Facades - Designing Facades with a Minimal Number of Objects

I've been working to fill in some of the geometry placeholders for skyscrapers in Elkins Beach and would like to share a technique I've been using to quickly place believable facades.  I do it because I'm lazy and would like to get these buildings done ASAP, but it may also be useful for conserving cell space.

Designing facades with a minimal number of objects generally follows this pattern:

• Find an orthogonal object with some depth to it. If you want your facade to have windows, make sure it also has some empty space in the middle.  Door frames, windows frames, primitives, and some furniture sets are good candidates.  
• Scale this piece so that it is very wide and very tall, but also very thin.  
• Layer other pieces into or onto your largest piece to give the image of building forms: Beams, posts, frames, etc.

For an example, we can start with a building I completed yesterday in Elkins Beach.  I started by selecting some objects I would like to play with.

 
For my main building frame piece, I selected Unit04.rwx as it is a cube with some depth.  For some thinner detailing that could make a believable 'wall' and window ceil, I chose wframe01.rwx.  For further detailing, I chose p1rec0100g.rwx for some simple beams in my facade. 

With these objects selected, we can begin scaling them to be very wide, very tall, and very thin, and then attempt to assemble them into a believable facade.  I scaled the Unit04.rwx to match a 10x10 meter space and scaled the wframe01.rwx to fit within that space.  Once I had this scale set, we can begin to see the facade take form:

Done! With these final objects:

# Object         Purpose           Action

2 unit04.rwx     large frames      create scale 5 5 1

2 wframe01.rwx   detail frames     create scale 4.39 3.53 4

3 p1rec0100g.rwx horizontal beams  create scale 0.5 1.85 1

All it needs is some texturing and a window panel... and we can slap it onto a building! I chose a texture theme of topgrey for the panel and ctable2 for the window frames.  There is a building near SW City Town Square Park that features these textures and I really like the colors that come out of it.

Here's an example of it in action.  Not counting windows and other detailing, this is only 7 objects for a 20x10 meter frame! 

 And the completed tower:

Designing facades with a minimal number of objects is all about experimentation.  Some things may work well, others won't. I've found that as long as the object sets I'm attempting to use have some depth, I can usually exploit them by means of scale or shear to look like believable buildings.

For example, I'm not a huge fan of the tan-colored building next to this skyscraper. The tan building uses quite a few flat pieces, which robs it of depth in some critical areas and really makes it look unsatisfying.  In this project I'm going for completion, so I don't mind these imperfections in some filler buildings -- the more important thing is the process and the learning gained for some of the more prominent buildings in the area I would like to work on.

Sculpture, landscaping, and working around pre-existing content in Elkins Beach

Work in Elkins Beach continues with a lot of landscaping and detailing.  I left this project unfinished years ago, and that was very visible before I started again a few weeks ago.  For example, ground panels were incomplete and floating in the air at various points, there were empty fields alongside busy 4-lane highways, and artificial canals butted up against thin air.

I've spent much of this week 'capping off' the landcover by connecting varying planes, by filling in fields that I didn't intend to build on with trees and rocks, and by placing geometries for buildings that I do intend to complete.

There was one build that I did manage to at least complete initially: a sculpture that I've named "Monolith Rise".  It consists of a grouping of glossy monoliths that increase in height and alternate in texture. The base of the sculpture is lit with a flickering gold light to better distinguish the sculpture from the ambient lighting of the surrounding world. The entire sculpture is surrounded by sheared sidewalk in a park scene:

Note that Monolith Rise is immediately next to the sheared truss bridge that was featured in my last blog about Elkins Beach.  You can find it in-world at "aw" 2680.24S 4071.27E 0.22a 314.

The sculpture sits on a lot that formerly held plans for a cathedral.  I felt that this lot was too narrow so I've scrapped that idea.  Behind the lot was also originally a curved extension of a river that cuts out to the sea.  I've expanded this into a small harbor and removed the curved concrete panels to increase the surface area of the water:

The rest of the work I did was primarily detailing.  A lot of geometries for planned building and some landscaping.  You can see that below:

There was one final area of interest -- I did some detailing around an older build (circa 2005) that was in the area before I was -- a military base built by Jaguar Hahn.  Fun trivia fact: Jaguar Hahn was building a city with me in AWTeen around this time called New Arklay City, but I don't recall him ever sharing many builds in Alphaworld.  Not this one, at least.

