So as mentioned earlier this week, I've been thinking recently about starting up a new business venture in SL, to replace the new adult blog -avatar- that I've now decided not to open after all; I'm thinking of opening a new "prefab" store, actually, to borrow an architectural term, one I'll call "Fabb" if I end up going through with it. Prefab, for those who don't know, is short for "prefabricated housing," and is a subject the real-life architectural industry has already been dealing with for a century or longer; but as you can imagine, the term takes on an entirely different relevance within the grid, which after all is a place where one can literally stick an entire medieval castle into a cardboard shoebox, then simply yank it back out when one is ready to live in it. Combine this with the fact that duplication and distribution of goods in SL is free, and you can see that virtual architecture is atually a pretty good business when it comes to labor versus profit -- once the complicated work of the prototype itself is done, infinite copies of that house can be sold into perpetuity with no extra effort, leaving the architect free to develop a bigger and bigger "long tail" of dwellings for sale in the first place.

My idea with Fabb is to construct modernist, space-agish houses that are nonetheless highly livable, taking just a bit of an advantage of the fantastical elements available in the grid (like waterfalls that can travel through rooms, decks that don't require load-bearing pillars, etc), to create something that at once seems from the future but also that one could actually buy in real life today (if one was rich enough, that is). The plan, then, is to create a series of dwellings with different footprints (20 x 10 meters, 30 x 30, 40 x 20, etc), each appropriate for a different kind of common land parcel out there; and then to also create a series of visual styles for Fabb, named for the types of environments in the grid where the houses would work best, and to create a version of each style for each different footprint I design. That way I get three or four sellable houses for each prototype I work on, vastly improving my work-versus-money ratio; plus customers get two different ways to shop, either deciding on a style first and then finding the size that's right for them, or vice-versa.

I'm in the middle of designing my first dwelling as we speak, actually, a three-story beach house with a total footprint of 30 x 20 meters. (That's 600 square meters total, for those playing along at home; in other words, a dominating structure if placed on a 1,024-m2 plot, not so much if placed on 1,536-m2 or more.) For this first house, in fact, I'm keeping detailed notes on just how long each step of the creative process is taking me; this is going to help me determine just what kind of labor/pay ratio I can expect in the future, as I get better and better at each step, which of course will help me determine whether or not to open Fabb in the first place. Anyway, I've now put a total of seven man-hours into the project (or should that be av-hours?), and believe it or not am actually getting dangerously close to having a completed house on my hands; for all of you like me who have always been curious about the planning and construction process in SL, I thought today I'd share some of my building notes with you.

Hour 1. My first hour on the project, before I did anything else, was spent in a cafe in my neighborhood here in Chicago, merely doodling out some of the ideas I had; I'm old-skool, after all (i.e. got my art degree in the '80s, before the introduction of computer graphics), which means that I was trained to think visually literally by holding pen and paper in hand. As you can see in the above images, how I started was to basically draw out the boundaries of the footprint itself, then start throwing down 2D rectangles until I was aesthetically pleased with how they interacted; I then extrapolated those into 3D boxes and did a series of perspective drawings (both from the front and back), just to make sure it wasn't totally a waste of my time to go with this particular scheme.

Hour 2. My next step, then, was to actually go into the grid and rez up a 3D version of my sketches, moving as quickly as possible using only a series of featureless transparent cubes; working out details on paper first is good and all, don't get me wrong, but ultimately sorta defeats the purpose of working within SL to begin with. This step was done for one reason and one reason only, so that my avatar could actually walk around within my "3D blueprint" and make sure I hadn't made any glaring mistakes in my planning; and as you can see if you compare these images to the original drawings, there were indeed a whole series of small mistaken assumptions I made in my pen-and-ink plans, which thankfully can be quickly corrected in SL merely by pulling a bit on the side of a prim. As a newbie architect, I'm glad I went through this step; as I get better and better at building, though, I have a feeling that I'll eventually be able to drop this step altogether, which is why I was curious how long this particular step would take me.

Hours 3 and 4. Okay, so then I was ready for the step that so far has turned out to be the longest individual one; the construction of the actual house frame, or in other words just the walls, floors and ceilings. And again, this is a step that I'm envisioning will take less and less time, the more experienced I get at building and the more grunt work I put in; that's the beauty of building in SL, after all, is that each time you perfect another basic building block (say, for example, a 10 x 2 x 2 rounded pillar that's been sheared into quarters and textured with tan stucco), that's one less piece you have to create for future houses, and instead can just plop down and shift-copy to your heart's content. This is also the step, by the way, where you can first start seeing the stylistic details that will be featured in all of Fabb's dwellings, as a way of setting it apart from all the other prefab companies out there (and there's a lot of them); the rounded corners, the elongated decks, the narrow horizontal windows, the complex interplay of indoor and outdoor space, etc. That's the hope, anyway; that eventually, a person will be able to randomly spot one of my houses in the wild and immediately think to themselves, "Why, that's a Fabb house!"

Now, that said, this step is also fraught with complexities, which I'm sure I'll be getting into in more detail in future entries; in particular I'm finding the process of matching up stretched textures to be a bit of a f*****g nightmare, for example all those mismatched wood planks you see on the floor in the above photos, a situation which comes about by having prims of different sizes but with the same texture next to each other. (In a nutshell, the way one corrects for this is by changing the texture dimensions on one of the prims; to have it repeat a little more or a little less, stretched a little more or a little less, offset a little more or a little less, until the pictures on both prims are in perfect alignment with each other. Can you see why this might be a bit of a nightmare when you have two different-sized prims next to each other?) Anyway, I'm already discovering a series of tricks that can help ease this process, as well as such other maddening details as getting prims to exactly line up; like I said, I will undoubtedly be sharing these tips in future entries.

