Second Life Designers and Consumers Speak Out: What It Takes to Make, Sell and Buy SL Stuff

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

This month I asked both Second Life designers and consumers to weigh in on an important issue: Exactly how long they think it takes, and how long it actually takes to create the staple goods of the virtual economy. Now, I'm reporting back with some of the most interesting responses I received in the hopes that, in some small way, we can try to bridge the occasionally cavernous gap between customers and creators.

As I said at the time and will repeat now, these numbers vary wildly depending on what's being made, how it's being made, and who's making it. I've slapped together some tattoo layers in the past, but the time frame for that has absolutely no bearing on how long it takes for someone with serious talent to make a mesh house. These responses provide purely anecdotal information, worlds away from something that could be collected in anything more formal than a Wednesday afternoon blog post. Nevertheless, I received loads of interesting responses, and anecdotal or not they're well worth sharing.

The Customers

In the original post directed towards Second Life consumers, there were a lot of educated opinions shared alongside educated guesses. I expected this would be the case; after all, who would want to openly out themselves as not having a clue in a post that was blatantly critical of people who don't have a clue? 

Even if few were willing to really stick their necks out there were a lot of fascinating comments, including one from popular blogger and photographer Strawberry Singh who shared her own estimates, grounded in the reality of virtual fashion designers she's worked with. She wrote, "I would say on average, it probably takes them, from start to finish including thought process, mesh creation, texturing, styling, shooting, etc... around 15 days with breaks and rests or 120 hours." 

Other commenters like Gealya Aeon broke things down in much more detail:

A new haute couture release by Soraya Vaher: I'm guessing a few hours to a few days, not including ruminating/sketching/dreaming. (By weeks, I mean full-time person-weeks.)

The very first liquid mesh jeans: maybe a few months of analyzing the weirdness of SL's mesh systems, then a month of developing the rigging, 15-30 min. of texturing and then many weeks of iteratively getting things to work in SL so as to be sellable.

Siddean Munro's first hands/feet: maybe a few weeks if she started from scratch, less if she used existing starter meshes. Then a week or two for her scripter to make the HUDs. She specifically mentioned that her mesh head took months of dedicated work.

The Mesh Project: they look like a group of friends from a commercial production setting who got together to try things in SL. I'm guessing there were about 3-4 people involved, that the prototypes took a few person-weeks and that getting their in-world store going with all the window dressings and all the server-side coding took a person-month.

Animations: I spoke once with maker of bits-n-bobs, an early animator. He said that making a 30-sec dance in Poser took him 1-2 months full-time. Motion-capture at the quality of Humanoid? Using existing infrastructure, maybe it took a few person-days to make a prototype, then a few person-months to get it to look good in SL.

A gesture with annoying text and sounds: I made one once in about 15 minutes with an Adobe sound-editor (I forget the name).

The Designers

Of course the post the following week attracted it's fair share of educated comments as well, as many notable Second Life designers broke down their own process and experiences for the benefit of readers. From her perspective as a long-time virtual fashion and interior designer, Tya Fallingbridge of Pixel Mode wrote:

I tend to calculate my time by hours as I believe most creators do. I have been creating since I joined SL back in 2003. Anywhere from shoes, clothing, complete sims and now currently focusing on home and garden, as where I find my most joy in the creative process.

Ultimately time is determined by skill level, complexity and detail. Now for someone to say " if their good it should only take a few hours." That is far from the truth. Most creators I know are working on their PC 15 - 18hrs per day, 6 days a week, creating items for one event.

This involves from start to finish:

Research - theme, style, modeling techniques
Modeling 
UV Mapping
Light Set Up - several light set ups are involved - from a basic spec to special fxs lighting - when you get into more complex lighting effects, its not uncommon that you can spend 20 hrs or more. The creator has a vision.
Ambient Occlusion Maps
Ray Trace Maps
Bump Mapping
Normal Mapping
Displacement Mapping
Specular Mapping
Testing Maps - rinse and repeat until you get what you are looking for
Upload in world - testing ; rinse and repeat 
Texture work - photoshop, combining all the maps you have created into your base texture
More Testing - texture work. How are the textures sitting on the mesh, how are your seams. Are you overall pleased with your progress.
Final Upload - you are happy with your textures and model- YAY! light at the end of the tunnel
Texturing : applying all those textures...
Scripting - do you have adult animations, pg animations or object related or all 3? that alone can take 12hrs or more just to set up and get working the way you want.
Packaging - this is when you realize you have made to many versions and or colors.
Vendor Pictures - this is where having a vendor template comes in handy
Store/Event Set Up
Promotion - through various avenues

Now add rigging if you are making anything that involves the avatar bones. I have seen many items that are bone heated. Is this right, no. Rigging, is a process that the creator needs to sit and take time with. The last pair of boots I released were rigged, I spent over 35 hours alone on the rigging, just because I wanted the best bend and overall look to the boots with avatar movement and bending. Proper rigging will make or break an item in my opinion.

Two years ago, I created a complete sim. all in mesh, that job was over 1000hrs. The Pixel Bean Cafe took over 250 hours and it wasn't a complex build. That was several years ago. If I were to redo it today, it would take longer because of the techniques I have learned along the way.

The average creator spends a minimum 75hrs, from start to finish. 

Prefab building legend Barneworth Anubis built a bit on Tya's post by elaborating on the various steps in his own workflow:

Like Tya, I have dipped into may arenas over my decade in SL but I will just talk about the last 2 years or so making mesh homes.

