Tag Archives: Second Life Tools

About various software tools used with Second Life

Second Life: Photography Tools

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On Flickr I came across an interesting image of a photographer’s viewer screen. I used the image in a previous article. But, in that article I didn’t say anything about the information Kerri Fegte included in the image description. You may not have seen the information, which I think is good enough it is a must read for any photographer shooting models.

Oh, Monday, you're such a Tool Meme 1.20.14

Oh, Monday, you’re such a Tool Meme 1.20.14 by Kerri Fegte, on Flickr

This is a wonderful collection of tools. Add some of these and the Black Dragon Viewer or Firestorm Viewer tools and your talent… you’ll be making pro quality snaps. You’ll have to find you own model with photogenic legs.

Evolution

Evolution by Kerri Fegte, on Flickr

Kerri’s image and posting were inspired by one of Strawberry Singh’s Monday Memes.

Second Life Transcript Coloring

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If you deal with transcripts of meetings, in our case in Second Life™ transcripts, they are usually chat logs. They are not that easy to read. So, some people have scripted tools to colorize the transcripts.

Gwyneth Llewelyn has an article up where she writes about her transcript colorizing tool: Revisiting the Colourising Script. She explains some of the problems she has run into over the years.  Continue reading →

Firestorm Q&A on #SecondLife’s Future

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Wednesday morning at 7AM PDT at the Firestorm Auditorium a Q&A meeting was held. Oz Linden and Peter Gray were answering questions. For most of the meeting Jessica was asking questions I think she took from previously submitted ones and that she or she thought the community was interested in.

And I’ll be proofing this after it is posted… so…

Toward the end they opened it up to audience questions.

The meeting was recorded so you can see it at several places; SLArtists, YouTube, and other places… sound is better on the SLArtists video, but it is hard to jump around in that player.

As always I am paraphrasing and not quoting. Continue reading →

Somato

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Inara has an article up on Yuzura Jewell’s Somato… a program that simplifies texture baking. The idea is to project an image you have onto a 3D shape. Then bake in shadows.

Somato

Somato

Yuzuru asked I check out the program. I’ve been spending my time on other things and just haven’t gotten to it. But, I want to let you know Yuzuru has Somato out. So, check out Inara’s article: Somato: create textures and shadows for sculpts and mesh.

Learn more and download page for Somato.

Second Life Render Metadata

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You may have noticed the item in the Develop menu labeled Render Metadata. At this week’s Content and Mesh Creation user group meeting Zed Tremont asked about getting more information for items in this menu. Nyx Linden provided some insight into these items.

Second Life Viewer’s Render Metadata Menu

If you have not noticed the item look in the top menu try: Develop (Ctrl-Alt-Q – Advanced has to enabled in some viewers to see it Ctrl-Alt-D)-> Render Metadata.

These tools are more for developers than ‘for creators.’ But, creators can use some of them. Unfortunately most of the items are not explained in the Second Life™ Wiki. Nyx says, “…at the moment our documentation around this *is* the source code, most of these displays are mostly used by our graphics engineers, they’re not intended to be general-use displays (hence the lack of documentation).”

Continue reading →

Avastar Rigging and Animation

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You may notice some of the newer animations in Second Life are getting better. There is motion capture to thank for some measure of improvement. Another contributor to the improvement is Avastar, a for purchase add-on to Blender.

One of the other handy features of Avastar is the ability to handle rigging a mesh. So, clothes makers and those making other objects rigged to the avatar will find Avastar a handy tool. I think this video gives one a good example of what it can do.

Continue reading →

Second Life Currency Exchange Extended

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VirWoX Home Page

VirWoX Web Site

I wrote an earlier post on the Second Life Currency Exchange as a tutorial. Parts of the post are being updated. The idea behind that post was how to easy get a better price and understand some of what is going on there. However, the SL Exchange is not the only currency exchange available to Second Life residents/players. One is Virtual World Exchange or VirWoX.

VirWoX Advantages

The biggest advantages VirWoX offers are for residents outside the USA. They can avoid exchanging Linden Dollars for US Dollars then their native currency. That saves a transaction/exchange fee. Europeans can use direct bank transfers to avoid some other costs too and supposedly be safer.

Continue reading →