Relay for Life – Organica & The Wilds

Fantasy Faire 2019

Fantasy Faire is quite possibly my favourite time of year in Second Life.

It’s a time when creativity across the grid comes together and is on showcase. Above and beyond the big money makers and monthly mixers, this is the opportunity for folks who create something truly different and magical to show off what they’ve been doing all year and to help raise funds for the American Cancer Society in the Second Life Relay for Life.

That said, it’s also bittersweet because, as an event raising funds for the American Cancer Society, it also serves to remind us of those who have been affected by cancer.

This year in particular has been rather poignant as someone I knew passed away rather recently from cancer – a week ago, as of this writing.

I didn’t know Mishellereine very well, but we shared the hobby of fountain pens and it’s a subject she could be deeply passionate about. Her passing leaves a hole in the fountain pen community and we miss her greatly.

She loved purple things, so I figured I’d make a Wyvern coat that would suit her colour preference. All proceeds from the sale of this Wyvern colour will always go to the American Cancer Society in her memory.

Amethyst and Pink Medusa Gorgon Hair are now available as donation items for RFL – be sure to try a demo to make sure it’s for you!

Of note, as of this writing, the Fantasy Faire team has raised a total of L$3,487,572 (US $13,950) for the American Cancer Society Relay For Life over a three day period.

Additionally, this year, I set about the task of updating the Centaur avatar for a more stocky appearance, as has been requested in the past.

This new body shape still utilizes the original centaur UV layout (and thus is also compatible with the Centaur applier system) but makes use of a modified rig which makes size adjustments more gracefully than the original Classic body. I’ve also added Omega applier support for fur layers, so folks with mesh bodies now have greater flexibility when it comes to transitioning the centaur bodies to mesh human bodies.

Has been tested with: SLink Physique (Female & Male), Signature Gianni, Niramyth Aesthetic. Full details on the Stocky body have been added to the Centaur info page, here.

All of the above releases are now available on-site at Wilds of Organica’s shop in The Shrine Tree. You can pick up other well-loved fantasy critters and accessories from WoO there, along with some fantasy-inspired releases by Organica as well!

Next week, keep your eyes open for a new release at Gacha Garden! NeoBokrug’s worked extensively to help make the next release super fun!

Home & Garden Expo is upon us again!

The past few days have been especially hectic with the development of new releases as well as build for Organica’s spot at the SL Home & Garden Expo. With the added work of needing to prime all my vendors with an event-friendly script, sleep has been hard to find this week.

Fresh on the heels of the Cherry Tree release, I put myself to task for putting together a new structure that would be a good fit for the smaller space I had chosen for this year’s exhibit.

I set out to work on a converted warehouse look and have been pretty happy with the results, but this particular build will be on-site as a preview only, while full release should occur not too far from now, in-store. When final tweaks are taken care of, the space should be a very flexible prefab suitable for use either on the ground or as a skybox, great for either commercial or residential use.

Additionally, I’ve created a number of brand new items for exclusive premiere at H&G Expo:

This vintage lamp can be used either as a hanging or standing lamp – or both! Put it right up against a wall to bounce light off in a diffuse manner or away for a more eye-catching effect. You can use it to divide a too-large room or to create an interesting centerpiece if you so choose. Mod, copy with a copy-only script. Click for on and off, or to set it to turn on at night.

This is a five-piece, modular brick & wrought-iron fence set, put together for a stately look. (Three unique pieces total – semi and full-circle items are included for your convenience) Great for gardens small or large! Use to line the perimeter of your land or simply to divide off a section and create a quiet enclosure. Ranges from 1 to 13LI depending on which item is used. Optimized for use with Advanced Materials. Mod, copy, no transfer.

This is a simple garden lantern – great for placement in a garden bed or upon any sort of patio table, plinth, etc. It’s 1LI, mod/copy with a copy-only script. Click for on and off, or to set it to turn on at night. This is an RFL item, so all proceeds will be sent to Relay For Life.

