Category: virtualreality

I’m calling it the Terra Atom. That has a kind of mid-century feel that matches my design.

For several days now, I’ve been pretty focused on texturing the new plane I designed for Second Life — that is, creating the surface detail for each and every part in an image editor. Without textures, the plane would look flat and grey, as it did in my previous blog posts.

The quagmire I have to avoid here is getting too concerned with textural detail. It’s possible to keep working on these textures, adding more and more detail, and never finish. Since I’m a little impatient to move this project forward, I’m setting aside the paints and instead focusing on the scripts. Scripts in SL are how you program the detailed behaviour of a vehicle, the user interface, and generally all the functionality that one expects from an airplane.

It’s not a small task, but I have a head-start. With each plane I create, I take my previous flight scripts, menus, visual effects, and more and adapt and improve on them. Every  iteration of the flight script that I started in 2005 and carried forward through a dozen or so planes improves the user experience and adds or refines features.

How long does it take to develop a plane from beginning to end? I can’t give you an exact number, since I haven’t tracked my hours, but it seems like an eternity. This particular eternity started in late November (or maybe early December), and will likely continue until March 2015.

The next couple of weeks, however, will be all about coding and testing. Making changes, saving and compiling, and testing the result immediately. If you see Cubey Terra in SL doing a lot of take-offs and landings in a half-finished plane, now you know why.

My new plane seems to be coming along. I spent most of yesterday and today learning how to map textures onto the mesh objects in Blender. This is my first set of test textures.

The textures are rudimentary right now, but now that I’ve mapped them, it’s just a matter of adding detail in an image editor. Before Blender, texturing meant creating many iterations of a texture and uploading each to Second Life to test it out on the prim. Then make edits, re-upload for another test. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum. With Blender, I can see exactly how the texture will look before I upload anything to Second Life.

 

Today, after fixing some annoying issues with the mesh, I was finally able to upload the whole model into Second Life’s Beta Grid. I slapped on a quick coat of paint and, before it was even dry, I dropped in an older flight script and took it up for a spin.

There’s still a lot of work ahead of me, though. As you can see, the mesh needs some tweaking around the trailing edge of the wings. The cockpit, too, needs finishing, which is a huge job — I plan to have working instruments for flying in the first-person view.

After that is the task of writing a script specifically for this plane and building and scripting a HUD in the same style as the plane. Finally, the plane needs a proper paint job. A few options, maybe, just for variety. It’s a slog.

But even so, the first flight is a landmark in the development of any plane — even a virtual plane.

 

Spent most of my day making subtle changes and fixes to my plane. Can you spot all the changes between yesterday and today?

Actually, most changes happened on the inside as I made the interior walls and bulkheads around the cockpit. Next step: fill it with controls and indicators.

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).

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.

More updates to come as work progresses.