Final Project and Documentation All At Once

The pictures above are of the same build, a scaled down version of my final.
I'm still focused on Second Life as a means to an end, allowing me to create objects and spaces more easily than if I were to attempt building them physically. I'll then be able to use these objects and spaces as resources for other works. Combining images with built objects as textures or backdrops will also provide a convenient way of visualizing and experimenting. The finished model and a backdrop image from the Hubble Space Telescope seem to work better than the full-sized construction for visualization in many respects, because they can be manipulated more easily and need less virtual space. A combination of the smaller and full scaled builds should provide any kind of reference I could want, so I will probably develop this into a pattern of working in Second Life (using multiple builds at different scales) to be applied to my other work, mostly drawing.

I apologize if all of this media seems shoehorned in, but that's because it is. I wasn't especially interested or concerned with documenting the majority of my work aside from the occasional picture. I am happy with the the pictures and objects themselves, but being fairly new to video and reluctant to use it, I haven't looked forward to using Camtasia. So I ended up making just a couple brief videos of looking around at my constructions.




As my work progressed, I ended up moving away from architecture and toward science fiction, mostly because that's an aesthetic I grew up with and like. The virtual environment of Second Life is also ideal for modeling spaceships and the like because it allows complete control over the basic shapes of elements, textures, transparencies, and all without factoring in structural strength or just how everything is assembled and held together. Following the suggestion of pairing the finished spaceship model with a space-like background, I had to scale the whole thing down. It was a bit of a process since there was only so small it could be made. Taking some prims out and scaling a few pieces at a time did the trick, until I ran into an inherent limitation in small-scale construction (incidentally, nothing will go any smaller than 0.010 meters in one dimension.)