Tag Archives: Landscaping

I’m sure I’ll do a few more tweaks as time goes by, since I never leave things be, but here’s our ‘finished’ landscaping.  🙂

Back up to the plateau on the top cliff, with two gaming tables (yep, that one is the Daisies applier from K. R. Engineering), plus some seating that I need to maneuver around.

I couldn’t resist adding a picture of these little cuties.  Jian had the chipmunk collection for fifty linden Friday and I just had to get them.  Most are wanderers, but their log is under the tree on the right side, with two fidgeting ones over there.  Unfortunately the viewer’s camera doesn’t include names, because we came up with some amusing names for these little chipmunks.  “Phantom McMunk” is a favorite, of course.  *grin*

These are some shots of the cliffs and coming down them.  It gives a feeling of nature’s interesting landscaping and feels more realistic, so we call these a big win.

This is a bit more complete of a shot from the previous post.  The rock arch that leads into the lively cave room, plus cliff stairways leading down on each side.  For some reason I love how it looks with the dark, growth covered rocks, flanked by the stairs.  

And a much better view of the final pond section with a little bit of the tree’s draped lights.

Toward the bottom right of the property, where I have the larger rezzing zone, is my fairy circle with my Celtic Cross and glowing orbs among the butterflies at the edge of the fairy circle.  I absolutely love using this WL when I use the fairy circle.  Impending storms while lazing among the fairies.   *smile*

The larger rezzing area and then the back of the house.  There are some fun little seating spots, plus my yoga mat, and I have to say that the retaining wall with the fence is really growing on me.  It also perfectly hides the differences between mesh landscaping pieces and actual SL land edges.  *laugh*

I hope that those that like the SL posts find some inspiration in this post.  If you want credits on any items, so you can use them too, I’m happy to share.  Just drop me an email.  Now that my SL house is in order I need to do a little more work to get my RL house in order before the meeting with our new Social Worker tomorrow.

When we discovered we had accidentally made a little room during our first step of landscaping, I decided that we really needed some caves.  Thankfully Fanatik has a super easy Cave Kit.  I went a bit nuts and had about a quarter of the sim filled with caves, but didn’t really want to mess with the landscaping of the SL land (one roommate is the actual land owner, so only he can do the SL landscaping, whereas I can do all of the mesh fun).  I scaled back and there are just four full cave rooms and then the exit.  I need to add more decorative features, especially to the first and fourth rooms, but at the moment, I’m good.

As you saw before, this is the “down the ladder” access point, which we typically use as the entrance, but there are technically two ways, since the other is a rock archway down by the pond.  We usually start here and leave by the rock path.  A little more Alice in Wonderland© this way.

When you go down the ladder (or fall if you’re as uncoordinated as me) you enter a pretty barren room at the moment, but there’s a full bed of twinkling lights that fade in and out on the floor, with torches lighting all of the walls.  There’s a little rock path near the white eyeball flower (which is now gone), which leads to the pathway to go to the second cave room.

I continued the torches through the rock tunnel, although the lighting doesn’t match the natural lighting in the tunnel.  I wanted lights and didn’t give a patootie if I put some in dark spots.  LOL

The second room, at the end of the rock tunnel path.  This is my absolute favorite room.  Unfortunately a static picture doesn’t capture the absolute beauty of this room.  The water has built in animations, plus I have meditation pose balls out for people to enjoy since it is so serene.  There’s a star archway as you enter, then rotating sections of colored stars all inset from the walls of stationary colored stars.  All twinkle and switch color schemes randomly.  I also added some luminescent plants I found at The Looking Glass.  When you set WL to midnight it is pure beauty.

So I took advantage of the built in animations.  Apparently I really needed to wash my legs, according to the first anim that kicked in.  *grin*  This gave a nice picture of the background of star lights, though, plus a dim hint of one of the luminescent fronds.  This room is an additive at Fanatik, so the water is not SL water and has the most gorgeous texturing.

The third room became an Aught gaming room, but was too blah, so I went to E.V.E. Studios and got their luminescent and waving colored fungi.  I first started out with the whole room covered in them, honestly just to disturb one of my roommates since the fungi weirded him out at the store.  *laugh*  Then I scaled it back and it is kind of fascinating to watch them wave around with the color fluctuating slightly.  For some reason it reminds me of the “poor, unfortunate souls” from Little Mermaid©.  *grin*

This I included just in case you get the Cave Kit.  It’s full mesh, so if you want to rez a mesh item (like all of my belongings LOL), make sure to build a prim to rez onto, and then move things into position.  Otherwise you’ll lose any no copy items and you’ll get that lovely “…does not allow…” message.

