Friday, January 6, 2012

The Lesbos Bath House

One of my first builds for the 2012 remodeling of The Isle of Lesbos was the bath house. For about a year, our little corner of Second Life was without one and everyone missed it. From the beginning some six years ago, Lesbos had a castle, a beach, and a bath house. It was high time the latter made a come back.

The main structure is round, as bath houses often are. Round buildings are "softer" than rectangular ones and more inviting. The large windows let in a lot of light while their placement up high allows privacy for the visitors inside. An extended deck replaced a shorter one after the structure was placed so visitors could relax sea side and enjoy the sunset, rez an inner tube bumper boat, or fish.  Behind and on the hill is the Lesbos University building, the Isle's main structure. Westward and off the coast is a nice light house from TUFF and a Torii gate made by Angela Seale, originally set out as a memorial shortly after the 2011 Japan earthquake/tsunami. A future post will cover the Isle's memorial area in more detail.

This birdseye view shows the open roof. At one point I had thought of planting a tropical topiary in the center pool you see and let bits stick up through the roof. I rather fancied the bath house to be part greenhouse, what with the big windows and all, but that didn't work out. As I rather fancied the roof idea, though, I created a nice scuplty to save prims and ran with the design anyway. Yes, at one point I thought of enhancing the feminine symbolism by making the building ovoid.

Inside I was stuck for an idea to have flowing water seem reasonably plausible. Ewers weren't quite right for the semi-Medieval theme and then I thought of barrels. The windows are "alpha textures" from a Prefabrica texture pack. I have an all-prim set I can put in, more than trebling the number of prims in the whole build. I can live with the conflicts these have with the alpha-texutred trees outside to keep the prim count low. I figure most women will be too busy concentrating on the mulit-pose pillows and other pose sets to notice. Not shown are the two massage tables. I thought of adding steam, but it would have interfered with the animated water. Oh, if you are an engineer and you notice the 'oops' I made, s'okies. There are no real physics to worry about here. I promise to eventually redesign it.
If I had more scripting skill I might have done a few things differently. Sinking the structure into Linden water would have been cool rather than using prim water, but the whole building would be totally different. And if prim count wasn't important I'd like to see the higher-detail windows. All-in-all, I'm rather pleased with the build. It didn't take great technical skill (just some experienced-builder tricks), but attention to details in prim alignment and texturing sets it above some similar ideas I've seen, if I do say so myself. I hope the ladies enjoy it.

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