Why SL for your own pleasure?

Ok..

First of all, I'm aware that some people are going to find this question offensive. Please don't, I'm not trying to flame or troll anyone, it's not supposed to be a "gotcha", and I won't argue back against what people say, I'm just really interested in answers to this question.

Many builders I've met say that they started creating purely for their own pleasure and had no intention of it going any further.

Assuming that you pay your own land fees (or, at the time when you did): why would you pay a monthly land fee just to create for your own pleasure, when you could do it in GIMP/Blender/etc or even a local OpenSim for less or even nothing?

SL provides an audience.

Bingo!

Sharing the art with others is a large part of the pleasure.

So before you bought the land, you knew/believed in advance that others would visit?

The land was a separate issue for me. Land fever victim.

Yes. Build something on ground level, make it look interesting, people will stop by just out of curiosity. Put a little effort into promotion and even more will stop by.

I don't know if "audience" is quite the right word, but it is definitely the fact that it's a public space that makes it worthwhile. There's a comradery among builders in SL, which is great. It's nice to have other people to talk to who actually know what you're talking about. And of course hearing "Wow, that looks awesome!" never gets old.

Also, SL lends a functionality to your models that isn't possible in a private environment. As the cliche goes, it's the difference between being able just to build a sandcastle, and being able to move into it.


As for the money, I think it's a non-issue. I'm firmly convinced that any builder worth his or salt salt can make his or her land pay for itself without having to try very hard. Mine doesn't anymore since it's kind out of date now (I don't have much time to put into my own projects these days; too busy with work projects), but it did for two or three years. I simply created a product line, put a few vending machines around my place, and used the proceeds to pay for the land. Since I wasn't out to get rich off my products, I didn't have to add new ones very often. Bringing in the $160 I needed every three months to pay for my 1/4 sim was happening pretty much automatically for a good long time. And when I find the time to update my product line (hopefully soon), I know it will pay for the land again, just like it did before.

There's absolutely no reason why any builder couldn't do the same. There's an awfully large market out there, and all you have to do to tap into it is have a pulse. If you want to make a living at it, then be prepared to work damned hard, but if all you want is a few bucks a week to cover your tier fees, it's stupidly easy to do that. Heck, for a plot the size of mine, all you need the equivalent of about $1.80 in sales per day. Anyone can do that.

For me it wasn't at all about the audience.. I don't care if people see my work, really. What I find interesting is the ease with which we can create here in SL. Truly, it's one of the easiest mediums to learn, if you think about it. Simple building blocks with simple, descriptive parameters, no huge menus, ability to create custom shapes if you want to, sharability of those custom shapes so easily..everything that makes creating in SL different and easier is what keeps me here.

I started SL at the behest of a friend, and stayed because of the content creation. I've been using 3d modellers since I was about 13, but here it's just so much easier.

I can make a top hat in about 30 seconds. If I tied making the same tophat, with the same shapes, in Maya or Rhino or Blender, or anything else, it would take me far, far longer.

Texture use is easier in SL than any modeller I've yet found, making light sources is easier, shaping and placing is easier, the ruler modes are easier and more helpful to me than most I see...

Everything is so easy to get into. Hell even scripting, that complex beast, is comparatively simple and easy here in SL compared to anywhere else that I've found. What I know how to script was as easy for me to learn as it was for me to learn to script on my TI-89 calculator, or the basics of HTML.

For me, SL is more pleasurable a medium than most modellers, because of that casual ease. I think that 3d applications could take a hint from SL, and start to include a 'lego' mode. Where you can just use building blocks, move them into place, and then in the end have a single object, or choose to go into the more complex work. Something where you could set parameters like the twist, taper, shear, cut, everything that SL has, and maybe a tiny bit more.

SL content creation is extremely simple when you really step back and look at it... so simple, and yet very, very powerful.

I gladly pay for my land to work on things, help others learn, and so much more. I am glad to have found a tool so very versatile and useful as SL for so cheap, really.

Here I can make animated videos, dress up avatars, make creations, things that actually DO stuff.. very few environments offer all the content creation possibilities of SL..actually, I can think of literally no other single product that can.

I love SL.

When I first got land I made sixteen 1 meter spheres in a 4 x 4 grid, with rock textures to use as a template and to learn how they would look in the landscape, I think I had more passing avatars land to look at them more so than any complex build I have ever made since, however, this was early 2007 when SL was full of many new curious avatars, so that could be part of the reason.

Good comments, Keira. I have to disagree with you on a few points, though.


