Genuinely natural-looking prim terrain

On Isle RFyre you can follow a natural-looking patch through a wilderness area with no cluttery walkways or handrails. It's done by carefully sculpted multiple prim rock surfaces set into terrain with the same custom texture applied to the mesh. I created the texture to look like a dark bronze rock with some mineral glints and dark moss, no obvious repeats. Every surface has the grain of the texture oriented in a natural way.

The image shows rocks with different tints because the occasional rock along the path is special -- it has an ancient glyph chiselled into it, and my client wants the visitor to click on that.

The small cave has a simple cascading stream/waterfall with a terrain border -- none of the angular rocks people often use to line the watercourse. The streambed is pebbled texture, and the water is a plain semi-transparent white ripple like the natural-looking waterfalls I've admired in Guild Wars.

The objective is to have the terrain unobtrusively guide the visitor along a route through that wilderness area. If anyone else is working on this sort of thing I'd like to see what you've done, and you're welcome to try out the path on Isle RFyre. : )

This looks really good. Blending prims invisibly with landscape is a fine art and good fun too.

I have a fairly large underground cave in Svarga, the roof uses the same textures as the terrain and a few special ones I made to look like blended terrain textures. It works so well hardly anyone has noticed so far. Also you can see the island of Bora Bora where the owner uses my rock textures for his terrain. I don't have any pics available atm and I'm just off to bed but you're welcome to visit and see any time.

That's gorgeous! Really good work, there. Most rock formations I see in SL are pretty disappointing.

Did you do this Traxx? It's really pretty.

Thanks everyone for the kind words.

Ingrid! : ) You darned well know it's my work -- you've seen the precursor patch of terrain in Miramare very near your etc store. For anybody else who's interested in the endless futile war against astroturf, that patch of prim terrain is visible from Miramare 128, 128. I think the prims are in my alt's name, but you can blame me for the bland look of my dirt/grass custom textures. The urban plaza was designed to fit in with an existing high-profile neighborhood.

Lauk, I briefly stopped by the new incarnation of your sim, and liked the way you've used that wonderful stone texture for terrain and stone walls. It gives a sense of place if the stone for the structures looks like it's been quarried locally. You made that texture? It accomplishes something I particularly like: looks dark and mixed-hue without looking brown. I'll check out Bora Bora soon.

I think you get the idea perfectly

I made that texture by processing and painting on a photo in photoshop. The original rock started off a very light grey and over exposed from the camera (i'm a crap photographer!) the colouration was all done in pshop. Flipping over a couple of times and using the eraser and stamp to make it tileable. It's ended up looking almost nothing like the original photo!

here's a bit of the original photo...






and this is an opportunity to show off the local area I get almost all my inspiration from ...




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http://www.jurassiccoast.com/index.jsp
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Artistry - is defined as a superior skill that you can learn by study and practice and observation. No where is this more evident then in the execution of the dream we all share at the House of Rfyre. Both Traxx and Robin Pennyfeather have spent countless hours weaving an environment that visitors can immerse themselves in. This space is dedicated to being a living gallery and Traxx's contribution has more than moved us toward our aim.

Raven Pennyfeather,
House of Rfyre
Striving for Virtual Excellence

The Rfyre island is beautiful, I visited that once and I liked the look of it, really it´s a good work

I visited this sim last night? and was awed at the natural feel of the place. SecondLife would benefit from having more areas like this -- as Raven alluded to in her post, it is -undeniably- subtly beautiful artistry.

Kudos.

luffly you are almost as good as me traxx.

Oooh That's so beautiful, very natural (realistic) lookin! How amazing that you correct the texture position and so on to make it look real!

I give a two thumbs up and 10 stars for you, Traxx! Great job!

I need to get back to Svarga and check out the new additions!

Here are some albums I put together:

Isle RFyre
Svarga
Ulrichsburg

and two of my parks:

Liferain Park--Dowden -- currently open
Liferain Main Park -- under construction

Exceptional photography, Shack. You caught the spirit of my architecture/landscape architecture on Isle RFyre much better than I can in all my zoomed out images. You seem to focus on the precision of the arcane style forms rising out of the wilderness -- that's exactly what I'd like to do if I had your talent! Naturally I've been looking through the other snapshot albums too, and wondering when your new park will be completed....

