Tag: Fallingwater

Back in mid-June, I mentioned that Fallingwater (Kitely) was relocating to the Seanchai Library core world there, the result of conversations between Caledonia Skytower, Shandon Loring and myself. In that report, I covered the physical move itself, relocating the house from a single region to the Seanchai 2×2 core megaregion.

Since then, and as time has allowed, I’ve been gradually re-working the place. Truth be told, I’d never really got it to a “completed” state in two years of having it on a region of its own, and the build really needed some TLC to get materials, etc., properly blended (I’d only just started messing around with them when I stopped working on the place in 2013). There was also much I was less than pleased with in the landscaping – such as the driveway up to the garages and Guest House, the river, and the falls, which I’ve always wanted to re-work.

As the house is now part of a themed estate (albeit one where each region effectively has a theme of its own), the land around the house needed a degree of blending so that it would fit the lay of the rest of the estate, and this gave me the excuse I needed to shovel through everything that I’d never really made the time to sort-out.

First and foremost. the falls received a complete face-lift. I’ve always been unhappy with how they looked throughout each iteration of the build, either in SL or Kitely; they never seemed to quite capture the spirit of the original. I’m a lot happier with the re-working. They’re still not “Fallingwater’s” falls – the rocks there are far more angular, but I think I’ve captured more of their “feel” at last.

Reworking the land meant I could get rid of the two roads leading up the house and replace them with gravel paths with brick shoulders. One of these. I decided, should lead to a stone jetty offering plenty of mooring pace for boats (water is a major feature in the estate), and the other I reworked as the main path connecting the house to the rest of the estate, reach via a bridge spanning the mouth of the river, and which I nabbed from Shandon and reworked a little, adding some wood texturing.

As the house is to be a venue for storytelling, providing space for people to gather has been an important consideration. So to help with this, I decided to thin out the trees a little and provide a couple of open-air spaces which might be used for smaller gatherings. One sits in the curve of the completely re-work driveway (I hated the original in the build, and while I’ve not found any sign of the walls I’ve installed along the drive in the drawings I have of the real Fallingwater, I think they fit the place rather well. beyond the drive, and outside of the walled parking area is another area cleared of trees and which faces out over open ocean to the north, as another space for informal gatherings.

Cale also requested that I provide a space which could be used for meetings, workshops, social events and suchlike, again in keeping with the overall design of the house. This left me stumped for a while, but in the end I came up with a combination of a large cantilevered terrace extending out over the ocean on the northeast side of the island, and a building styled after the Guest House and offering two connected rooms. hopefully these will together provide flexible space for hosting indoor and outdoor events. A set of steps leads down to another set of piers below, and a path arcs around the headland and down to a small cove.

This all sits well below the lie of the rest of the land on the north side of the island, and so hopefully also offers a feeling of isolation from the rest of the build – although a path does link it to the pool patio by the Guest House, the patio also having been extended to provide a further venue for small gatherings.

I’ve add new lighting to much of the outdoors areas – lamps which come on at dusk and turn off again at dawn – which hopefully add some more ambience to the place. There are still some nips and tucks to be taken care of, but overall, I think the major work is done – subject, of course, to Cale and Shandon being in agreement.

I doubt this is the end of my infatuation with Fallingwater; I rather suspect that were the opportunity to arise, I’d happily start fiddling with the SL version once more. However, where Kitely is concerned – given that I have so little time I can spend there – I’m really happy that Fallingwater has a new home and will be put to good use.

You can visit Seanchai Library in Kitely via the Seanchai Library Kitely web page or via a hypergrid teleport from any hypergrid enabled OpenSim grid via:  hop://grid.kitely.com:8002/Seanchai/144/129/29 (main arrival point, Fallingwater is to the northeast).

Regular readers here will be only too aware of my obsession with Frank Lloyd Wright’s building designs, and in particular that of Fallingwater, which I’ve used as a model for no fewer than three builds over the years: two in Second Life (both now gone, but one safely packed away) and one in Kitely, where it has had a full region to itself for the last two years.

As I’m rarely in Kitely nowadays, the model there hasn’t really seen that much use. So, to rectify this, and as a result of conversations between myself and Caledonia Skytower and Shandon Loring at Seanchai Library, Fallingwater (Kitely) has been relocated to the Seanchai core world, where it will be used as an additional set of venues for Seanchai’s storytelling in voice.

The idea of relocating an entire region – buildings, furnishings, plants, tree, flowers and the rest on your own, and without having to pay for it to be done for you, is something liable to fill SL users with a feeling of foreboding. Fortunately, OpenSim users can make use of the OpenSim ARchive (OAR) capability to export and entire region / simulator’s contents to a local hard drive, subject to any permission protections used on their OpenSim grid.

A slight complication with Kitely is that it is not possible to target a single region within a group of regions  – “world” as Kitely call them – without also overwriting the others. As our aim was to make Fallingwater a part of the 4-region core Seanchai “world”, simply exporting it to OAR and then importing it into the Seanchai world would leave the other three regions replaced by default flat terrain.

There is a way around this, but it requires a small amount of fiddling, and the use of something like New World Studio (NWS) or  Sim-on-a-Stick (there are also user-offered services for those wishing to do something similar and who don’t have access to either). Using NWS (which ‘ve previously reviewed)  made the work of combining Fallingwater with Seanchai a simple 6-step process.

• First, I created a 4-region (2×2) set-up with New World Studio.
• Second, using the OAR format, I exported Fallingwater from Kitely and Shandon exported the Seanchai 4-region world, which he passed to me as an OAR file
• Third, I uploaded the Seanchai world to my 2×2 New World Studio set-up

• Fourth, I selected the region Fallingwater was to overwritten and imported Fallingwater
• Fifth, I exported the updated 2×2 set-up to an OAR file and passed it back to Shandon
• Finally, Shandon uploaded the revised OAR into Kitely.

The entire process of creating the New World Studio environment, exporting the OARs, uploading and merging them and then exporting the updated world literally took around 5 minutes. Granted, Shandon had some additional work to sort-out some items in the Seanchai world which were non-exportable due to permissions, but overall, the longest time in the process was sharing the OAR files via Google docs!

So Fallingwater has a new home on Kitely. However, the work isn’t finished. As well as the house, the plan now is to incorporate additional venues for stories and to blend the Fallingwater region more smoothly in with the existing Seanchai regions. I’ll post images of this as the work progresses!