I don't want to derail the thread, so I'll keep this part brief, and just say we should talk about more about this at some point. You can absolutely make that same top hat in Maya, in well under 30 seconds. "Lego mode" does exist.

Or you can make a significantly better hat, in the same or less time. I can think of several ways to do it, off the top of my head (no pun intended), that would be just as fast, if not faster, and would be geometrically superior.



You must have a talent for understanding scripting that I don't. I learned basic HTML in 3 weeks, out of a book. I've been staring at LSL for almost 5 years, and I still don't understand 99.9% of what I'm looking at.




There are only five things I'd want other programs to borrow from SL:

1. Planar movement handles - These are so simple, and so useful, it really surprises me that others haven't adopted it. I find myself wanting them in Maya all the time. Even though Maya's manipulator tool beats the snot out of SL's in about a hundred different ways, the planar handles are still an amazing advantage.

2. Ruler overlays - Again, great concept. Even though traditional 3D modeling programs have grid functionality and snapping options that put SL's to shame, orthographic views, multiple simultaneous viewer panes, etc., I still find myself wanting those rulers all the time. They're really handy.

3. Shift-drag duplication - This is so useful. While on the whole, the duplication options in SL are ridiculously limited and time-wasting, the ability to pull a new copy from an existing object with the mouse is really handy.

4. Dynamic camera focus - I love the fact that wherever you alt-click in SL instantly becomes the camera's pivot point. In many other programs, the focal point remains fixed, no matter what you're looking at, until you manually change it. And in some, you can't even change it at all. SL's alt-zoom controls are really well implemented. (I just wish they'd lose those silly on-screen controls, so more people would learn the power of alt-zoom. Those on-screen controls are quite handicapping.)

5. Per-object undo - This is so useful.


Other than those five things, SL is welcome to keep everything it's got all to itself. I would absolutely not want most other programs to step backwards by adopting any other parts of SL's tool set.

I do agree with you that certain aspects of SL's building methodology are very easy to learn, and that that's one of the platform's greatest strengths. But just as many parts of it are convoluted, poorly named, and quite confusing at first. How many people figure out Select Texture on their own, for example?

I kinda laugh at myself on this subject. (^_^)

For RL monies, I spend around 8 hours a day in front of a huge LCD screen doing 3D modeling (Alibre, SolidWorks) and scripting (VB6, C++, LabVIEW). (o.o)

Then I go home, for fun, I spend another 6 to 8 hours a day in front of a huge LCD screen doing 3D modeling and scripting in SL. (=_=)

I own a 512M mainland parcel, so I'm not paying any tier, and I'm very very satisfied with what I've been able to do with the prim count given to me and still have prims to spare. I also built for a friend's plot on Volunteer Island where I really got to stretch my legs, so to speak, on a nice high-prim build of a small boardwalk with some tarps and a simple shack. (^_^)

I often enter myself in Show & Tell and Blitz Build events and hardly consider content creation in SL work at all. It's all part of the fun and a great way to spend time with online friends. Most of my best friends are builders and scripters and we totally enjoy a day of geeking out on the next silly thing someone made. (^_^)

I would say... Creating and building locally on a platform that's not SL is much less limited, less laggy, and the end results can be heavens above the visual quality of SL. But, it's a solitary practice that often only results in self-gratification. I'm here for the crowd, community, and activity. And, to be surrounded by such a large community of creative people is an absolute blast. (^_^)y

I like the audience feedback.
I like the instant gratification when something works the way I want.
I like the delayed gratification when something FINALLY works after several tries.
I like the simple building tools.
I like puzzling out workarounds for the things they can't do easily.

And something nobody else has mentioned...I like the possibilities for real time collaboration in building stuff.

Well, I'm not a professional graphic designer or even a super-talented amateur like many of you. I'm a retired academic with -- finally! -- some time to have fun doing things that I have only watched other people do for years. (OK, not quite ... I was in the sciences for much of my career, so I have more than a passing familiarity with computers.) I design and build because I love to.

Almost as soon as I came to SL a year and a half ago, I was entranced by the thought of creating clothing for myself. It turned out to be much easier than I expected, and the texturing challenges grew until it slowly dawned on me that I could sell my stuff. That meant making more than just clothing, since a shop needs display racks, furniture, and other things. The snowball kept growing.

At the same time, I have been part of a large, vibrant community of librarians and academics who keep expanding into larger and larger spaces in SL, and who need all the volunteer designers they can get. With one thing or another, I have ended up creating buildings, educational exhibits, landscaping components, signage, and whatever else on several islands. I have never felt the need to buy land for myself, since I don't seem to run out of creative opportunities on group-owned land.

