At Home with the Hopsons

Taarna Welles: now we get to the fun part

Taarna Welles

Most people in Opensim have heard of the Dutch creator of inworld goodies, Taarna Welles. Her home grid, Bubblesz, is one of those special places where original content, freebies and art come together in a harmonious whole. If you haven't been to LaBaronnie and Savvy, you're missing a little bit of OS heaven and history. 

The Hogwarts-inspired landing point on Bubblesz grid

Beyond making clothes and accessories for men and women, Taarna has always enjoyed creating landscapes. wander into the woods of Savvy and you'll see that - visit close by Hidden Leaves and the adventure continues. More recently, in the past year or two, Taarna has been working on a new region, Domadun. It's inspired by Harry Potter, the films and also the video game. You can tell how much Taarna is intrigued by the HP look when you get to the Bubblesz Welcome sim, where the portals that take you to the grid's different sims are themed around the game of Quidditch. 

In a visit by the HG Safari group at the beginning of this year we found out a lot about the grid and the project - we were all impressed at how stable and robust the tiny grid was! Taarna always makes the point that this is a work in progress, we were all intrigued by her work with animesh, lighting, and with recreating elements out of the game which has high end graphics.

Now, it's even more animated.

Taarna Welles:  The new area in Domadun is the Forbidden Forest, which is also based on the game Hogwarts Legacy. I had started working on it, but during one of the Safari tours I came across the Candoranien region. There I found a lot of inspiration and decided to rebuild a large part of the Forbidden Forest because the first version just wasn't quite right. 

Taarna Welles: watch the mushrooms :) if you see them... wait a while...

Thirza Ember: yaaaaaa just found them

Taarna Welles: this are leaping toadstools

Thirza Ember: true toad stools then! whoaaaa also actual toads!!

Taarna Welles: this is the Hopson family, it's based on a rabbit... they are unique in opensim

Taarna Welles: I show you more new animals... here in the green grass are two toads, if you zoom in you can see them breathing

Thirza Ember:  did you make all these animations also?

Taarna Welles: yes, all of them, they are unique... it took many months and a lot of frustration. the blue animals are based on the Thestrals of Harry Potter. They're very small, you have to look hard to find them.

Taarna Welles: I use also AI for the scripting, it saves time and AI is much better than me ha ha ha

Thirza Ember: was it hard to learn how to use prompts to make the AI script?

Taarna Welles: No, I say to AI what I want, and ai makes a script for opensim. I also have older scripts I give AI and AI makes it more modern or low lag. If you have time, have a look at the program Claude it is fantastic.  Initially, I used DeepSeek for this, but there's an even better AI, which is Claude. With Claude, you can specify what you want and for which platform it's intended. Scripting in Second Life is often slightly different and doesn't work smoothly in Opensim. As a test, I provided older scripts to Claude, and it then gives you a better, low-lag script. It's highly recommended for someone who can read scripts a little but isn't a scripter. Claude explains why something does or doesn't work.

Taarna Welles: I think there are many people who despise AI, but within the IT sector, it's widely used, and it's certainly not true that it takes away your creativity. In my case, it only makes me more creative. However, it is important that you have a basic understanding of many components. This applies to creating a 3D model, texturing, animating, scripting, and knowing the platform you're creating for. So, for me, a lot of thinking comes first, and then it's a matter of trial and error. I often do this testing offline, where I run a standalone Dreamgrid. So as you can see, it's a never-ending project that I'm still happily enthusiastic about.

HG Address:  bubblesz.nl:8002:Domadun