Bag End

Yes, someone had to build it. I only have the entry done thus far. 206 prims! I'm going to be land shopping to finish this in one piece. I'm building it on my tropical 8K, hence the odd backgrounds. The green door alone has 35 prims. There is also a secret door in the back that leads to Bilbo's treasure. That's in the last pic. You'll also notice the roots of the giant oak tree on the hill growing down through the back wall. Tomorrow I'll have to pack up the entry to free prim space to work on the living room. I'm using a mutant combo of Tolkein's maps and the movie. Sorry, JRT, I just can't build a bedroom without a window.

My ultimate plans are either to sell copies or to set it up in an area along with a Bywater market square and Green Dragon pub and rented stalls. Heck, if I can get the prim count I might do all of Hobbiton.

Insane, yes, but the happy kind,

Yours,

R

Thats a lot of excellent work .

Have you considered using bump mapped applied textures for the doors? Apply 3d shadows and bumb mapping to a pic overlay is a great way of reducing the amount of additional prims... just a thought

Rusalka

Good work, but a lot of prim use and waistage.

The door without any handles can be done with just 1 prim if the door itself does not exceed 10x10.

The wooden beams could also be reduced significantly assuming you are using individual prims.

Would like to take a closer look to give some advice.

I know I could go to photographs of the build and single-texture lots of things now, starting with the door. I plead that I was once a designer and architectural draftsman and sometimes you just want it to be made of as many parts as it takes. The way all the pieces move and shift as you walk though it. The way the light moves as the sun comes up and goes down.

Here are some pictures of the living room. My plan now is to buy an 8K piece of land, put it all together, adjust all the colors and textures, build furniture for it, cover it in sculpty grass, and live in it when I need a break from the tropics! Next up I'll be building the kitchen, Bilbo's study, and at least one bedroom.

Wow! That's really impressive. Nice work!

Thank you. I've done the entry, the living room, the kitchen, a hallway, and am working on Bilbo's study. I want to take a stick to the movie version. I think they built their Bag End in the Bermuda Triangle. The geometry is slightly impossible. Windows and hallways everywhere! So I'm making parts that should fit together in different ways. I don't know when I'll ever have the whole thing put together in one place, but I'm learning a great deal along the way!

Please see this thread:

Also, @Rusalka: Lovely work! I'd pay to live in a Hobbiton sim!

I've been somewhat puzzled by the reactions I've gotten in terms of prims. I am using all the texturing tricks and conservation techniques I've learned thus far. But I know what I want, and I don't want a smooth cylinder with a "Bag End-y" picture on it. If I did want that, I could have it pretty quickly, jam it on my mainland 512, and call it a day. But I don't want to live inside a textured beer can. I'm going to make what I want, use the prims I need, and buy a suitable piece of land for it. As Second Life goes on and servers get bigger and faster we'll probably have more and more prims to play with in every sim.

There's a rule in architecture and design. You tell the client that there are three considerations:

1. Quality
2. Cost
3. Size

You can maximize two, but not all three. A similar rule applies here.

Rusalka, that's just beautiful. Pretty close to my mental image of bag end after reading the book as a child.

Hard to tell whether 203 is a lot of prims for that build from the pictures, but if you got the prims .. sheesh, with workmanship like that .. you flaunt them.

The only wasted prims are prims not rezzed. It's very nice. I was thinking when sculpted prims came out that now would be a good time to do a Bag End. Not so much for the interior but the hill. The ground over and around the hole has usually been the weak spot in hobbit holes I've seen before. But I hear people are getting nice natural terrain with sculpties.

Anyway, nice work. I hope you do find the resources to build all of Hobbiton, so I can visit.

You have learned thus far!, erm, and you can learn more, that is what the forums are for, with genuine people to help.

As I originally said, I would like to take a look to perhaps offer some advice, nobody wants to take away from you your hard work and discredit you for what you have acheived so far, but I have been here a year now and I am still learning lots and thats come from people I have met along the way.

So my door is always open..

It's this sickness people have when it comes to SL builders. There are probably analogs to real-life, but for some reason the first thing that a bunch of residents say upon first seeing someone's work is, "Too many prims." Don't take it personally, seriously.

Ooh- I did think of one outside-of-SL example, even though it's from a movie: Early on in Amadeus, Mozart gets rather indignant when all the emperor can say about his new piece is: "Too many notes." Mozart's response was something like, "Exactly which notes would you have me remove?"

Now the interesting thing is that Bag End was built into a hillock, as I remember. You've built yours as a discrete above ground building - and from what I can see it looks like it would be possible to use your structure as a pattern for a building in real life!