Your overhanging precipices look like the 'prim rockwork' (actually a mesh, not prims) in one of the explorable areas in Guild Wars. But I didn't like the GW texture as much, since they were trying for a harsh scary effect. Here's a cropped image of a boulder with a wonderful texture.

...and also from Guild Wars, amazing huge roots. Making something this polished would take a lot of prims.

...and an awesome tangle of huge thorned roots overhanging the path.

LOL that's a question I've been thinking a lot about... I was ambitious in what I wanted to accomplish and it's clear to me that I won't get it all done in this iteration. Obligations in both RL and SL have kept me from building very much in the past two months, though it appears that I'll have more time in the near future.

After seeing what Lauk's done in Svarga, it's also clear to me that I need a private island sim. That fits in well with what I view as my next stage of concentration which is textures.

But I really want to get something completed in BonnyDoon and have it open for a month or so before moving on.

So my current target is to officially open it by the end of June and give it a one month run. The third week of June is my deadline for any substantially new construction.

The biggest thing that's missing from my original floorplan is a large complex of underground caverns. Then, I had planned a series of dynamic elements: a raft ride ending with a plunge over high falls, another rollercoaster-type ride such as the one in the Dowden park, and a game along the lines of the Pot Healers game in Numbakulla. Most of that will have to wait for Liferain Park: The Sequel. But I do want to get some caves in there at least.

Even though it isn't finished, people are welcome to come take a look. It's built in the air at about 700m over BonnyDoon. BonnyDoon(183, 48, 688) will put you in the center of it.




Most of my building so far has been an exploration of scale and perspective. Perspective, to me, is essential. As someone walks through one of my builds, I want them to see the same thing from many different perspectives.

It takes a lot of work, but when it's done right, it makes it fairly easy for me to photograph. There have been some builds in SL that I thought were really nice, but somehow when I tried to photograph them, the result was never quite right.

By contrast, some builds are like photographing a supermodel. Seems like it's hard to take a bad picture. And it doesn't necessarilly depend on the beauty or level of skill in the build. There's something else in the design and layout of the build that makes this happen.

Anyway, Isle RFyre was a pleasure to photograph!

Not trying to hijack the thread, but since I was asked about BonnyDoon, I thought I'd post an update.

The park opened on June 30th. Still some scripting to be done, but the major building is complete. Visiters welcome!

It's a huge build: 230m x 160m x 180m. 11690 prims linked into 1125 objects.

WOW!!!

Shack! Absolutely amazing...

So much to see and explore....I need to go back

Primtasticlicious!

Hey it's a great contribution, not a hijack. Now that I've finished replacing my original BMPs in this thread with JPGs I'll comment on your new park.

The Numbakulla influence is particularly noticible in the interesting habitats of different indigenous cliffdwellers. You mention wanting to develop a game, and of course it's a traditional aspect of a game world to make different sets of NPCs have their distinctive settlements. One example from Guild Wars: the Deldrimor settlements have small, picturesque stone houses -- somewhat too homogenous to look authentic. Sort of like dwarven cookie cutter tract housing arranged on the mountains. : ) So my unsolicited advice would be to introduce enough variation in each settlement to make it look like various denizens built the dwellings over a number of years. This would take a lot of work, but would make the game-world aspect more immersive.

What I liked the most is the dramatic exuberance of form, both large scale and small scale. And moving through the construct does not feel like following a predictable path. It's the opposite of how some level designers want to herd the gamer along a set path with monsters appearing at fixed locations. When travelling through your park the space around the avatar opens up or constricts in various unexpected ways. Views of one space are framed by elements of another. These things give it a cinematic quality, which is usually lacking in SL. I like exploring and climbing on things, so I naturally ended up on the highest point of the structure, and it seemed made for a visitor with that kind of motivation.

Glad you're getting your own island -- you'll make good use of the creative scope!