Organica Trees part of “MidSummer Night’s Dream” production

Aug 15, 16, 17, Ivy Falls Talent is playing sold out shows of their production of Shakespeare’s ‘A MidSummer Night’s Dream’. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to be included in the group of folks who donated stuff to their set decoration, which is fabulous – all put together by Rekka Berchot.



I have to say I really never anticipated seeing my work in such a professionally put together production, and I really hope things go well for them.

I was kinda slow on the uptake to get tickets though… so I don’t think I’ll be able to attend.

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Grand opening of new sim and Organica’s new main store!

All are welcome to attend the Grand Opening of my new (and first evar!!) sim, Sylvan! The island will be host to a number of things, but for now just the ground level, which will be an immense outdoor area, as well as the new main location for my tree store, Organica! Festivities will begin at 9AM and run until 4PM, Saturday August 2, 2008, and will include DJ sets as well as a live performance by singer/songwriter Wendy Curtiss! (This to be updated as I get more info) There will be a number of freebies available throughout the sim, as well as custom catches exclusive to the Sylvan sim through our 7Seas fishing spot! This event is very casual, outdoors, and you may even want to bring along swimming gear to best take advantage of what this sim has to offer! It will also continually be added to, so if you can’t make it, feel free to drop by any time you can just to explore and hang out. Feel free to give me a shout if you have any questions; I really hope you can make it!

Back in action

I finally have internet service at home again, after a little over three weeks of waiting for Bell Sympatico to get off their collective duff and actually deliver as promised.  After being told for the third time that our modem would be in our hands in 5-7 days (after having waited that amount of time before asking, of course) and that only after that would they be able to book a technician to set things up, we bit the bullet and cancelled the order, opting to go with Rogers instead, even though they had inferior upload for the same price (which was the main thing i’d been after).  I’ve also always had issues with cable since it can get sluggish when too many people in the neighborhood are using it.  I don’t know…  we’ll see how things go.  We’re on a month to month plan, fortunately, so we may well go back to Bell if we find Rogers’ service is just not working out.

In any case, we’re about 60% moved in… and I’m pretty confident I’ve dealt with all remaining inquiries.  If I haven’t gotten to you yet, please email me at aki.shichiroji (a t ) gmail.com and I will be happy to help.

Pending limited customer service availability

Beginning May 16, I will be undergoing a move across the country.  While I may have limited access during that time, I cannot guarantee immediate response to inquiries until such time that I regain internet access at home.  If you need to get in contact with me, please IM me or drop me a notecard and I will get back to you at my earliest opportunity.

4 new releases from Organica

School has ended, thus leaving me with a bit of extra time on my hands!

As a result, I’ve taken the opportunity to update Organica with a few new products you might be interested in.

A new oak is now available! Just under 20m tall, this tree comes both mod/no copy/transfer and mod/copy/no transfer, in two versions: One has no poses and is completely moddable for your resizing convenience. The other has three poses inset in various locations, however it is not moddable due to the sit targets it’s been given.

A second willow is now available! It’s about 15m tall and features all new textures and flexible prims to recreate the flowing nature of willow foliage. It comes both mod/no copy/transfer and mod/copy/no transfer.

Low prim sculpted grass is now available! This package comes copy/mod/no transfer ONLY, and includes 3 varieties of grasses in 5 colours each. Landscape your land with natural looking grasses for low prim cost!

Finally, by popular demand, a version of ‘Fountain 1’ has been changed up a bit and is now available as ‘Fountain 1 redux’ for those who would prefer a fountain that goes in the opposite direction.

Everything’s viewable at Organica’s main store, located here.

Subscribeomatic & other notes.

Organica now has an update service!

If you’d like to get updates on new products, updates, etc, check out our location in Bhima or Lohengrin and click on the update sign to be subscribed.

Subscriptions are free and do not take up group slots!

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If you’ve been shopping in SL lately, you’ve probably noticed that transactions and product deliveries sometimes fail. If this has happened to you for any of our products, please IM me (Aki Shichiroji) with your transaction number and the item that failed to deliver, and I’ll be glad to drop you another copy as soon as I can.

It’s spring! :D

And with spring comes new growth!

Maples #2 & 3 have been updated with spring foliage! They’re now being bundled with all mod/copy/no transfer editions of these trees. If you already own the autumn foliage editions, send me an IM or notecard explaining such and I’ll drop a copy of these spring editions on you for free!

Ficus Benjamina is also now available! Inspired by banyan-type fig trees from Asia, this tree is just under 20m in height, consisting of 61 prims and was made from scratch in Blender & Photoshop.

Organica New Releases

Organica begins February with the release of several new products as well as news of a new store on the way!

I’ve been developing a new themed location in the area of Lohengrin, which is also host to Another Man’s Treasure – Zen inspired furnishings store. This has been in the works in light of the wonderful encouragement of AMT’s owner Stormy McCallister and I can only hope that Organica’s products measure up in quality 🙂

That said, I’ve released three new trees in the last few weeks.


This Weeping Willow utilizes 23 prims and a sculpted tree & branch structure. Selected prims are flexi to provide realistic foliage movement.

Two blooming cherry trees are now available for sale seperately – 22 and 26 prims respectively. Each utilize regular and sculpted prims for a natural branching structure.