Additionally, both an RFL Edition Rosebush 2 and Fresh Cut Roses are now available, alongside many of the RFL-only releases, so if you missed them in previous years, now’s your chance to pick them up (although some very old offerings have been retired).

Several recent releases are also available for viewing – if you haven’t yet had a chance to check out the Animesh Weeping Willow and Cherry trees, you can now do so, along with many other items that have been put together over the past year, all in one small exhibition located in the heart of Hope 3 region.

SL Home & Garden Expo features nine merchant regions as well as a gachapon region, all attached to the American Cancer Society region. It begins March 15 and runs thru April 7. I hope to see you there!

If you really like my stuff, perhaps consider donating to my Patreon?

Perks include new release postings, access to beta testing (should it be required), a monthly L$1500 credit, and (recently unlocked) monthly Patron-exclusive gifts !

Your continued support helps to produce regular content (written, modelled, animated or otherwise) and helps to keep original content creation in Second Life!

Thanks for your support!

New releases from Wilds of Organica at Fantasy Faire 2018!

Fantasy Faire is probably one of the most long-standing events still held yearly within Second Life. It’s moved in lockstep with the Relay for Life movement since at least 2009 and I can count myself fortunate to be a part of it for many many years.

There are relatively few events which are offered at the same scale for the wide spectrum of fantasy and scifi genres and I’m happy to say that, for the most part, I’ve had positive experiences – at least enough which keep me coming back year after year.

This year, I’ve chosen to release Corgi avatars on the virtual world! More details are available here, but I’ll just say that five coats are available to start, including a special RFL Pearl Lavender exclusive.

Additionally, I have decided to release a new line of coats for the kittens – Point furs! These are coats where the majority of the coat is a pale, creamy colour and the snout, ears, paws and tail gradiate towards a darker colour. There is also a brand new Point-themed RFL purple coat, PLUS the old Cheshire RFL coat has finally been updated to bento as well (if you already have one of these previous to update, please contact me directly for a free update)!

These new coated kitties have been released with the updated bento kitten avatar (1.2) so you can expect to see tail and facial movement in response to Bento animations, just like the update that was applied to all of the other kitties earlier this year.

Both of these new items can now be found at my booth at Fantasy Faire for the duration of the event (thru April 29) along with many other WoO items. If you missed the chance at picking up the two free Fisheye avatars last year, this is your chance! Additionally, this is a great opportunity to pick up various editions of wings, ears & tails, and masks – in the process helping to end the fight against cancer. All items in official RFL vendors will donate 100% of their proceeds to the American Cancer Society.

It’s been a bit of a week for me – April is typically busy for me because it’s the convergence of multiple events. At the very least, Fantasy Faire and planning for Home & Garden Expo. This year, Bloom has also been a factor, and in previous years I also had the privilege of being a part of The Arcade.

Adding to that the fact that most of my WoO releases are full avatars requiring a lot of out-of-the-ordinary setups and this is a recipe for a lot of stress!

Nonetheless, I wouldn’t be doing any of it if it wasn’t stimulating to me and I didn’t learn anything from it.

Athenaeum Arcana is a vast library, shattered by a gargantuan presence, put together by Elizabeth Jarvinen (polysail). Elizabeth has made an immersive space, making use of repeated assets to minimize load times and seamless Materials (diffuse, bump and shiny maps) to help give the region subtle but important and immersive detail that draws a visitor in.

Setting up at Fantasy Faire this year went off with minimal issue. Thanks to having been given a mock-up of my store space beforehand, I was able to roughly figure what I wanted where, although by the end of setting up, this had changed a moderate degree.

I did take a fair amount of time to juggle and rearrange, mostly because it’s not always easy to have a shop space fit just right at first try, even if a mock-up has been offered. Environment, eye-lines, figuring out what kind of eye-catches are available on-site – these are things that aren’t always present in a mock-up and may not even be ready at such time that they are delivered.

In addition to this, I spent a fair amount of time setting up RFL vendors, although I must express immense gratitude to whomever revamped the vendor situation this year.

