Facades - Transparent Windows in a Solid Wall

Today I'd like to share a very old trick -- likely a bug, honestly -- in a particular texture mask that has been used in AlphaWorld for over a decade to create windows. 

Stone1m is a very useful mask that leaves the texture unchanged except when a transparent surface is placed in front of the masked object -- the rendered area of the masked object then itself is rendered as transparent. Here's a screenshot from another angle that shows this clearly:

 As I said, this is very useful to create windows on facades that are very inexpensive users of cell space.  To demonstrate, I'll share another facade for a building I completed in Elkins Beach this week.

We start with the base selection of objects:

For this facade, we want a simple wall panel to cover the entire span of the wall. This piece will contain the stone1m masked texture, and  the windows will be placed on it.  We also want a transparent object -- winb2.rwx is a rectangular window that supports the optional texture "tag" parameter:

Texture the frame:
create texture topgrey tag=1 

Texture the pane:
create texture topgrey tag=200

Finally, we'll use p1rec0005g.rwx to add some depth and break the different levels of the facade apart. So we can arrange the facade objects in the location we want:

And then add textures, masks, and scale:

For a final result of 9 objects:

# Object          Purpose        Action

1 w1pan_1000j.rwx masked surface create texture tv4 mask=stone1m
4 winb2.rwx       windows        create texture topgrey tag=1,scale 3 1 0.1

4 p1rec0005g.rwx  depth/detail   create texture topgrey,scale 1 1 5

With this base facade completed, I replicated it out into a larger rectangular building and added some additional detailing as wall dormers and some street-level shops. The street-level shops are currently complete, but the overall structure is done:

And that's that! Feel free to share your own examples of this technique in the comments! This is a very common technique in AlphaWorld and I enjoy seeing new and creative implementations of it.

Noticeboard: Susan3D.com now a free resource -- models, avatars and textures formatted for Activeworlds

Hey everyone.  Coming out of the woodwork to share a link that has come across my radar.

Cy Award-winning artist Susan 3D (formerly Lady Murasaki) has made her online resource -- http://www.susan3d.com -- free to use.  She has designed many objects, textures, avatars, and other resources such as tutorials during her time in AW and I expect that opening the site up to everyone will be very valuable to the remaining private world owners.

In addition to this, she will continue to post resources to the site.  See this AWForum Thread today for the most recent updates.

Building - Basic Terrain Manipulation

For private world owners, manipulating the terrain is very simple and can go a long way to adding character to virtual landscapes and scenes.  Terrain editing used to be a caretaker-only right, but as of Active Worlds 4.2 Build 1015 can be given to users through the World Rights list. Public worlds also have limited terrain editing abilities, and rely on bots such as Demeter to allow builders to manipulate terrain on their property.

This tutorial explains simple terrain editing for users who can edit terrain directly.  Terrain in Active Worlds is manipulated at the intersection of coordinate grids.  You can view the coordinate grid by pressing F10 in Active Worlds.  This is the easiest visual way to distinguish between different areas terrain, especially if they have the same terrain texture or are on the same elevation.