Our last Adventure Club tour for the year in November was to Mudpuddle Cleanslate’s region Arles.
Mudpuddle is the “creator of Van Gogh’s Virtual Arles, a beautifully landscaped sim showing 17 of the views that he painted during his time here. At each viewpoint I have placed an easel showing Van Gogh’s finished painting.”
When we first started to wander around the sim my first reaction was “Wow” what an amazing build, I can tell that much love & thought have been put into this region from Mudpuddle, it is truly wonderful. The thing that struck me the most were the colours, I loved the vibrant colours you see as you explore the region. We were also very fortunate enough to have the creator Mudpuddle be our tour guide. He is a very warm and informative host.
Here are some of my favourite snapshots.
I asked Mudpuddle to put into his own words a little about his creations.
“I first became interested in Van Gogh about 20 years ago now. I was using Acorn computers at that time and had my own monthly double page spread in an Acorn computer magazine. The article was called Brush Strokes and covered all aspects of computer art. I was frequently given new art software to either try out or review. A nifty bit of 3D software found its way to me called Illusionist which let the user set up a 3D scene, light it and then render it as a still image.
For me The Bedroom by Van Gogh was perhaps instantly recognizable to most people and so I thought about creating this painting using the new software but instead of the normal view, show the end of the bedroom that Van Gogh painted it from.
In early 2000, Adobe were working on their own 3D product called ‘Atmosphere’ and for its time, was an amazing piece of software. I tested it for a while until its release. This software allowed the user to create 3D worlds but this time you could actually move around within the virtual space. Also, it was uploaded to the user’s own server and you could meet other people, go to their creations and vice versa. Needless to say, I was hooked and this time built the bedroom scene again but also the Yellow House in Arles. Sadly after only one year, it was taken from the shelves simply because it couldn’t compete with that other online community known as Second Life.
Therefore, I joined Second Life, bought a small parcel of land and built the same there, just the bedroom inside the yellow House, oh and the grocery store next door of course. I was offered the use of one third of a full sim which I jumped at, built the same again there but also more buildings behind the Yellow House…and right at the bottom of the street, I built the Cafe Terrace and Night Cafe. Sadly the owner couldn’t afford the tier any longer and so I bought my own Homestead. Now I was really buzzing, more and more paintings came to life and I landscaped the sim to resemble what I referred to as a ‘Mini’ Arles. Again I had to let this go after two years for reasons of malicious stalking.
One year later some people who had been to my homestead and loved what I had done there, invited me to build Arles on their full sim, pretty much all of the space at ground level. There were promises that it would be a permanent fixture but this wasn’t the case and so yet again I had to take it all down again.
Chelsea suggested I move to OpenSim and join the Littlefield community where you get 30,000 mouth watering prims to play with. This I did and after about 8 months, the new Arles has been reborn and this time around, it’s the best ever….I’ve reworked some of the old buildings, remade solid doors as opposed to alpha ones, even made completely new scenes, including a few surprises that you can teleport to.
I’ve even made a machinima movie showing the new Arles with a specially written soundtrack by Keoki Trask, a ‘new age’, ‘progressive’ composer. The movie as is the music, is called ‘Le Royaume du Arles’, ‘The KIngdom of Arles’ and already has some great comments said about it on my youtube channel. The movie runs in HD at full 1080p.
After so many tries at rebuilding, taking it down time and time again, I simply cannot face having to go through that again. It’s very tiring and disheartening and now this is the 5th and final time that I will build this….hopefully it will stay in Littlefield, something that the community here can be proud to own.”
Mud, 18th November 2014
Thank you Mudpuddle for sharing your creations with Littlefield Grid.
World of Littlefield 