The following is a transcript of our “Building Character” talk with Fornicola Butuzova during the “Meet the Designer” series held on May 14th, 2011, at the Home and Garden Expo. Enjoy!
Saffia Widdershins: OK. let’s begin. I’d like to welcome Fornicola Butuzova of Pre’Fabulous to Prim Perfect Meet the Designer. Fornicola, as her store’s name suggests, creates prefabs… but that is a rather underwhelming name for some of the most beautiful modern homes and stores in SL. Not that ‘modern’ is the only thing she does.
Ceejay Writer really loves the word-playful store name.
Aisling Sinclair nods
Fornicola Butuzova: Hi everybody, thanks for coming
Saffia Widdershins: I first met Fornicola waaaaay back in the summer of 2007 when I was introduced to her Castle Gothos which had the most amazing and awesome painted wooden ceiling … I was an instant fan.
Saffia Widdershins: Welcome, Fornicola!
Fornicola Butuzova: Tyty, my pleasure
Saffia Widdershins: Now, tonight, we’re going to be talking about a really interesting aspect of your work (for me, at any rate) and that’s the narrative content that you bring to your builds. Can you tell us something about that?
Fornicola Butuzova: Sure. What your job is as a builder, to me anyway… is to recognize that everybody, inside them, has a little creative spark. So I try to build things, that wake that up inside of people. To tell them it’s ok to play with that. So before I do a build… I come up with a story, or at least an idea, of what it represents. Try to give them a little bit of fuel, to get their creative juices going.
Saffia Widdershins: Can you give us an example?
Fornicola Butuzova: If you’re building a giant castle, or a huge mansion….buildings like that don’t just appear for no reason. A person that wants to live in a castle, is here to tell a story. To create a world around himself. So I approach it more like helping that person create a film, about their second life. As a set director.
Ceejay Writer: As a writer, I totally approve of the Build-To-The-Story concept.
Aisling Sinclair: that’s a really interesting approach.
Fornicola Butuzova: Odette, our big french mansion…a house like that stuck in the middle of the woods, where I imagined it being built, would have been built by somebody with a reason for doing it. So I create that reason. It was a man who built it as a tribute to the woman he wanted to marry. So when you walk around the house, everything in the home helps tell that story a little bit. The paintings, furniture, even the design of the house. Most never will understand the story that I have in my head, but if you build that richness into it, it will fuel the creativity of the person that owns it.
Aisling Sinclair: how deep do you go into your story, Fornicola?
Fornicola Butuzova: It depends… sometimes if I have an idea for what I think a house or concept should look like, I’ll just explore to myself. Why is this cool, why do I like this, why would somebody have made this in the real world? That would tend to be a shorter “character development” for a build… like boonturabi… I just imagined this british ex-patriot who got fed up with the society life in England, said to hell with it all and ran away to the south pacific. So I just thought about this guy, and who he is, why he would leave, and what he would bring with him.
Something like Odette. That house is all about love and romance, and that’s never a simple thing. So there I geeked out on the relationship between the two people, their motivations, and had to incorporate both people into the build. So there’s a contrast. A masculine side in some areas and feminine in others.
Aisling Sinclair: can you give some specific details of how you did that?
Saffia Widdershins: That’s fascinating.
Fornicola Butuzova: Here’s this big fancy house in the middle of the woods. The first thing I thought was “Ok, who built this?” Second thing is “why? what would drive a man to built this gigantic house….what would motivate somebody.. and of course love is the biggest thing that would drive anyone to do anything.. I knew I wanted to do french. Ok, so now I’m in france.. where in france, and when. Wanted to have a rich sense of context…so we made it in the 1800’s. So here’s this guy in 1860’s france..in love with who? In comes the girl…Odette. So I created a story, how they met, the dynamic of their relationship. And once I new both of these people in my head, as friends. I just built their house. What room would Odette spend her time in..what room would Alain spend his time in, and then I just decorate the house with the things that suited their personalities. All of this never comes to the attention of the people who buy it.
Saffia Widdershins: That seems a shame … it would be like knowing the story of the previous owners of your home …
Aisling Sinclair: brilliant way to go about it
Saffia Widdershins: Shared and individual spaces?
Fornicola Butuzova: but it creates a subliminal ‘lived in’ likeness, that gets people emotionally engaged in the house. They know that there’s a story here. In any house where two people live, everybody is going to have their little corner that’s exactly the way they like, where they spend their time, what they find peaceful…and there’s going to be rooms that represent conflict and compromise.
