Brewery Build-Off

Today was the second annual Build-Off at the Builder's Brewery in SecondLife and I did the first heat (out of four). They judge on MOnday & Tuesday and (hopefully) the winner is announced on Wednesday. And all the entries will be featured on http://primbusters.com/

Here are some pictures from my heat. I took them...so mostly my stuff *chuckles*

Here's a big overview of all the building platforms. I had the platform at the bottom of the picture. I like not having people too close as I zoom around checking out the build

And this is the basic sculpty shape they gave us. Each heat gets a different shape so it's always a surprise. Last time mine looked like a vertebrae. This year...it's like a twisted column, twisted piece of toffy...twisted something or other.

This was the second or third idea...I threw out those ideas and went with a sort of prim fountain. At one point I tried adding water like a regular fountain..but it looked kind of silly and in the time I had I didn't want to dink around with it.

See the clock...i was mostly done with an hour to go...and it took me an hour to finish up - dinking with textures and adding the "park"...and I came up with the idea for the "puddles"

The mostly finished product..long view and closer view. The time zoomed by..it's amazing how fast 2 hours disappears. I called it Puddles in the Park.

I popped over to look at Heat 2 - here's a pic of the sculpty they got..kind of looks like a fireplace. I like the sculpty we got in the first heat better. This is the same platform I used...hopefully their project won't be as cool as mine.

Playa Aesthetics

Burning Man takes up a big chunk of the playa. 50,000+ people, trucks, supplies, porta-potties, stages, radio station...it's a town..a city. That can be seen from space! Check out this image from the GeoEye satellite. Volunteers lay out roads, camp boundaries. They put up lantern stands for night time illumination. They lay cable for sound systems. They set up generators for electricity to keep the ice cold and the coffee hot.




They have this concept at Burning Man - MOOP which stands for Matter Out Of Place. I love that word. We've been playing around with it in between building cars and finding images for our camp. And we came up with the phrase..don't be a party mooper. Mostly because I always forget to clean up after myself when I'm building - bits of cars, stray prims with images are always left laying around when I am working. Would ya believe...I'm an artiste? hmmm..no didn't think you would. I'm just messy.

I found these entries on the Burning Man blog - their Moop Map - so you can check out their efforts to control/eliminate MOOP - http://blog.burningman.com/2011/09/news/moop-map-live-2011/
and
http://blog.burningman.com/2011/09/news/moop-map-live-how-the-map-is-made/

Turns out the playa gets inspected by the Bureau of Land Management and if it isn't MOOP-free, there will be problems with getting permits in the future.

So clean up after yourselves people. No party moopers allowed.

Got Distracted

I'm supposed to be researching ideas about the afterlife and death in different cultures, looking for images and artifacts. I found a Senet Table in SL (whooo...Thanks Rowena) which the Egyptians used as sort of a model for their afterlife. Marc took some pictures of a tomb and some marble memorials in England. But I need some ideas for what to put in the 2 levels above our tomb cave. Any ideas you can pass along?

But..I got distracted making bikes. Marc had an idea for a rocket car and made a great sculpty before he went on vacation. So I made a texture for it, added some sparks shooting out the back, and made a pose that makes ya look like you're hanging on tight to the rocket. Then I made one that's a surfboard. I put one of our Elvis poses (yes we made poses based on famous photos of Elvis) on it for the driver. They are a hoot to make and I have to admit that they look pretty cool too. I will clean them up, double check all the permissions this weekend and pass them on to the Dept of Mutant Vehicles, the DMV.

Here are a couple of pictures


Check out the galaxy tires..they spin as you ride the bike.

This bike holds two people..the standing driver and a passenger who sits all stretched out on the rear of the bike. It just has regular bike tires...maybe a little retro?

What our camp looks like after a week

We're playing with our ideas and getting totally intimidated by the other builds around us. There are some amazing graphics and animations

We got our cloud wall going a little better, we're working on our cave shadows, and we have a sign with our camp name. We found an animation for sort of floating in limbo that we're playing with. We're researching traditions and holidays related to death and funerals. Whew..a lot in a week.

Here are some pictures.

