)
I will be posting more pics soon but on my parcel I made a little curving inlet of water, that wrapped around a roman ruins with a view of an olive tree grove across the inlet.. Here's a pic of Henry and I enjoying the view which included a moonrise! It was so nice to finally relax after all of that work!
More pics to come later... once I get my blog entries caught up...
Around new years we all gave ourselves a month to find a place with the idea of purchasing at the beginning of February.
Well after much research, we decided we could live with the lower prims of a Homestead Sim (3750 Prims), which has a quarter of the number of prims as a Full Sim (which was about 15000 Prims) .
Both types of sims are 256 x 256 meters but you can rezz a lot more stuff on a full size.
Anyhow, we found an estate company and bought a SIM called Dark Water.
There was a LOT of work to be done with terraforming and land texturing.
This is one of the reasons I had not blogged in so long - I was SWAMPED!
It was very very hectic but a LOT of fun!
The first thing I had to do was parcel out the land and sell portions to my fellow resident friends.
Then everyone shared what they had in mind for their parcel terraforming wise, and then began working on their parcels, with an eye toward making each parcel blend naturally into the next.
Sky was new to terraforming so I had to get her parcel terraformed first to her specs, and then she did the finishing work.
A few days into the terraforming, we realized the water level was too low in the one underwater parcel, and we had to raise the land on all the other parcels by about 10 meters so we could raise the water level enough to cover up some of the underwater structures. I raised the land only 1/4 sim at a time, which caused some humps in the land along the seam lines, so more work smoothing those out.
Then we had to deal with finding good terrain textures that did not look like a spinach souffle (That was Sky's wording). It is very tricky picking out a Terrain texture, as often you are only seeing one tile of a repeating texture and it may look completely differnt repeating on the ground. So there was much buying and rezzing of terrain textures for a few days. And we will get to do more research as the seasons change.
We found a good sand for the underwater lagoon at the low elevation, and a freebie daisy terrain texture from Heart Garden Centre served as our mid-level elevation, and a good rocky pattern for the highest hills,
Then we had to calibrate the elevations of each texture in the 4 different quarters of the SIM. Sky actually helped me a lot with this.
Then we had to have different people look at the ground, because everyone's graphics cards reads the textures differently. (I evidently have a sucky graphics card compared to Sky LOL)
I will be posting more pics soon but on my parcel I made a little curving inlet of water, that wrapped around a roman ruins with a view of an olive tree grove across the inlet.. Here's a pic of Henry and I enjoying the view which included a moonrise! It was so nice to finally relax after all of that work!
More pics to come later... once I get my blog entries caught up...