One of the best ways to made new friends in Caledon Oxbridge is to hang out at the stone circle seats outside the lecture hall. Many visitors, scholars and faculty staff pass through and stop to say hello or stay for a longer chat. That was how I met and became friends with Mr Snow recently.
One day, after seeing him show off his newly built motorbike, I asked if he would build a steampunk robot vendor to distribute copies of the then forthcoming Oxbridge Gazette. There was also a possibility that the Chancellor Emeritus Carl Metropolitan would use it for the SL11B celebrations.
“For the next few weeks… he sweated in Blender…”
Mr Snow and Charles the Gazette Vendor
With my editor’s instinct for a good news item, I made sure that Mr Snow understood that an interview with him regarding the building experience was part of the deal. His early design models were very promising, and lead me to suggest that a land impact (li) of 10 would be a good goal. Mr Snow then spent many hours trying to meshify the robot, reduce the li value and animate its arms to deliver the gazette upon ‘touch’. For the next few weeks, as he sweated in Blender, I fretted for the lack of news. Unless Mr Snow delivered a build that would be accepted and displayed at SL11B, this interview would be like a Black Forest cake without the vaunted cherries.
However, with more than a week to spare before the opening of SL11B celebrations, Mr Snow delivered to me a perfectly textured, 5 li mesh robot vendor. Although he will work further on the animation and land impact reduction, he can now work with the sense of accomplishment of having his build added to the Caledon Oxbridge University SL11B display.
Finally, with Charles installed at the SL11B site, I booked an appointment with Mr Snow at Caledon Mayfair, where I made provision for him to rez some of his builds for my camera.
I started the interview keen to clarify that he is indeed an Oxbridge scholar who only started building recently. “Mr Snow, you say in your profile that although you created your account in August 2012, you only started using it recently?”
“Yes,” he replied. “I studied New Media in college, and we looked at SL. I only used it for a few days, maybe a week, before giving up. I came to the wrong landing spot, apparently,” he said wryly, implying that the right landing spot would have been Caledon Oxbridge. “ There weren’t that many people where I first logged in, and the few that were there were rude and illiterate.”
“Caledon was the first place I landed in my return to Second Life”
But a longstanding desire to create and model in 3D would eventually lead him back to SL. Mr Snow’s Typist got involved with a 3D printing club and he recalled that SL’s building tools were particularly effective and user-friendly. Even that was not enough for him to dust off his SL account. The real catalyst for his return was discovering a podcast about Caledon.
“I’ve recently, in past months, become a huge fan of steampunk; an aesthetic I’ve loved my whole life, but never knew it was a thing until recently. But there don’t seem to be that many avenues for it in RL. So I was searching the internet for steampunk stuff, and I found a podcast. It turns out it was a podcast for steampunk in SL. I listened to the first episode and knew I had to come here.That podcast was many years old, though, and Caledon has changed a lot. But I was not disappointed by my experience. So Caledon was the first place I landed in my return to Second Life.”
A return to the right landing spot indeed.
“What’s the point of building if you can’t show anyone?”
While he first came for the building, he has since become pretty obsessed by the whole SL experience. Building is still what he spends most of his time on, but he probably wouldn’t have stayed but for the wonderful people he has met. He loves an audience too. “What’s the point of building if you can’t show anyone?”
I then rezzed out a vintage camera that Mr Snow shared with me a few days ago. I noted that I could halve the li down to 28 prims by using the convex hull technique. He must have built it quite early upon his return to SL, before he learned this nifty trick.
“Yes. When I heard about the university’s photo salon I realized that I could use SL lighting engine to light portraits and practice photography for my RL work. I was so excited, and so I set to work building a light kit. It isn’t scripted or anything, I just set the bulb to emit light in the build menu when i want to use it. After I built my light kit, I decided I needed a camera for a prop.”
We both agreed that SL is a good simulation for practicing the RL photography, even though there are a lot more complications and challenges for RL.
After breaking his teeth on camera equipment, Mr Snow moved onto building his first moving vehicle, a steampunk motorbike. That’s where he learned about physics shapes and also tackled the challenge of bringing the li down to 32 or less, a requirement for moving vehicles.
“It was also my first foray into scripting! The camera was just a large paperweight. I was so proud of this bike… I still am, really… but I have recently seen people that make bikes for SL. And oh my goodness they look real. Every part of the engine is there and has moving parts. I just randomly placed pipes on a cube… I totally fudged it.”
