Thank you to everyone who's given me encouragement and support with the trees. For someone who can barely string two vertices together, they're an ambitious project with an uncertain outcome (even now, it still may end in disaster), and the blog comments have helped when I've been tempted to just give up. Right now, I'm sculpting the branches, which is really tedious but not particularly difficult. I need to finish with them and clean up the trunk, then create all the sculpt textures. Then I can bake the bark textures onto the pieces that will be sculpted prims in SL, while rendering the rest of the branches individually, so that they can be turned into textures and placed onto flat prims in SL. If I can get that far and it looks good, I'll be happy, though I will still try for some scripted extras.

My hiatus is going to continue until January, when the sim opens up. Putting things together to sell is actually a lot of work for me -- and I don't mean building the first version of the item, but doing the ads and packaging -- and I just have zero desire to do that while simultaneously producing new things for the opening and wrestling with complicated landscaping and building. In an ideal world, I'd still be churning things out each week, but I just don't have the energy to do all that right now.