Lessons in... Making it in Opensim

The following is a Guest Post by My Virtual Beach grid owner Trizaria Hunter, and  her 20 year career as a content creator in virtual worlds.

The best place to start is at the beginning, and that goes back to 2002/2003 and a game put out by Blue Fang Games and Microsoft Game Studios called Zoo Tycoon. While the creation differed greatly from what I do today, it was the beginnings of it all. If any of you have ever played and downloaded content for it, there is a possibility you have one of my early creations. 

2019 Creation for Zoo Tycoon

In 2010 my daughter asked me to create an account on the IMVU platform to help her with some difficulties she was having. After a few weeks of discovering my sea legs so to speak, I discovered you could create on the platform. 

I started out just texturing picture frame meshes made by others and adding images to them but soon after discovered the free 3D modeling program Sketchup when it was still owned and distributed by Google. That led to a whole new world of creation. Picture frames to start, then other furniture pieces, even room meshes and then eventually to texturing clothing meshes made by my favorite clothing mesh creator which gave me a whole new direction to my texture creation.  

One thing that disappointed me about the creative community back in those days was the unwillingness of creators to share information to help others, and just how mean and, I guess in some ways vindictive, one creator can be towards another. Being medically forced to retire from working that same year, being able to open up Sketchup and make a few things for use by others - I guess you could say that gave my now workless days a sense of purpose. It gave me something to do with my mind and kept me busy so I didn't go completely stir crazy. 

After discovering what a lot of the other creators were like, I made up my mind to never be that kind of creator. If someone needed help and I had some knowledge I could pass along to help them achieve what they wanted, then that's what I was going to do. 

Peasant gown design from IMVU in 2014

After an unfortunate experience with textures while on IMVU one night I began to make my own.  After a month or so I even wrote a tutorial on how to achieve the look I got for my textures so others could begin to make their own as well. I also set up a website to share my texture creations with other creators. The site still exists but at the moment is offline. 

In about 2016 I was introduced to the world of Utheverse and a few months later to one of its franchises Eros Island, where my discovery for creation continued. Not long after, Eros Island closed and, after a few other 3D clients that just didn't work out, one of the 3 primary world leaders from Eros Island was introduced to OpenSim. We opened as Eros Resort in mid 2017. As I learned to work with the OpenSim build editor I made quite a few prim creations and upon discovering the proper method for uploading mesh, I uploaded some creations for OpenSim, a few of which can still be obtained today on my region on Virtual Beach. In August of 2019 I left OpenSim for a while, and in November of that same year Eros Resort closed, to reopen in May 2020. In July of 2020 a second grid named Virtual Beach was started, but was short lived due to a major server hard drive failure later in 2020. Everything on the hard drive was lost. A few days later the Virtual Beach you visit today was opened and the rebuilding of the grid began. 

Skirt & Tank from about 2016
 while on Eros Island-Utheverse Franchise

When I first saw people not so much wearing the things I offered, but just on the RRD Fashions region and obtaining them and some of the comments posted when I put pictures up on OSW, it made me feel it's all worth whatever it takes to be able to continue.

Since 2018 however I have been purchasing mesh from a creator on Second Life with the hopes of one day being able to release them on OpenSim. My hope turned to reality earlier last year, and I have since acquired permission from another creator to release their mesh on OpenSim as well. These 2 creators are aware their meshes are going to be textured and offered for free in OpenSim and they both had requested me not to offer them as full perm products, which I have followed. You see, one thing I find mind boggling is how people can, for lack of a better way of putting it, steal from others when a simple asking of permission is all it takes to be able offer some quality content to those who maybe don't have a lot of funds to spare. 

There are those creators out there that are more then willing to allow you to use their work if you ask in the right way. I have gotten nothing but positivity from these two creators I am working with at the moment and looking forward to hopefully more in the future. 

Recent Virtual Beach outfit released at RRD fashion Exclusives.
Mesh by CrashOV Uladstron from Second Life

Rayvn's Roost Concourse and RRD Fashion Exclusives give me a place to offer the OpenSim Community as a whole content that would have otherwise disappeared from OpenSim or possibly never appeared in Opensim. So with both those regions I get a feeling of satisfaction knowing I can do something for the community that others in the community with their respective regions have done for me - so more of a giving-back feeling.

Being a senior on a fixed retirement income I know how it feels to not always have funds to buy products that I want. I found trying to survive in SL even with a $3500 bi-weekly paycheque when I was still working hard. As a result when I came to OpenSim and found so much content available for free, I decided I could do the same with my own creations and began looking for other content I could offer as well. I began to scour websites that offered their mesh creations for free. And so some of the content I offer is not created by me, but uploaded to the grid by me to offer to the OpenSim community. My philosophy is - just ask, the worst they can say is no. Accept it and try another creator.

Good luck and Happy Creating From Trizaria Hunter.

HG Address  grid.myvirtualbeach.com:8002