In previous years, vendors connected to a website and required multiple variables to be set web-side before functioning in-world. This year, it seems all the team authentication got handled up-front, and they seem to have done away with any sort of web-side editing. Instead, the system is as easy as dropping the reward item in, clicking to add a price, then dragging the vendor texture to the appropriate prim.

I’ve only had a chance to skim through the other Fantasy Faire regions so far, but certainly intend to explore in greater detail when I get a chance later. Perhaps I’ll see you around?

Fantasy Faire runs from April 16 thru 29! Visit Wilds of Organica on Athenaeum Arcana region!

Looking forward, keep your eyes forward to April 25, when all Organica, Wilds of Organica and Akimeta products on Organica region will be marked down 25%!

Full details to follow.

If you really like my stuff, perhaps consider donating to my Patreon? Your continued support helps to produce weekly content (written, modelled, animated or otherwise) and helps to keep original content creation in Second Life!

Thanks for your support!

Fantasy Faire 2017 Wrap-up

Thanks for helping to make this year’s Fantasy Faire such a success – Our combined efforts allowed Wilds of Organica to raise L$28950 for the American Cancer Society!

All new releases are now available in-store and moving forward we’ll be working on offering applier functionality and some new coats for the centaurs.

I’ve received excellent feedback for them so far, but if you have something specific you’d like to ask, I welcome the opportunity to correspond. Send me (Aki Shichiroji) an IM and I’ll try to address your questions!

Additionally, I don’t recall whether I pointed this out on the blog before, but there is now a Wilds of Organica group. All notices will also get sent here, but there is a group chat component for those who want to socialize or need some help with Wilds of Organica products.

Home and Garden Expo 2011

Organica will again have a display at this year’s Home and Garden Expo!

As usual, items that were originally RFL fundraisers are being offered again as fundraisers, so things like the Bougainvillea Gate & Tsukubai will raise funds for the American Cancer Society for the duration of Relay for Life. Additionally, RFL exclusive items will make an appearance/reappearance for the fundraiser; the RFL Pink tulips are back and two new RFL exclusives will debut at the Expo, then make their way to the main store when the Expo closes on May 23.

Like the other lilies released earlier this past month, these RFL exclusive purple tiger lilies are low prim, come in 4 shapes to fit various terrain, and are mod/copy/no transfer.

New roses are now available! Ranging from white through red to black, these bushes are low prim and look great! Offered separately or as a fatpack, mod, copy no transfer.

There’s also a RFL exclusive purple rosebush, and it’s also mod/copy/no transfer.

Visit Organica at Home Expo 2 sim May 13, 12PM thru 23rd 10PM SLT!

Today is the big day!

Organica celebrates its official opening this afternoon from 4-6PM SLT with some great tunage, prizes and discounts for today only!

Join us in Organica Sim for your chance at some pretty valuable gift vouchers,

The sim is presented in two parts that will combine what regular visitors will be used to based on the previous store set-ups both in Sylvan and abroad:

First, much of the sim is devoted to displaying new stock. Visitors are free to explore the ground level areas and will find vendors for stock on display next to most items.

Visitors will additionally be able to browse vendor boxes for most stock within the Japanese styled building just west of the store landing point.

Out with the old

Sort of. Some of you will have received updates for your products earlier this week or may be receiving further updates soon. Many items were updated to use more efficient foliage and rather than making you buy new ones, they were passed out to existing customers on record. If you have one of the following items and haven’t yet received an update, please pass me a notecard with your transaction number or a screenshot of the edit menu that comes up when you edit your tree and sit tight – I do have records, but they are plentiful, very old, and archived. Since I am also in the middle of organizing events for today, there may also be some delay in my getting back to you right away.

Updated Items: Cherry 1, Cherry 2, Japanese Maple 1, Spruce 2, Trident Maple 2

***Trident Maple will be sent out later today – please wait until after March 21 to send inquiries about this update***

Some items have been withheld from sale and are on hold pending update or retirement. If you don’t see something you were looking for, please ask.

