Failure IS an option.

This is the story of a build.

This build was going to be challenging as it is. Recreating the first life Burning Man is always something – sometimes you have to be able to walk around inside the build, sometimes the thing is just HUGE.

Add to this my preference for keeping the proportions realistic (unless that super-high ceiling is part of the design, nope!), and having to find visual information about the original.

In past Man builds, one of the Man Team members in first life has documented EVERYTHING. Every day’s progress, all the little details… Not this year. That person was dealing with some serious health stuff (knock it off, 2016!!) and so the images and video were much more scarce.

Mari and I did manage to find enough though, especially after the first-life Burning Man festival concluded, and the Man Team had returned to areas with WIFI/Internet service.

Time to build ours!

I love driving through the Playa. It’s super flat, and there’s plenty of space for turns in my trusty old flatbed. Also, it’s fun to bring in pieces of the build this way. 😉

Suz stopped by after a long night of unloading and assembly. Burn2 is a social event, even during build time. There are a few first-life burners that started in SL, and vice-versa. I think Suz has gone to the first-life event, but Mari and I have only done the virtual Burns.

Building went very well, when I was able to get in and do it. My first-life was tremendously busy, and there were many many long nights in SL after a long first-life day.

The Man Base had a pretty heavy engineering problem: the toothed wheel at the bottom seemed to turn the two larger gears in opposing directions. There were also planetary gear sets that seemed a bit over-powered (and heavy) for spinning the Man. Balancing the entire thing was a bit of a challenge.

I ended up making a few modifications to the design. I deleted one of the planetary sets, and left one of the large gears free-spinning, so our Man wouldn’t strip his motor.

Of course, if this had been done with physical models, it would’ve flown to pieces with SL’s physics engine. 😀 This is where Mari’s building skills come in – she is extremely handy with scripts. All I had to do was tell her what moved and in what direction.

The best part of Turning the Man was having to have FOUR avatars to get him going ’round. Mari had a timer set for allowing this at the top of the hour. And then you had an entire ten minutes to give the Guy a turn! Extra special thanks to Loki Eliot for some tips on multiple-avatar interactions.

And then it became time to Burn the Man.

My first-life kinda settled down a bit the week of Burn2. We had managed to get the Man on the Playa and turning by the second day of the festival, and now I had to rebuild in prim for the Burn. (Prims burn better than mesh!)

Time disappeared and I was scripting the Burn the day of. The scripts we use are kinda old, and from a couple physics engine updates ago. (Hey Mari.. wanna rewrite these?) 😀 They do still work, but are not terrifically robust in modern lag. Yes, lag has changed too in Our World.

I followed all the steps for setup, and tested a bit of the build to see the timing. (Wow! those arms flew right off!) The entire thing was about 1100 pieces, and calculated to 900 LI. Lots of work for the scripts, but they burnt down a 950 LI giant a couple years ago. This will go just fine, and I can click “burn” and sit back and wait, right? Right?

This started really well! The arms still flew right off, but hey, they went through all their steps in order…

What happened next was.. Nothing. All of the fireworks had ended, and we were watching the sparking arm pieces rattling around on a perfectly intact build. A build that was supposed to be engulfing itself in flame.

I checked my chat history, yep, there’s the calls for ignition of all the parts… But nothing after.

During a Burn, my chat fills with calls of “link 19 catching fire” and “man arm setting hot coals texture” and “link 72 requesting detatch” and “link 3 falling”. None of that was happening. It was really quiet in my chat history.

“Um, I don’t think this is working,” I said to Mari. “Okay…hang on..” she responded and then started dropping more fire and particle effects to cover the error.

We began manually unlinking and setting various things physical. And somehow in between all that, Mari added a flaming particle effect to several of the larger pieces. My genius pyro-sis. ♥

Nobody noticed the glitch at all. 😉

Art is part of the word participation.

Hi all! Mari and I are going to be starting on Burn2 projects.

We’ve started researching the various art projects and thematic things that will be appearing in Black Rock City, Nevada, very soon. Our hope is to bring a bit of the first life Playa to Our World for the Grid to experience.

The Burning Man theme this year is “Da Vinci’s Workshop”. This can be interpreted in soooo many ways! I’ve seen mostly maker-community inspired things, but there have been a few other interpretations as well.

Mari is hoping to host Inner Child Camp, based on Kidsville, the Black Rock Kids‘ theme camp in first life. We have entered the Plottery, and applied for a Theme Camp on the Burn2 website. We’ll keep you posted on how that plays out.

We are also co-leading the Man Team. I have my old blueprints from the giant Man we built a couple years ago, so the big and fun part will be the Man Base. It’s called the Turning Man, and is designed to be a huge and interactive Vitruvian Man.

More on that later, though, we’ve gotta figure out how to make it work in SL!

Burnt out for another year.

The regional Burning Man event in SL occurred last week. Mari and I have been building the Inner Child Camp together for some time now, and this year it was the only build we submitted.

Inner Child Camp is the virtual version of Kidsville from Burning Man. We are where kids can go to make their own Burn experiences away from adult stuff. (The Burn2 regions are moderate-rated, so non-sexual nudity is ok.)

The theme was “Carnival of Mirrors” – an easy one for those who play child avatars. 🙂 We invited Burn2 participants to explore their inner child by running through the meander, maybe battling in the mini-Thunderdome, bouncing high over the Playa on the large trampoline, and climbing across the camp on the ropes course.

