Ripping it up

Organics Animations
Originally uploaded by Snowy Hoobinoo

Completely stuck in a rut for the past month or so I found myself just logging on for the sake of it and wasting away hours doing.......nothing. Sometimes I walk away from an SL session after a couple of hours with no real idea of what i've achieved or done, i'm not the most talkative and my friends list is fairly short so no long winded conversations, no building, no great explorations across the grid, I guess i'm just sat in world procrastinating.
Anyway, it got to the point where I was ready to take a break for a while and walk away, but that evening while dropping of to sleep images came to me, caves/organics/life systems colliding, must be that point in quiet stillness where your brain begins putting together all the things you've learnt/seen throughout the day that give the best ideas.

So the next day I went back into the RG sim and ripped it up, deleted the lot and leveled the land, as a cathartic action it really did wipe the slate clean in my head and the building just flowed from there, land went up, sculpted were sorted and texturing was easy, no pre planning just bouncing ideas along as they revealed themselves. I really like visiting enclosed builds or eco systems where the closeness and conformity create a believable cohesiveness.

Shortly afterwards Vlad Bjornson set through a link to this vid: http://donwhitaker.tumblr.com/post/234026846/yonder-inspiration-for-virtual-plants

The thought of animated plants and organics in virtual worlds has been on my mind for a while but after testing various anim systems etc the end result never matched the initial idea, too jerky and unrealistic, after watching the Yonder vid above it occurred to me to use my avatar as the base for the animation and the plant itself, creating smooth animations in the process. After knocking up some quick test anims using folded limbs and attaching some forms I knocked up this video, works pretty well and i've experimented a bit more since so should be showing those soon.