A Week's Work

Wow, has it already been a week since the last time I posted?

The head of Rockcliffe University, where I teach building (and am writing a scripting course, which hopefully will debut before the end of the month), went and bought an entire sim. Which means all new classrooms!

One thing which I thought the old space lacked was actual lecture halls. So I decided to build one . Once I got through the inevitable round of "could you change this and this and this?" (never build things "on spec" if you're trying to realize your own vision!), I ended up with this layout:



Sure, it'll get the job done, but it's not all that exciting visually. So I took a couple of days, and wrote the set of scripts I've been planning to write for ages.

One script, which I dropped into every prim in the build (except the chairs), just sat there until I uttered a command. Once I did, each prim announced all of its parameters: location, size, rotation, type, hollow, cuts, and so forth. I copied all that information out of my chat history and pasted it into a text file on my computer.

Then I ran that text file through a PHP script which I wrote to convert each prim's data into a POV-Ray object. POV-Ray is a freeware 3D renderer, which does shadows and other things very nicely. The great thing about it is that its scene description language uses plain text statements which describe graphics primitives very similar to what's used in Second Life: boxes, cylinders, spheres, tori, and so on! So my PHP script converted the build into a POV-Ray scene file, which (when rendered out) looked like this:


Not terribly exciting when everything's grey, so I started adding textures to everything. It's not really easy to add image textures to different surfaces of POV-Ray objects, like it is with Second Life prims, but POV-Ray has some very versatile texturing capabilities in its own right. After another day or so of writing texture statements, it rendered out like this:


I then rendered out orthographic views of pretty much every surface, which gave me image maps I could then upload and apply to the build in Second Life. This was what took the longest, as I had to calculate the repeats and offsets for pretty much every face. But in the end, I think it was worth it, as here's what the final result looks like in Second Life:



The chairs are kind of lame, unfortunately. I had made much better textures for them, with rounded backs and seats which appear to curve down in front, but they'll have to wait until the alpha-texture sorting bug is fixed before they make their appearance.

But regardless of textures, the chairs themselves are very low-prim; each bank of four chairs consists of seven prims, whereas the five-chair banks are only eight prims each. Through the judicious use of alpha textures, I was able to make them look more complex than they actually are. They don't stand up to close scrutiny, but they manage to seat 52 people at a cost of only 88 prims (the entire build is 186 prims).

And here's a view looking from the side of the stage out towards the back of the hall:


Oh, foo, I just noticed I forgot to make the doors more interesting, with a crash bar and a narrow pane of safety glass and one of those things up in the corner to make it close slowly.

And no emergency exits! I hope there aren't any fire code inspectors in Second Life!