Early build

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Originally uploaded by Beq Janus

Madness took me when I decided to reproduce a work from the Art Nouveau period and chose to try the house of Art Nouveau heavy weight Victor Horta. Its natural curves and complex build are not sitting easily in SL. The lack of photos of the house in broader publication is also an issue but then I was never one to shirk from a challenge.

This shot is a week or so in to the build. I've laid out the structure and put up some texutres for the front elevation. Each of these was built by taking a photo and in many case a number of photos and merging them to form a complete view of the given feature.

For example: the downstairs iron window bars were formed from a low resolution colour shot inconjunction with a higher resolution black and white photo, the two were first transformed to the same alignment and then the black and white shot was recoloured form the low res shot ( and the colours used in surrounding shots) to give a colourised texture. the window/shutter was deleted to give it a transparency allowing people to see in to the building. This was actaully a problem, due to a bug in secondlife viewers, but more of that in another post.

Note: This method is far from satisfactory, while the results are OK the use of different sources ineviatbly leads to tonal variation which has to be corrected, again, I'll defer that post for another time.