Monday, February 05, 2007
Daily Walk: 2007-02-05
Since I'm going to be light on real posts for the next few weeks, I thought I'd take the opportunity to finish up a little project I've had on the back burner. I've created a HUD to record SLurl locations and parcel names for locations on demand. During my morning walks (explained here, for those of you not already tired of hearing about it), I'm going to use the HUD to store interesting sights I run across. Every few days, I'll dump the HUD to e-mail (it generates the webpage for me already), and post the results here. Sometimes, I'll add commentary, and sometimes I'll just let the location speak for itself. This gives me a cheap way to keep my post count up, and perhaps it gives you, my loyal readers, a few nifty places to check out in SL. Win, win!
So, without further preamble, here's the first one.
Here are some interesting places I've found during my morning walks.
- Sunseed's Riverside Studio
- Zero Point - Sculptures and general psychedelia. Be sure and check out the black cat and pigeons sculpture at these coordinates. Very simple, yet very neat.
- Ramonia-Garden of Immersive Sound & Vision Sculpture Art - Came here via a NWN article. Be sure and turn on your speakers.
- Cave Rua Water Gardens
- Art at Oyster Bay Aquarium and Sculpture Garden
- Magic Foundry - Morph Wollongong's place. Actually, all of Theta and Pi is worth a wander.
- Cavorite Mines and Praeternatural Mineralogical Society - One of many remarkable locations in Caledon.
- Caves of Lascaux and Berry's Bazaar - Via a NWN article. Go check out the caves. It's surprisingly hard to make good, realistic caves in SL. Prims are just unsuited to the task. But, somehow, Berry has managed it. I think part of it is his simple willingness to forego convenient flat floors and avatar-friendly corridors. That's the difference between a convincing cave and a mediocre Star Trek set.
- Neo Japan Store
- Venice, a city of Love
- The Valley of Autumn - I love this place. It's a simple thing: just drifting autumn leaves. But so very well done. I've tried time and again, but have never been able to quite capture the effect. The water garden is also quite nice.
And, since I haven't done one of these in a while, I'll go ahead and post a stereo image of the cat sculpture from Zero Point. Note the multi-frame blur effect on the pigeon at the center. Nice, subtle effect that gives motion to the whole assembly. I don't know why I'm so enamoured of this one, which I'm sure most folks would consider one of the least impressive of the fantastic lot. Perhaps that's why. It's that much more difficult to do realism, and do it well, in SL. Or maybe I just like cats... Or dislike pigeons. In any case, do yourself a favor and visit sculpture gardens like Zero Point or Ramonia next time you're feeling burned out on SL. You'll be glad you did!