At Tura’s workshop.

Tura is building a new home.

In south-west Jernberg.
The multi-coloured object to the left is a working 2x2x2 Rubik cube.
Try it! Or pick up one of your own.

I have this unfinished Japanese castle, which I started building as soon as I bought this piece of mainland, but then for a while I wasn’t in Second Life much, and I never got around to fleshing it out. It looks passable from the outside but there’s almost nothing inside, and there are already builds of Japanese castles, such as Hosoi Ichiba (now defunct, alas) which completely outclass anything I could develop this into.

The Villa Foscari, also called La Malcontenta. Image from Wikipedia.

I’ll keep the castle in inventory, but I want to replace it with something else, and an Italian villa takes my fancy. I like the view from the top floor of the castle, though, so rather than just recreate the Villa Malcontenta pictured above, I want to make something much taller, but in a similar style.

Everything in the picture at the top is a placeholder for something better, especially the upper floors, which are just sketched in to get an impression of the overall size and proportion.

Today’s addition was the double-height windows on the first/second floors, and the loggia at the top.

The stairs are a mock-up in prims, to be replaced by a sculpt now that I’ve worked out the line they need to follow. This was the most difficult part of the build so far. It had to be easy to walk up and down the stairs, but I didn’t want them to dominate the space in the central hall. The pegs in the floor are marking out sightlines.

I want to make a lot of the architectural detail as sculpts. I’ve written some programs to generate stuff like these pedestals and capitals with any desired profile. Balustrades can be made similarly. At some point, I’ll have to start making this sort of thing in mesh, either by hand in Blender or by having my code create .dae files instead of .pngs.

All the floors need to have a function, which I haven’t yet worked out. The ground/basement is notionally kitchens, servants’ quarters, and storerooms, although that will be the last priority for building. A chapel or crypt is another possibility. The first floor, the ”primo plano”, has a long gallery running down either side of a central hall, the galleries to be decorated with art works and fine furniture. The second floor might be divided into smaller reception rooms. At the moment the third and fourth have no meaning of their own. They only exist to provide elevation for the top floor, which will be the actual ”home” level, with a loggia from which to contemplate the landscape. The rooftop will be a good place to start a balloon trip from.