New World "Nighthawks": Hopper's Classic Made Immersive

Hamlet serves late-night joe to Pavig Lok, Tuna Oddfellow, Shava Suntzu

One day, a Resident with the implausible name Tezcatlipoca Bisiani was talking mid-20th century art-- specifically Edward Hopper's masterpiece, "Nighthawks". A builder friend was wondering if the coffee shop counter was shaped like a triangle, or a rectangle, for starters.  On a visit to Manhattan, Bisiani tried to find the Greenwich Village cafe Hopper used as a model, but it's long since been demolished. 

His solution was to recreate it in Second Life. "It turns out," Bisiani tells me, "it's not obvious. I thought I settled it by building it as a triangle, but then I saw a version built as a [real life] stage set with a completely different construction, providing the same general position of things with a different viewpoint."  Probably because Hopper plays with perspective, and making a 3D translation is bound to expose that illusion-- click the above pic, for a side-by-side comparison. 

The next challenge was finding the decaying tones that Hopper used to evoke his lonely city.

Tezcatlipoca Bisiani's "Nighthawks" site in Primtings

"I didn't want to try and copy it exactly," Bisiani explains, "but I wanted something that would have enough surface texture to at least evoke the idea of a painted surface. I eventually used a distressed metal texture for almost everything, just tinting the color. Finally, round shapes are difficult in SL, and almost none of the angles of the building are 90 degrees. The rounded corner on the front of the diner was a bit of a challenge, but the biggest problem was the baked textures. I like to use transparent prims with gradients to provide shading, but if you overlap them they don't look right.  Aligning square gradients on round surfaces was a bit of a challenge."

The result is an immersive space that translates the feel of Hopper's painting, and wraps that sense of isolated alienation around you.  "In the end it's not perfect," Bisiani  acknowledges, "but I think it's pretty evocative of the painting-- in Hoppers work the whole focus is around the people in the diner, one of those 'bubble moments' where the whole universe could be cardboard, because the only thing real are the people.

"SL feels like that sometimes," Tezcatlipoca Bisiani observes.  "Big and empty and beautiful, and it only works because you're there in the middle."

See for yourself.  His version of Hopper's "Nighthawks" resides in Primtings-- click here for a direct SLURL teleport to the location.

Hat tip: a sexy robot named Crap, who I recently spotted in Nighthawks.

Comments

[Crap Mariner]

The coffee percolators totally wanted to do a threesome, but I'm not that kind of robot.

[Hamlet Au]

I dunno, I heard rumors!

[Marianne McCann]

There's been a recreation of this cafe in Winterland (within Del Agua) for at least two years now, as well as one not far from the Nova Albion infohub.

[Crap Mariner]

*sigh* Ducky's spreading rumors again, eh?

She'll never forgive me for the dishwasher incident.