So I'm a dilettante. I do sell my clothing, and I make a tidy profit -- enough to easily pay the rent and more -- but I'm really designing and building because I love to do it, and I have the space and time to do it in. And -- big bonus -- a great community of talented and helpful people to learn from and share ideas with.

*cries* Okay, maybe not "ANYONE" can make $1.80 per day... though I'm sure anyone with experience and talent can make it look stupidly easy! (hehe) Maybe you can spare some time to mentor an enthusiastic lacky, Chosen?

Though I've built a few structures and a handfull of little items, I have to admit that I've yet to sell a single thing, not that I have offered much for sale (one gorgeous low-prim house on SLExchange - still haven't sold a one despite that its dirt cheap and *I* like it). I'd love some tips and feedback (and maybe some help in finding ways to enjoy my building while making my real life hubby stop rolling his eyes every time the subject of what I spend on monthly land use fees comes up).

I'm pretty new to the building thing and to 3-D modeling, but so far, I love it; I guess you don't have to be "successful" or have an audience ooo-ing and ah-ing your creations to enjoy building in SL. For me, nothing's more entertaining or relaxing to me than edge-wrestling with a prim while yacking with a few friends. I love being able to make things I imagine in my mind take virtual shape before my eyes, in a form that I can share with others, no less, so that they might enjoy them too.

But I think what I like the most about building in SL is being able to share ideas and experience - and while I wasn't kidding about it, bugging Chosen about mentoring is a great example of this. I don't have the time or patience to go through books of information that I probably can't understand anyway, and trial and error doesn't always cut it. Having a real honest-to-goodness human being explain or walk me through things sure makes it easier, and that's one thing I can get from SL than I can't get in any of those 3-D modeling programs.

None of those programs have ever inspired me the way people have here, either... I've enjoyed all I've learned about 3-D modeling and scripting here in Second Life so much that I have actually considered going back to school to take my newfound passion to the next level. From being inspired about a new design to being inspired to make a career change, I'd like to see offline software do THAT one day...

Oh, nearly everything everyone has said above. To pick the three that were important to me:

1. Ease of getting started. Right click, create prim litter I doubt I would be learning 3D modeling now if it weren't for that first plywood cube

2. Fantastically helpful and fun community. Not only did I get all sorts of help starting, but it is so much fun to share projects and ideas with each other.

3. The ability to walk around in one's creations afterwards, and play with them.

I just want to be loved. Seriously, that's how I got involved with the BDSM scene- I learned I had a knack for it, and the feedback I got was great. I bought and developed my first sim out-of-pocket with zero commercial aspirations, simply because I wanted to develop a playground that my friends/family could enjoy. When the public started to discover it, I got more feedback, constructive and positive, and that just drove me further. I have zero interest in OpenSim because there is no community, and zero interest in the other tools. Very few people build just to build. While many folks have a creative drive; a sense that they MUST create things- the desire to impress and please others is frequently an important factor in ensuring that the artist keeps producing content and refining her skills.

For me it is about creation of something I can't find in SL or thinking I can take an idea I have seen elsewhere and make it better.

Like someone said earlier, it is not about land/money...for me...it is about personal satisfaction. I spend way too much money in tier, textures, scripts, tips, shopping, etc each month to ever break even. I have a sim that is closed to the public...I show off what I have built to a few friends, but that is it. Oh, the occasional person that sees my stuff on SLX will IM and I happily tp them for a tour; otherwise, I don't really care if others see my stuff or not because I do it for me. I do it because I love to learn (note all the stupid questions posts I have made in the past few months) and love to be creative.

Not an offensive question at all! And nice to meet you.

One always wants to be useful. To entertain people, make their day, laugh, smile, make something they can use or change their lives for the better. Isnt that part of the greater whole of what life's about anyway?

if i were to create in blender /poser/whatever the only ppl who would ever see it are those who are interested in blender ect

whereas SL provides a vast audience, from the technically skilled to the average joe

But Chosen, counting from the time you log in/bot up (Depending on the app) to the time you have a completed, textured, and visually complete tophat, personally I can't do that with Maya, or anything else for that matter, in such a short period of time. I could have the geometry done, in a few programs, but to texture it and have it look right to me With a separately textured band across the base of the chimney bit) is way beyond me in 30 seconds. A couple minutes and I could have something as complete as I would in a shorter time in SL.

Lego mode does exist on some level, but I haven't seen one so completely versatile as SL's with the simple and effective parameters...perhaps I'm missing something.



I can honestly say that if you show me a script in LSL, and it's reasonably uncomplicated (No huge monster scripts in other words), I'd feel confidant I could at least tell you something similar to what it's supposed to do and how it does it.

LSL, you have to admit, is a very descriptive scripting language. Things do what they sound like they'd do, and the built in editor is extremely useful. Mouse over a function and it tells you syntax, it color codes things as any good script editor does, and it's got the complete list of functions and such right there ready to be used.

Not only that, but it's not a strict language. Spaces are rarely necessary, tabs aren't needed for it to be read right, multi-line vs single-line isn't so important... it's a very easy language to get started in and have it do what you want for very simple things.

I'd say after I spent maybe a week with LSL I understood the syntax as well as I do now, and really the different functions are right there to search through. I know which to use for the things I do most often, and whatnot, and can find new ones easily, and learn to use them almost immediately.

HTML I have more than a basic knowledge of now, and I think it'd take me longer to code a webpage than most things I do in LSL. To me HTML seems a little bit less user friendly, really, and has no single built in editor that's so readily available.

LSL is awesome, I think.



I think if you take a longer time to examine everythign SL has t offer, beyond just the pri building tools, you may find more that it could share with other programs that you'd find useful.

Definitely.

Again, definitely... combined with the various other tools offered by most modellers and such, the rulers would be even more useful. While the orthographic views aren't possible in SL, and the grid-use can be a little odd at times, I think that the rulers were an ingenious decision that made ortho less needed, really. Still would be nice of course.

Actually I believe I saw this in a program, though for the life of me I can't recall where.. either way, fast and easy duplication is definitely a plus.

Definitely. I find it saddening when people don't know about it XD I swear I'm rarely ever looking around from behind my avvie, usually my camera is far away looking at whatever is around me. I wish it were so easy in every program..I'm tired of accidentally only being able to see half an object >.<

Useful, yes, but in larger projects would take up a ton of memory, I'd think. What I find interesting though is that objects seem to remember their last action indefinitely. Ive logged in to mess with something, hit crtl+z immediately, and still had it work weeks later. Really lovely.

Well, those that figure it out on their own are the ones that simply try it out. Everything in the SL building tools is made so you can simply try it, and learn it. If you try things, it's a very very very simple thing to learn really. And 'select texture'....what else would you call that? 'Select Face Texture'? Could get into some clunky names there...

Really though, I don't mean that things like Maya should take a step back and be simpler, less powerful tools, I mean they should offer the option. Maya is huge, super powerful, and takes forever to learn, really. Offer an option to use a simpler, easier mode, that's less powerful, and possible a 'scaling interface' that you can make more complex, and more powerful, as time goes by. Start with very simple things (That would always be available) and then from there teach you to integrate into the tougher things.


To me I find that most people that want to make something look nice, but not make a career of it or something won't sick with it because there is no program that's simple enough for it to be just for fun, really. It becomes work until you learn it well enough to do your thing. I think that SL's simplicity is it's charm. More people stick around because it's easier, really, and you can make things that still look amazing.

Along with this, it forces you to think along the terms of 'How can I make Y out of X shapes?', which is a very important fundamental for keeping things simpler and less resource intensive. Many people would think 'I'll make a lion by taking these curves, revolve here, stretch here, sculpt, particles, blahblahblah.... but if you look around SL, there are some beautiful fully primmed lions, made essentially from boxes, spheres, and torii. That's damned impressive in my mind.

Everything that makes it so easy to learn can be incorporated into a larger, more complex program, and used effectively to teach the basics, and still be useful later, I think.

Anyhow, I have definitely shied away from the purpose of the thread, I think, and sorry for that.

I'm always around to talk, in game or out

Keira, let's move our discussion to a new thread. I don't want to hijack this one any further. This discussion is useful, but as you noted, we're getting pretty far off topic for this particular thread.

I'll edit this post in a minute to include the URL of the new thread.

ETA: I've been trying to post the new thread, but it appears the forum doesn't want to cooperate with me. It keeps telling me the post has too many images in it, even though it doesn't have any. I'll try again later.

As a member of the audience I am just amazed at what people build here!

Its a great pleasure to me to shop and view the things people make. Its like living in a creative paradise...

Hugely better than TV or most movies...people pay to watch commercials for heaven's sake...SL is miles better!

Hi folks,

Thanks for all your replies.

Chosen, thanks for commenting but I want to address this from the point of view of someone who is paying their own tier with their own money. I understand your point that a good builder can make their tier back but not everyone wants to deal with building a shop, marketing, exchanging, etc. and some might just want to build their own homes or other things for which there wouldn't be much of a market. Also, tier recovery is limited to a percentage of the population (the money has to come in from _someone_) whereas building itself is potentially universal.

