STA Travel Unveils its New Globe!
Last week, STA Travel unveiled its latest addition to its Second Life property, installing a 10 meter globe at its Orientation Island. Embedded in the globe are Landmarks for Real Life themed sims such as: London, Costa Rica, Casablanca and New Berlin. It is STA Travel's hope that SL residents will find this globe a fun new way to explore the virtual world.
-Bob
Posted at 5:22 PM in STA Travel Sim Build | Comments (0) |
Museum of Submissions
Some of you have been asking about the Egyptian Temple, also known as the Museum of Submissions.
This build is our choice to represent the African continent, and while we were initially concerned that it may be too similar in color and style to the Mayan temple, we found with a little research and come careful detail work, they each stand as unique builds and styles in their own right.
The concept of Egypt (at least in the U.S.) is still tied pretty strongly to the influx of museum tours, artifacts and the ensuing craze for all things Egyptian in the mid-eighties. With that in mind, it seemed like Egypt was a natural fit for the Museum of Submissions on STA Travel Main Island. Here visitors can contribute their own artifacts from their travels, both in real life and in SL, in the form of photos and sculptures.
As you visit, you'll notice some empty pedestals set up inside the Museum. Those are waiting for your works of art! Swing by the STA Orientation Sandbox (on Orientation Island) to practice your building skills. When you have something you're proud to show off, drop a copy in the Submission Kiosk (located in the Museum and over on the Sandbox). STA Travel management will go through the submissions and if yours is selected, it will be put up on display in the Museum for all to see! Also check back here to see the winners of the various building contests that STA Travel will be hosting in the coming weeks.
Even if you're not a builder, you still can contribute to the Museum through the use of the Photo Displays. There's one for SL travel photos and one for real life travel photos - just follow the instructions on top of the displays to add your photo, and the display will automatically cycle through each photo that's been added!
-Cory
STA Travel's Mayan Temple Ruin
Hi guys, Cory Edo here again to tell you a little bit about the Media Center on STA Travel Main Island - or, as you might notice when you visit, the Mayan Temple Ruin.
The Media Center will be the place where you can view STA Travel movies, and there's some good material lined up - student produced films about traveling, stories about how travel has enriched students' lives - but what I wanted to touch on here was the choice of style for this area.
As you might notice from checking out the other architectural styles represented on STA Travel Main Island, we picked a design for each location that represented a different continent. The Mayan build represents the South American continent, and besides fitting well into that design scheme, it also was a good fit for another reason - the dark interior, with vines covering the entryways, lends itself to create the dark atmosphere one expects when entering a movie theatre or viewing room.
There's a few neat little scripted touches on this build as well. When you walk into the Center, the vines hanging across the doorways sway and part as you walk through them. Also, be careful - if you enter the Center from the main entryway (the one that faces the center of the island), you'll awaken Quetzalcoatl, who resides in the statue in the center of the build!
-Cory
Posted at 2:41 PM in STA Travel Sim Build | Comments (0) |
Creating The Dome
Domes are one of the trickier builds to do in Second Life unless you have a little help. Prims, which are the building blocks that everything you see in SL are made from, have a size limit of 10 meters on any axis. This means that instead of creating one large sphere that spans roughly 134 meters (as the STA Travel dome does), the dome has to be constructed of smaller prims that are rotated and cut precisely to give the illusion of a large, curved structure.
Scripted tools can be a big help in creating these large, mathematically complex builds. Instead of painstakingly working out each prims' cut and rotation, scripted tools allow you to input a number of variables, like radius and number of sides, and then can calculate, create and place each prim according to those variables.
The scaffolding effect on the STA dome isn't the result of a number of small prims, however – that's all done with the use of textures to simulate the effect of a metal grid forming the archway.
Doesn't it look amazing! This was a very hard build for me but I think it turned out great!
-Makaio
Structural Breakdown Information for the World Tour Build
Hey it's Makaio again! I'll be discussing some of the structural details of the World Tour build for STA Travel.
