Okay, so #
Christmas was approaching, and I wanted to have a new #
ChristmasTree this year.
But where to get one that fulfills my requirements which had grown over the last two and a half years? I had two basic requirements. One, I wanted a
legal tree. As in one that wasn't stolen from #
SecondLife. Two, I still wanted a tree that doesn't look like 2007 with a bunch of crossed textured surfaces, you know, like what all plants looked like before people started making them from sculpties.
Now, if you look around most Christmas-themed sims, all you find are mesh trees which don't really look legal. And older Christmas sims have those old-style trees.
Good thing we have people like Bibiana Bombinante. Her sim
Encantada is chock-full of scratch-made mesh goodies. And I knew she had Christmas spruce trees; all the trees around my house come from her, including a spruce that carries Christmas lights in December. So I didn't even have to pick up a tree, I already had one.
The size wasn't much of a problem either. Bibiana's trees are designed for the outside, so they're
big. Like, Clark Griswold big. But on that particular tree, the baubles are the size of bowling balls. In other words, the proportions are just right for in-doors which really goes to show once you shrink the tree.
The bigger problem was that I couldn't simply put a spruce tree up in my house. I needed a stand. Okay, alternatively, I could have surrounded the bottom end of the trunk with one or two dozen gift boxes so that you couldn't see the lack of a stand anymore. But... no. Not really.
So where to get a tree stand? This turned out more difficult than finding decent dining-room furniture. I didn't even bother with the usual suspects of freebie sims for reasons mentioned above. I knew that Bibiana has never made a tree stand, neither has Aaack Aardvark. We have
a nice old Christmas sim on #
DorenasWorld with its own little Christmas market that has quite some exclusive or otherwise hard-to-find content. I did find a few tree mats, but not a single tree stand. And I didn't want to look through my various Selea Core Christmas boxes.
Last resort, as always: Clutterfly. I went to one of the several Clutterfly instances I know in search of a solution. I knew Linda Kellie had made some Christmas stuff in her mesh phase. And trees. No tree stand, though. But she has made a tree planter. And some people actually keep their Christmas trees in planters. Well, better than nothing and better for the tree.
As I didn't want to take the raw planter and wade through my collection of textures to texture it myself, I picked up a planter with a tree already in it, separated the planter from the tree and put Bibiana's Christmas spruce tree in it.
Et voilà.
Maybe I'll re-texture the planter next year. I already have the raw planter to get shadow maps from. For now, it works reasonably well, also because the planter somewhat looks like it's covered in woven tinsel.
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OpenSim #
OpenSimulator #
Metaverse #
VirtualWorlds #
MadeInOpenSim