Fornicola Butuzova: It is [a shame]…but if you really look, you can actually find the story in the house. Most don’t, but it’s there.
Aisling Sinclair: now I have to go look *laughs*
Fornicola Butuzova: lol
Ceejay Writer: I do too!
Rowan Derryth smiles
Saffia Widdershins: 🙂
Saffia Widdershins: So do you find that the stories also feed in to the furniture you create?
Fornicola Butuzova: Of course. I used to not put any energy into furniture at all. I built houses and just threw crap in there to make it look nicer at the store. But when I started getting hip to this concept of emotional context in a build, and how much it hooks people, then I started to think… the things in your home, say as much or more about who you are and what happened there, then the building actually does.
Saffia Widdershins: Right (although I still think your early furniture was impressive)
Fornicola Butuzova: lol. my early furniture was junk.
Saffia Widdershins: I remember a Parisian apartment …
Fornicola Butuzova: it was ok for the time it was built.
Saffia Widdershins grins. I think you might be your own most stringent critic, you know
Fornicola Butuzova: for me, building is like self torture……This sucks..this sucks..this sucks…this sucks…OH, that’s cool.
Ceejay Writer laughs.
Fornicola Butuzova: then I marvel at it for 10 min. and go onto the next thing that sucks. lol
Ceejay Writer: I thought that was just me!
Fornicola Butuzova: lol
Saffia Widdershins: How do you feel your work has evolved in technical terms?
Fornicola Butuzova: Well in 2006, I made a dog house out of 5 prims with 1 texture. My last house has over 100 light sources and took literally 5 months to bake all the textures. So I think now, to be honest, I really just getting going.
Saffia Widdershins: heh
Aisling Sinclair fans herself
Rowan Derryth: this gives me hope
Ceejay Writer: Wow.
Fornicola Butuzova: I feel now, there’s nothing that I can’t create. I feel like I don’t have limits at his point, so that’s exciting. 4 yrs later, I’m now just getting started to make really cool stuff.
Saffia Widdershins: I wanted to ask you about your baked textures.
Fornicola Butuzova: sure
Rowan Derryth has always wondered what a baked texture even is.
Saffia Widdershins: they give an intensity to your builds that’s almost painter-ly, I think.
Saffia Widdershins smiles. Perhaps you can explain, Forni.
Rowan Derryth: please 🙂
Maxwell Graf: the betty crocker of sculpted housing.
Fornicola Butuzova: a baked texture is a convenient term for ripping a texture out of a 3D model, that has all of the light and shadow and bumps and shininess and cool little accents, out of the 3D model, and bring it in with all of those benefits already built into the texture, into SL.
Rowan Derryth: Aha! Thank you!! 🙂
Fornicola Butuzova: what’s funny is I used to paint them by hand, and I still do sometimes. Like Odette, that was all by hand, no baking.
Ceejay Writer: I love the notion of painting by hand, for our virtual world.
Fornicola Butuzova: but you just have so much more available and can move so much faster, using computer generated lighting and texture, if that is, you have a good grasp how light works in an artistic sense.
Rowan Derryth nods
Fornicola Butuzova: this said from someone that spent 5 months building one house.
Saffia Widdershins grins
Maxwell Graf: easy to do, but incredibly almost impossibly difficult to do an entire house like she does.
Fornicola Butuzova: I get asked about how we do our shadows all the time.
Rowan Derryth: I doubt you could do it well if you didn’t have that basic artistic understanding… the fall of light is the most critical part of rendering.
Fornicola Butuzova: the thing people don’t understand about shading, is that all a shadow is… is a place where light lost the argument.
Saffia Widdershins: so in essence, the light on the textures reflects the light source in the rooms?
Ceejay Writer: oooooh. Well put.
Rowan Derryth smiles
Rowan Derryth: Well said
Aisling Sinclair: indeed
Fornicola Butuzova: the real drama comes where light and shadow are fully engaged in that argument, where they’re mixing up, fighting for space in the room, in the sky, what you try to do is make the light work the way it does as a part of our natural world, so you try to represent all elements. If the house is in front of a reflecting pool, and the water is green with algae, that green will reflect on the house, but only part of the house next to that pool. So you have to account for all that. Lighting a build is more about a thousand subtle things, then one big thing.