Starting from the ground up, the basic footprint of the overall build would be an open-interior hexagon in which five of the six sides would be variously themed builds borrowing appearances from styles around the world. The sixth side of the hexagon would be removed, allowing for traffic to enter from the STA main office to the courtyard that sits at the center of the build in it's entirety; from there people would have a panoramic view of each of the individual nested structures which is very cool!
Tying each of the builds into one continuous structure would be the 60 degree corner pieces, which had been stylized as airport interiors - the overall idea being that as you travel the circumference of the build it would be as if you were hopping between airports and various locations around the world consecutively.
The five structures chosen to house the functional rooms needed within the sim were selected as an open-air French cafe, a Mayan Ziggurat, an American store-front, an Egyptian temple as well as a Chinese pagoda. Each of these structures were built to fit a specific template that had been premade, which I will discuss further.
Once all the pieces of the build had been determined, our first course of action was building out the necessary footprint. For the sake of aesthetics, as well as complexity, we had decided to keep each of the five segments built to a measured template. The template that created the footprint for each of the builds would in turn represent one wall of the hexagon. After some basic geometric formulation to determine the width of the entire structure, followed by some small adjustments to make the measures more workable, the template for each of the five builds would measure 40 meters wide, 30 meters long, and approximately 25 meters high! With this determined, the members of the build team set to constructing the varied architecture; our primary goal was to create five unique looks utilizing the space we had available, making sure not to exceed it - which would cause us problems in the long run once it was time to fit the segments together.
As each of the pieces was completed, it was linked into as few linksets as possible and the entire build would be rotated, moved and centered to its final destination within the hexagon. Building to template allowed for next to no adjustment, the pieces socketed to their individual cutouts left beforehand. After this had been completed the hexagon was capped with an open-air dome composed of a number of long arms and the work on the central courtyard, as well as the content to fill out the builds had begun.
That sums up the overall design and process used in the creation of the STA Travel World Tour build. Keep an eye out for my next update where I will go more in depth on the creation of the dome used to span the build.
-Makaio
STA Travel Island - Background of the Build
Although building in Second Life is very different than construction in real life, when working with large complex structures there is still a considerable amount of planning and team work needed to pull it off successfully.
For the STA Travel primary structure we started out with a proposal made by Damien Fate that laid out the main concept of the building. The concept was a six sided ring with a central courtyard and a dome-like structure over the top. The six different sections, built in architectural styles from around the world, would house areas for shopping, hanging out, exploring, learning and all that fun stuff.
After some tweaking, experimentation and of course a little frustration with the size, location on the region, and overall shape, Makaio and I produced several small models, finishing with a 1/10 scale math model of the building and its positioning on the region.This model provided us with exact and easy to reference dimensions to lay out the ’footprint’ of the building and all its parts so we can start construction on the detailed segments of the building.
The diagram above shows measurements we used to lay out the footprint of the buildings. Doesn't it look cool?
So far it is going really well! We are extremely excited and cannot wait until you can come and enjoy it!
-Barnes
Vive la France!
After the initial building structure was laid out, it was time to start working on the individual themed sections. I had a picture in my mind from the reference photos that Barnes found to model this area after, so I asked if I could take a crack at building the French Cafe.
The main idea that I had in mind as I went into the build was a comment Barnes made about false building fronts, think along the lines of Disneyland's Main Street, where facades of buildings fill out space even thought they aren't functional. To give the feel of a small slice of a French street, I created two of these facades on either side of the open entrance to the courtyard in front of the bakery. Behind these buildings are two tiny park areas, more facades to create an alleyway feel, and the exits to the airport-themed corner sections which lead to the neighboring builds.
My favorite part of this build was the detail work to give it a real immersive aspect. When you work on sim-scale builds, a lot of times the detail work gets hurried or overlooked – I finally had an excuse with the French Cafe to really add in little touches, like the loaves of french bread, custom street signs, falling leaves from the trees, etc.
This is also the first build where I've added in ambient sound effects, scripted by Crystalshard, to give the sense of place another level. As you sit in the courtyard and sip on some wine, you'll hear the strains of music fade in and out, possibly from a street performer just a block away.
-Cory
Posted at 6:59 PM in STA Travel Sim Build | Comments (0) |
