A key design idea from the earliest phase of the project has been for visitors to first appear on the highest point of the island, affording panoramic views of the vineyard as well as the overall layout of the winery, such that one might be able to easily find their way around without the need for a map or the usual bevy of signs and arrows.

A pavilion of sorts has thus been set into the landscape to receive rezzing avatars, provide introductory information about the island, and to display a scale model of the RL winery. A partial gable roof (raised up high to mitigate camera/flight issues and set to phantom lest one bump their coconut) is supported on heavy trusses to lend a somewhat iconic presence that differentiates itself to a degree from the wine game elements. These elements will also likely show up in other non-game structures such as the event stage and wedding arch.

Next up in the build are the platforms for the first three stages for the wine game, flanking each of the three tall towers. This basic design will be further modified to suit the specifics of the winery equipment to be housed by each.

Josh mentions in a very informative blog post (and subsequent comment thread) an idea he had for the RL tasting room - a water feature functioning as a spittoon. Evoking sushi restaurants where the dishes float lazily by, he envisions as a 3-4 inch wide trough, constructed of dark slate and inlaid into the bar. The idea is that continuously flowing fresh water carrying away the er, effluent might be more hygienic and/or sophisticated than having it accumulate in a container.

Consistent with the notion of a tasting room that ‘flows’ as a continuous modulated surface, here in virtual space we’re playing with the same idea on a larger scale, creating a rather sizeable ribbon of glass that weaves between the tables and frames an archway as one enters the space.

The feature on Second Life entrepreneurship to which the previously blogged screenshot was to apply came out today. The National Post chose to run a shot from one of the other projects submitted for the article (free sign-up required to read the entire thing, regrettably), but it nonetheless does a good job of introducing the project including a couple of quotes from Josh.

Over the holidays some progress has been made on the architectural structures for which the game interface and the winery equipment will either be contained or attached. Primary goals at this point (the ‘Detailed Design’ phase) have been to examine massing, functional sequence and scale. As such, these structures are currently untextured, an exercise to follow in the ‘Construction Details phase’ of the project.

The first image above is an annotated overall summary of the structures that now appear on the island.

Read on ‘Adventures in Plywood’

Here is a screenshot of the new vine row texture in action, taken from atop the cellar. It was sent to Danny Bradbury at the National Post (a national Canadian newspaper) who has expressed interest in the island.

The preparation of this image was aided greatly by Torley Linden’s ‘Advanced Snapshot Magic’ video tutorial over on YouTube. Anyone looking to show a project in its best light should check this one out

Arriving at a suitable vine texture was proving difficult, as it is hard to separate a single vine from the others in the row, and to do so from a camera angle that allows it to mapped on the vine row prims.

Thankfully, Matt at Metaversatility has come to the rescue, isolating a single vine growing in a hothouse. The texture was applied to a sample object, which I was then able to further composite in Photoshop to allow multiple vines to appear on a 10m wide prim as well as the crossing prims that provide the vines with depth vis a vis the ‘Charlie Brown Christmas Tree’ One or two additional ‘remixes’ of the composited texture will also be created in an effort to mitigate obvious repitition.

A challenge in the preparation of any texture that utilizes an alpha channel for transparency is the ‘halo’ of edge pixels that usually appear as a result of antialiasing with the original background. I originally learned of the means to eliminate this from a helpful video tutorial posted by Robin Wood (and since compiled with a series of additional tutorials and building resources on the recently launched SL Foundations Wiki). The secret is to create blurred copies of the image that bleed past the edges of the defined alpha channel. Hence the ‘fuzzy edges’ in the image you see above.

John reports that a preliminary version of the wine game is up and running! In a manner similar to the Silly Tasting Notes Generator, the game is configured via the web:

The basic idea is that there are a set of ‘attributes’ which range from 0-100 which describe the wine in progress. There are stages (currently 5 (fields, ferment, press, barrel, bottle)) which contain a set of choices of which one is selected at random. Stages can be chained to permit multiple sets of choices per one of the 5 main stages. Stages also have a set of “events” which are random occurances which can happen at the end of the choices and a “comment” which uses the same sort of configuration as the silly wine note generator. Choices have a “result” which is a block of code in which the “attributes” can be changed. My feeling is that at the end of bottling (the last stage), the $goodness attribute will be the final score, but we could change that.

right now I’d estimate $goodness(efforts so far) to be way up there.

The layout of the vineyard rows is being studied with a sketchy placeholder texture while a suitable photo-sourced vine image is being prepared. The attempt has been to accept the terraforming completed to this point as a given, ‘natural’ condition and work with the slope of the terrain, although as the structures begin to appear some further adjustments may need to be made.

Hopefully, this will provide varied visual compositions from any vantage point, and to act as a counterpoint to the axial path of travel planned for the wine game.

While I’ve been down with the ground, John has been having some fun on the aerial platform we created for developing mockups.

In addition to a spitoon he is currently working on, fun abounds with a scripted bottle of Pinot Noir that after a few swigs blurts out some random tasting notes blathered by a person who has clearly had, well, a few swigs.

The idea is inspired by the Silly Tasting Notes Generator. The really cool thing about the way John has this one is set up is that the interface to the back end is similarily web-based, allowing descriptors to be easily edited and changed over time.

My favorite note so far is

Classic but intense Pinot Noir. Attacks with shallot, mocha and perceptable bagel dough. Drink now through 2007!

I love it when shallots attack.