I know lots of people who would live in a home like this in real life if they had the chance, and personally, I'm one of those people. The love and care that went into your vision of Bag End is obvious. Very very beautiful, inspiring work.

Indeed

http://www.taunton.com/finehomebuilding/how-to/articles/inside-hobbit-house.aspx

Thanks so much for all the support, and apologies for my overreaction to perceived criticism. It's well-deserved and given kindly, I know. I'm hoping to have some pictures of Bilbo's sitting room later, if I can sort out the series of intersecting curves. Why did I not pay more attention in geometry? Calculus is proving less than utilitarian in SL!

Here I am sitting in Bilbo's Study. This one went through about four different structural designs. Only thirty prims for this. I still have a lot of work to do uploading and replacing textures, but the overall structure is getting close to completion. Two bedrooms and some hallways to go. It seems I have to make rooms overlarge to fit larger avatars and my poor girl and her floating camera, and the furniture and appropriate hobbity clutter. I've included a picture of the outside of the structure, just for technical interest. Pass those grass-covered sculpties!

.


it is often said that ...
"Less is more."
Mies van der Rohe, Dutch-American Modernist architect

but then on the other hand ...
"Less is a bore."
Robert Venturi, American post-Modernist architect

however when i think about Second Life,
something like the following often comes to mind ...
"Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century."
Alexandr Solzhenitzyn, Russian novelist

compared to some of the Blah-Blahs ...
Rusalka Writer, your vision and art, along with an apparent tenacious
and a dedicated work ethic towards unique creativity
is to be admired and congratulated from someone so new to SL ...
(unless of course, youre an alt)


"A Prim, the very essence of a Virtual World,
is not as much a sin as is the consequence of its purpose
by the intentions of the Avatar who created it."
Arsenic Soyinka, Resident of Second Life ... (about 2 minutes prior to this post).


.

The creations derived from the humble prim... painstakingly joined, sculpted and molded, fine artisty of the texture applied to perfection.... is not unlike the birth and bringing up of a child... in the begining you have such visions and expectations... thankfully LL don't host our children lol....

I, for one, am heavily in favor of using lots of prims to achieve realistic
effects. See the Horyuji pagoda on Bodhi island. Your hobbit house is a delight. That said, the limitation of SL will always force us to compromise on the different building techniques. Those who criticise when the prim number goes above their land limit probably prefer bland flat concrete over convoluted carvings and bas-reliefs. As for using texture to simulate complex structures, it's a 3D world, use it!

I seem to have found a divide in philosophy. To prim or not to prim, that is the question. I certainly enjoy wrestling with the U-shaped prims that wrap under the floor of Bag End, to produce two columns with a single object. Changing the size, checking the hollow, the cut, the position, the texture, ^*Y*&^@*# fighting the good fight. But I will have those two columns!

Found this a few pages in...excellent work. I'm very impressed. You don't even have to be a LotR fan to appreciate this kind of build.

Would it be wrong to want to build Dwarrodelf... Ah, well. Maybe I should build some lovely places people might want to live before I build my cavern haven. I took a break from Bag End today and build two elvish wine services. Hoping to find a good drink script. The one I bought runs too fast, and the gun-hold based ones leave my avatar in terror. Tips appreciated.

The last two major parts of Bag End are Frodo and Bilbo's rooms. I'm using an architecturally older technique, figuring bedrooms would retain an older structure, not being influenced by community and culture quite so much. So I'm going more Romanesque, if you will.

My landlady has new islands coming on line soon. I have hopes of acquiring more land and being able to assemble the build in its entirety. In RL I'm traveling a bit in the next two weeks, so the timing is up for grabs. I want to have a nice assembled build with interesting textures available for tours.

Attached a pic of my elvish wine trays, today's diversion...

Just finished (for the moment) Bilbo's bedroom. My theory is that this is the oldest part of Bag End, and at one time was the entire thing. So the woods are dark from smoke and more elaborately carved than the rest.

The last room to do is Frodo's bedroom, which I'll do although I'm not certain where it will go. There are also doorways to two storerooms, one of which is secret, and at least one hallway. No building that until the whole is in place somewhere.

I'm going to need a thousand extra prims just for furnishings and clutter...

You need to rotate your wood textures so that the grain runs parallel to the lenght of the wood beams, otherwise the beam will break under the weight. (details, all is in the details.)
Fantastic work.

I did rotate the grain, but with the planar mapping the texture broke down at certain points in the curve. I'm thinking that I'll eventually replace those beams with sculpties, to make the thing look that much older. It's the perfect project for their irregularities!

Just got a lead on some land. I may be able to assemble the whole faster than I thought. Fingers crossed!