Decorating SOS...how do I?

[Trinity Blakewell]

I thought I'd start a new thread for decorating SOS as I have come across a challenging decor issue...and maybe this could end up being an ongoing thread.  Because, as my recent browsing around my Newbrooke neighborhood revealed, there are a lot of Linden Home residents out there that really need help (whether they know it or not!). They are free to do as they wish (at least inside) but it would be nice to have a specific thread residents could go to in search of pointers and assistance.

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So here's my specific issue. It's been a while since I've paid much attention to external decor/landscaping. Stilts and Log Cabins haven't needed much; Fantasy has a rich -exterior landscaping already in place and typically I just added a fountain; I haven't been in a Chalet for very long so I didn't focus on the exterior there, and with Victorians, once I put in a gazebo, perhaps a fountain, and sone structured flower beds I was satisfied.

But now that I'm in a Newbrooke I think I need more focus on landscaping, and I want it to coordinate well. I've been to several of the shops in-world that focus on landscaping, and spent a lot of time looking through the Marketplace. And I admit, I'm lost. Perhaps its because it's difficult to isolate the items that would fit well in a Modern theme. Maybe I just am not familiar with the sellers that focus on that style for landscaping products.

So, anyone able to help point me in some good directions? Brands? Search terms? I really don't want to spend even more fruitless hours trying to weed out (no pun intended) what I need on Marketplace.

Edited March 17, 2022 by Trinity1776

[Chloe Bunny]

I would say Studio Skye, HPMD, Heart and Felix landscaping and lots of content pack items from all of the themes. The log home ivy is particularly good as are the plants. Mind you it is one thing having these items but knowing what to do with them is another. I regularly break up Skye items to use in different ways - their realistic water can't be beaten. 

[Chloe Bunny]

Also Fundati rocks can be tinted to look like the linden rocks

[Leora Greenwood]

9 minutes ago, Trinity1776 said:

I thought I'd start a new thread for decorating SOS as I have come across a challenging decor issue...and maybe this could end up being an ongoing thread.  Because, as my recent browsing around my Newbrooke neighborhood revealed, there are a lot of Linden Home residents out there that really need help (whether they know it or not!). They are free to do as they wish (at least inside) but it would be nice to have a specific thread residents could go to in search of pointers and assistance.

------------------------------------------------

So here's my specific issue. It's been a while since I've paid much attention to external decor/landscaping. Stilts and Log Cabins haven't needed much; Fantasy has a rich -exterior landscaping already in place and typically I just added a fountain; I haven't been in a Chalet for very long so I didn't focus on the exterior there, and with Victorians, once I put in a gazebo, perhaps a fountain, and sone structured flower beds I was satisfied.

But now that I'm in a Newbrooke I think I need more focus on landscaping, and I want it to coordinate well. I've been to several of the shops in-world that focus on landscaping, and spent a lot of time looking through the Marketplace. And I admit, I'm lost. Perhaps its because it's difficult to isolate the items that would fit well in a Modern theme. Maybe I just am not familiar with the sellers that focus on that style for landscaping products.

So, anyone able to help point me in some good directions? Brands? Search terms? I really don't want to spend even more fruitless hours trying to weed out (no pun intended) what I need on Marketplace.

I don't have solutions to offer but have been haunting the marketplace (searching on "Newbrooke") ever since the Newbrooke regions opened.  I seem to be your polar opposite since I always decorate the exterior and grounds of my Linden homes first and have to remind myself to get around to furnishing them inside.  I always like to be outside and up so my Newbrooke efforts have featured a wooden roof terrace with ladders placed to access it.  I am still pondering landscaping in Newbrooks, trying many things.

[Chloe Bunny]

Also I just used Old World for a vegetable patch at my mainland and I really love it - have to admit I have not decorated any Newbrooke - if you will forgive non linden home you can see the temperate shrubs from skye and the hpmd in the second photo and the veggie patch in the first

Edited March 17, 2022 by Chloe Bunny
added photos & suchlike

[Demri Nova]

Hayabusa has a lot of trees, plants, shrubs, etc. that look good anywhere. A large display area is kind of hard to navigate and find what you want, but if you enjoy browsing you are certain to run across something you like. I use them almost exclusively because of the quality and low prim counts.

[Rowan Amore]

Fourth Wall has a lot of modernist items for indoors and out.

Second Life Marketplace - Fourth Wall by William Wanderer

Edited March 17, 2022 by Rowan Amore

[TT120]

Fundati makes some good stuff as well as T-Spot but their stuff is all full perm and kind of expensive.

[syndi Pearl]

Here are a few principles that I have found useful...

