Babbage Travelogue: Clockhaven

Next on our travelogue of New Babbage is the Clockhaven sim. Considered part of the "Old City" the layout is more built up with narrower streets than the rest of Babbage and a less gridlike layout. The architecture too is supposed to reflect an older style.

Wide shot of Clockhaven from the Vernian Deep.

The Clockhaven lighthouse. 

The end of the City Wall. I still wonder what enemies Babbage has seen in the past to call for the mounting of Tesla Canons on the wall.

Dark 'N' Crazy's shipyard warehouse. Be careful of the safe.

The only section of Babbage that could be called "beach". Complete with clockwork turtles.

Dark 'n' Crazy Furniture Designs

The Old Brewery - also part of the Dark 'N' Crazy group

Topical Julian Assange crate in front of the Dark 'N' Crazy Vehicle outlet

Madville Textures

The Steamjunk.

Corner of the bay with Rip Wirefly's Sculptify, the Clockhaven Aquarium and Fullerton House (containing Mornington Photography). Fullerton house is well into the double figures when it comes to interior redesign but might be Victor's least rebuilt building. And if you happen to see penguins roaming the streets of New Babbage, they're out for an evening stroll from the aquarium.

Satu's Sushi barge. Now with shaved ice treats!

Clockhaven Market Square. Grim Bros., Baroquen Ethic, Miss Sheryl Skytower's book outlet and Steadman Kondor Publishing.

Alchemic Agility and Vrai Vert owned by Dr, Cyberusfaustus

 Some Babbagers are quite keen on their gardening and will set up a glass house in the strangest places.

Curious shop "Yooma Guijin Dou"

 Doagrun Road

Mechanics Mews

The New Babbage Militia offices and one of the entrances to the Babbage sewers.

 The Red Rum Cave. May now hold the title of the smallest pub in New Babbage.

 Clock of the Red Rum Cave. Put up by a demented mathematician The Clockwinder

Miss Avarial Falcon's power station. Bringing electricity to New Babbage

 The entrance to the Gangplank and the stairs of Southgate Road

The Seven Sisters Emporium

Prince Dakkar Boulevard looking east. Wexhome's Wonderous Wares Emporium on the left and Dark 'n' Crazy's antique furniture section on the right.

The Emporium also contains Babbage's only Kinoscope. Though I've never seen anything screened there.

Miss Erica Fairywren's Electrics & Scientific Company

Unnamed building in progress.

The Palaeozoic Museum and Velvet Snare Gallery. The Museum was originally located in Babbage Square and had some difficulties with the exhibits coming to life. Thankfully this new location is without incident.

The recently installed Port Babbage tram runs from Clockhaven all the way down to the end of Bow Street in the Babbage Canals.

A monument to Titus O'Drum, the builder of the City's very first public clock way back in 1485

Breakfast in Babbage: Space Travel!

Fly me to the moon

Let me swing among those stars

Let me see what spring is like

On Jupiter and Mars

Join Edward Pearse at The Clarendon for an intergalactic musical extraviganza.

8am to 10am Saturday 18th of August.

BYO towel.

Babbage Travelogue: The Vernian Sea

The second in a series of entries exploring the various buildings of the City State of New Babbage.

The Vernian Sea. Installed in November of 2007, the Vernian Sea was the fourth of New Babbage's sims. Inspired by two large underwater tunnels built for the RFL 2007 track the Vernian Sea is the reason that New Babbage's land mass defaults to 100 metres rather than the usual 23.

 The tunnels still exist and connect the undersea dwellings to the Port Babbage sea lift.

More recently made into a homestead. the Vernian Sea is home to two significant builds.

 The Lotus of the Sea Gallery. Originally built by Kandace Commons, and maintained by Breezy Carver since 2008.

 It's hosted exhibitions, balls, wedding anniversary's and was even part of the recent Pub Crawl.

 Small mischievous kittens even have their own submarines: The Mewtalus peaks through a window

The interior is lushly appointed and looks wonderful.

The other build is Beq Janu's Aegir's  Hall. Named for the Norse God of the Sea, it's a lovely creation that takes delight in it's underwater location.

 Sporting some excellent octopus motifs on the wrought iron frame work, there's lots of small details to look out for.

 Even the seahorse submersibles are fun.

 There's even a working airlock for when people can't fit through the moon pool.

 More recently a kelp farm has been added to the build. Perhaps farming this natural resource can be used to vary the diet of wiggyfish in New Babbage.

There's even guard sharks to keep away the too curious explorer.

While Port Babbage and Clockhaven have large port areas, there's not a lot below the surface.

Explorations in Mesh

I've been a reluctant starter in mesh building. Normal prims I'm quite good at and I've even had build commissions. Sculpts I've had difficulty with. I bought Prim Oven which is a handy conversion tool but it's a little tedious and requires lots of back and forth to get the end result. I bought Sculpt Studio which was supposed to allow you to create sculpts inworld but I found the learning curve extremely steep and haven't really used it much.

However Mesh became the Next-Big-Thing. Initially Mesh looked like it was going to be another tool that you required specialised graphics knowledge to use. However Black Box, the people who made Sculpt Studio, soon came out with Mesh Studio, which converts regular prims into mesh. Unlike Prim Oven you can cut, twist, taper or use prims in any way you feel, and you can use all types of prims too.

So I began my experimentation after a few of New Babbage's builders began rebuilding their prim dwellings in mesh.

My first attempt was this front to the Apothecary's Shop in Clockwork Close. 90 prims down to a land impact of 4. The thing to remember is that each mesh piece may have a maximum of 8 texture faces. That includes shading. If you need more you'll need to make a second piece.

After attending a class on mesh put on by Victor and Tenk, I decided to up my goals a little and see what I could do.

Originally I was just going to do the bottom of the Automaton Service Centre in mesh and leave the rest as textures.

But I decided I could try and redo the texture in mesh and see how I go.

The middle roof section is a Sculpt from a building Rip Wirefly made. The date clock is one from the RFL build from earlier this year. The total prim impact of the build is 85. The ground floor, the first floor window and the top clockroom are all mesh pieces. I've also learned NOT to link the mesh pieces to the sculpt section. This produces a significant prim count blowout. I'm sure if I worked on it I could reduce the prim impact further (redoing the roof would help) but I think I can live with that for now.

Babbage Travelogue: Obolensky Observatory

I had been planning on starting a new series of webposts documenting the New Babbage sims as it seems that just as you get familiar with a building, it will disappear.

A case in point: The Obolensky Observatory

 The Obolensky Observatory in the Vernian Sea

The Death Ray

 Interior

 One of the Smashington's guarding the building

Sadly, due to a number of factors, Doctor Obolensky (or "Doc O" as he us more usually known) has decided to scale back on his SL involvement. His buildings skills as well as his flare for the dramatic will be missed. Which of course leads us to the next big thing in New Babbage entertainment, the villain evil-offs (bad-offs? Twirl-offs?)

I mean someone will have to try and outdo the other for positions of New Babbage's worst citizen right?

I'll be continuing this series will look at the rest of the Babbage sims very soon.