Ceejay Writer: I feel I am gaining a lot of insight here, I am rather graphics-challenged. But this helps me understand so much.
Fornicola Butuzova: too many times in SL, .light is used as a gimmick “ohh look, there’s a shadow”. But again, what I’m after, is emotional engagement. I want to make it REAL. I want to suspend disbelief. If you look around the room everyone is sitting in right now, there is nowhere in that room where this is a hard shadow. It’s a thousand little battles of light and shade.
Saffia Widdershins: How complex is that when you also have the passage of an SL day to deal with?
Fornicola Butuzova: It depends, depending on what kind of build it is.
Saffia Widdershins nods
Fornicola Butuzova: like boonturabi, it’s all about the sun, all about being in the natural elements. So it was really hard to strike up a balance and make the light shining through the logs and planks look sunny, and at the same time look like moonlight at night. In a house like the new one…the modern house it’s less important, it’s a different buyer, who’s telling a different story.
Saffia Widdershins nods
Fornicola Butuzova: a house like that is so much more about the interior, that you can kind of leave the exterior out of the balance a little bit.
Saffia Widdershins: You also do very popular commercial work – do you find that the creative narratives become a factor here too?
Fornicola Butuzova: Not at all. If I’m building a store, my only concern, is to help the merchant sell his/her items. The most important thing is to make people feel comfortable, make them feel like they’re surrounded in quality and lend that quality to the merchant and the products they are displaying. It is completely selfless. There was a neuro marketing study where they measured the brain scans of people in real time as they looked at the images of product logos. Tthe guy who did the study, cited SL in his book. It’s called Buy-ology. What he found, is that people get the same psychological rush, from buying a BMW in SL, as they do if they’re buying a real one. Your brain registers it the same way. So we try to make it as real as possible. We try to make that person standing in front of your vendor say… I’m not wasting money, I’m not buyin stuff I don’t need. I’m in a very opulent store that I can’t afford to shop at in RL, and I can buy antyhing I want. We try to help merchants make their customers feel that kind of empowerment. We love merchants, we go crazy trying to help them set up stores and be successful.
Aisling Sinclair smiles
Saffia Widdershins: 🙂 The Mall I saw recently as part of Designing Worlds was really lovely.
Fornicola Butuzova: The best thing in the world for me is when someone buys one of my small stores, and we have a little chat. And they come back and IM me and say “OMG, i need a bigger store”. that’s the best.
Saffia Widdershins laughs. I bet!
Kim Chihuly: that would be a great feeling
Saffia Widdershins: Well, at this point, I’d like to ask our audience if they have any questions …
Maxwell Graf: Yesah!
Fornicola Butuzova: lol. oh no
Maxwell Graf: 😛 Can you describe your application workflow a bit, what you go through, the steps you take, which apps.
Fornicola Butuzova: Sure.. lol.. I go to my big white dry erase board, and I write, step 1… and then I walk three steps to the right, and write…all done… and on the line, in colored marker I write “Magic”. lol. But seriously…
Aisling Sinclair chuckles
Maxwell Graf: sorry to get all builder geek on you 🙂
Kim Chihuly smiles..like south park underpants gnomes
Fornicola Butuzova: I’ll usually start in a 3D app, lately I’ve been using blender. I’ll work with materials and build the lighting for the world, and I’ll start there. Once I kind of have a feel for how things are lighting, if it’s looking real, if it’s engaging, I’ll build a little bit in blender, bring a chunk into SL..and then revise, revise, revise, revise. If that fails, I just go to rustica, copy a bunch of stuff and stick it in my vendors under an alt.
Maxwell Graf: lolz
Dellybean North: hehe
Ceejay Writer dies.
Fornicola Butuzova: lol
Saffia Widdershins grins. Any more questions?
Aisling Sinclair: I’m going to geek too… you said your modern house took five months – where did you start? and do you have a process to go through?
Fornicola Butuzova: it will all be in my book – lol – I always start with materials and light.
Aisling Sinclair: heh, that’s fair
Fornicola Butuzova: what time of day is it that I want to light for… A modern house like that I usually think early evening because I think of cocktail parties by the pool, and then I’ll think, what kind of material is the house made of, throw that in the renderer, see how the light is effecting it, make adjustment. Once it has the overall vibe on just a few polygons, I’ll get that right first before expanding out. I made the mistake of building a lot before I set lighting and materials, boonturabi I just started throwing stuff around, and it came back and bit me in the ass, hard.
