Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Cathy Foil sent me a note explaining the Project Bento updates to MayaStar. I copied, modified, and paraphrased what she sent.
The MayaStar 4.5, I’ll call it BETA version, addition runs on PC and Mac. It works with Maya 8.0 through 2016. While most of MayaStar works with Maya LT, but Maya LT is lacking some abilities and that limits what can be done with MayaStar. Cathy asks you contact her for more information if you are working with Maya LT.
Two or three years ago Jeff ‘Lehm’ Adams began modeling the Guild Hall from the Myst Online: Uru Live game’s concept art. I later started modeling it for my use in OpenSim. I had started building a replica of the guild hall in OpenSim before the introduction of mesh. So, it was being built with prims, which was rather limiting. Once mesh was on the horizon I lost interest in the prim build.
Jeff had RL distractions. Neither of us was doing much with the Guild Hall. Now he apparently has had some time and has moved his work into the Unreal Engine and made a standalone model available in an executable Unreal file.
You can find a copy of the Guild Hall linked to from the Myst Uru forum.
I haven’t worked on my model of the Guild for some time, years. Walking around in his model and walking in my model is very different. Seeing his nearing completion rekindles my interest. I need to get Blender’s procedural textures figured out and generate some textures.
Of all places I find Tom’s Hardware has new screen shots of Project Sansar out. See: Linden Lab Reveals First ‘Project Sansar’ Screenshots. But, apparently one image was released Friday 2/4 and another 2/10. Linden Lab CEO Tweeted out the images. May be I should pay more attention to Twitter.
Took just a few hours to create a multi-user #Mars #VR experience with #ProjectSansar pic.twitter.com/YvTER74Kui
— Ebbe Altberg (@ebbealtberg) February 4, 2016
I downloaded the full size image:
Quoting from Tom’s:
Linden Lab said building environments in Project Sansar is quick and easy, noting that, “In just a matter of hours this very realistic, multi-user Mars VR experience came to life.”
Ebbe’s comment that this was done in ‘just a few hours’ has drawn some dubious responses. Hamlet collected some of the blow back in: 3D Builders Seriously Skeptical of Project Sansar Screenshot.
Gaia Clary has been putting more of the Machinimatrix/AvaStar videos on Vimeo™. There are good reasons for doing that. Vimeo offers better monetization and distribution control. Unfortunately Vimeo has to compete with YouTube.
As best I can tell, not that many of the Second Life™ community use Vimeo. If I search on ‘secondlife’ at Vimeo, I find 6,373 videos. Doing the same at YouTube I get 572,000 hits or about 90 times more videos.*
We have heard Project Sansar is being built first and primarily for content creators. For some of us that sounds like it is going to be for professional game designers. But, we are told the idea is to make 3D Virtual Reality available for the masses. That tells me professionals to amateurs should be able to use the Sansar platform for their creative work.
On the high end of game design we have Cry Engine, Unity, Unreal, and others. Those platforms are for professionals. Hobbyists can use them, but they have to be pretty tech savvy about game design. From what we have heard, it sounds like Linden Lab is not planning to compete with those platforms. At least not head to head.
I’ve seen and played a little with Black Desert’s character creation tool. I speculated about character creation in Project Sansar: What will Character Creation be like in Project Sansar? with a video of the character creation from Black Desert.
Massively Overpowered points me to the release date announcement for Black Desert. Word is: March 3rd, 2016 – a Thursday… Much sooner than most anticipated.
https://youtu.be/v6rmBCMBJWs
Learning to play…