Fantasy Tree Houses Part 3

Decorating the Outside

by Teresa Firelight

The last two articles talked about interiors, and I still want to talk about the Fairybrooke interior. But I would like to postpone that one article and talk about decorating the exteriors.

I flew around several regions on the Fantasy continent and saw a lot of tree houses. Most of them had empty yards. I guess people were still working on the inside of their homes and had not yet gotten around to decorating their yards. That is why I thought it might be a good idea to share a few ideas on decorating the outside of our tree house properties.

THE HOUSE:

Let's start with the building itself, and the deck. I have to say that while I was very impressed with the tree house interiors, the exteriors left me wanting. I tried several different exterior colors and could not tell much difference between them. For that reason, I strongly recommend that you consider buying an exterior shell. Most of them will only take about 2 LI, and I feel they are well worth it.

Some people love the fairy dust that glows at night and do not want to cover it, so they haven’t even considered getting an exterior shell. But my friend, MissBehavin Nevah, discovered that if you change the shell transparency (on build window’s texture tab) from zero to 8, you can still see the fairy dust when it glows at night. (This is pictured above).

There are many talented shell makers in the Bellisseria community, and I suspect that all of them will come out with excellent exterior tree house shells. But the first to hit the market, which I and several of my friends used, is from Paradise Homes (Spyder Haifisch). I particularly like this shell because he has included some outstanding shingle and vine wall textures that just seem perfect for this style home. (He has included quite a few other textures as well; I am just particle to the shingles and to the vine coated wall textures.)

One of those textures is pictured above, at my own home. I did make one small alteration to this... I changed the Horizontal Scale (on texture tab) from 0.3 to 0.2 because I thought the vines were a bit too bunched together. (Note: I only changed the scale the bottom portion of the shell (by selecting the face). I did not change the scale on the roof.)

I included a few potted plants on the upper porch, and some Kazza outdoor chairs on the lower part of the deck, up against the rails. I put a small table between them and put a wine dispenser on the table.

But you don't have to stick the textures that come with the shell. For example, MissBehavin found a lovely vine coated stone wall texture (pictured above) and put it on her Paradise Homes shell. She also added a lot of detail including a few mesh vines, some hanging plants and even an outdoor candle in an iron holder. Then she decorated the deck with outdoor wicker furniture and potted plants.

The idea of using vine coated walls originally came from LadyFi Marques. She created her own shell out of prims before any of the creators had shells on the marketplace. She used a vine coated wall texture on her shell and all of her friends said, “Wow, what a great idea. I want to do that too.” One of them told Spyder about her idea, and he included some of those textures in his shell. LadyFi swapped out her prim shell for the nice 2 LI mesh one when they came out.

She did not stop at just putting a nice texture on the exterior wall. She also used a bunch of lovely mesh vines against the building and included some lovely strings of lights along the deck rails and along the front of her house. The effect is stunning.

THE YARD:

There are a LOT of options on how a person can decorate their yard. I am only going to cover two of them in this article. (My goal is to give you some ideas, not to cover all possibilities.) I will touch on two areas: Fantasy and Classical Wildflowers.

FANTASY

Fantasy tends to have things like sparkling grass, colorful and/or florescent plants, mushrooms, trees with twinkling lights, fairy dust, fairies, glowing rocks, crystals, fantasy statues, etc. If this is done tastefully and carefully, it can be quite beautiful. If not, it can get gaudy and hard on the eyes.

The yard (pictured above) is from LadyFi, and she has most of the above elements in it. But she spread them out tastefully so that the effect is not overwhelming. She uses several heights and colors of mushrooms, which gives a delightful variety to the scene. She includes an animesh dancing fairy, which can captivate the passer by... you can watch that fairy dance for several minutes… in fact it is hard NOT to watch the fairy.

The overall effect is very scenic, pleasant and inviting.

