I think I got the river stuff figured out and “Snow on the Mountain”

Saturday, July 10th, 2021 – +17˚C / +60˚F —> sunny, clear and pleasant @ 10:29 am after last night’s heavier rain storm —On Cousin Emilie’s Birthday 🙂 —

– Aerendel Mountain With Snow” – Still a work in progress – But lookin’ better all the time … 🙂 –

— Looks like somebody poured vanilla syrup over the mountain in this screen shot – I had to turn off the fog or this would have looked like a silhouette seen through a collection of very white – almost sheer – curtains.

— I think the trick might be – add several layers of the texture ‘Snow’ that came with the latest upgrade to the world building stuff.

– ” Raeynie at the ruins” – a side path on the ‘road’ from the newest version of the Birkenport – Aerendel Mountain Trail. –

— I had to ‘ramp up’ the exposure on this screen shot – What looks fine on most computer monitors and “Amazing” on a a ‘Gaming Monitor’ with the right settings – shows up almost too dark to bother trying to see in Mac’s ‘Preview’ app. Preview is a lot less bother and easier to use than PhotoShop for half-way decent photos and screen shots – But pushing the exposure up or down is a snap.

— Again – with the fog turned off – she looks like a kid shining a flashlight up at her face to look ghoulish – I could easily fix that – move the ‘Time Of Day” settings back and forth to get the best effect – but we’re trying to remain ‘synced’ so when more than one of us are working in different areas of this virtual 3-D world – we get to see our stuff go through dawn to sunset to dawn in a couple hours – we try to keep them set so everybody’s more or less in the same time zone – and those settings are a pain in the dupah to mess with.

— Oh, The name – “Raeynie” —> Every character – even the builder avatars – the ones with the ‘gear’ ‘axes’ – have to have a unique name. – There was a young woman named ‘Raynie’ who lived across the street from my grandparents’ motel, restaurant and gas station in Vermont when I was in my teens and twenties – She was maybe three or four years younger than me – and one of my young friends had his eye on her as a possible future mate when they were going to high school together. Somebody explained to me that “Raynie” was a misinterpretation and/or ‘cute’ version of “René” – when pronounced with a and old Vermont accent. Role players seem to be gifted with more imagination than most of their contemporaries – & I’ve seen them come up with brilliant variations on their characters’ names. —> And another quirk that came along with the latest upgraded world building software – is – somebody who left the company that developed that software – took all the male characters’ ‘rolling’ routines with him when he left. And instead of half a dozen different possible ‘classes’/’occupations’ and I think there were at least half a dozen races developers that world builders could play around with as they built their games and decided what their subscribers/clients could look like – we now, in the upgrade – can only have human women and could only choose from ‘Ranger’ or ‘Wizard’ wardrobes for the builder-avatars’ looks and or ‘occupations’. Raeynie’s Orange ‘Ranger Shirt’ and the ‘Human Ranger Gauntlet’ on her left arm and hand are a bit more modest than the ‘Wizard Robes’ that look like skimpy/’sexy’ under garments. She’s also wearing all Wizard stuff below her belly button.

– “I think I figured out how to make a river look right.” –

— With the upgraded world builder stuff – they included a ‘Ribbon Water’ routine, or set of routines for improving the way rivers look even look how they flow – it’s tricky – and you can’t grab a “Ribbon Water 1” from the asset library and expect you can just drop it into place and smile at how clever this innovation makes you look and feel – You have to ‘grab’ a ‘mirror/water’ asset from the ‘Create’/’mirror-water’ menu – move it down into a trench you very carefully designed carved into the two dimensional face of your world – and and then carefully turn the small square you get from the ‘create’ pull down menu – in the direction you want to tell your ‘dynamic ripples’ to flow – and then carefully click and drag the river – one little bit a time – in the direction/directions you want it to flow – BUT! – you can have the river flow down a waterfall, or many waterfalls – on its journey to the sea – and/or bend the river’s course around { – carefully – } so it meanders like a normal real life river, and flows around rocks in a fairly good representation of rapids and then spills down to meet the sea at the end of its journey – or near the end of its journey – the ripples look great – but when the river flows into the sea you have to be careful again because the sea and the river might want to duke it out to prove something to themselves or brag about their genius and testosterone levels – sigh.

– “Almost the same shot from the same angle – but with normal early morning fog and lighting.” –

— To illustrate what happens when you turn the fog back on after turning it off while building/developing your world – I had to ramp up the exposure level again – and that made the fog look a bit more pastel and cyan in colour than it looks on the gaming monitors… and now the rivers and the fog look a lot more realistic since the latest upgrade.

— And – it took me almost four hours of not quite constant concentrated ‘work’ to take the screen shots, mess with the exposure and size { in Pixels } to get these four screen shots visible enough and under 2 MegaBytes so the WordPress Software – { ‘Hosted” on my computer, not their servers – } – would accept the ‘media’ – {when wordpress dot com hosts a blog the size limit on ‘media’ is one MB }.

-Yay?

 – – – – – Shrug….

~~~~~ Jim