Inner Child Camp, aka playing with forced perspective

Inner Child Camp… camp

We always build to the aesthetic of the first-life Playa, represented in our world by a ground texture and flattened terrain. Our builds are pieced together carefully with prims and mesh parts that would fit in the back of the iHaul truck we always have out there.

It presents a good challenge for us veteran SL builders. You are building for a very harsh and bright environment. There is no water, and any living things aside from humans are scarce. It is also a very temporary build. It should be able to be dismantled as quickly as it went up. The idea is that you are borrowing a natural resource, and should do everything in your power to not disturb or destroy it. Leave No Trace, y’all.

We had a larger parcel this time than we’ve had in the past, so more PE was available for our use, but we always managed to come in a handful of LI under that. This year we were able to add a full camp site to our build, in case any of the other kid avies needed a place to stay for the week.

I enjoy the Burn2 event for the art and music, and seeing a wide variety of creative people try to build for a very specific environment. Some are very successful

this camp had the best lighting effects 😀

and incorporate some SL-ness into their builds without losing the virtual Playa.

There’s also the banter in the builders’ group leading up to the event. The first-life Burners that have either always been a part or have been recruited recently to SL have fun educating those who have never been about what it is like.

BACON

We RP passing bacon sandies around (hopefully not too much sand in those…), and coffee is drunk round the clock as builders finish their camps, stages and art installations. Participation from all attendees is encouraged, and frequently takes on some aspect of role play.

I posted some of my own on my profile feed just before the gates opened. I chose a whiteout situation. Here is what that looks like on the first life Playa:

Day turns to night during the initiation into the 2008 Burning Man Festival in the Black Rock Desert opens with an unprecedented 12 hour white-out sand storm Monday, August 25, 2008 in Black Rock City, Nevada

I pretended to get caught in a storm at Center Camp, which was only 100 meters away from ICC. In the right Windlight settings, that’s too far..

Whiteouts occur on the Playa during the first life Burn.

The dust is so thick and fine that you cannot see much around you.

Even if your camp, or that art piece is not far away, it can be very dangerous to navigate.

Many of the camps are still up on the Playa for your viewing and exploration this week, which is unlike the first life Playa.

Land settings allow us to return all the stuff left behind by participants. 🙂 In first life, you have a large crew spending a month doing this:

Restoration: identifying the unidentifiable after the crowd leaves

BURN ON!

(Re)building The Burning Man in SL

It’s time for the other huge, all-the-Grid-is-invited-to-participate event I’m involved with. Burn2, formerly Burning Life when the Lab had sponsorship, is a regional Burning Man event. In the last couple years I’ve been involved in helping create the two iconic builds of the Burn: the Temple and the Man.

The year I led a team for the Temple build was the first year that the Man Base was being recreated in SL for Burn2. A person from the first life Man KCrew was recruited into SL to provide the design specs and assistance, and it was really amazing seeing it on the Grid. It was also the first time that the Man was really a destination for the SL event. The Temple usually hosted more avatar activity, as the Lamplighters group held daily processionals to it during one of the sunsets (a varied schedule to accommodate all time zones).

In the first life Burn, the Man is also a destination. The Man Base is a work of art that you can walk around in, or climb, or use as a secondary Temple. Having that happen in the SL Burn was something special. It’s difficult enough getting people away from the performance stages to go see what Burn is about. That year had little green dots all over the event area, wandering around looking at the camp builds and having more fun away from their dance HUDs.

I was on the Man build team last year, and had great fun recreating the three-story saucer-shaped Man Base. There were a few more first life Burners coming into SL to wander the virtual Playa, and Mari and I received compliments ranging from “wow” to “it’s eerie being inside something I saw burn three months ago”.

This year, Mari and I are doing it again. There is no Man Base – we are rebuilding this year’s first life Man. He stood 105′ (32m) directly on the Playa. He burned for two hours before the burn crew pulled him down, and I hear that people were still dancing in the smoldering pile of wood well into the next day. These may have had much to do with that part. 🙂

 

75 feet long and about 2 feet wide

The Man’s legs arrive in town, in July

The Man’s arrive on the virtual Playa’s version of town, in October

The entire building process of the first life Man was well-documented. Helpful for two resourceful folks looking to recreate it in Second Life. Mari and I are long-time SL Burners, she having done the SL version of Kidsville since 2008, and I’ve done a couple of art camps as well as assisting with Mari’s Inner Child Camp. We’re familiar with the aesthetic of the alkali desert, and enjoy creating immersive builds. We took the source images and recreated the build process on the Playa as much as SL allows. While we’ve been working on various parts of the build, we’ve been listening to Burning Man Information Radio for inspiration and the funny PSAs.

 

building blocks – the “bones” in the arms and legs are rings of wood

workspace layouts

the legs went up first

torso (and arms) were assembled next

torso placed on top of legs

had to tack things down – it’s very windy on the Playa!

the head had some wind resistance carved out of it as well

up goes the head!

big Man, little builders 🙂

the virtual Man is double-built – one to display and one to burn

>:-D BOOM!

all ready for the party!

The virtual version will only burn for about half an hour, after a fireworks show that Mari has recreated from the first life Burn. The virtual Burn will look very similar, but as SL nighttime only lasts an hour, we’ll be speeding the process up considerably. 🙂 There will still be dancing in the burnt pile after, so bring your HUD for that!