I've tried to help integrate into this cityscape that was built up around it by making sure it kept good road access and by trying to respect the airspace near a very short airstrip on the property.  There's an unfortunate concrete fence that may be doing more harm than I am, though. 

 

Some points about detailing around pre-existing builds:

• Respect how this build fit into the existing area.  For example, this base connected to an existing road in the area.  When I took the road over, I made sure the base still connected to it well and made sense in the overall scene.

• Contextual additions make it feel like it fits in better.  One helpful addition I made was to add metal towers with reflectors leading into the airstrip. There are also no trees leading up to the airstrip.  I think this complements the build by demonstrating that it has effects on the surrounding content.

• Don't be afraid to hide parts of a build when necessary.  The backside of the base is closed off by a fence, so I can't add a road to it or really complement it in any way.  I think the best thing to do here was to add some flora and rocks to obstruct its view from a nearby road that doesn't access it.

I'll probably post another update about Elkins Beach again next week.

Townbuilding - The Big Board of Townbuilding

Ever wanted to know how to build virtual cities?  I've hosted a townbuilding booth at each AWExpo, and a few years ago I made a 'Big Board of Townbuilding' that offered a very nice visual of resources that you can follow up on.  This is the blog's introduction foray into Townbuilding, and hopefully I'll have some guides and tutorials up soon.

In the meantime, click on the image below to enlarge enlarge the image.  Warning: It's pretty big.  Enjoy!

Click to enlarge!

Is grassroots advertising the answer for Active Worlds?

Of the things I would say that I am not, a social builder would be one of them.  This is probably perplexing if given any thought, because I enjoy building towns and even the occasional collaboration -- but that isn't my preference.  To be honest, I feel that I've come to a compromise with townbuilding because the projects I like to build are so massive -- mountain ranges, neighborhoods, cities -- that it would be impractical to have a single builder on the project.

This may explain some of my more recent projects, such as incentive neighborhoods in the Southern Highlands and Builder's Challenge. I tend to set up a context as a larger, pre-existing environment that builders come in and fill.  Still social in a way, but I'm never building alongside others -- I'm a before and after thought.

Either way, the challenge and experience gained by working with other builders in this way has been invaluable to me personally, so I'm always glad to see new builders coming through.  New builders have new ideas, and that can inspire all sorts of things in a project.  This sort of truth is behind my approval of a trend that citizen Urbane Chaos has taken to lately -- writing articles about Active Worlds around the web.  And what an article! Most everything I'd want to tell someone about Alphaworld is nicely formatted and ready to go on that page.  This should bring in new builders by the truckload, right?

Well, maybe.  I've dabbled in a bit of this myself -- with limited success.  If you follow the forums you may remember that we made FARK.com last year during the There fiasco, which drew a few older members out of the woodworks.  I'll occasionally spread links on social networks and have taught others how to use them effectively, and personally I feel that this as a method of advertising has a lot of potential.  If you'll notice, Flagg has picked up on it in the past few months... utilizing re-tweeting to spread his message and starting a Facebook Fan Page to get the userbase mobilized in advertising.

Twitter / Flagg: AWI's ONE-DAY SALE Announc ... via kwout

Active Worlds hasn't really had any sort of advertising for years, and I think this may as well have been their un-official policy all along.  Word of mouth; if it's a good product, you'll tell your friends about it.  Before social networking, this was unreasonable... and the Active Worlds Universe has really suffered because of it.

These days... I don't know, is it?

I feel like a lot of us have given up on that route some time ago, but it may be worth it to revisit the idea.  In Urbane Chaos' example, I had never heard of hubpages before visiting... but they seem to have it all right there.  The method here is to write and article, and use their tools to add some pictures and make it visually interesting.  There are numerous feedback options -- including facebook integration -- that then allows readers to take the article and share it how they will.  In this particular case, some AW citizens have done so by sharing it on their facebook feed.

Other avenues have also seen success -- Flagg's retweet contest drew 12 retweets (about 7 more than I had anticipated), and reached at least a few hundred additional people because of it.  He threw in a prize for incentive, but I really see potential there.  A good number of tweets can get passed over before something really sticks, and it only takes one to get the attention of hundreds.

As social networking outlets gain in popularity, it seems that this idea that was once asinine and destructive may actually be viable now.  Given the current situation, I'd say it is worth a shot.  At least with these few anecdotes, I see the potential for a successful advertising campaign.

What do you think?