1. We each have our own preferences. Make sure you build something that delights you. I tend toward more natural landscapes.

2. It's useful to have a signature landscape item that sets the tone for everything else.

3. Look at other builds... everywhere (other Linden Homes, mainland, shopping event booth decoration, etc). If you see something you like, edit the object, determine the creator, open their profile, and look at their Picks to see where to buy the item. Or use their name to search Marketplace.

4. Landscape items can be high LI, particularly older items. Make sure you check LI before you buy. In Linden Homes LI is more important than on mainland as you cannot increase it.

5. Learn how to create, edit, and texture basic prims. In Belli homes there is usually an issue with bridging the gap between the home and the road and a custom textured prim does this. Overhang into the roadway is permitted as long as it blends reasonably. Use basic prims for decks, steps, connectors, skinning (retexturing no-modify walls), and light sources. To cut the LI of prims in half, link them and make the root convex hull (Edit/Features/Physics Shape Type/Convex Hull).

6. Use the Content and Texture Packs that come with each Linden Home Theme. Mix and match. The fencing objects are particularly useful. The plants in the Newbrooke pack are 1 LI!!!

Photo 1 notes: Deck extension is 2LI (4 prims convex hull). Iris is 1LI and in the content pack, as are the planters. Ground cover is 1LI Heart 10mx10m squares. Maple tree in upper left is Botanical, old and crazy LI, but I love it.

Photo 2 notes: Texture on the square slab is from Newbrooke texture pack. Surrounding fence from content pack.

Photo 3 notes: My "bridge" prim is textured with gravel that I found on Marketplace. The 1LI tree (in planter) is from Yugen. The sconces are 1LI... saw them in a forum post, found the house, got the creator info and bought them. The small magnolia is from [keke], which is still a store on Marketplace.

This Faraday Newbrooke is an Open House.

Edited March 17, 2022 by syndi Pearl

[Marianne Little]

I will not talk down creators who make beautiful things, but it is Linden Homes with only 351 Li we discuss. I will just say that Heart has wonderful flowers. Simply wonderful. But... they have higher Li than Landscaping by Felix. Felix often has clumps of flowers that in only 1 Li, where Heart is 3-5 Li.

Why does it matter... Because six flowers that's 2 Li each can be replaced with six 1 Li flowers, and the six Li you save is almost a bed or a sofa. And when every Li counts, flowers that are more than 1 Li must fight hard to get in my garden.

Hayabusa and Fundati can also be high in Li. Inspect before you buy. All the Fundati Saturday sale offerings has been high Li. Not a beach slope thing, but that isn't actual for Newbrooke or any Linden Home.

I would say that Mesh Plants by Reid Parkin and Landscaping by Felix is the best low Li places. T-spot mesh too. If you need to save money, Simply Shelby is often in sales, and is using T-Spot in her flower beds. It is modify, so you can take them apart.

Botanical has boxwood in hedges and shapes. That is good for formal gardens. I also use the cypress tree from them, and it is pretty big at 1 Li.

The Moles has given us a perfect fence and a perfect wall in the content creation pack. And it is low Li too! I can honestly don't recommend a better solution, because it is a perfect match. Use the longest parts to save Li. The plain stone wall can be stretched a bit before the texture start to look bad. The small and medium planter in there is low Li too.

I have used the pavement textures and concrete textures in that pack. It ties everything so well together. I am baffled by the fact that so few is putting out a prim from the door to the road. The textures are free, and it is only a single prim needed.

[Leora Greenwood]

31 minutes ago, Marianne Little said:

The Moles has given us a perfect fence and a perfect wall in the content creation pack. And it is low Li too! I can honestly don't recommend a better solution, because it is a perfect match. Use the longest parts to save Li. The plain stone wall can be stretched a bit before the texture start to look bad. The small and medium planter in there is low Li too.

I have used the pavement textures and concrete textures in that pack. It ties everything so well together. I am baffled by the fact that so few is putting out a prim from the door to the road. The textures are free, and it is only a single prim needed.

I totally agree and always do that at minimum.  For my Coniston, I adapted a front bit from the marketplace that was originally made for the Heaton but looked easy to mod and it was.  That is all I have pretty much finished on that house.  Need more time inworld!  😁

 

[Baiphen Quintessa]

21 minutes ago, Leora Greenwood said:

I totally agree and always do that at minimum.  For my Coniston, I adapted a front bit from the marketplace that was originally made for the Heaton but looked easy to mod and it was.  That is all I have pretty much finished on that house.  Need more time inworld!  😁

 

OMG!!!! I freaking love your elephant! Please, please, please can you tell me where you got it. My stilt needs it to guard the stairs.

