Ophelia, on NWN, is pointing us to Loons McColumbia’s art on Flickr.
Second Life Artists
Firestorm’s Tool Tip Tuesday 09
It was Tuesday again. Seems to happen every week. This last Tuesday another FS Tip came out.
In this one Jessica is teaching us about the command line available in the Firestorm Viewer’s chat. This is one of the way neat things about the Firestorm Viewer. There are plenty of neat features. But, this command line thing is something power users will likely use several times per login secession.
These tip videos are getting about 9,000+ views after a couple of weeks. This is a very small percentage of the Firestorm users. Since Firestorm is used by more than half, closer to three-quarters, of the users of Second Life that means very few people know about TTT Videos. Pass around the link to the YouTube Channel.
Net Neutrality Explained
It has been hard to get people to think about or research what Net Neutrality actually is. Also, few have noticed who is in favor of it. This video does a pretty good job of explaining it, except for free speech and government control aspects.
PS: If you haven’t heard of the Canadian Supreme Court ruling on healthcare see: The Canadian Supreme Court’s Ruling on Private Health Care. (2005) Text: Chaoulli v. Quebec.
Changing Windlight & HDR in the Second Life Viewer
In the Designing Worlds how (previous post) Honour McMillan explains a problem solution for photographers using the SL Viewer. The idea is we often just want to just tweak a region’s settings. In Firestorm that is easy. You just do it. In the SL Viewer it doesn’t work. The settings are grayed out until you select a preset, which changes everything. The region’s settings are effectively hidden. But, there is a work-around. (Lindens: don’t break this!)
Honour explains in the Designing Worlds video:
- Open the environment Sky Preset editor and select any preset. World->Environmental Editor->Sky Presets->Edit Presets…->select any preset.
- Next open the Water Preset editor, select any water preset, X it out or cancel.
You’ll see the region switch back from the Sky Lighting Preset you selected to the region’s settings when you cancel the Water editor. Now your Sky Presets editor is using the region’s settings and settings in the editor are still enabled. Good work-around.
Second Life Photography Tips
Prim Perfect has done a couple of shows with Strawberry Singh, Honour McMillan and Wildstar Beaumont that are about SL Photography. The first is here: Designing Worlds looks at Second Life Photography with Strawberry Singh, Honour McMillan and Wildstar Beaumont. (Video is here: Part 1)
The second is here: Second Life Photography Part 2 – After you’ve taken your picture: A Designing Worlds exploration with Strawberry Singh, Honour McMillan and Wildstar Beaumont. (Video is in post)
If you are looking to improve your photographic work check out these two shows/videos. The first is about taking images and the second about processing them.
One of the things Strawberry points out is that over the last year she has started showing people she is photographing a screen shot of their self before starting. She has found it is the only way to know if everything they are wearing has rez’d. Too many times she had to redo shoots because something was not rendering. This is a more recent problem and over the last month seems worse.
Honour gets into more tech and details about what she is doing. I cover that in a separate article. It will publish about noon today. I haven’t figured out how to link to an unpublished post… and have it work once posted. I’ll add a link here later… sorry.
New For Second Life Designers: MayaStar
Cathy Foil sent me a note about a new tool, well updated one, for Second Life designers: MayaStar. This is the equivalent of AvaStar for Maya users. Awesome… not so much for me, I’m a Blender user. But, I suspect Maya users will be thrilled.
Cathy wrote me that she wanted to create something like AvaStar for Maya users. She’s apparently talked to Gaia about the use of the name MayaStar. My take from Cathy is that Gaia is somewhat flattered. Whatever, Mayastar is similar to Avastar in more than just name.
Kathy says she has figured out All the technical issues with collision bones. That may be reaching a bit, but she has made videos explaining what she learned.
Kathy is planning to remake her videos, because they’re out of date with her current Mayastar. Gaia had the same problems keeping her videos up-to-date with Avastar’s fast updates.