Maxwell Graf: whats next for prefabulous, whats coming down the pike for you?
Fornicola Butuzova: I’m glad you asked Max. lol
Aisling Sinclair: nods… sounds like you explore light before the shape of the house, almost.
Fornicola Butuzova: Amo is going to start a new line of gorean builds, we keep getting requests, so that should be fun, old and dirty. For me, it’ll be a retail store and once that’s done I’m starting a new castle.
Maxwell Graf: yays
Fornicola Butuzova: Aisling, by the time I”m working in polygons, I pretty much have a good idea of what I want the house to be in terms of shape. So when it comes to the pipeline, light and materials is where that road begins.
Saffia Widdershins: I’ve been ask with a ceiling? A painted wooden ceiling?
Fornicola Butuzova: maybe. I still haven’t quite decided what I want to do.
Saffia Widdershins: 🙂
Fornicola Butuzova: one half says a castle for the 4096 sq mtr crowd, and the other side says just go crazy and do a 2500 prim mega build. But it’ll be 14th century so it’ll have a leaded timber ceiling.
Maxwell Graf: any mesh in your future?
Fornicola Butuzova: yea. I spent quite a bit of time over there. Made some mesh. Uploaded it. Yay it worked.
Saffia Widdershins: heh
Maxwell Graf: your work looks mesh already.
Saffia Widdershins: indeed
Fornicola Butuzova: but I spent most of my time playing with the lights over there. I don’t know how much of it is going to make it to the mesh viewer, but built this kickass bayou swamp with fog rolling over the water and light shining through the ferns and it was mind blowing awesome. I just hope enough of that comes in with it when they release the mesh viewer. It will probably be gimped, lol.
Saffia Widdershins grins
Fornicola Butuzova: If I had half a brain, I would just build a bunch of furniture mesh primitives and retire in the lap of luxury.
Saffia Widdershins: Like sculpt maps?
Fornicola Butuzova: it’s not going to work like that, it’s just going to be a custom shaped prim, but there’s going to be a pretty good business in premade mesh items to make other creations. Like sculpties are now.
Maxwell Graf: i still say we should spawn and let our prim babies grow up and take over the design universe. we would never have to work again.
Saffia Widdershins laughs
Fornicola Butuzova: yes Max, but we must remember that, we can’t count that child would be a force for good and not evil.
Aisling Sinclair: they’d be pretty babies!
Fornicola Butuzova: would be more fun if it was evil
Maxwell Graf: they would be uncontrollable devils.
Rowan Derryth: lol
Maxwell Graf: but the work would be good. 😀
Fornicola Butuzova: lol. I’ll think about it.
Maxwell Graf: lolz
Saffia Widdershins: any more questions?
Rowan Derryth: that was fascinating, thank you 🙂
Dellybean North: thanks Fornicola:)
Fornicola Butuzova: thanks for having me
Maxwell Graf: ty forni and saffia
Saffia Widdershins: Now … Forni has a special treat for everyone 🙂
Fornicola Butuzova: been a really cool expo so far, had a chance to meet a lot of people whose work I’ve known, but never put an AV to their name.
Kim Chihuly: Thank you Fornicola and Saffia
Saffia Widdershins: over to you, Forni
Fornicola Butuzova: I’m going to rez my old barn vendor, everybody here, for putting up with my typing, can grab one for free. It’s one of my favorite builds.
Rowan Derryth: aw, cool, thanks!
Aisling Sinclair: how kind, thank you!
Kim Chihuly: Wow..thanks so much
Dellybean North: thankyou!!:)
Maxwell Graf: o.o
Fornicola Butuzova: go ahead, help yourselves, it’s set to zero
Maxwell Graf: thank you, i love that build
Saffia Widdershins: Thank you!
Fornicola Butuzova: my pleasure, thanks for coming
Saffia Widdershins: I think this has been really interesting … and I’d very much like to put the chatlog of this on the blog.: Would people be cool with that?
Aisling Sinclair: it was really interesting to hear your approach to design and a bit about your process.
Kim Chihuly: yep
Rowan Derryth nods happily
Maxwell Graf: yus
Aisling Sinclair: yes, sure
Fornicola Butuzova: cool
Rowan Derryth: Catch everyone later, night 🙂
Fornicola Butuzova: I’ll try to tell this stuff to customers and bore them to death.
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