SecondLife Library

Teammates: Theja Jayalath and Hyewon Lee.

Our first approach to our library was to create a repeating structure that could integrate with the mountain and over which water could flow. We worked with symmetrical hexagonal shapes that we joined and cut entrances through.

Theja and me on site

As an interactive element, we put sliding doors as an entrance to one of the rooms. These doors are just like real-life automatic doors: they open when an avatar is near them.

After realizing that our library exceeded the floor area permitted , we did some remodeling and  kept only three rooms. We also transformed these rooms into more irregular and abstract shapes, adding pyramidal windows and distorting the hexagons. This added appeal to our project.

We kept our initial idea of water flowing over the structures, so we  added prims scripted and textured like water, and two particle systems for the fountain and drops of water (scripts were from the "teal" particle lab). The cones where the water was emanating from were camouflaged behind rocks that we bought in the marketplace. Additionally, we added a steam with a script from the Free LSL library. 

To create an interesting media texture, I used three photoshop features that I had never used before:

- Alpha channel
- Offset Material
- Lighting effects

Image I took from Google Images

Using photoshop, I offset the image but it did not match the edges. 

To solve this problem, I cropped the image so that the edges matched perfectly when offset.

Then, I used the alpha channel to separate the opaque (white) from the transparent (black) parts of my new texture.

After adding color to my texture, I used the lighting effect to make it appear as though light from  lamps are  on my texture and to give it a more interesting effect.

This is the final texture I made, in tga format, and then uploaded to SecondLife.

My texture in one of the rooms of our structure (as you can see, it is transparent and you can see the lighting effects on it)

My texture viewed from outside of the building.

Railing made of glowing tubes. These tubes move up and down in a random order, The floor and stairs are interactive: they light up when they are stepped on. This script was obtained from sutor.com

Tubes are in movement. The floor is glowing since I am stepping on it.

We added the same script that we gave the glowing floor (with adapted values) to make the books slide off the shelves when clicked on.

In this room, the chair slides out when touched.

Finished structure.

Access to my blog in the Library, where my three journals can also be accessed.