Making Plants
It has occurred to me that people make things out of “prims” for the most part. As I look around myself I find circles, cubes, pyramids, spheres, tubes sometimes twisted or cut or stretched. In other words SL is a recreation of “man’s” world. But nature is not so simplistic. While it is possible to make a bear or tree out of cubes and spheres and such, it never looks quite natural enough so people have created another way to make more natural-looking items – sculpties. I have Blender -the open source program that is used by a number of people I know. I haven’t had time yet to really explore it.
But to begin my design of natural things I decided to do a few very SL-ish plants. But the plants I needed to do are not found in the Linden Library or, for that matter, anywhere on SL. I needed specific plants from the Great Lakes region of the US, specifically the Upper Peninsula and Lake Superior shore. I started with a photo of a “sand cherry”, a native dune plant. I found it takes a lot of time, patience and a fine hand to take out all that background junk and leave in all the leaves and flowers that are there. Then , the image has to be saved correctly, uploaded, put on a prim and 3 or 4 of those prims assembled to give it a more-or-less 3D appearance. Here is my first plant – the Sand Cherry.
Is it possible to use fractals in SL
Once I saw these are great at making ferns for example and other biol structures.
What a good idea. I’ll look into it.