All for the love of creating.

So I've long known that most creators in SL don't make their own mesh for SL, that most just buy prefabs (I guess which are mostly made by pro art teams) and retexture those to sell.

As an lone artist, I admit I've thought about doing this a few times over the years just for expediency's sake...but something about that strategy always rankled.  Rankled a LOT.  

I think it has to do with the fact that, before the ability to upload models was introduced to SL, we all worked with prims.  The geometry was something that was right there, in-world, directly in OUR (the users) hands.  We made things out of these prims (and later, sculpties); we shaped them, textured them, programmed them, sold them.  They were accessible to every user, with only a fairly small learning curve and no need to be outside the virtual except for when we had to create our textures.

When mesh came along, prims and sculpties were relegated to the trash-heap, and for good reason -- they were limited, ugly, inefficient, slow, kludgy.  The bar for creating content shot up ridiculously (and possibly needlessly) high, and with this mesh capability came the severely unfortunate obligation to spend more time OUTSIDE Second Life than inside in order to create.  

At the time, I was making lots of stuff for SL, but had nearly zero experience with modeling.  I rejoiced at the "new" mesh technology, but it didn't take long to understand that I would no longer be able to make desirable items because of my own skill limits.  

I could have just given up there, and I think many people did.  Lots of creators became strictly texture artists after that point.  Turns out I was just Not Okay with being effectively shut-out of creating original objects, so I did what I had to do: I downloaded Blender and started learning with the intent that I would make my own things again...but it turns out most people didn't.

Why didn't they, I wonder?  Maybe it was just too daunting of a prospect to commit to self-teaching a new and actually really technical skillset.  Realizing this, it's clear that Linden Lab really dropped the ball as far as empowering their non-professional community.  There were things LL could have done to bring mesh creation in-world, but they didn't and I think that irreparably damaged SL as a whole and changed its landscape from being collaborative & community-driven to just a platform for professional art houses to sell their slickly-made assets to consumers.  It's very sad that independent small-time artists, they who initially shaped this virtual world we still love, are now nearly unheard of.

~EC