Here is another lovey fantasy yard by Tal Ram. It uses the same glowing grass, but an entirely different type of fantasy mushroom. The focal point of the yard is a captivating statue of Princess Azura, standing in a small pond surrounded by boulders. You cannot see it in this picture, but Tal’s yard also has some tall colorful fantasy grass and some blue crystals.

This yard easily could have become cluttered and overwhelming. But Tal tactfully used a large sprinkling of the twinkling grass and placed the taller colored grass along an edge and the crystals in corners. So, instead of overwhelming the scene, they contribute to it.

CLASSICAL WILDFLOWERS

Your yard doesn’t have to be explicitly 'fantasy' to look fantastic. You can go with more traditional plants and create a lavish and lovely effect. This is one of my favorite looks and with the right plants, you can coat a 32x32 ground area without a high land impact cost. The secret is to use some very large pieces and then scatter in some varying heights, including some taller pieces and some very low to make it seem realistic. Then I like to throw in a few shrubs and small trees.

So, what do I use to achieve this garden wildflower look? I mix it up a bit, but my favorite tools include HPMD Sweet Garden Grass08 for low laying paths, and HPMD Sweet Garden Grass09 for covering large areas for extremely low LI. The 09 is what gives the Monet-like effect. It is a bit pricey, but I strongly recommend you get the fatpack for the HPMD Sweet Garden Grass09, so that you can create a lovely mix of grass and flower colors. Just a word of warning... if you are going to link them, manually delete the scripts before you do. Otherwise, when you link them, all the child prims will change color to match the root, destroying the multiple color effect you worked so hard to create.

I like to use the Love Mixed wildflowers to give some height and sprinkles of color in the midst of one of the large HPDM 09s. And I like to use the Love Bella Flower Patch to create of the scenic shorter flowers. I also mix in Love’s Birch trees (the smaller ones and groupings) and some of the Skye Temperate shrubs.

Those are not the only plants I use when I create one of my wildflower gardens, but they are the main ones. I also like to throw in a few other from my collection to make my properties look different. I don't bother with any paths for the Tree Houses, but I do use paths and sometimes little fountains when create the same effect for a ranch.

Also, I create a small hill using linked together small land mound pieces. I resize them to a few different sizes and arrange them overlapping until it resembles the terrain I want. My favorite shell to use for this is “Skye Zen Garden Mound 1” from the Skye Zen Garden collection. It looks stunning when you coat your hill in the flowers and grasses.

To finish off, use a bench or two to have places to sit or throw in some very low LI stationary animals. These can be animated like a dear raising and lowering its head as it eats.

Finally, I added a door to the tree trunk which teleports the person to the deck and a small cellar door on the porch that teleports a person back to the ground. I do this using a simple script so that when the person touches the door, they “sit” on the object and are almost immediate “unsit” at the target destination. I am enclosing a copy of it in case you want to use it… the only part you have to change to adjust position is the gUnsitOffset array. The values here will usually work on the door to the Fiaryspell and Fairybrooke tree houses, but you can experiment by adjusting them if they don't work for you. The door I used is just a prim box, shaped and textured to look like a door. But you can use a mesh door if you prefer.

Here is the script:

/* destination in x, y and z distance from door in meters */

vector gUnsitOffset = <03.0, -9.50, 18.0>;

/* do not change below here */

default

{

    on_rez(integer sp)

    {

        llResetScript();

    }

    state_entry()

    {

        llSetClickAction(CLICK_ACTION_SIT);

        llLinkSitTarget(LINK_THIS, gUnsitOffset, ZERO_ROTATION);    

        llSetMemoryLimit(llGetUsedMemory() + 2048);

    }

    changed(integer change)

    {

        if (change & CHANGED_LINK)

       {

            key avatar = llAvatarOnSitTarget();

            if (avatar)

            {

                llSleep(0.25);

                llUnSit(avatar);

            }

        }

    }

}

Comments

[Deborah]

Another great article!