 

[Missbehavin Neva]

Love Home and Garden by Krystali Rabeni is also a good source for pretty and low prim landscaping. 

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/18133

[Mercedes Avon]

52 minutes ago, Missbehavin Neva said:

Love Home and Garden by Krystali Rabeni is also a good source for pretty and low prim landscaping. 

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/18133

I was just going to recommend this store too. I find a lot of what I like and need there and the best part is that she often has sales on the weekends so you can slowly pick up a lot of neat things for a very good price.

With the Newbrooke, I haven't gone as crazy with the grasses and landscaping as I usually go. I've put down more concrete then I typically do. I got a lot of good ideas googling mid-century modern landscape ideas. I have been enjoying trying new ideas outside my norm.

[Stella Carver]

Maya's Architecture has some super budget friendly furnished homes (some only 50linden, most under 100)that are mod and copy and many of her plants and trees are T-spot and other good quality creators. If someone has the time to mess about rezzing them in a sandbox, unlinking, and organizing, it's a great resource for landscaping, furniture, decor, and architectural pieces.

[Stella Carver]

4 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

Fourth Wall has a lot of modernist items for indoors and out.

Second Life Marketplace - Fourth Wall by William Wanderer

They had a nice fence set in the weekend sales that works great with Newbrooke homes.

[Leora Greenwood]

1 hour ago, Baiphen Quintessa said:

OMG!!!! I freaking love your elephant! Please, please, please can you tell me where you got it. My stilt needs it to guard the stairs.

LOL, trying to imagine him guarding a stilt!  Looks like I got him here:  https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/QUTWORLD-Stone-Elephant-Statue2FP/22540223  Just note that he is 5 LI at the size I have him guarding my Newbrooke and I gave him a bit of shine which I will probably remove now that I look at it more.

[Baiphen Quintessa]

43 minutes ago, Leora Greenwood said:

LOL, trying to imagine him guarding a stilt!  Looks like I got him here:  https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/QUTWORLD-Stone-Elephant-Statue2FP/22540223  Just note that he is 5 LI at the size I have him guarding my Newbrooke and I gave him a bit of shine which I will probably remove now that I look at it more.

Yay! Thank you! He's going to opposite my smoke blowing tiki I think. There isn't much you can do to a stilt so I might as well plant a few things in the sand. Or maybe he'll stand guard off the back deck. You're awesome!

[Lysistrata Szapira]

I have a Vic. What I did was just wander around the Vic regions aimlessly until I found landscaping I liked, wrote down the stores and item names and ran off to see how much they cost.  I always check LI first because I don't want to throw money at something that uses up too much of my limit.

I use Botanical's brick pathway kit to fill in that annoying empty space between the public sidewalk and my front steps.

I use a mix of flowers, ivy, and grasses from Heart, The Looking Glass and Love. TLG and Love are almost always in weekend sales.  Love's LODs can sometimes be annoying though, so if you like to look at a distance view, you might not like that. 

I have some fairly lanterns from Disorderly and a fountain from Dust Bunny (I had to use 11 LI for that fountain and it's so triangle heavy, but it matches perfectly with my Vic). 

I don't have any trees out currently because I ran out of LI, and trees aren't all that important to me in the Vic area (moles have provided plenty).  Right now all of my landscaping is at the front of my house because I am terrible at linking to save LI.   As long as the front is cute, I'm good. 

 

 

 

[Trinity Blakewell]

Well, I got a little inspired, and I put "concrete" on the ground and Linden-supplied walls in the backyard where the flat deck/patio area was. I think that's going to work better for me, but still working on the decor and landscaping.  One thing to note about much of the Linden-supplied stuff, it doesn't get any smaller when linked together. I have planter arrangements I made today and thought, we'll, it's 5LI or 7LI before linking, surely I'll gain back 1LI or so...but nope. Even all the walls around my new patio do reduce in size a single LI when linked.

[syndi Pearl]

2 hours ago, Trinity1776 said:

 One thing to note about much of the Linden-supplied stuff, it doesn't get any smaller when linked together.

The Linden-supplied stuff is mesh which keeps the same LI when linked. However, resizing mesh can increase/decrease the LI.

Only prims (e.g. a cube you rez) change LI when linked and only if the physics type of the root prim is set to convex hull. The LI is halved.

Edited March 18, 2022 by syndi Pearl

[Persephone Emerald]

16 hours ago, Trinity1776 said:

I thought I'd start a new thread for decorating SOS as I have come across a challenging decor issue...and maybe this could end up being an ongoing thread.  Because, as my recent browsing around my Newbrooke neighborhood revealed, there are a lot of Linden Home residents out there that really need help (whether they know it or not!). They are free to do as they wish (at least inside) but it would be nice to have a specific thread residents could go to in search of pointers and assistance.

