![avsitter second life copybot avsitter second life copybot](https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49882971766_15903d55b7_h.jpg)
Simply put, Apple Fall – and others like him – hasn’t bothered to read LL’s Good Building Practices. But even if it wasn’t for his desire to make it “shabby chic”, his decision to offer it with pre-baked shadows would again necessitate the usage of different variations of the same textures on things like walls, floors etc. He applied the same approach to the doors, door frames, window frames, ceilings, rooftop, patio floors – and this explains how quickly the texture count rose so high and so quickly. In the Country Hall, Apple Fall divided the two floors in different faces, with each face having a different, always 1024×1024, texture showing a different amount and pattern of aging and damage. This dictates a different texture set for each instance of the same 3D object. The thing is, he has chosen to appeal to the “shabby chic” crowd, so he needs to make his items look (heavily) worn – and, if this derelict look is to be realistic, it must the wear and tear must be uneven and different for each object – even if we’re talking about three identical columns this wear and tear is, after all, dependent on which areas of the object(s) in question suffer the most from everyday use and / or neglect. Quite honestly, I believe Apple Fall could have gotten away with far less than half that number and total filesize of textures, if he had made different decisions from the outset. On the floor, you can see the thin, diagonally-running shadows being at odds with the thick shadows rendered by the viewer under Advanced Lighting Model. Remember that the default maximum amount of graphics card RAM the viewer can allocate has always been 512MB, and that only recently have SL viewers (the 64-bit version of Firestorm got this first, I’m not sure about the others) allowed you to allocate up to 2GB of your graphics card’s RAM to textures – depending on how much RAM your graphics card actually has, of course. What does this mean? Well, an awful lot – please see my old post “ How we turn Second Life into a lag hell” for more details. The Country Hall itself is burdened with more than 300MB of textures. Apple Fall uses literally too many textures in his builds, and, typically, all but one or two of them are 1024x1024s. Why is it so high? It’s all about the textures, really. Why is this happening? Let’s dig a little deeper: The Country Hall’s display weight is a massive – for its size – 76922. You can literally watch your frame rate drop like a brick as you rez it on your region, or as you approach it on someone else’s land – unless you’re lucky enough to have a good machine with a mid-range to top-tier graphics card that takes such things in its stride, copious amounts of RAM, and an SSD – yes, they do make a huge difference in SL viewer performance. The shadows on the walls, door and window frames, and on the crown mouldings are pre-baked. The Apple Fall Country Hall, front and side view.
![avsitter second life copybot avsitter second life copybot](https://slm-assets.secondlife.com/assets/25949269/lightbox/avsitter_int.jpg)
It really has to be seen up close and personal. The texturing is very detailed and atmospheric, giving it the look and feel of a building that had been abandoned for many, many years, with moisture and mould having taken hold in the walls, with pieces of plaster having fallen off, exposing the brickwork, with words carved into the patio walls, with chipped paint on the doors, door frames, and windows. There are also two patios, one in the front and a bigger one, guarded by a side wall, in the rear. It has two spaces, a square entrance hall and an oblong one with a skylight above it brightening the space. Its shape is beautiful, and the same goes for the textures. Surprisingly enough, it’s not yet on Apple Fall’s SL marketplace store, so you have to head over to his in-world mainstore to buy it its price is extremely reasonable: L$600. It’s an all-mesh construction, made of 88 individual objects (“prims”), has a 14x15m footprint and an LI of 148. OK, now that we’re done with the professionally-edited picture on LTD, let’s examine the actual building. Being who I am, though, I wouldn’t leave it without a fair degree of customisation – which it honestly needs, and not just to make it more “me”. It, too, will be part of my sim design project, and I think it would make a good office with a nice little garden around it. This time, I’m going to write about the Country Hall, which he had launched in the January 2016 round of Shiny Shabby, and which I’ve also been working on. In that post, I had written about the Portobello Corner Store, which is sort of an ever-ongoing project, with little details always being added. Last year, I wrote of my involvement with Apple Fall’s builds. Click on any image for the full-size version, they all open in a new tab.
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A beautiful, 100% mesh, build that lends itself to extensive customisation and optimisation.