Second Life and Virtual Worlds
In my July 14 article Kirsten Viewer S20 (29) Released I included a video by Marx Catteneo showing the use of Kirsten Dynamic Shadows and a Projector used like a flashlight. I think it is very neat effect.
Of course I wanted to know how it is done. So, how does one make a projector?
Today Modular is announcing the release of a new Emerald Viewer Beta version. Yay!!! \o/
5/30 – Emerald Beta build 2028 is out. I don’t see a date or any new information at Modular. The Google wiki is not up to date. So, I’ll have to dig through the forums to find any new news.
They are warning this is an unsupported version. Plus it has known bugs… like which viewer doesn’t? So, this is bleeding edge technology. But, it has some nice new stuff.
Some of the new features are undocumented. What is a Growl Notification? Update: I found out what Growl is. It is a tool for getting notifications from SL while you are doing something else. It is a downloaded app. See Growl for Windows.
There is a new graphics setting page in the Preferences’ Emerald tab. (Page 2 – Graphics). There are new settings there. Fast Alpha has some problems. Check the image for the new page.
I came across Screenr this morning. I tried it out. One signs up using a Twitter account. This seems to be an nice free service. It has some problems. But it seems to work well.
The recording was certainly easy. There is a record button. It gives you a ‘frame’ you can slide around the screen and resize to let you capture the part of the screen you want. You can start and stop recording, pausing. The max recording is 5 minutes. Surprising how fast that goes by.
Many of us have learned we have fewer problems if we use separate caches for each viewer. Going into Preferences, Network tab, and changing the cache location is a basic post-install step. What many of us miss is the idea of having a separate cache for each alternate avatar. Plus there are other settings we may want to change from avatar to avatar. Those changes have been an annoying part of the pre and post login process for those of us that need to have separate settings for an AV. However, there is an easy way to create a settings file to remember those changes and create a desktop icon to start your viewer of choice using different settings for each avatar.
If that title makes no sense to you and you make sculpties then pay attention. There are some great 3D models spread around the Internet. The problem with using them in SL is there is no easy way to get them into SL. The only meshes we can bring in, for now, are Sculpties (4/09).
Sculpties have strict limits on the number of vertices a mesh can have and the number of rows and columns of vertices. You can bring in almost any arrangement of vertices. The problem is it may look like vertex vomit (I heard that somewhere). One must get the numbers right for it to look good in Second Life. Shrink wrapping is a way to turn those models into sculpties. One can take a premade sculpty mesh and shrink wrap it over another model. Presto easy conforming mesh.