Friday, July 25, 2014

Mesh Flowers at Whimsy Entry

Teleport Board at the Whimsy Entry Point
With New Mesh Flowers And Free Whimsy Hard Hat
Click Read More to see the way the entry at Whimsy looked when the sim was first built.


Riciulous, huh? It was a simple platform I threw up. It would have blown away in the first typhoon. Before long Sweetie and I had thrown up this far more substantial structure.


We originally placed Lilith Heart's strelitzia in the planter below the teleport sign. Here's the area with just one plant laid in. We added three or four more so it would look lush.

We had to keep the strelitzia small because like any plant composed of planes with alpha textures, the prims are much larger than they appear to be. It was necessary to keep the invisible areas away from the teleport board because avatars, meaning to touch the teleport sign would, without realizing it, click on the plant-- and nothing would happen.

Mesh flowers are seen by the viewer as solid. There are no alphas and hence no alpha problems-- and no invisible areas to interfere with clicking on other objects.

Here's a closeup showing the level of detail of the mesh in the flowers we used. They are not flat textures repeated over and over, but three-dimensional shapes.


The creator is Mitsuki Kyori. The product is named Hayabusa Design MK-BT Albuca M9 v5-1 d-f 1 - tf2. Yeah, you bet we renamed  it to something like Orange Flower 1, Hayabusa.

The flowers toward the center of the planter are also Mitsuki's. They're called MK-BT Tree for flower M1 v1-1tf-1...


... and Hayabusa Design Flower Scolymus Hespanicum simplified F1a.


The entire arrangement (shown at the top of this blogpost) has a land impact of 12. That means most of the flowers, and perhaps all of them, have a land impact of one at a reasonable size.

These are placed at the start of the path to the volcano. They're called MK Flower Base STD M4 v1-1 Rose color only.


By way of comparison-- and I'm not knocking the work of Lilith Heart--she makes wonderful trees and flowers-- here are her three-prim irises.


By comparing mesh flowers with the best available three-prim flower, whether looking at them in world or in photos, it's easy to see how mesh surpasses the flat prim technology it is replacing.

Further up the path are several more types of three-prim plants. As more mesh flowers hit the market we'll be replacing some of them. I dare say, though, we will probably not see the day when there is no three-prim vegetation on Whimsy.

Mitsuki's flowers cost $349 and are modifiable and copyable. Prim count is low. We seem to break about even whenever we swap a three-prim flower on the land for a newer mesh flower.

You can visit Mitsuki's store here.

No comments: