SL Video: "Terrain Model of the Bellisseria Continent in Second Life (January 2024)"

 

 

(click here if the video does not play)

From Eric Mondrain on January 20, "A terrain model I made showing Second Life’s Bellisseria continent in all its topographic glory, with a total of 2,541 regions as of January 20, 2024 (counting “Sandbox Bellisseria” and the Welcome Hub regions as well, just for good measure). [https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Lind...] I gathered each region’s elevation data at half-meter X and Y intervals using an interconnected set of LSL scripts, feeding that data to my computer via a series of HTTP requests, then (re)constructed and textured the terrain model(s) in Blender using its incredibly powerful Python API [https://docs.blender.org/api/current/...]. The textures here can be downloaded individually from Second Life’s official map servers [https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Lind...]. Note: It took my revised scripts a little over 18 hours to gather the elevation data for the entire continent (compared to the 190-ish hours that it probably would have taken when I first started this terrain modeling project, before I optimized the process). At the original level of detail, Bellisseria’s topography would be over 1.3 billion triangles; for the purposes of this video (and to prevent my laptop from exploding), I decimated each region’s mesh so that the model in Blender totaled only about 13 million triangles instead."

The Art and Jewelry Show at the Panorama Art Gallery

Grease Coakes was recently invited to an art show. There, two new artists were showing what they could do. One was Wanda Muggins, whom besides her art talked about her father's collection of WW2 photos. The other was Sandafina Birgisson, a jeweler whom was willing to share the tool she used to make her craft.

Read Grease's story in Design.