Content Creation – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Avatar Size in Second Life

2026/03/24 by Nalates Urriah

I see this subject come up every so often in the forum, why did the Lab make things so big, not to-scale?

Why are you so big?

In the 2004 era of Second Life® (SL) the default avatars were 7’ for males and 6’ for females. Camera angles and settings were adjusted to give, in the Lab’s opinion, the best view. Buildings, doors, and furniture were designed to accommodate those conditions, basically the camera above and behind the avatar.

But why those settings?

We are legion…

It seems everything in SL played into making things big. Making the default avatars 7’ and 6’ tall is sort of a chicken and egg conundrum. Are things big because of the avatar or is the avatar big because of all the things?

Neither. I suspect the Lab put some thought into deciding on size and general scale. So, I think it was more of a planned thing than avatars or things making SL what it started as.

Adobe Spark – Free

2018/04/05 by Nalates Urriah

Adobe has released a new free web tool, Spark. It is an editor/creative tool for those wanting to quickly put creative things on Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, and other social media. The video shows how it is used as a video editor.

From the video, this image shows that video is one of the three primary areas in which Spark is useful, Posts, Pages, and Video. Amy Landino, the video creator, points out the limits of Spark. It is not going to replace Adobe Premiere Pro.

But, this is may be handy for quick little things and those that can live within the restrictions of a template driven system.

Since it is all free, you may be wondering why it is free. The servers and programming all cost money. So, there must be some financial model behind what Adobe is offering. I think Adobe’s incentive is marketing for Adobe products. There are opportunities they take to promote Premiere and their other retail products. I can’t yet tell if that is the sole benefit to Adobe. But, they weren’t asking for an email address or log in during the parts I played with.

YouTube already has some Spark Tutorials. So, you aren’t solely on your own.

If you have ever wanted to show off your SL creations, avatar, pretty place… this is an opportunity to create with free tools from the premier maker of artistic software.

AvaStar: MakeHuman or Manuel Bastioni?

2017/03/302017/03/29 by Nalates Urriah

I noticed Machinimatrix posting a video on how to integrate Manuel Bastioni with AvaStar. BElow is an image link to the video as it won’t display embedded here. Sheeesh..

So, what is Manuel Bastioni? It is an open source character generator for Blender. Seems it is competition for MakeHuman. The download is here: Manuel Bastioni.

RL Creativity

2016/10/11 by Nalates Urriah

Every so often I stumble on something that just so NEAT!!

Yay, Max Ellis! Thanks.

If you want to see some of the most awesome images on Flickr see Flickr’s Top 25 Images of 2015.

Also, if you haven’t, check out the Flickr Blog.

A New Universe with Procedural Worlds

2016/08/222016/08/22 by Nalates Urriah

Massively has an article about a game named No Man’s Sky. In the article is a video by TheHappieCat explaining how the game’s makers created quintillions of worlds using fractals. The thing I find surprising is the worlds are never stored in a database. Yet when you come back to a world it is re-generated, but the same exact world is generated. TheHappieCat explains how she thinks it works.

The Massively Overpowered article Eve Evolved: No Man’s Sky vs Eve Online, by Brendan Drain explores what the differences between Eve and No Man’s may mean how Eve could be impacted.