For the last little while, I’ve been bashing away at my new project in Blender. As a novice, it’s taking me a considerable amount of time to figure out how to achieve the shapes I want. I’ve made several missteps along the way, but it’s finally looking mostly the way I want — on the outside, at least. I have yet to build the interior, which comes with a whole raft of new problems, like trying to fit it to an avatar (and vice-versa).
My retro hot-rod plane in Blender (work in progress)
So here it is, so far. As you can see, it’s kind of a retro hot-rod concept. I’m a little worried about the number of vertices already. In Second Life the Land Impact is a whopping 150, but that can be mitigated with assorted tricks and techniques.
One detail I’m pretty happy with is the propeller blades, which is a complex shape that has eluded me since I started in SL. Blender made it fairly straightforward. So even though it takes 100 times as long to construct a plane with mesh as opposed to SL prims, the results are far more satisfying.
The new year has heaved the bloated, stinking carcass of 2014 over the cliffs of time, and now stands sweating and panting from the exertion in a pool of dried vomit leftover from the New Year’s Eve party. In these first few days, we prepare ourselves for the gauntlet of days ahead, in which we will need dodge boulders in our path, leap over quagmires, duck low-hanging branches, and maybe occasionally take a very soft tomato full in the face. If we navigate the path correctly, the rewards are great; should we fail, we will learn from our mistakes and do our best to put on a brave tomato-covered face.
Blender is a horrible nightmare
My personal tomato-in-the-face right now is Blender. This is the free 3D modelling tool favoured by designers who don’t want to spend any money on 3DS Max. I’d like to say that I’m making great progress learning to create things in Blender, but that would not be entirely accurate. In the weeks since I started sculpting my next plane, I have managed to restart five times after discovering that I was doing it all horribly wrong.
If you’ve mastered the building of objects in Second Life, you might mistakenly believe that you’re ready for proper mesh modeling. You would be wrong. Blender is a nightmare.
Nothing about the UI makes a lick of sense. Everything in the interface is contextual. Controls are completely non-intuitive. Menu items seem to be an afterthought to the extensive keyboard shortcuts. Remember those old WordPerfect keyboard cheat sheets from the nineties? Blender’s keyboard cheat sheet would be novel length.
After my five restarts, I have something that almost resembles the approximate shape of half an airplane. I’m not, however, giving up. While other aircraft makers might be uploading absolutely perfect replicas of real-world aircraft that previously appeared in other games, that’s not my goal. Obviously, I can’t compete with a professional 3D modeller when I have only a few weeks of experience with Blender. No, my goal is not to compete with hyper-realistic planes, but to return to my Second Life roots and explore retro-futurist designs with a touch of art deco. I’m taking my inspiration from movies like Rocketeer and Sky Captain, from old serials with rockets, fins, and chrome, and from 1930s aircraft and artwork. You’re going to see a lot of copper and steel.
Progress is slow, but today I sculpted a tail fin that I’m mostly happy with. Ahead of me, I’m looking at weeks more of careful, detailed work before I even think about texturing. After that, weeks more of scripting. That’s what it takes to create original content in Second Life. It truly is a slog. Yes, I could upload a prefab model to SL and have it flying in a matter of hours, but that’s not content creation — that’s simply adapting (and stealing) existing content — and that’s not what I do.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll post my progress (and possibly my mistakes as well). I’m confident that 2015 is the year you will fly the first mesh-based Terra airplane in Second Life.
Update (Jan 14, 2015): The blog I referred to in this post is no longer online.
In a previous post, I observed that there were many professional-quality mesh aircraft in Second Life. While it’s not impossible that Second Life is home to a startling number of extremely talented 3D artists, it seems likely to me that at least some of these aircraft have been obtained from a third party — possibly from one of the many mesh model sharing sites on the web. I know for a fact that some SL aircraft makers spend weeks painstakingly rendering their favourite aircraft in a 3D modelling tool, so when an aircraft maker releases several extremely detailed, realistic aircraft in rapid succession, I can’t help but wonder if these aren’t original creations.
Today I learned that a Second Life resident has begun to blog anonymously about mesh content that appears to have been copied from other sources. By comparing the wireframe and textures of the Second Life model to third-party, non-SL models, the blogger makes a convincing case.
Is this a legitimate investigative blog, or is it a competitor with an axe to grind? It’s hard to say definitively. It does, however, highlight how charged the topic has become in a competitive content creation market.
This week I had the pleasure of chatting with Draxtor Despres on his podcast The Drax Files Radio Hour. We covered a range of Second Life topics, including Lindens working in-world, privacy and freedoms, public perceptions and misperceptions, what makes good content, where I came from, and where I’m headed.
Not everything I make in Second Life is necessarily useful or even desirable. For example, today I adapted the classic ELIZA-type chat bot that used to dispense psychological help to be an extremely rude and insulting salesperson.
Here’s a brief excerpt of the result. The bot’s name is “Terrabucks Coffee”.
