My Wife's Small Project

After my wife, Summer Axon (Thanks for the post by the way haha) and her great friend Velvet Beebe agreed on moving in together, I thought it would be cool to give them a nice house to get changed in, mooch about and have friends over for midnight pajama parties.

So I set out in creating something quick that turned out to be something typically not lol oh dear.

But saying that, I'm glad of what this project turned into, as its become more of a miniature spectacle rather than a simple habitat.

So here it goes in explaining a few things, in which you might want to try out yourself.

First thing you'll notice is the city, I think its seattle, I'm not sure seeing as I've never been.  This is one of the main features that you'll see from the pictures, as it uses a special alpha overlay, highlighting only the shine, glows and lighting effects on the image. So, what does this do? Well, it produces an environment transition effect that you can use with Second Lifes lighting. Thus, when you change your Day/Night timeframe, the city changes with it, without the need of scripting and its viewer compatible for each individual perspective, yay.

How do you do this? Easy Peasy if you know your finnicky bits in Photoshop, took me 5 minutes to do all 4 alpha overlays, so its not that hard really. All you need to do is copy the original image/images into another document, convert them to greyscale, so its easier to handle. Then adjust the curves so it blackens out everything you don't want and white out the lighting areas. Just have a play in curves, its easy to get the hang of. Then from there, blacken any parts that curves cant do without losing its lighting areas, eg. on my city, the only thing that needed blackening was the sky. Then, select all, and copy, paste into an alpha channel. Simple.

You'll see other things in the pictures above, like lighting, ambience, effects, reflective techiniques. Things you cant see or hear are alot of sound effects and animated textures for the rain. Such as, walking closer to the windows, you'll notice streams and splashes of rain running down the panes of glass. The closer you get to the glass, you'll hear the rain hitting the surface of the pane.

Walking closer to the edge of the balcony makes winds rush past you as the rain pours down around you. As the wind subsides, you'll hear noises of the city below, honking cars, sirens, crickets and so on. As you walk inside, the wind and rain quieten, leaving you with the soothing sounds of the rain pattering on the roof.

Below you'll see the transitions between the times of day and how it effects the city and the shading around the apartment building...

I need to add a few other things like raindrop animations on the balcony floor and finish off the interior with some more modern furniture, but overall I think its looking nice, I hope you find it interesting too :P. Some last pictures taken by the notorious Zephyrin Raymaker, featuring Summer Axon, Velvet Beebe, Zephyrin Raymaker, Acid Zenith and myself.