Office Journal

[Whilyam]

I'm re-doing the Age I'm calling my "office". The old age had some bad bugs, textures that could be copyrighted, and some corruption. Also everything just seemed too big. This topic will have all the updates about the age. As there's currently nothing in the age besides the link-in point and a few other places, I'll hold off posting pictures. Though a shot of the old space was put up on my blog a while ago. Old image

[Whilyam]

It's late, so no pictures now. But if I get a chance tomorrow, I'll put some up. Now that I look at what I made, I think I may have made stuff too small! Particularly the link-in spot.

[Pryftan]

Scale's annoying. My second Age was an office type thing and I spent a long time on a lamp trying to get the lighting working properly.. I'd just link in and look around to see how it was shining on the other objects. It wasn't until much later that I actually ran up to it and realized the lamp was about twice as tall as I was o.o

[Aloys]

To check the scale in Blender it is important to remember the size of the avatars. They are exactly 6 feet high and 2 feet large (1 foot = 1 blender unit). The best way to do that is to have a dummy avatar in your Blender scene that you can move around so you can check how big or small everything is compared to it.
To do that you can either import one of the Uru avatars (you can import one of the CustomAvatars PRPs like you would import any Age in Blender, but they are made of several different meshes, so a bit of work will be needed) or you can just create a simple 6 feet high cylinder that you will use as a reference.

[Whilyam]

Unfortunately this wasn't a simple "I've made my room two inches high" but more of an error in design. Linking into a small building just isn't that good. Pictures, I hope, tonight.

[Whilyam]

As promised, pics. Note I didn't specify pics you could SEE anything in! Actually, this is slightly outdated. I took these before I fixed some lighting (from those crystals). I just thought these pictures looked cool. Still some light tweaking to do in this area along with changing the lighting of other areas and, of course, modeling the rest of the age.

The Chasm 01
The Chasm 02

[Robert The Rebuilder]

I like it without the lights, Whilyam! Very dark and mysterious caverns. Perhaps the crystals could slightly illuminate their surroundings - but not too much.

[Jennifer_P]

Whyyyyyy the glowing crystals always, whyyy-yy-yy why whyyyyyy??!?!" /me the geologist breaks down sobbing and shaking fists at the sky then realizes she is on a public forum and pretends to be stretching and yawning...

But seriously, not only are glowing crystals as a sole lightsource geologically unrealistic, they're also kinda overdone...Everyone seems to want to have glowing crystals in their Age. But look at the great lighting in Riven--it was all very dramatic and moody, but not a single glowing crystal around.

*Disclaimer: Then again, maybe there are giant glowing crystals in Riven, I wouldn't know as I still haven't finished it yet...

[Chacal]

Recipe for success:
1- Glowing crystals
2- Cowbells
3- More cowbells

[Jennifer_P]

Gee, I always thought #2 was floating rock islands...Another pet peeve of mine, though not nearly as severe as my issue with giant crystals (glowing or otherwise).