There are other items that are being retired from display entirely due to age and lack of space. These items will be found in the store on the right-hand side at permanently discounted prices. They may at some point be retired from sale entirely, though such will be announced specifically at some later point on the blog or through notecard.

In with the New

This package of young sugar maple trees includes five different seasonal foliages – Spring, two Autumn shades, Winter and Lit. A first for Organica also is texture change scripts (which were also included with the Trident Maple 2 update) which are available as a seperate single tree in the package for those who wish to use them.

These trees are available in three sizes and are great as broad forest items. They include both spring and autumn foliage, scripted and unscripted.

A taller, fuller edition to the Japanese Maple series, this tree reflects the lush and humid nature of the natural environment Japanese Maples hail from. This tree is again available in green and red foliage, along with a scripted edition which can switch between the two.

This is an arched trellis covered in bougainvillea vines and will be the first of Organica’s contributions to this year’s Relay for Life campaign for the American Cancer Society.

On Scripted Trees
I have long debated about the use of scripts to control tree textures since folks have a tendency to use so many trees at a time. Particularly in light of the lower prim offerings many tree stores offer today, the potential for increased lag server side is certainly there. I’m not going to say the scripted trees I have begun offering are ‘lag free’, since no scripted object can ever claim that no matter how many times those words are bandied about in all-caps.

With that said, the scripts in each tree presented thus far have been found to average 0.03ms each, which is quite reasonable on a sim that is performing properly. For those who are a bit more script conscious, non-scripted editions will always be provided for every foliage texture used in the scripted edition.

Closing thoughts on HG&P Expo

Visit Organica this week at the Home, Garden and Patio Expo! — Organica at the Home, Garden and Patio Expo. The show closed May 10.

It’s been a busy for me this week. On top of keeping up with work stuff and taking a few days to do RL errands and the like, keeping an eye on the Home, Garden and Patio Expo has been an interesting and educational experience.

There have been comments here and there about lack of publicity and a slow expo overall. I can’t say I disagree – I really didn’t see much advertising for the event until at least a couple days in, and would never have joined had i not seen one very small listing about a month back on the SLU forums. Things seemed rather low key for the whole period between registration and show, so I really have to wonder how much attention promotions got. I don’t mean to slam the team that organized the event, however, beyond a few forum postings and a little plurking here and there, I saw very little chatter about the event outside of the few home & garden blogs I keep an eye on.

Merchants did not recieve any official promo material beforehand to put in their stores or post to their blogs. Posters carrying landmarks for the event were sent out a couple days after the event began. If there were any banner ads taken out on Xstreet SL or SLU, i never saw them. I’m told someone did eventually see a link to the event on the tip of the day dialogue – never actually saw that myself, unfortunately. It is also unclear to me whether there was ever a central blog of any sort announcing changes, new merchants, or whatever – not essential, but would have been nice, since so many people seem to take to SL-related RSS feeds so well.

While there were many live music and DJed events held at the four corners of the Expo sims and they certainly seemed to draw in traffic, it didn’t seem like a lot of that traffic stayed around to circulate around the show. This is the sort of thing I refer to when I say traffic doesn’t necessarily do a lot if you’re relying on a single traffic draw to transfer interest to other things – IE: Traffic doesn’t necessarily equate to success. That said, ultimately I’m sure the goal of the All-Stars RFL group was to generate donations to RFL – and ultimately if judged by donations at the Live Music stage alone, I’m sure they did well.

***

Overall, the sims were laid out reasonably and the sims were, for the most part, not too laggy (for me at least). Surprising, considering builds and scripts were the biggest complaints at last year’s Hair Expo. In any case, I saw a decent variety of content – prefab, furniture and landscape content were all fairly well represented, though surprisingly to me, there seemed to be a larger contingent of content makers I was not familiar with. Kind of the point, really, but i was surprised not to see contenders like Trompe D’Eoile, Maximum Minimum, Melino Style etc.

Instead what I noticed was that there is an active creator community centered around lower prim, more economical solutions, tailored for landowners with limited space and prim alottment. Quality varied considerably. Sculpted solutions were of course rampant throughout the four sims, however it was surprising to find a number of overly simplistic furniture solutions that I can recall seeing (and even myself making at some point) many years ago.