------------------------------------------------

So here's my specific issue. It's been a while since I've paid much attention to external decor/landscaping. Stilts and Log Cabins haven't needed much; Fantasy has a rich -exterior landscaping already in place and typically I just added a fountain; I haven't been in a Chalet for very long so I didn't focus on the exterior there, and with Victorians, once I put in a gazebo, perhaps a fountain, and sone structured flower beds I was satisfied.

But now that I'm in a Newbrooke I think I need more focus on landscaping, and I want it to coordinate well. I've been to several of the shops in-world that focus on landscaping, and spent a lot of time looking through the Marketplace. And I admit, I'm lost. Perhaps its because it's difficult to isolate the items that would fit well in a Modern theme. Maybe I just am not familiar with the sellers that focus on that style for landscaping products.

So, anyone able to help point me in some good directions? Brands? Search terms? I really don't want to spend even more fruitless hours trying to weed out (no pun intended) what I need on Marketplace.

With Linden Homes and in general, I try to go as low Land Impact and low script as possible while still creating the look I want. With Linden Homes, we have a great set of textures we can use to retexture exterior items and keep them homogeneous with the rest of the neighborhood. I like the flowers in the Victorian pack well enough that I'm happy to landscape with them. Using textures that are already in the neighborhood helps them load faster and keep down server lag. I bought a carport on MP that was designed for a Traditional, but I retextured the whole thing with Victorian textures so it looks like it fits with the house. I don't mind the look of the benches in the pack, but I found I had similar ones in my inventory from Dysfunctionality that were only 2 Land Impact instead of 6. Dysfunctionality has a nice assortment of low land impact mesh that is not expensive and is usually modifiable. 

I use a full perm mesh box I bought years ago on Marketplace for many simple things I make. It can become the walls for my parcel-sized skybox, a painting with a separate frame texture, a row of grass or flowers,  a patio/ driveway, a curtain, or the mirror for one of my dressers with a fake reflection of the room. Because it's only 0.5 Li, linking it to something else makes it almost invisible in terms of land impact. 

Edited March 18, 2022 by Persephone Emerald

[Hymn Celestia]

23 hours ago, Trinity1776 said:

Perhaps its because it's difficult to isolate the items that would fit well in a Modern theme.

To answer this problem I looked at online pictures of modern houses and examined their landscape. This picture here tells me a lot about how to do something that I find pleasing.  The shapes are worth focusing on.  The right angles of the house mean that you can use right angles in your landscape to good advantage.  Setting out free-standing boxes of flowers that you find attractive would work; or little clumps of grass here and there to soften some hard edges of the deck or concrete.  The nature-makers listed already in this thread have so many of these elements; you'll hopefully enjoy wandering through their regions filled with flora and take your inspirations :)

[EnchantrixLisa]

If I may, I have a question. Is there such a thing as furniture/decor that doesn't cause a lot of lag? I ask because I noticed with my other Houseboat after I put everything out that I wanted and was still under my prim count my fps rate went down to 10 or less. I pulled everything up and my fps went back into 20+ range. This happens when I go to a crowded or highly decorated SIM but I understand the reason for that. I tried to find things that were low in prim but is there another factor I am missing? 🤔

[Persephone Emerald]

1 hour ago, EnchantrixLisa said:

If I may, I have a question. Is there such a thing as furniture/decor that doesn't cause a lot of lag? I ask because I noticed with my other Houseboat after I put everything out that I wanted and was still under my prim count my fps rate went down to 10 or less. I pulled everything up and my fps went back into 20+ range. This happens when I go to a crowded or highly decorated SIM but I understand the reason for that. I tried to find things that were low in prim but is there another factor I am missing? 🤔

There are different kinds of lag and different things that can add to it. Too many textures or high rez textures can cause textures to load slowly, which makes things look gray. Too many scripts can cause freezing and slow responses. Having light or glow added to prims can be a factor. Breedable pets are especially bad for causing script lag.

Using fewer textures and simple textures (lower than 1024 x 1024) would help. If you can take out retexturing scripts, that might help. Furniture with lower land impact might help. Items with many vertices aren't great. Avoid sculpts if you can. Flat prims and low-land impact mesh are best. There are so many factors that can create lag that it's hard to say what is the worst cause. Maybe if you go to a furniture store where everything rezzes easily and you don't get lagged out, their furniture would be better? If you make or retexture items with textures from your Linden Home Houseboat pack that will help too, because those textures have already been loaded in your region.