Hour 5. Okay, so now that I had the framework together, it was time to take a much more detailed look at the house so far, and to start tweaking the various elements that I thought could be done better. For example, one of the big things I did during this step was to deepen the floor/ceiling between each story, from basically a flat panel to a slab a meter thick; this, it turned out, not only helped greatly with meshing the stories together afterwards, but also gave me an aesthetic white strip along the exterior of the house in intriguing locations and patterns. Also, I decided that having the entirety of the decks be white was just a little too modernist; that's why I changed the center of each to now appear like wooden slats, just like the flooring on the inside of the house. Also, this was the step where I first put in the fantastical waterfall I had envisioned for this house from the start; one that starts on the second floor as a pool, then pours through a glass wall in order to form an outdoor waterfall, as well as inside the house where the pool spills over the second-floor balcony. (Sorry, by the way, for the waterfall looking less than spectacular in the above photos; I happened to be having problems with the rendering engine right when these images were taken.)

Hour 6 (which was actually an hour and a half). All right, we're finally starting to get a house on our hands! Now that the basics of the frame were becoming more and more finalized, in fact, it was time to get into the structure and start adding the details that will eventually sell the thing; the means of moving about within the home, that is, the hallways and staircases and other elements that avatars directly deal with when moving around. Let's face facts, after all; with the building process in SL being as easy as it is, it takes neither an exceptional amount of smarts nor training if all one wants to do is assemble four walls and a ceiling there. Where the crucial difference lays, then, in all the competing prefab businesses out there, is the one element that does take smarts and training to master, which is the flow of the house; of how easy or intuitive it is to move from one part of the dwelling to another, of how the different parts of the dwelling interact with each other not only functionally but aesthetically. This is just my opinion, of course; but when all is said and done, I do believe such details to be the fundamental thing separating the merely decent builders in SL from the truly great ones, no matter if it's homes or clothing or vehicles you're talking about.

Hour 7 (which was actually a half-hour). And then here's the latest work I've done on the house, just a couple of hours before writing this report, which as you can see mostly involved finer and finer details; the stairway between the second and third stories, railings for each story and the like. By the way, in these shots you're seeing the glass walls as they'll appear in the "open" position; these will in fact be giant sliding doors by the time this whole process is over, which the homeowner will be able to open and close simply by clicking on them. For those who are curious, the windows will also have multiple tints that a homeowner will able to change by clicking on a button; for those who don't know, among other things you can even embed interactive scripts within prims in SL, which is what powers both of the features mentioned, as well as such things as lockable doors.

Okay, so that's it for now; and as you can see, I don't think it's going to be much longer at all before I have a fully finished house on my hands. And what's after that? Why, find me some testers, of course! And this is where you potentially come into play, dear reader; to be precise, I'm looking for five to ten people who would enjoy receiving a free copy of this house when it's finished, in return for filling out a questionnaire on what they think of it, as well as letting me come by and take photos of it rezzed on their land. Remember, you will need a plot of land at least 1,024 square meters in size in order to use this house, and ideally 1,500 square meters or more; if you do own such a plot, though, and would be interested in being a Fabb tester, do be sure to drop me a line at inthegrid [at] gmail.com and let me know.

By the way, these days mark the first time I've ever gone seriously shopping in the grid for textures; and ooh, man, have you ever tried such a thing yourself? It's a nightmare, frankly, and a perfect example of how SL is not actually the best option for every online activity out there; textures are cheap, after all, meaning that the only way to make money from them is to have thousands of them, which when selling in SL means that you need thousands of prims on display as well, each of them with a different texture rezzed on its side. Now compare this, for example, to how one would do this through a website; how you could simply have the different textures displayed as JPEGS on various pages, taking almost no time at all to load, and with a search engine as well so that one could simply skip directly to what one is looking for.

This always makes me laugh, to tell you the truth, when some new SL fanatic starts talking about all the various things that could be done in that environment, that don't actually make any sense to do there; like that executive from Amazon.com, for example, who was recently talking in public about how cool it'd be for Amazon to build a superstore in SL, and how much better the shopping experience would be because customers "could browse and ask for help just like a retail bookstore." Well, excuse me for saying this, but wasn't the whole reason Amazon became popular in the first place was that it wasn't like a retail bookstore? That's what makes Amazon so great, after all; that you can simply type in what you're looking for and have the book instantly delivered to your hands, out of a total catalog of titles that would literally take dozens of miles to cover, if one were to ever build a retail bookstore for all of them.

That's what Amazon would be if they ever came into Second Life: they'd be a 100-mile-long bookstore, and to browse the shelves with any expediency they would literally have to provide motorcycles to their customers. Jeez, I can barely stand going to the mall to begin with; could you even imagine what a nightmare it'd be to shop a virtual Amazon in such a fashion? Face it, people -- there's a reason certain things have become a lot more popular on the web than they are in the physical world, and just because you can fly and teleport in SL doesn't necessarily change this. There are certain activities that are simply better and easier to do on the web, and will always be better and easier, no matter how cool an environment SL is. I wish more texture vendors would take this lesson to heart!