I find it interesting that people have said that pleasing/impressing others is part of their motivation. I've noticed that many new people are no longer interested in building - yes, the classes still have attendance, but there was a time when practically everyone who went to NCI would ask about building. Also, attendance at show and tells - a great opportunity to impress people - seems to have dwindled significantly.

Most of the new people who do build that I've spoken to have been plain that they build for themselves with _no_ intention to impress anyone. And most of the time, if I've mentioned to more experienced builders that someone (or myself) didn't build because they didn't think anyone would care, the response has been to just do it anyway for the pleasure of building.

So evidently, this particular motivation method won't last forever, as the rising standard, and volume, of existing content in the world, makes it harder and harder to impress or please anyone. The migration to Private Islands and Openspaces has made this worse, by reducing fly-by traffic.

So - is there an alternative motivation that would drive you to build in the absense of the "impressing others" one? We've already seen one (the tools are easier), thank you, what are other good ones (that could be used to encourage new folks to give it a try)?

Okay, ignore what I said about making your builds pay for your land, then. The rest is still very relevant.

The comradery with fellow builders is something that's very hard to find in any other environment. That alone can make it more than worthwhile. Working from home, as most freelancers do, can get pretty lonely.

And even if you remove the social aspects altogether, the "move into your sandcastle" factor is still there. As I've said before in these kinds of discussions, you could build a much better looking car in programs like Maya and Max than you ever could in SL, but in those programs you don't get to hop in the thing and drive it around town. The ability to interact with your creations in meaningful ways is another thing that's very hard to achieve anywhere else.




I must take issue with this notion of "the tools are easier". They're certainly more constrained than in a lot of other platforms, but I really don't think "easier" is an accurate descriptor. In many ways, SL is actually far more complicated than other, more full-featured, 3D modeling programs.

Consider something as simple as creating a Stonehenge-like ring of duplicated objects. To achieve that in SL, you either need to write a script, or else employ any of several convoluted methods of duplicating, undoing, rotating, and duplicating again, over and over and over again until you've got your desired result. But in a "real" modeling program, you could just call up your duplication options box, enter a couple of numbers, click OK, and it's done. What might have taken 20 minutes or more in SL just took you all of 5 seconds in something like Maya. There's just no way anyone in their right mind could call SL's method "easier" for things like that.

And don't even get me started on SL's texture mapping controls. They're atrociously underpowered and exceedingly tedious to use. Frankly, it's a miracle anyone has the patience to operate them at all. I haven't counted, but I'd guesstimate that somewhere around half my billable hours on SL projects get eaten up by texture alignment. That's simply ridiculous. I could likely provide at least 25% more unique content for my clients if I didn't have to spend so much time punching numbers into that damned texture tab. Again, hardly the definition of "easier".

SL has a lot of great things going for it, but the ease of use of its tool set is not one of them, in my opinion.

Still, if someone has been in SL for a while, and then ventures out to try other platforms, I could certainly see how SL could feel "easier" than the adjustment to how things work everywhere else. But for every person in that situation, there's someone else who has lots of experience outside of SL, and then hits a brick wall as soon as they try to model here because none of their favorite tools are present. Those people inevitably spend their first 2-3 weeks complaining left and right about how "silly" and "stupid" and yes "hard to use" SL's tools are.



In any case, I find it very interesting what you said about the changes in the kind of people who are now joining SL. I always knew the builder-centric majority would one day become a minority. Such is the way of things with any new communications technology. Early adopters are often those who want to make stuff for the system. Then later on, everybody else arrives, and content creators quickly go from having been the giants on the scene to becoming drops in the ocean. And that's absolutely not a bad thing. The more non-creators there are, the bigger the market for the creators' work.

If what you're saying is any indication, it sounds like that transition is starting to happen. This is good.

I'm not sure that it is.. at least some famous builders who I've talked to said that they didn't "arrive wanting to make stuff for the system", they just tried SL out and turned out to like building. As I said.. most new people I've met still don't arrive with a fixed desire.. they want to "try it out" and see what happens, and what they do and try is still malleable. So the idea that it's a case of a market desire shifting, and the world shifting with it, is certainly valuable but I'm not positive it's right. It could be that the market desire was never that specific, it hasn't really shifted, in which case I'm not so sure it's such a good transition You may be right, it's inevitable, but.. well, anyway, this is a different discussion probably.