2013 Console Room in SL

[cobalt]

Here's a little peek at something I've been messing with on Second Life for a little over a year, now. It's all imported mesh, build in 3ds Max. This ended up being the most complex thing I've ever worked on, owing to the number of fiddly little bits all over the console. Much use was made of the Google Street View TARDIS, as a reference source. Anyplace where I couldn't read a label on the Google version, I made something up that looked right.

[vortex maker]

Looks great despite not being realistically lit and textured. I think you really got the feel of the interior down well.

[cobalt]

Thank you - and yeah. SL's lighting system is somewhat limited. You can only have a certain number of lights active at a time, and even fewer that project with shadows. I'm actually only using two shadowed lights (the orange lighting from above) Shadow lights can only be spotlights - no shadows on omindirectional light sources are available.

[vortex maker]

OK. Second life is a game? That would mean that it's drawing everything there in realtime. Pretty impressive results.

Have you considered baking everything and importing it that way? It would be a lot of work but I think it would be worth it.

[cobalt]

Second Life isn't really a game. It's a 3D virtual environment. Think of it as a cross between a chatroom and a lego set, built inside a MMO system. So, yes - it's realtime.

If you mean baking the lighting, that would be possible, but only up to a point. SL did recently add illumination maps, but they're still somewhat experimental.

[vortex maker]

Basically I mean making your scene look exactly how you want it to with a rendering engine like VRay (I don't know if you have access to that or not), LuxRender, Cycles (if you really want to take the time to learn it). Basically just use a nicer rendering engine. Then you bake everything, shadows, materials, caustics, everything. You then use these as a shadeless material in SL.

Here's a little demo with Blender:

Hopefully you get the idea.

[TheWitch]

Wow - Just, WOW, that is remarkable work Cobalt! I have a that interior buts with the Capaldi updates, I don't suppose you could teach me your ways in getting it into SL also?

Have you got your Beautiful piece to travel yet? like they do with all the other less awsome now interiors aha!

- Tom_j

[cobalt]

Getting things into SL is a bit of work - to save on rendering RAM, they use a "level of detail" system, where they swap out models at varying distances. So you can't just import a model. Ideally, you should have several versions of a model: Hi res for closeup, Medium res for medium distance viewing, Low res for distance and Ultra-Low res for far distance. For some pieces you can do away with the lower res models - if they are never going to be viewed from far enough away. The central platform for example only has a high-res model, because by the time you're far enough away for the medium-res model to kick in, there's a wall blocking your view.

But all those fiddly little controls I had to make multiple models for. It got quite tedious.

The other thing to remember, is that since this is a real-time virtual world, you're going to need physics models for anything you're going to interact with as a solid object.

Once you have all your bits built, you export them in collada format, and then there's an importing window in SL where you pick the model for each level of detail, and the physics model.

[rob49152]

wow! That is rather amazing for second life! I didn't think it could even do this type of lighting. Impressive.

[galacticprobe]

That is amazing and impressive - period! Show those renders to most people and they'll think they're looking at the real console room set! Great work, cobalt!

And just a quick question on that cubby with the portholes under the console platform: did we ever find out definitively whether it was an eight- or nine-sided structure? I remember this being discussed in another thread, but I can't locate it to link to (of course because I'm looking for it), and I don't remember if we ever figured out if it had only eight sides, or nine, like the rows of new floor vents in the console platform. (I know the cubby structure came before the new vents so it wouldn't have changed, but just how many sides does it have? It's even hard to tell using the Google Maps interior.)

Your render looks so real, cobalt, that it's brought that question back to the forefront of my mind.

Dino.

[superrichi1a]

wow! That is rather amazing for second life! I didn't think it could even do this type of lighting. Impressive.

Seconded, in fact I don't think in my day anything like this could ever have been made! Have they improved the, I don't know, building mechanics or graphics etc in the last 4 years? And is the prim count as scarily high as it looks or has a lot of it been reduced by being a sculpt? (Yeah, still got the lingo!)
In short, fantastic stuff, you rarely see such attention to detail and I love it!

[LMC97]

  I really like your interior Cobalt  It makes mine look boring. 

LMC

[TheWitch]

Dino -

I think it was because you commented on one of my old threads saying that's its is indeed 9 gratings in the floor.



Soo now I got my floor updated with 9 gratings. Looks soooo much better than 8.



- Tom_J

[cobalt]

wow! That is rather amazing for second life! I didn't think it could even do this type of lighting. Impressive.

Second Life has added an alternate rendering system called Deferred Rendering, which allows for the use of shadows from light sources, and increased texture effect including specular maps, bump maps (normal maps),  and illumination maps. I also tweaked the atmospheric (sky) settings to add a bit of ambient fog/haze to the room.

As for the number of sides on the bin, I went with nine, because as mentioned above, there are nine floor gratings.

Which makes sense, since it seems that the room itself, being circular, is built around the degrees of rotation in a circle.

360 degrees gets you all the way around a complete circle.

So, there are eighteen "ribs" around the room, each offset by twenty degrees of rotation. (18 X 20 = 360)

The central platform, and the supports under it, follow the same math - there are nine support ribs under the platform, and nine gratings in the top, each offset by forty degrees of rotation. (9 X 40 = 360)

Thus there are nine sides to the cabinet under the platform.

[cobalt]

wow! That is rather amazing for second life! I didn't think it could even do this type of lighting. Impressive.

Seconded, in fact I don't think in my day anything like this could ever have been made! Have they improved the, I don't know, building mechanics or graphics etc in the last 4 years? And is the prim count as scarily high as it looks or has a lot of it been reduced by being a sculpt? (Yeah, still got the lingo!)
In short, fantastic stuff, you rarely see such attention to detail and I love it!

They've added the ability to import mesh objects, so you're no longer constrained to the in-world primitive objects or sculpties for building. You can import actual proper mesh models now, in collada format. Prim count on the entire room was about 390 when I finished it. That will probably go up a little after the scripts have been added to make everything work.