With a new quarter upon us, a new continued adventure is upon us. Following the Digital Storytelling course that I, amongst many others, have contributed towards the previous two quarters, bring the curious audience towards another recording of my adventure working within this virtual world. This time, I had to work more with applications that can create 3D objects to be placed within the world of Second Life—Second Life being one of those programs.
In Winter 2025, this is where I am at in my Digital Storytelling Journey.
If you want to check out the previous quarters where I recorded my progress for this project, you can check them out on this page:
The Hero’s Journey
As per the previous two quarters that this story has taken place, I use the Hero’s Journey as a way of documenting my process with the things that I create, the emotions I was feeling for this quarter, and to explain the things that were added and the story behind them. These things will be sporadically filled out as we continue the storytelling journey for this quarter. I will always make sure to try and mention anything that relates to an upcoming or previous step of the journey (for example, if I say anything in Step 4, and it was added in a later step, I will preface the section by saying something like, “I had mentioned this in Step [7]…”, and so on and so forth)!
Step 0: Onboarding – This welcoming step is where the hero enters the world via the pirate ship, learns about the journey, and suits up to head out.
I was already familiar with the idea and the process of creating a 3D object for our world—it was something that I had done for my first quarter stepping into the world of Second Life for the first time! This was documented for the Digital Storytelling Management Report and Projects, if you so desire to check it out:
This was the quarter where we would expand on those idea and the process, and create our own objects using programs that can create 3D objects. For this quarter, I have been switching back and forth between using the in-world creator for Second Life (using the Firestorm viewer), as well as Blender, which is a free application that many professionals use to create art and videos in 3D. I was excited to try and create my own objects this time—but better!
Step 1: Ordinary World – This step refers to the hero’s normal life at the start of the story, before the adventure begins.
Since this is my third quarter into the Digital Storytelling chapter of my college degree, I am already quite familiar with the process of this overarching adventure, and have an idea of what is to be expected from it. Just like every quarter that I have taken, I was excited to see what we would be getting up to, and what we would be doing on this chapter of our adventure.
Step 2: Call to Adventure – The hero is faced with something that makes them begin their adventure. This might be a problem or a challenge they needs to overcome.
An unfortunate thing that I find that keeps happening to me is the ebb and flow of my mental state throughout the year—and especially throughout the quarter. This is something that I have most likely talked about a lot throughout the last few quarters that I have done these reports, but it continues to be a prevalent thing that happens. I won’t get into anymore detail than that since it’s already so repetitive and it’s not anything serious (promise), but it has prevented me from feeling like I can bring my all into this quarter (despite what you will see later on with me trying to use videos and with using blender for the first time in almost a year, I don’t think that I contributed that much this quarter).
Step 3: Refusal of the Call – The hero attempts to refuse the adventure because they are afraid.
I wouldn’t say that, for this quarter, I refused to do anything for this class. I did have some hesitations with doing things in another class unrelated to this one, but for this class I was really happy to be a part of it, especially since I was able to contribute more to the Digital Storytelling story!
Step 4: Meeting with the Mentor – The hero encounters someone who can give them advice and ready them for the journey ahead.
In a wonderful way, I would consider chatting with my fellow classmate and friend, Esmeralda, as a sort of meeting between “mentors”. We are both students and still learning about the virtual world and the creativity we possess, but we have things that we have learned for ourselves and can share with each other. In a way, we are mentoring each other, even if the things we talk about aren’t things we can really mentor each other on (we were talking about the game God of War: Ragnarök and how wonderful and beautiful it is in terms of story and how it looks).
Even though the conversations we were having were more casual rather than educational, it was still a wonderful time and I think it was definitely worth mentioning as a part of this report since I rarely get to have these kinds of interactions with people!
Step 5: Crossing the First Threshold – The hero leaves their ordinary world for the first time and crosses the threshold into adventure.
While I wouldn’t call working with 3D programs to be a different sort of threshold in terms of familiarity, the functions and layout of these programs are much different compared to the programs that I am familiar with (aka: photo editing apps and drawing applications). Especially with Blender, it takes a while to get used to the concept of editing in 3-dimensions, having to take into major consideration of the position of your object.
In Second Life, there is a simpler UI and approach when it comes to building objects in 3D. In order to access the ability to build, you would have to pull up the “Build” menu, where you can access things that you would need to build in a simple fashion. The program is build in with simple objects to build upon, as well as edit in more detail depending on how you want it to look in structure and in texture.