A Box of Birch – these 5 prim trees are now available in three seasons (winter, spring/summer, autumn), all included in one purchase.

All trees are available both as copy/mod/no transfer AND no mod/no copy/transfer.A tentative store opening is scheduled for Feb 9. I’ll provide more details as they firm up 🙂

Curious folks can drop by the main store at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Bhima/135/22/36 or poke around at Organica East at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Bhima/135/22/36 .

See you there!

Windlight release on the horizon.

Just back from today’s Windlight office hours.

Not much to report except to say that it looks like Windlight will probably see Release Candidate soon. Runitai mentioned maybe one or two more FL releases before all the kinks are worked out.

It’s been pretty interesting looking back at the last few months of Windlight development.

There have definitely been a lot of snags along the way, with a wide range of opinions all round from the appropriateness of the lighting offered to the operability of the client on the wide range of computers that run SL. And there will always be folk who feel Windlight is too ‘x’ in some way, always stuck firm in the opinion that ‘Windlight sucks! Why are you not working to make SL more stable??’ etc etc etc. But from what I’ve seen these past few months of keeping an eye on WL office hours, LL, and in particular the Windlight Team has been really good about keeping up with problems that are plaguing their testers.

They’ve added parts of the client that have definitely made things better form a stability point of view – allowing for av imposters has definitely helped cut down on lag in heavily populated areas. They’ve also run a lot of feedback surveys and have listened to feedback given on the blog, over JIRA and at office hours.

Overall, for such a major addition to the SL client, things have been working out really well and I look forward to seeing it in general release in the near future.

That said, as a resident using somewhat old hardware, I have to express dismay that something that was readily accessible back in June/July during its first trial in First Look is barely accessible to older computers at this point. My Mac Powerbook 1.67GHz, 2GB RAM, ATI Radeon 9600XT machine runs Windlight… reasonably well with no atmospheric shaders applied, but that means no Windlight skies – just an adjusted sky and slightly improved lighting structure. I can run atmospheric shaders, but doing so slows down performance to less than 0.5FPS, rendering any sort of movement or interaction nigh impossible.

This is a limitation of my computer to some degree, and I’m sure significant components were added to the latest Windlight compared to the original trial – I guess the visual benefits of the new client leave me wanting more than what I can get with the machine i use. And that’s a good thing I guess. But saddening since I don’t have the resources to see that happen any time soon.

Anyhow, getting back to the office hours commentary, I think it’s a good thing that the WL team has been so open about making things work for residents. For a time transparency from LL was not a strong point, and it’s good to see that change, since so much of what SL *IS* involves the community. It is nice to see Lindens recognize and appreciate that.

On Windlight, skins and face lights. (A small rant)

A common complaint that has been voiced in the wake of Windlight returning to First Look viewers new you has been the following:

‘Windlight SUCKS! My face is all dark and shadowy! I have to wear this 8 prim face light to keep my face bright!’

This complaint shows up almost anywhere the words ‘Windlight’ and ‘skin’ are combined.

The folks behind Windlight made it known that the new lighting in Windlight is meant to reflect a more realistic rendering of SL and avatars inside it, but have made numerous adjustments and concessions to user feedback throughout the various iterations of the First Look .

Yet, the fact that this does come up so often shows there are definitely a lot of people who dislike how their faces are lit in SL. But does this necessarily mean this opinion is justified?

For starters, let’s have a look at this experiment I put together, which compares lighting between the normal and Windlight client.

On the left, I’m wearing one facial light set at intensity 1, radius 0.35m, falloff 0. It gives off a soft, indirect & short-distance light that is not too obvious but still allows the face and skin to be recognizable as what I consider to be ‘me’. Photographed in the normal viewer.

On the right, the same face light, but multiplied a number of times and photographed in Windlight.

Preference and milage may vary as far as just how lit an avatar ought to be, but I found my preference still lies in one light prim at the same settings. Lighting for 2-8 lit prims became excessive, at times bordering on radioactive! Had I been wearing a lighter skin, i’d be at risk for being mistaken for Michael Jackson!

More to the point, here’s why using multiple prims is ineffective and greedy: SL, whether normal or windlight, only ever renders 6 lights at a time in your camera view. Additional prims that are light sources will intermittently turn on and off based on their vacinity to other light sources. This is why the figure above comparing 6 & 8 face lights has similar lighting, but a slightly different light configuration.

Worse though is this: You know how people complain about their faces being underlit even *with* a face light? Well, if they’re hanging around other people who have 6-8 prim facelights, light might be rendered from these other prims, and not their own face light.

Consider this photo of my friend, who was standing 5m away from me and wearing one light source at the time. You wouldn’t know it! In playing around with multiple lights for this experiment, I’d inadvertently caused her face light to not work at all!

The other thing that should be mentioned at this point is that, even if you really prefer a brightly lit face, you only really ever *at most* need one prim as a face light, since you can adjust intensity, radius and falloff to much greater than the settings I listed here.

That’s about it. This has gotten to be a little longer than I intended, but over the weeks I’ve heard words like ‘crap’, ‘ruined’, and a lot more cursing directed at people who deliberately take time to listen to Residents at two Office Hour sessions a week, PLUS through the First Light discussion group and really make the effort to make the SL experience work better.