OSgrid Welcome Station - Primstarrific

The OSgrid Welcome Station (the equivalent of SL's Orientation Island) is nearing completion, and undoubtedly would not have been possible without the Primstar scripts. Nearly every building is chock full of sculpted prims, both for their aesthetic appeal and to reduce prim/texture count.

I figured I would share a few screenshots here with the Primstar community; hope you don't mind. All images are linked to larger versions; click to embiggen.

The image below is the area where newcomers will rez, with a seating area for greeters and information displays giving the basics on movement and interaction. Apart from the ceiling and floor, nearly everything in this shot is a sculpted prim. The railing segments in the foreground (two horizontal bars and four vertical bars each) are single-prim sculpts. Even the pipes are sculpts.

A reverse angle, showing the "spawn tubes", also completely sculpted, where newcomers will eventually emerge from, once the appropriate functionality is added to OpenSimulator's "Mini Region Module" code:

One of the corridors connecting the buildings. Apart from the transparent windows, the yellow caution sign above them, and the glowing light panels, the corridors are entirely sculpted.

Below, the power station for the maglev train. Plenty of sculpts in here too. Thanks to the power of oblong sculpts, the unlit worklight is a whopping 4 prims (the lit one has 2 additional prims to produce glows on the front side). The ladder on the right edge of the image is two sculpts stacked on top of each other.

Below is one of the generators, textured only with ambient occlusion. 13 sculpted prims, but only 10 sculpt maps. I can't even imagine how many non-sculpted prims it would take to make one of these (and texturing would have been a nightmare).

Another view of the generator room. I think the only non-sculpts here are the ceiling, floor and walls. The large piece of machinery is 12 prims, including the platform it's on.

The maintenance office. Everything but the walls, floor, ceiling and door are sculpted. The shelves are one prim per unit. To make texturing easier, each box is just a cubic sculpt.

The lift up to the maglev platform. The railings, pipes, girders, lights, cables, electrical cabinets, railings and control box are all sculpted.

The maglev platform, all sculpted except the outer walls, floor and ceiling. The columns in the middle are one prim each; you just can't beat sculpts for low-prim architecture.

A secondary maglev terminal, reusing a number of the same sculpt maps from the one above, but with different textures:

For those who are interested, I created the sculpts individually as needed (using the Primstar scripts, naturally), then brought them inworld (untextured) for placement. As I finished each building, I would link it up and then use an LSL/OSSL (OpenSimulator Scripting Language) script to generate a number of notecards containing Prim.Blender-compatible XML describing the prims. I then copied the text out of each notecard and pasted it into a single file in a text editor, pulled the file into Blender using Prim.Blender, and did all the texturing there. (Oblong sculpts required a bit of work to pull back in, as the Prim.Blender import treats them as square sculpts.) I then baked all the textures (color, specularity, reflections, lighting, ambient occlusion, etc. where appropriate), saved them, uploaded them to OSgrid and applied them to the appropriate surfaces. With the exception of large expanses of ceilings/walls/floors, I tried to keep the textures down to 256x256 or lower, so as to make the region rez fairly quickly.

All told, there are somewhere between 200 and 300 sculpt maps in the build - many of which are reused a number of times. Thanks to the awesome primcount-reducing powers of sculpts, the entire island contains fewer than 2200 prims.