You can also import objects from other 3D programs into Second Life to edit in there; however, the files have to be specific, otherwise it won’t load into the world properly.
Step 6: Tests, Allies, Enemies – The hero learns the rules of their new world. During this time, they endure tests of strength of will, meets friends, and comes face to face with foes.
Most of the time, for me, learning a new program or structure proves to be something that I get excited about; there’s a certain air of curiosity and excitement that I feel when I get to try something new. I like to consider myself a quick-ish learner, as well as enthusiastic to learn when it comes to things that I am interested in.
This time…learning the medium was a feat..to exaggerate myself a little bit.
Since I have almost always worked in 2D environments, it took a minute for me to get used to the idea of using a third dimensional plane to work with my objects. I definitely struggled with making sure that I could get everything to work properly as I wanted it to. In Blender, there are features within it that made it overwhelming to work in the program simply because I wasn’t sure of what I was going to use, and I wasn’t sure I would have time to learn how to use them. When I say that there are a lot of features…
There are a lot.
And that is just on the surface. Diving into each section, there seem to be a million other things that you can do to further enhance the object that you are making. I won’t go into the intricacies of Blender, since there would be much to talk about if I just stuck to discussing it—I still don’t know what everything does, anyway, so I would be repeating myself and giving a bullet-point explanation of what I do know.
Step 7: Approach – Setbacks occur, sometimes causing the hero to try a new approach or adopt new ideas.
When I struggle to learn something new, or curious about a specific thing I want to make, or am watching videos relating to things that I am interested in, I tend to pick up on a few new tricks to utilize for future projects. For this quarter, I am spending my time watching videos so that I learn specific things that I want to add to my creations and such.
Step 8: Ordeal – The hero experiences a major hurdle or obstacle, such as a life or death crisis.
This was something that was already referenced in the previous steps 2 and 3, so I won’t repeat myself again talking about this, considering that this step is directly tied into those previous steps.
Step 9: Reward – After surviving death, the hero earns their reward or accomplishes their goal.
I’d like to think that there were some more things that I learned this quarter when it comes to creating 3D objects. I still think that Blender is a tedious tool to use, though I had fun stepping back into the program to try some things out, despite the difficulties that I still had with it.
Step 10: The Road Back – The hero begins their journey back to their ordinary life.
I have no idea if I will be participating in anymore of the Digital Storytelling world in Second Life since I don’t know if any other classes use Second Life as the primary teaching tool; however, I do hope that there is another chance for me to participate in this world again, and to create more things and add onto the story a bit more.
Step 11: Resurrection Hero – The hero faces a final test where everything is at stake and they must use everything they has learned.
This year I neglected to attend the final presentation of the quarter where I got to showcase everything that I made this quarter. I do hope that this report can be used as a replacement for my lack of attendance to that presentation. I do have another page that showcases the 3d objects that I did make this quarter, including some that aren’t part of this particular report:
Step 12: Return with Elixir – The hero brings their knowledge or the “elixir” back to the ordinary world, where they apply it to help all who remain there.
Unfortunately I feel like I did not contribute much to this quarter. I still did the work that I was supposed to do, but I know that I wasn’t at the top of my game when I was working on these things. I think that this is an okay thing to admit! I still had fun this quarter, and I’m happy with the things that I did contribute. I still think that it was a successful quarter no matter how much or how little I contributed—and as long as I was able to fulfill some parts of what I wanted to create.
Achievement Awards
I, so far, have only created one previs moodboard for an achievement award object for our world. I thought it would be a neat idea for people to be given flowers that were made out of gears and metal to fit in with the idea of 1) flowers gifted after an event, or as a gift for a special occasion; and 2) to fit within our Neo Pirate Steampunk theme within our world in Second Life. At this point of writing this section (February 20, 2025), I haven’t created the actual object just yet.
(February 28, 2025) I have since created the object for the gear bouquet for this project; however, it did not come out as I though that it would. I want to try and revisit the object soon.
The colors are not part of this specific render, as they have been applied separately within Second Life using UV mesh models.
Since getting into Dungeons and Dragons—and finally playing my first official campaign!—I’ve been wanting to try and incorporate things from the tabletop roleplaying game into my creative works. The dice are clearly not the most perfect dice in the world (the d10 dice can definitely use some work), but I am happy with how they turned out nonetheless! I’m going to go back and fix them, as well as, hopefully, have some color and textures for the whole set.