My process is a bit simplified from Tya's as I dont "bake" my textures for my homes but the process is about the same. Here is what my average work flow looks like for a house:

Research - I sometimes spend quite a bit of time researching before I make a house. I have even on occasion visited a home or place in RL to get a feel for a style (for the Carraway Bungalow I actually had the opportunity to tour a beautiful Craftsman that I found listed online near where I live.) At the very least I shift through saved reference images, and usually search for more to get some ideas for textures, features, details etc

Planning - I still often make at least a rough layout sketch in SL with prims so I can get a feel for rooms, space, navigation and such. SL prims are still great for quick dirty planning like that. It helps me work out any problems in the layout before I sink too much time into the detail modeling.

Modeling - From there I usually get started on the modeling in Blender. This is the bulk of the work for me. Because of my style of mesh homes I usually plan textures and do UV mapping as I model so this is all rolled into one for me. Some time is saved by carrying over assets from other homes - you may have noticed some homes share the same doors, door frames, knobs, windows etc with other homes.

Refinement - after initial modeling often a significant amount of time is spent optimizing the build for uploading into Second Life. Creating logical segments keeping in mind Level Of Detail (LOD) and physics issues that might come up. Different LOD and physics models may need to be created for a substantial percentage of the build - up to 3 levels of detail and a physics model for some parts. This keeps a house looking house-like from a distance without eating up all your prims! This is essential - this is how you can create a 4 bedroom 2 bathroom home with a respectable level of detail for only 85 prims (carraway bungalow again, my best selling model).

Uploading - not as simple as just pulling in world, usually there is an initial upload of what I call a placement model then I re-upload pieces (again a substantial portion of the house) that need custom LOD and Physics models. I often put some preliminary textures on as well to test mapping and see if anything needs fixed while I am uploading again. Sometimes parts have to be redone if I cant get the LOD, physics, or prim count to work out how I hoped.

Texturing - I admit I have got somewhat lazy with texturing, often reusing basics from house to house. Fortunately I have a lot of great base textures I have made in past years that I can pull from. However most homes need a custom texture or two or at least some tweaks to colors and such for the feel I wanted. I have found that many people who buy my mesh homes are interested in personalizing them so I usually don't do anything too detailed.

Scripting - I am very lucky to have a great complete house system made by a friend that is fairly painless and quick to install. But this is still a step.

Photos - I share a sandbox sim with some friends and we have a corner ready to go for photos with plants and props and stuff off to the side, which is a huge time saver but nice pictures do take time to set up! I often try to take at least 4 good exterior and 4+ good interior shots of a house. Luckily since its good to give an accurate impression there is no post processing on my vendor images. For better or worse they are all raw shots from SL into vendor templates.

Vendor Set up - I use caspervend which is pretty easy and i would recommend to others

store set up - for me this usually always means an in world display of the home. I have been trying to be better about landscaping displays nicely but time doesn't always permit

promotion - for me this includes a short blog post and notecard(s), flickr, plurk, in world groups, in world subscriber list, and sometimes more depending on if its a special event

updates and fixes - with content creation more complicated than ever more and more most creators find themselves needing to fix and update things at some point - I myself consider it a huge miracle if at some point a product doesn't need an update implemented. This can in some instances knock you back starting from the early steps all the way through needing new pictures and packaging to reflect the changes.

All said and done, I would say a house, depending on the complexity and size, can span anywhere from 40-80 hours from the first stages of figuring out what I am making through you being able to click "buy" on it in my shop or at an event. 

The Takeaway

If you've read all of that and you're asking yourself why any of this matters in the first place, well first I'll applaud your patience, because that was quite that wall of text and if you stuck it out you clearly already think it matters to some degree. Second, I'll point you towards something Tracy RedAngel shared in a comment, based on her RL design experience:

One thing I've found is the only value customers/clients put on time is what it costs them...not you. When people buy something, they think of what they're getting, not how long it took to make the thing they want.

The comments section in both the consumer-oriented and the designer-oriented posts are a phenomenal resource if you're looking to adjust your own understanding of how your Second Life sausage gets made -- or if you ever need to give someone else a bit of a reality check. Read the former here, and the latter here. 

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Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart on Twitter, Iris Ophelia in Second Life) has been writing about virtual worlds and video games for nearly a decade, and has had her work featured on Paste, Kotaku, Jezebel and The Mary Sue.

Comments

[Gealya Aeon]

I feel a little bad reading back what I wrote above about the effort it takes to make beautiful things in SL. All the designers I mentioned are people whose work I greatly respect and adore, so I see what they make as the product of genius: inspired, created quickly under that inspiration. Partly this is because I had once seen a haute couture designer do just that, years ago, before SL had mesh: I was in her studio, she had a insight and she made the key parts of an outfit in about 30 minutes as I looked on. But I also don't want to minimize that genius is part inspiration, but usually mostly hard work and dedication. It takes many years to become proficient with 3D modeling software like Blender or Z-Brush. It probably took months or years of brain-storming and speculating before The Mesh Project even decided to try what they have. I wasn't including that kind of time in what I described. The Mesh Project thoughtfully calls its work "in beta" and in addition to the changes and fixes they've made since opening their store I'm sure there will be continuing updates for as long as they stay with SL. I really wasn't thinking of that kind of effort for revisions and updates in what I described.

[FredTheGamer]

I were pretty early with getting mesh out, and it was like you say a lot of trials and errors and nobody in the beginning knew the whole work flow needed. The first top I made looked somewhat decent but was nothing special by todays standard, but the amount of work.... And you should add the license fees for softwares, they can get rather costly. I'm sure a lot uses pirated versions, and I am guilty of that too in some exceptions mostly becuase of being lazy, but not everyone does it and it would add to the pricetag.