Chameleonic Possessions

Floating Earth Goddess Fountain with scripted sounds on/off and volume controls.You can reduce the sounds to 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 volume as well as mute by touching the fountain. Make a copy, take it apart, and learn how it works!If you have questions on this product, please IM me, I receive them all via email.

via Second Life Marketplace – @LC@ Floating Earth Goddess Fountain

It’s good to be building again and not stressing out about “what I should be doing.” It’s especially relaxing to fool around with these fountains because the sound they make is pretty soothing.

Actually, this new fountain is an older student project that I started playing around with the other night. I’d always liked it, because it came with quite a nice sounds/volume menu that I’ve used before. It just was never quite ready for prime time. I added some nice “ruined Asian temple” textures I got in a hunt, and spent a happy few hours fooling with a water animation tutorial I picked up at Builder’s Brewery by Auryn Beorn. I’ve taken a lot of her classes, and her paid tuts are well worth the time and $L to hunt down.

So after getting it mostly done last night, I started another wall fountain that is based on what looks like a Marc Chagall window. I’ve got other stained glass textures that are pretty nice, and hope to do something with those and with the projection lighting trick soon.

Additionally the Creators’ Village at Builder’s Brewery has some really, really nice little shops with good quality builders’ kits. There truly are a bunch of creative types there, and I had fun hanging out there in an animation store with my friend Mistletoe Ethaniel. She’s been getting into machinimas and cute little movie trailers lately, look for more from her soon.

Last night I also updated an older product to add projection lighting. Torley describes how to do it in his most recent video:

It’s a colorful wall fountain – I should redo the product image for it, but it looks like this now with the projection lighting on. It’s just a flat panel, hanging on my photo background at the moment.

Dhughan has been having fun with this trick too, and will shortly be doing a lot more of his One Prim Lamps. He’s got a few items out for sale in his outlet shop, and is in the midst of setting up vendors. So am I, actually.

Part of what stopped me in my tracks as far as motivation or productivity for making stuffs is the difficulty I had setting up a “simple” one prim vendor. It looked great, and used texture offsets to show the products, with a big display area.

The vendor script works really well, and the first part of setting it up is pretty magical – it automatically resizes and sets up a path-cut box with 2 faces. But the hard part is having to edit the notecard the scriptor provides – lots of editing, lots of places to make a mistake, and you have to use UUIDs instead of, say, a simple list in an array. It detects inventory changes, but it’s really complex editing it. Another product I have reads a simple list in a notecard, but this vendor… what a headache. What can I say? It was free.

I had set up 1 vendor for myself, and, er, Dhughan set up 1 vendor. Editing the image files to get up to 9 product images placed just right was a huge pain… and then the scriptor released a required major update, completely re-writing the scripts and notecards. AUGH! Not only had the image offsets changed, but there was no documentation as to how big to make the images – he provided a template that wouldn’t open in GIMP, either. So it could be used as a background image with a grid, but it wasn’t all that helpful.

So a third vendor sat in my workshop for literally MONTHS, plopped in the middle of my workspace in an accusatory manner. It had objects in it, and I had gotten it mostly set up. But then I started struggling with the texture template. And then RL issues came to the fore, and the better part of a year went by.

Then Mistletoe recommended the free Hippovend system, and I set up a vendor fairly easily with that over a couple of days. But I was still all “meh” on vendors.

But something I saw in my GReader/Feeddler newsfeed for SL had me looking at Caspervend’s product – I’ve set up Dhughan’s vendor up (and will have more to set up) and I’ve set a couple up for myself. It’s pretty cool how you update: you dump an object in a “magic box” like thing, then go to a website and fill some stuff in, similar to Hippovend. But if you set a “default” profile with a marketing image, ALL your vendors instantly show that image. Updates are a snap. I’ll be putting more of them out and eventually will dump the one-prim ones entirely. Caspervend announced recently that they’ll accept affiliate vendors with products in them at their showroom. Sheesh, I gotta do that with my best 2 or 3 items.

Meanwhile, I’ve got stuffs in my inventory that are starting to look pretty marketable, that I’d just made for myself (hats and whatnot).

And for the “Dry Goods” side of things, I’ll be putting together a little medicine cabinet, full of bottles and boxes of products from the “1880s-ish Gaslight Steampunk” era that I’ve collected. The medicine cabinet will be based off of a real example that’s now owned by a family member. That’ll be something to get started on – time to actually make some stuffs that frontier Steampunks and werewolves and moon elves would need in Steelhead, I guess. Some will be in vendors, some will be displayed as “staging.”

Dhughan’s shop is coming together – he’ll have more to say about that later, but here’s a peek.

He’s actually got people in his update group (Further West Updates Group, derp!) AND a group gift! I’ll have to… get on the stick. Heh.

Final rambling notes: I literally dropped in on tonight’s music and dancing at Cafe Wellstone after my friend Bookemjackson Streeter IMed me to ask if I still made hats, as she wears the one I gave her all the time. Next thing I know, everyone wanted landmarks, group invites, and all that… I’m not that skilled a builder, but it sure was motivating to be complimented for my stuffs.

So… I guess I’ll get some stuffs done this week. I’m even considering signing up for STEAM 7 again, after skipping the last one. It seems as if I’m… back after just marking time listening to music, playing Free Cell, and worrying about family.

Vacation in early August, so whatever doesn’t get done by then will get done after the 20th.

Here we go, then: CREATE, damn you Lela! You’re not that half-assed a builder!