And the final room, leading to the exit.  I decided to go a little more lively, since it leads to the outdoor sunlight, plus I then got to find a use for some cool finds I picked up in the past few years.  I need to add some additional items, especially to work with the overgrown piano that I totally love, but for now, it works.

And this is one of the sloped entry pieces of the kit that is attached to the last room with most of the slope behind this shot.  I love the inside of the rock archway we used though and how it works with the growth from the last room, so I chose to skip up a little.  You can just slightly see the pond with the HPMD lit tree just outside the exit.

If you want any caves, I can’t recommend Fanatik’s kit enough, although it’s an investment, since it’s not super cheap.  For the quality and ease of use, it’s well worth it.  And there are TONS of pieces I didn’t use or show.  Some of the tunnel creases are covered up with the included tunnel rocks and collapsed rock piles and you could even use them to give a lot more craggy details to the walls/rooms.  This was a long part of the landscaping process, but I’m so glad that I held out through three attempts in order to find the kit that worked perfectly.  Now excuse me, because I’m off to meditate in the glowing grotto…

It was brought to my attention that I had added our home’s landscaping pictures to my Flickr account and forgot to actually blog it (thank you Z!).  *facepalm* So, for those of you that like this side of my blog, here’s for you.  There will be one more part, since I still made some tweaks after this set of pictures, but the general build was becoming solid at this point.

This is at the lowest right corner of the property.  The weird looking white thing is actually a lit twig tent with a fire in front, and it looks really cute when the night setting is turned on, however, you wouldn’t have seen anything else, so I had to make the choice of a weird picture.  *grin*

This is obviously the side that shows the above bridge’s side, along with our cliff line, just because those cliffs are so freaking amazing!  Walking them in mouselook (where you look through the avatar’s eyes) is one of the coolest walks!

This is at the top of the hill, which I tweaked a little bit more after this was taken.  I tried a few different buildings, but this is the one I landed on.

This is the look down as you walk down from the plateau on the left side of the above picture.  It has stairs to go down to the house or you can stop at the landing and take the ladder down into the new cave system that was installed (next post)

This is once you hit the bottom with some rezzing spots, plants, and later on I added a seating area.  The slight sideways front view of the cliffs was kind of cool to me, so I had to include this shot.

This is the lower level if you walk straight past the tractor/house in the above picture.  The pond comes with a willow that isn’t quite as pretty compared to most of our landscaping choices, and the animations and scripts are built into that willow, so I didn’t feel like fighting modifying to a different tree.  Instead I just moved an HPMD lit tree to the very back edge of the willow, so all of the anims and poses work perfectly still.  *pats back for creative thinking* 

And another shot of the pond, but a little more of the detail plus the super cute open canoe cuddling seat/bed, to sit and watch the twinkling lights when an evening WL is selected.  🙂  (By the way, most landscaping features are either HPMD or Studio Skye, with flowers predominately from Heart Botanicals.)

Caves come next and then the final version.  A few may overlap a little, since there are minor tweaks and it’ll be hard to keep track of honestly.  *grin*  Just wanted to warn you.  Make sure to check out the gorgeous caves though!!

We’ve been in the middle of a massive remodeling of our property for a few weeks now.  Half way in (where this post ends) I changed my mind on the direction I wanted to go and a lot of it got picked back up.  I can’t seem to plan these out very well.  I have to just get in there and see what works.  We accidentally created a tiny water room in the midst of the land pieces, which got me obsessed with having an underground area, so after the last picture here I went and found a cave kit.  Up came the land pieces, a cave system was put in, and land was put down around it.  I have almost all of it changed now, except for needing to put out some plants and little things like that.  Even ended up changing the building at the top of the cliff.  *laugh*  I stand by the belief that as a woman I can change my mind at any point in time and SL isn’t any different.  *grin* 

We prefer to use some mesh cliff land forms, since they’re easier to manipulate than the world land, plus we can get a more realistic look.  In order to get help, I just make tons of copies of each piece and then Z could help move them into place too, so that’s why you see pancake stacks of pieces.  *laugh*  Goodbye to our little stream for now…we’ll see you next remodel.

Kind of reminds you of Legos©, doesn’t it? 

At this point we had discovered the accidental cave (you can see just the tip of some blue in the middle of the land in the bottom picture.  And I stopped taking pictures at this point, since another remodel of this area was going to start the next day.  Weeks later I’m still finishing up…*laugh*  So here’s the behind-the-scenes look of the craziness that goes into our designing our little edge of our digital world into the Eden that we dream up.  Hopefully you got a few laughs at the complete oddity of this.  *smile*