Botanical New Releases: Palms, Ferns, Grasses

As I had mentioned in the previous post, Sculpted Prims allow us to truly bend the old rules of landscape designing. To this end, I am happy to announce the release of 8 new items to the Botanical catalog, starting with SL’s favorite type of tree, the Palm.

Two Palm tree styles in 4 variations and 3 prims each! Available right now are the Mexican Fan Palm set and the Coastal Palm variety. Extremely low prim and hand detailed with sculpted and normal prim textures.

Even if the world is a beach, you can’t just have trees, however!

That is why I have also introduced one of my favorite creations, the 1 prim plant! Green and Yellow Dune Grass is currently available now at Botanical, and continue the low prim, high detail theme. I have been told from various customers that they have saved upwards of 400 to 1000 (yes, one THOUSAND) prims, just by switching to Botanical’s palm tree and grasses. This is fantastic news. Besides, what use is a tropical getaway, if you don’t have prims left over to really enjoy it?

4 Forest and Tropic Ferns, 1 prim each!

This is just one of the 4 new fern releases that I have made at Botanical. Like the dune grasses, this release boasts a 1 prim sculpted design, and creates an excellent filler for both beach and woodland areas.

These new releases and many more can be found exclusively at the Straylight Botanical store! Come to shop or just to explore, and truly see nature re-imagined!

 

Sculpt Sculpt Revolution!

When Sculpted Prims were first introduced to Second Life, I had just started designing prim trees and landscaping. It was easy for me to take advantage of their face value, which allowed for much more organic designs. My first attempts at using this new SL technology produced some of my longest running products for Botanical, and are fast becoming a staple to SL landscaping.

As the technology was explored deeper, ways of making NON organic shapes emerged, and brought into focus another aspect of sculpt prims. Saving Prims. Until sculpted prims, there were 3 standard options in landscaping your home, business or play area with plants. Mesh plants (standard in everyone’s Inventory Library), 3D prim plants (trees and plants constructed out of normal prims), and billboard prim plants (alpha pictures of plants and trees on flat prims set at angles to each other to present a common face to the viewer.)

The mesh plants provided by Linden Lab for landscaping are low polygon 3D models with varying levels of detail for varying distances. This approach is also available with commercial packages like Speedtree, with which LL has had an account since around 2005. Mesh plants count as 1 prim and take advantage of simulator physics effects, like wind. Making our own mesh plants is still out of the common user’s reach, however, and cannot be modified, except for size.

Prim plants and trees are 3 Dimensional items that can (based on the creator’s permission settings) be edited, modified and personalized. Prim levels in these items can be high, however.

Billboard prim plants take advantage of an optical illusion that the game industry has used for quite some time. Take an image of a tree or plant, put it on either side of a prim, and duplicate the prim, setting it at an angle to the original prim. Any way (except for top views) that people see this plant, they will have the original texture facing them. This allows for varying levels of detail (that’s up to the creator) and can make for extremely low prim items. You *do* miss out on the 3D experience, but they make fantastic options for filling in details of your landscaping.

With the advent of Sculpted prims, however, we have the opportunity to break some of the rules. One sculpted prim can LOOK like 4 separate prims. Or 8, or 16. By combining this technology with traditional approaches to landscaping, a whole new prim saving world can be explored, not only giving us more resources to use on our land, but giving us MANY more options in modifying and editing. The next couple posts will cover new Botanical releases that take advantage of sculpted prims to really drive down your landscaping resources and let you do MORE with your Second Life.

 

New Release from the Mediterranean

Botanical announces a new release! Olive Trees! From the warm Mediterranean coasts comes this beautifully detailed evergreen! The trees come in a pack of 3 unique designs, with touch-to-change foliage textures (with or without olive fruits). Perfectly suited for your villa or scenic hillside. Available in mod/trans and mod/copy varieties. See them here!

 

Botanical Releases Sculpted Groundcover!

Everyone has waited for it (and no, I didn’t say patiently) and today I am pleased to announce the release of the first four Botanical Sculpted Groundcover patterns. Each pack contains one pattern, on 6 mod/trans, no copy tiles. These 4 initial patterns can be combined for striking effect, or used by themselves to enhance the standard Second Life ground. They can be found at Straylight Botanical in the new ‘Accessories’ area. Frequent Straylight Pilgrims will recognize it as the area where I play the flute for visitors.

This is only the beginning!