Mesh build for [HANDverk] booth

This is Tobias here, long-lurking companion of the prolific Daph that has good-naturedly been semi-ghostwriting my entries for all too long now. It is time that I stepped up my game and contributed to this awesome blog that Daphne has set up and maintained. Hopefully this will be the first of many posts, as I have long-intended to do some blogging and I have a store of ideas that I have accumulated.

Enough of the chit-chat, on to business! I would like to tell you a little about the [HANDverk] booth that I designed and built very recently for Culture Shock 2012. We are excited about it because it is a foray into Second Life© building that I am more than qualified and to do, but have been looking for the right opportunity to start. Daph has been encouraging me for a long time to throw my hat into the Second Life© build-creation-ring and now with the full-fledged arrival of !MESH! on the grid I have no reason to jump in with both feet. First though, one little dirty secret about my “other life”. Motions the reader closer and whispers, “I am a real-in-the-flesh designer/architect.” This will be perhaps my sole confession about that, ahem, other part of my existence.

I have been a power-user of the awesome 3D building app Sketchup almost since its appearance in 2000. Using it for both personal and professional purposes it dragged me into the 3D creation world gently and easily and has become a powerful tool for me. Now I was always eager to take advantage of my skills for Second Life© building, but it never quite meshed (no pun intended) with my needs or workflow. I never quite bought into the sculpty experiment as it always seemed like an awkward work-around to a bigger problem, the problematic prim-based creation mode that was Second Life© content creation. BUT in 2011, mesh arrived on the scene to save us all from that prim-counting-purgatory! I was not deterred by the common conception that “Sketchup was not a good tool for creating mesh” and was determined to make it work. Maya was brought into my workflow, and low and behold, I could create that elusive .dae file for import to Second Life©. With a little bit of massaging and coercion, I’m now able to bring in a low-prim Sketchup model into Second Life© as a low-prim mesh object with texture mapping included! /me gestures with a flick of the hand to the man behind the curtain, “First slide please!”

The mesh shell comes in-world as only four prim equivalents, but with the baked lighting and textures packs a lot of punch! The curved panels contain the vendors for Daph’s and my exclusive creations for the event, for which our theme was the Bauhaus.

For my exclusive Culture Shock Bauhaus items I created a few that were based on actual objects created by the Bauhaus, and a few that were inspired by the same. The “Wassily Chair” was designed by Marcel Breuer in 1923, The “Tea Infuser MT 49″ and the accompanying “Sugar Basin” was designed by Marianne Brandt about 1924. The Floor Lamp was designed by Gyula Pap in 1923. All of these items were not commercially produced at the time of the Bauhaus, but were produced as replicas later, a testament to the forward thinking that was typical of the Bauhaus.

The remaining items in my little collection were designed by myself as companions to their inspirational Bauhaus objects to create a cohesive set for the event. I hope you will visit our little booth at Culture Shock 2012 starting on May 4 to see Daphne’s and my first entry into the events of Second Life!

[HANDverk] Wingback Chair

Our Mesh Wingback Chairs are highly detailed and textured, complimenting any decor. Richly rendered brown or black worn leather makes the seat inviting to both singles and couples, with high quality sit and cuddle animations.

Features:

1.  Mesh chair (requires a mesh compatible viewer to see it).
2. Nine male sits.
3. Nine female sits.
4. Six couples sits.
5. Thirteen prim equivalents.
6. Featured animation menu system which requires no unsightly poseballs. The male simply clicks on the seat back and the female on the seat bottom to sit and bring up a gender-specific menu from which they can pick from over 24 animated poses.
7. Sit positions can be adjusted from the menu and will be stored indefinitely for each avatar.

To see and try out this chair, please come to our mainstore.