Our Camp Got Finished for Burn2

We got finished. Whoo. Three levels with graphics and some freebies

Problems...there are a few

1. lag lag lag...takes a while for the textures to load, it's hard to move around, and music streams can't be heard by everyone at the party. SL has got to do something so events can attract more than a couple of people without everyone being stuck in lag soup.

2. Most people so far have been paying attention to the artists and scheduled music. I understand that attention..the art is gorgeous and well worth seeing. We had fun building...and that's all that's really important.

The first floor is the rites of committal...a passage tomb filled with items found in tombs in different cultures. There is a statue of Anubis, images of modern funerals, Indian cremation pyres, and Ghanese art coffins.

 The second level is rites of commendation...items and images of things we do to help the dead move on to or have a happier afterlife. There is voodoo and a senet game and images of the weighing of the souls by Anubis.

The third level is rites of commemoration...celebrations in honour of the dead. We have a family ancestor altar and images from the Day of the Dead and Asian festivals honouring the dead, including the Japanese Obon festival's ceremony with lit floating lanterns. There's a reincarnation wheel - click on it to see what you will come back as.

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.

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?

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.

Burning Man update

We'e started working on some ideas for the camp for the SecondLife version of Burning Man. We're also getting involved as volunteers - communication, making clothes, building vehicles, being a ranger. We want to tie in the idea of death as a rite of passage. Hopefully we can collect some data for our research project on virtual memorials. We're going to ask people to leave pictures or written memories of folks that have passed away, put them up on the metal tree, and see how people respond.

Here's the tree - my first idea for it anyway. It has to be made out of stuff that we could conceivably truck to the playa and erect there. I found these trusses in my inventory. Originally there were rusty metal, but i'm thinking wood might be better, lighter. The idea is that there is a central trunk - the vertical truss. And the roof trusses are the branches..right now there are 2 of them. My burn buddy Marc, who I made machinima with, thinks he can write a script to let people "touch" the branches and they will rock for a little bit. I'd like that - interactive is cool (so are bow ties and fezzes, but that's another show)

We've been looking at images of death and funerals and the afterlife...trying to get some ideas for the camp.  We may put some of these images around at the burn camp..to get people talking and to sort of seed the idea of leaving memories.

Here are a couple of coffins from Ghana

And some other images I found looking around the Smithsonian website

Building in SL

The students in the Critical Analysis of Games class started building in SecondLife on Monday. Whew - 26 students spread over our 2 islands trying to line up shapes. They came up with some interesting stuff tho. Here's a pic with a couple of their builds - one student built a table and a childs stacking toy. There's an ice cream in the background and several of our early experiments with shapes and texturing.

Here is a link to photos of the things they built (on Flickr) - http://www.flickr.com/photos/kgregson/sets/72157616413802019/

We will be building more things on the island. I think today we will pair up and try to build checkerboards. They'll have to think about the overall size and the size of the individual squares and they can use the position numbers to line everything up. Still trying to decide what to build next week - I want it to be something with a bigger group working on it . Any suggestions? Leave them in the comments - thanks!