I assured Mr Snow the bike still looked impressive. It was eminently suitable for driving around Caledon with a friend. I then brought the conversation back to the gazette vendor. Charles was such a specific personal name. I asked if he named it early on in during his work.
“I first named him Mk. 1 automated newspaper dispenser. Miss Emerald Rayn named him Charles. I still call it that in my head, but everyone else prefers Charles.”
Mr Snow’s sequence of major builds in SL: Camera, Bike, Charles
I then asked Mr Snow to expound on his design approach as he rezzed a few of the earlier versions of Charles.
“Caledon is steampunk with fantasy, so I wanted it whimsical.”
“I wanted to take ‘advanced technology’ like modern day newsstands and put in the Victorian age, and adding their version of fantastical elements to make it work. Caledon is steampunk with fantasy, so I wanted it whimsical. I don’t think I delivered on that, but it did drive the design process. I was originally going to have it have steam exhaust ports, which I can do easily, but you didn’t want particle scripts. I was also going to have the arms reach out from inside to hand out the paper, but decided it would be more whimsical if they reached from the outside. They were going to be encased in a compartment that opens up before they unfold. And I was going to animate him to hand you a paper and make a grumpy remark. You can see he doesn’t like his job!”
When Mr Snow realized that Charles looked too 1950s, he dressed him up in a vest and tie.
“I thought it makes sense for him to be formal,” he said. In an early build, Charles wore a gramophone on the head and I suggested a bowler hat instead. Mr Snow then “took inspiration to make the final design for Charles to look more like a gentleman.
Then Mr Snow recalled my surprise when I saw that he was using Puppeteer script technology for Charles to reach out his arms and hand over a copy of the gazette.
Early Charles Models
“I thought it was a fiendish challenge,” I said.
“ Fiendish is the PERFECT word for it! So as the robot gradually become more human-looking, I wanted to make the arms look less human, which is why they have hollows, and have as many joints as they do in the final version. To counterbalance it.”
“So can you talk us through this part of the building process that lead you to Mesh Studio and Blender?”
“Actually, it was right about this time that I even learned what Mesh Studio was. Mesh was still an abstract concept for me shortly before this. I had won a few build contests, and that combined with the commission money for this project would have given me almost enough to buy Mesh Studio.”
“With Mesh Studio can you do non-prim type of shapes?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. I believe it only converts prims and sculpts.”
“One could say in the long term you are better off learning Blender…”
“It will still be a LONG time before I can do everything I can with prims using only Blender… ”
And since the SL11B version of Charles was created using Mesh Studio, we both agreed that it is still a very effective and valuable tool. Then we walked through the extended period where things did not go so well.
“… then came that long period when you had some uv mapping challenges. Is that right?”
Mr Snow shuddered thinking about what he termed the ‘Dark Ages’. This was also when he started to call Charles the Infernal Machine.
“Yes, I used Firestorm to export into Blender, and then spent 12 hours removing faces. That was how I learned to use Blender! I got the li from 50-something down to under 2. However, it wouldn’t display the textures properly when I imported it back into SL. I learned that was because of the UV mapping process.” He then added gloomily, “I spent about two weeks not making any progress with this thing because of that…”
Invasion of the Infernal Machines – the different versions of Charles the Gazette Vendor worked on by Mr Snow
“I hope my specification was not too tough,” I said. “ I asked for a best effort to 10 li. Your final was only 5.”
Mr Snow was quick to assure me that I have been a patient and supportive Dean. He added: “Since Charles isn’t animated, there is no need for the arms, or the paper inside. There is a 1 prim block on top of the stack of papers that I forgot to take out. So without that it would be 4 li. It is literally a waste! The arms at least add something… If you removed that paper though, it wouldn’t look any different.”
Such a perfectionist attitude augers well for Mr Snow as a builder who will only grow in skill and reputation.
Finally, I asked whether he did any classes at Caledon Oxbridge University, and if any classes stood out.
“All of them,” he said. “Except for Advance Building which always seemed to be at the wrong time for me. I also thought Miss Lindal Kidd’s Avatar Safety class was particularly helpful.”
On this high note, a satisfying validation of the effort and energy put in by faculty staff to service the Caledon Oxbridge community, we ended our interview. I’m sure this is not the last that we will hear about Mr Snow’s achievements. Indeed, he has just been enlisted to create a centerpiece engine for the Europa Consulate of Wulfenbach’s entry for SL11B. Perhaps we will get you the scoop on this next month’s edition of the gazette.