Today’s jigsaw comes once more from the Home and Garden Expo – and this time it’s a piece that has attracted a lot of attention. It’s a chandelier, made using the new mesh technology and, despite its complexity, it has a land impact of only 6 prims. You see it in its setting at the Expo here, an amazingly beautiful ballroom in the style of eithteenth century France (and I am not going to attempt to sort my Louis Quartoises from my Louis Quinzes here). Again, it’s all mesh, and it is created by Loz Hyde of Meshworx, a designer with considerable real life experience of working with these techniques. And, as you can see here – and in his exhibit on Dreamseeker Home Expo 11 – it shows!
The best part? This chandelier is available to take home with you … and all the profits from the sale go to Relay for Life.
What are you waiting for? You are bound to need a beautiful Rococo chandelier sometime, aren’t you? Or maybe you’ll prefer the modernist coffee table (only two prims) that is also being sold for Relay for Life.
I bought the chandelier.
You’d guessed that already, hadn’t you?
Let’s do the jigsaw.
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Catch up with your Prim Perfect jigsaws (showing images of Second Life and other virtual worlds).
If you’d like to submit a photo of your own to feature as a jigsaw, send it to the Prim Perfect Flickr Group. It should be sized 800w x 600h, or else it will need to be re-sized.
Prim Perfect 
Unfortunately, both the chandelier and the table are no-mod, so I certainly won’t be cluttering my Inventory with them. Indeed, much of the Mesh content at the Expo has that inexplicably restricted permission — even some entire prefab houses. Who would own such a thing?
It worries me that there’s a market for no-mod stuff; it suggests SL is a much dumber, less creative place than it used to be.
As I understand it – and I may be wrong – the nature of mesh objects mean that they cannot be modded. That’s why, for example, mesh clothes frequently come in packs with different sizes (and alpha). The same with hair. So I wasn’t surprised to see these mesh items as no mod.
I honestly don’t see it as a dumbing down of creativity. Not only is there the creativity that went into the process of creating the object, there’s also the creativity of setting up the mis-en-scene where these objects will appear – assemblage is, after all, an art form.
No mod objects may be a major pain for some people – but I’d see less creativity in the standard Linden home fitting of a sofa, a cuddle rug, a sex bed and a potted plant – no matter how modifiable each of those objects might be!
Some interesting stats about mesh are emerging from the SL9B applications. KT Syakumi asked people on the exhibitor application if they were using mesh (which prodiuced a predictable response of “OMG – they’re banning mesh at SL9B!!! It’s be so SL3B!!!” But as KT explains:
“It’s also been commented that we must be wary of mesh as we asked in the application form if builders would be using it. What do we have in mind? Well, nothing really. that question is there partly as an unofficial survey by me to see what kind of uptake mesh has in SL (cos I’m nosey) but mainly just to see if we needed to do anything about mesh. Possibly 1/4 to 1/3rd of builders currently might have mesh in their builds as of now, so really there’s probably no reason it needs to be treated separate. It’s just nice to know. And no complaints that you can’t see mesh please. The major viewers can all see it, just update to the latest version.”
For my purposes, if I can’t add or change scripts in an object, it’s not fit to own, Mesh or no-Mesh.
Also, Mesh objects may not be able to be easily re-textured, but that’s hardly the only reason to want to modify them. How about rescaling, or linking them with others, or in some cases de-linking to remove unwanted parts?
Yeah, changing scale of objects with the physics shape types that were introduced with Mesh can change the Land Impact. That’s hardly the weirdest consequence of Mesh, and certainly doesn’t constitute a reason to remove Modify permission from copiable Mesh objects.
If SL has become a market of helpless consumers, unable to make the simplest edits to objects they buy, it *is* less creative. And creators who enforce this dumbing-down of their markets will have only themselves to blame if the sedentary sport of admiring pretty pixels turns out to be not all that popular after all.