Second Life and Virtual Worlds
FabFree is talking about some great sales going on this month. Magika, a hair and clothes maker, is putting their old sculpty hair on sale as they close it out and move on to mesh hair. Single do’s go for L$35 and fat packs for L$100. So, the place is crowded.
Magika has some fun looking matching hair and tails made from mesh.
Magika’s new mesh hair is on display too, on the opposite side from the non-mesh hair.
It isn’t common to see people making all four LoD (Level of Detail) levels. But, we can do the polygon reduction thing for making a lower poly model for use with a normal map. The challenge is in making the lower poly models. Now Mixamo has a ‘decimator’ online that we can use. It is free to use until July 12, 2014.
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You’ll find it here: Optimize Your Polycount the Fast and Easy Way.
Ciaran Laval has an article up that covers the history of Second Life™ groups and his suggestion that things change to break a pattern present in SL since it started. See: Second Life Group System Still Needs An Overhaul.
SL users always want more groups. We are limited to 42 now. Originally it was 10, before my time. I started with the 25 limit.
A major part of groups is chat. Adding more groups increases the server load exponentially. Chat lag and not being able to post to a group are common problems we all deal with now as we use groups. I have no idea how many times I have had to send an IM to someone in the group because I could not get a comment into a group chat, connection fail…
Ciaran is suggesting that we shift from the chat we have now to something web based. I suppose something more like IRC, but with more persistence.
In Second Life™ we talk about scale. Some of us are big on getting people and things to RL scales in our virtual world (VW). I’m a fan and I’ve written several articles about building to scale. Now people interested in Virtual Reality (VR) are thinking about scale at entirely new levels. The site Road to VR has an article up about how the fashion industry may use VR to allow people to model RL clothes in VR prior to purchase.
Imagine you could specify your avatar based on your RL shape… that could be a good or bad thing. :/ But, the fashion industry is thinking of using the idea to allow us to try on clothes in VR and decide if we like the fit. I suppose if it fits then we can order it and an Amazon drone will deliver it. Well, it is a dream at the moment. But, an Australian company has a proof of concept demo out for the Oculus Rift.
The idea is also to get away from sizes. Ladies know that sizes from various designers vary, often varying as a way to attempt to flatter the female ego. ‘Oh, I can wear a size 2…’ Personally the miss sizing for psychological advertizing just annoys me.
OK everyone is posting about these. If you haven’t already heard, you have to be hiding. They are far better than the Ruth and Roth avatars from earlier times.
They are interesting and noobies will look much better. However, noobies will still act like noobies . They won’t be all that hard to recognize.
However, Saturday when I was trying to play with the new avatars the SL system was acting up. The Choose an Avatar panel did not want to load. I kept getting an empty panel. I left the panel open and relogged, that got it working, or it may be just the relog did it. Or my region may have been having difficulties.
Once the panel was loaded then some avatars would not load. I would get what looked like an LOD4 version 0f the avatar only, very bizarre looking up close but ok from a distance. Switch to another one and later retry the one with loading problems, seemed to work.
When you wear one of these avatars a folder is created in the Clothing folder of your inventory. The ‘Lucy’ avatar is of course in the Lucy folder.
These avatars completely replace, well are worn over, your system avatar and a full body alpha mask hides the system avatar. They are complete mesh bodies and clothes. I am not sure why they made them No-Mod.
Appliers are the scripts that allow you to wear clothes over mesh attachments. Those using Tangos and Phat Azz and similar attachments know about appliers.
The problem with appliers is many of the creators of mesh attachments are using their own applier, a custom script they developed. If you make system clothes via the clothing templates, you get a template from the mesh attachment maker and make textures for the attachment. It then looks like your clothes are fitting over the attachment.
The problem is everybody seems to be making their own scripts. The result is there are incompatibilities in how appliers work and how to make textures for the attachments. A big peoblem for designers is in knowing which face number is to be used for a texture. Is face #1 the breasts or butt?