A few from the side...still some construction scaffolding in place. You can see the cave, our "limbo" with translucent picture walls, and the start of our clouded "afterlife."

Here's me floating in the the clouded afterlife dome.

The front of the camp. You can see the cave entrance which is now all shadowy and, hopefully, spooky.  Actually this is version 2 of the cave. My burn partner Marc totally redid the sculpties for the cave and they look awesome. The cave walls are thinner so there's more room inside. I put up a highway sign with exits for death, limbo and the afterlife - our three levels. Right now there are a lot of things scattered around that will eventually end up inside when we get shadows fixed up. I found some skeleton sculpties and coffins.

Started building

Here's some pics of our build so far. I do like taking pictures while flying. here's the back. We have a cave..that's the tomb representing death. We have a middle layer..filmy walls with images projected on them..that's limbo. And the top will be a smokey walled space, like being in a cloud..that's the afterlife.

Side view

Front view..with the entrance to the passage tomb

some shots of other builds on the first day

We got our plot! We got our plot!

I'm doing the happy dance. We got our plot for burning man in SecondLife. WHOOOOOOOO

We have about 3 weeks to get our camp built and figure out what we want to do exactly. it's so exciting.

Ok - here are some pictures. Mostly i wanted to show off how empty the playa is right now so i took some long distance pics.

i'm inside the central camp looking out toward our plot. An artist is building some big strange piece behind us.

here's kind of an ariel shot - you can see the roads/paths between the camps and the mountains in the distance. If you click on the picture you can see me standing in the middle.

Another ariel shot from a different angle looking towards the administration type buildings

and here's me...standing on our rental box. We'd been out in the motorboat..hence the navy & white outfit

One Last ArtCar

Image by Michael Holden via FlickrThe theme of Burning Man in 2011 is "Rites of Passage"

I made a coffin car, because our camp is looking at death as a rite of passage.

We were joking about cars and i wanted to make a merry go round..then realized that could also be "marry-go-round"...since marriage is a rite of passage

I wanted to build a car where the driver stood still in the middle and the passengers rotated around them.. Well......that made driving tough because the car didn't want to turn to the right when it was rotating to the left.

So..a few adjustments, some tweaking..and here is the latest and greatest version of the Marry-Go-Round. The driver and passengers stand still and the church wall rotates around everybody. I still need to make a veil for the bride

Want to see some cars from Burns past? Check out these pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmom2k_darwin/tags/dmv/

Slide show of DMV pics

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Related articles

• Burning Man 2011: Rites of Passage (telegraph.co.uk)
• Burning Man Has A Thunder Dome (buzzfeed.com)

The temple burns tonight in RL

Here's some pics of the real temple as it burned. It was spectacular...i can't imagine what accelerants they put on that wood. It looked like the gas fields on fire in the middle east during the Gulf Wars. (for some pictures of the Man statue burning - because i forgot to take pictures - check out http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelholden/6111738368/in/set-72157627529205924)

So in SL we're partying on DeepHole..the burning man "administrative"sim. that piece of plywood was a media player if you were using LL's viewer 2 which I wasn't.

Art Cars for Burning Man in SecondLife

Well, it might be a little presumptuous to call my efforts art cars, but there ya go..that's what i'm going to call them. They are art cars for the SecondLife Burning Man (http://www.burn2.org). I hope they will be anyway; I have to submit them to be checked for script errors and terms of service violations.

I built 2 so far...The first, the coffin car, goes with the theme of our camp..death as a rite of passage. My machinima and research buddy, Marc, built a coffin car too; his looks like a 50s souped up drag car with some cool chrome exhaust.

Here are some pictures of my coffin car..that's me laying inside it. There's no steering wheel ..guess you're just "thinking" it around the playa.

My second car is a big teapot on a tray with 2 cushions for passengers to sit on. I got the teapot sculpty files the other day from a Midnight Mania board give away..whoo hoo. I used textures from Chipaholic and Sick Bubblegum. Think about it - a person size teapot = the ultimate never ending cup of tea. And instead of steam (which looked pretty cool), big yellow daisies come out of the spout occasionally.

Here are some pics of this car - i have got to learn to take close up..but check out that playa texture, with dusty car tracks to follow.