Month: April 2017

Second Life: Will We Bake Our Mesh Body Avatars?

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The idea of baking mesh avatars has been a subject coming up in the Content Creators UG over the last couple of weeks. The idea is to change how mesh avatars work. If you don’t understand how a Classic body layers work now, this may be confusing. I’ll try to sort it.

Mechanical beauty
Mechanical beauty

Starting back a couple of years, the Lindens added Server Side Appearance baking (SSA). The Classic avatar is made of three separate parts; head, upper body, and lower body. The parts allow layering of textures placed on the Classic body. Sort of like sticking decals one a top another. 

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AvaStar-Blender: Switching from IK to FK and Back

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Medhue streamed a tutorial this weekend. He was showing how to switch between IK and FK animating. In September 2014 I was facing that problem and posted a tutorial titled: Blender-AvaStar Animation IK/FK Tip because I couldn’t find any tutorials saying how to change between the two animating styles. I think the video is a … Read more

Second Life and Sansar in the News

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The Irish Times has an article by Marie Boran, Virtual reality is giving Second Life a second lease of life. (4/13) Marie was a participant in Second Life™ in 2010. In the first few words she reports the Trump-Swastikas at a Bernie Sanders meetup. That mention should clue people to the possibility of the reporting being shallow. I’ll try to push the Sansar news deeper and provide some perspective on Second Life..

The Blarneystone in Dublin, SL – 2017

Marie moves on to point out that while there is an ‘underbelly’ to SL, that is often reported on, there is also a surprising number of ‘ordinary’ folks in SL. The real world is pretty much that way… so…

Next Marie says her 2010 outfit and skin had expired… I went back and tried some of my 2008 outfits, well, we didn’t have “Outfits” in 2008. So, I had to find some stuff from then and make an outfit to see if things still worked. They did. I looked horrible. We can’t be sure what happened to Marie. I’ll take this as being another nail in ‘shallow’. But…

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Second Life: Inventory Help

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There are loads of tutorials giving Second Life™ inventory management styles and suggestions. It is Kitty Barnett that is actually building helpful tools into the Inventory Panel. Kitty, having a 100K+ items in inventory has been finding using the inventory TEDIOUS. I can feel her.

~Everybody's Changing~
~Everybody’s Changing~

These are the types of tools users think awesome and Lab programmers doubt they are worth the effort. I believe this type of improvement is something only someone using their inventory daily would think of and see its value.

So, being the programmer for the Catznip Viewer and using her inventory a lot, she is adding handy tools to her version of the viewer. To see what she is adding and why, see her series of articles titled: Three Days of Teasers.

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