For a 3D world there sure is a lot of information in Second Life being communicated in 2D form. The attempted strategy for signage here on Capozzi Winery Island is two-fold:

1. Design the place to require as little of it as possible.

Finding your way around the island should be as easy and intuitive as we can make it without being boring. We’ve tried to create a very clear path from the intro point, following the gravity driven steps of the wine-making process to the cellar, and finally ascending a ramp up to the tasting room. For the planned event stage and wedding arch, access pathways through the vine rows connect directly to the the Welcome Area.

2. Integrate it into the architecture as seamlessly as possible.

The signage completed thus far consists either of wood burnings or glass etchings. Each of the five stages of the wine making game and the introductory area is framed by a large slab of sandblasted glass with the letters appearing as transparent. As well, the stages of the wine game are also demarcated by large numbers burned into wooden board strips with the intention of being seen from a great distance.

At the moment we’re tweaking the transparency of the large glass slabs to optimize legibility. Like any standard piece of signage, readability varies depending on distance and camera angle, however being made of glass the color of the sky also has an impact. If the sim is set to follow normal day/night cycles the signage background will therefore be continuously variable.

I say ‘if’ because one is also presented the possibility to hold the sim at a fixed sun position, and you may have noticed a gravitation on my part toward the dramatically colored skies of sunrise/sunset states when it is time to post screenshots on this site A reddish/orangish color also seems to make the signage more legible as well. We’re still considering the pros and cons of either approach.

What do you think?  Let ‘nature’ take its course, or ‘preserve the moment’?

Me no like Blogger.

I was attempting to use one of Blogger’s new ‘features’ which is to use a custom registered domain name, so that posts would appear as www.virtualsuburbia.com/blahblahblahfromchip instead of virtualsuburbia.blogspot.com/blahblahblahfromchip. It is supposed to transfer seamlessly and not break the old archives, since the files are still with blogspot.

Of course as soon as I set it I realized the dns records had not propagated, requests to either form of the address were getting set to a parking page from the registrar. Yikes! As soon as I realized this, Blogger wouldn’t let me switch back to the way it was. It barfed up an error code and a search on that just revealed more people in the same boat as me with no solutions…

So temporarily, the domain has been forwarded to here, just to let you know the site hasn’t died! It should be back within a day or two (see update - thanks to some sleepless googling, i’ve found out a thing or two).

My SINCERE apologies for this debaucle.

In the meantime, feel free to have a look around…and please visit us again soon…

Update: Apparently its not just a simple matter of waiting for the dns to propagate. It has propagated now and still not working for reasons documented here. If you’re on Blogger, hosted at Blogspot, and considering using a custom domain, you might want to *cough* reconsider.

Update 2: Its been a rough day but we’re back up over at www.virtualsuburbia.com now, requiring some craziness that I won’t get into here, seems more appropriate for the rather active ‘Something Is Broken’ Blogger Newsgroup

Texturing in Second Life is quite intuitive relative to a number of offline 3D modeling packages that I’ve had experience with, but that doesn’t mean it is any easier to get the materials to map on properly, especially at the junctions between faces. Luckily there are a few tutorials and other resources out there to help. Forseti Svarog of the Electric Sheep Company has been especially gracious in sharing his insights on the subject, both on the web and in-world.

A key question for me in texturing is the degree to which one adds shading and shadows to the objects. As a starting point the goal is a relative degree of consistency in the tonality of the textures, lightening or darkening certain faces as required to differentiate them from each other and better express the shape of the prims. Following that some subtle shading is added where there are clearly awkward junctions between dissimilar materials. The problem is knowing where to stop. One thing that bugs me somewhat is when some standalone items like furniture have huge honkin’ shadows under them when the adjacent elements of the main build have none at all.

Stay tuned for tex-tour 3: the revenge…

Since the last update texturing has begun in earnest, starting with the Welcome Area. It seemed as good a place as any to start, as there are a number of decisions to be made here about the logic and use of materials that will carry through to the rest of the structures on the island.

As noted in some of the initial concept sketches, the idea has been to use materials traditionally associated with wineries and winemaking in new and deliberately different ways, with the intent of evoking a sense of craft as making fakery something honest and perhaps more authentic to our virtual circumstance. Hence the composition of stone, wood, shingles, cast iron, and glass that you see before you. Stay tuned for more preview images and thoughts on texturing in the next couple of days.

As in finished all the vine rows. Pretty much.

Next up: textures, additional props and structures, including adjustments to the ground textures.

As it relates to the vine rows the default ground texture set for the sim renders the highest elevations like stone. In spite of comments made in the previous post, pinot vines penetrating solid stone may challenge the desire to establish the vineyard as a semi-believable base condition which the winery spaces and structures subsequently play off of. At the opposite end of the ground texture spectrum, The lowest elevations are rendered in a ’sandy’ material, which when viewed from certain angles seems to make the vines still appear as though as they are floating, even after careful placement on the landscape:

With new textures in tow, the process of replacing the sketchy vine rows has begun. ‘Planting’ each section of vines and ensuring that they are rooted in the landscape has given an added sense of respect for the labor of the people who pick the grapes come harvest time, or indeed anyone who works in a produce field for a living.

While attempting to evoke the experiential qualities of a real vineyard, here in the sim the vines respond to the conditions of the virtual world in a couple of ways. Here in the virtual vineyard the vines can closely follow the contours of the terrain by appearing to grow perpendicular to the ground, rather than straight up and down. As well, the construction of the vines as a series of alpha channel-mapped texture planes that cross each other lends itself to variations in face brightness and a small number of subtle, almost holographic flickers, as if “Vine Unit #VU39ghtu4-A” were somehow malfunctioning and in need of scheduled maintenance Given a limited number of prims, the nature of Second Life’s rendering engine (and/or my knowledge of it to date), these artifacts while imperfect also impart an added level of variety and activity to the vineyard and seem to be mitigated somewhat by the overall scale of the planting when viewed as a whole.

…in attempt to reduce an angry snarl of pipes, tubes, and rollers to its illustrative essentials.  Josh reports that rather than sink significant amounts of money into equipment that is only used but a few days of the year, many wineries are opting for the services of mobile bottling units that come to the site, help you do the deed, and then head off to the next job.  Of course doing it all in software would be even better, er, yeah.

Since the last post on the subject the vine row textures have been painstakingly reworked again, primarily to illustrate fruit zones and overall proportions to a greater degree of consistency with the reference photos in the Capozzi Winery Group on flickr.

The upward angle of the source photo for the previous texture created some issues with isolating the fruit and bringing it down, therefore the latest iteration starts from scratch with a new shot used with kind permission from the photographer Linda Blakely.

Supplemental fruit (perhaps a little too much), vines, leaves, and wires have been added in Photoshop. Thanks to deviantART user Spiritsighs for making available an excellent collection of foliage brushes. This version also follows an updated tutorial by Robin Wood outlining an even better method to create alpha channels without the white halo around them, this time utilizing a nifty free photoshop plugin from Flaming Pear.

Didn’t know whether to title this post “Roll out the Barrels” or the more risqué “Over a Barrel”, so in the end went with neither

With the winery structures now roughed in and ready to go for the most part, attention now turns to the winery equipment and any necessary modifications to the platforms. Here is stage 3, the press, being created from a reference photo.