In this respect, I found (and have often found) that the home, garden & patio market has always been significantly less competitive than other markets, such as the hair, clothing and jewellry markets. While it’s true that there’s likely less demand for these items since many Residents choose to adorn their avatars before even thinking about owning land, I think it’s still very important for makers of home, garden and patio content to be a little more competitive and strive towards higher standards. This would serve to improve demand for items in their market overall. As SL continues to grow, it will be abundantly more important for content creators to recognize what customers are looking for and carve a niche for themselves, becoming the best at what they do.

***

As an individual merchant, I had a good experience. Things weren’t *crazy*, but Organica did reasonably well and saw a fair jump in sales this week. Late last week, merchants were given an updated map for their assigned lots, and that sorta set me in a tailspin about how to make my design work a bit better for the space. After some consternation, I was able to fix things and package the whole shabang Saturday night, dropping in vendors late night Sunday. I found the busiest day to be the first, subsequent days wavering somewhat, but I still saw traffic each day.

I was able to make back my registration fee and a bit besides. L$6,700 were raised through the RFL item vendors, and the silent auction donation for landscaping I last saw was bidded up to L$18,100 (*woot*). I really look forward to connecting with the winning bidder and getting things rolling for their landscaping project.

In any case, I was glad to be there, regardless of the fact that things were a bit slower than Expos for other markets. It was cool to see new and old visitors drop by and provide feedback, and I think I would certainly join in next year given the chance. I would just hope promotions for future events would be a bit more active.

HG&P Expo booth open, Silent Auction info, old product updates

Everything is set up and fixed – and as of 5AM SLT this morning, the Home Garden &Patio Expo is officially open!

Visit Organica’s booth at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Iridium/67/71/61 , and explore the whole 4 sim exhibition, spanning Iridium, Platinum, Rhodium, and Palladium sims.

As part of the expo, I’ve released the following product that will remain exclusive to the Expo for its duration, then be moved to the main store when the Expo is completed.

I’ve also made available one certificate for 3hrs of landscape design and implimentation as a silent auction prize. It includes three sketch layouts of the land to be developed, terraforming, as well as mod/copy editions of all Organica materials used in the project. The service may be used by the winning bidder or gifted to an individual of their choosing, however said individual must be able to bestow building priveleges on the parcel of land in order for the design to be installed. The offer is valued at $75USD, so bid wisely and generously and you could still come out on top with a great landscaping deal! You can bid on the silent auction, all proceeds going to RFL, here: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Iridium/248/157/60

tsukubai-vendor-sml — Japanese zen wash basin

Finally, I have one last tidbit that is unrelated to the HG&P Expo, though the changes have already been proliferated to the vendors there;

I’m beginning a series of updates to some older products so that they are a bit less primmy. So far, I’ve updated the Ficus 1, and Dogwoods 1&2. I will send out updates to all existing owners of these trees this week, once I can compile a proper list to send out to. Additionally, look out for more landscaping content and trees shortly!

Organica build now available at Home Expo

Ok, so most of the build is on the ground and walkable – Organica is located at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Iridium/61/64/60 . I’ll be out most of today, so unable to change much, but still havea buncha stuff i need to fix/add/make. Expect more updates about RFL here, however if you haven’t picked up your RFL tulips, this would be an ideal opportunity!

Home, Garden and Patio Expo

This weekend, amidst a bunch of activities afk, I’ll be setting up a build at the HG&P Expo, which will be running from May 4th thru May 10th, 2009. The show features 4 sims full of prefab, furniture, landscaping, and more, with charity items collecting donations for Relay for Life. There will be a number of silent auction items as well as ongoing classes all week for those who are interested. More info to come.

For those who’d like to catch up with what Organica is doing at the Expo, I will be located in the south-west corner of the Iridium sim. There isn’t much there just yet, but hopefully I’ll be ready in time for the opening on Monday. More info on new releases to come very soon!