On Various Subjects
Everyone seems to be playing with materials. For those interested there are changes and new pages appearing in the SL Wiki.
Strawberry Singh is well known for her personality and gorgeous pictures. She has a talent for posing an avatar and composing a great image. In the blog post Moving your own Avatar! she explains how to position your avatar. I mean to actually move the avatar.
Singh Logo
One of the ways to move an avatar into just the right position for a photo is to sit it on a prim, play the pose, and make the prim invisible. You can edit the prim and move it wherever you want. Of course the avatar goes with it. But, things get much more complicated when you are in a no rez region.
That is when Strawberry’s tips will come in way handy.
I recently needed to see how some things are scripted in Second Life™. I went looking for an existing script similar to what I need. I came up with these sources for free Second Life scripts.
Free LSL Scripts
Waving Girl
Free LSL Scripts – This site’s domain was obviously selected for search placement: Free-SL-Scripts.com. The blog style site, once you get to the free scripts page, shows popular, recent, and after scrolling down categories of scripts. This is a great site for beginning scripters, IMO.
The site includes a great collection of tutorials on all sorts of things related to SL.
They have an in-world shop too: Phaze Demesnes.
SL Wiki Script Library – This is the script library maintained by users on the SL Wiki. It is a good collection of scripts. Some are old. A few are new. Continue reading
If you have played with the new avatar Appearance Setting HOVER you may have noticed it is less than ideal. The slider ranges from 0 to 100. At 0 the avatar is lowered 2m. At 50 the avatar is neither lowered nor raised. At 100 the avatar is raised 2m.
Since the sliders are integer settings each setting increment of 1 moves the avatar 4cm (1.6 inches) up or down. If you watch the change from 50 to 49, it looks like it moves more than 4cm to me. (see image below – click to enlarge images)
New Appearance Setting: HOVER
I’ve used third party viewers (TPV) to adjust my height and found much better control. But, with the release of SSA (Sever Side Appearance – baking) those adjustments in TPV’s will stop working.
SO… how do we get our height adjusted now? Well, the choice for now is Appearance HOVER. But, what if you only need to adjust 1 or 2 cm?
The default Second Life animations have odd pivot points in the animations. If you are using them for import to SL then that is a good thing. If you are trying to use the animations for other purposes, like I am to pose the avatar for weighting clothes, it is a problem.
If you import the default SL animation into Blender, the feet are at the Blender 0,0,0 position. If you change to EDIT mode the hip is at the 0,0,0 position. In POSE more, again the feet are at the 0,0,0 position. See the image.
The problem with Default SL Animations
That does not really matter for our use for making Second Life clothes. But the T-pose only being available in EDIT mode makes it hard to position the imported animation with our clothing avatar.
I recently decided to buy Avastar-1 (RC2-782) and see if it could solve some problems I’ve run into with posing the avatar for weight painting. I’ve also had some problems getting custom mesh to fit my avatar. Tight skirts require everything be precise. Things weren’t as precise as I hoped. I was getting frustrated.
Comparing In-world with Avastar and OBJ Export
Avastar is an add-on for Blender sold by Machinimatrix.org for US$22. ($27 4/2017) I resisted purchasing it because I wanted to provide tutorials that provide a free path to accomplishing the same things. I’m in the process of updating my tutorial: Second Life Mesh Clothes Blender 2.6 Setup 2012 Tutorial. It’s almost a year old and a few things have changed. Continue reading
There is information about the Materials System in the SL Wiki and Forum. The part I found interesting is the link to: Brief Considerations About Materials. This is an article by a teacher for a Post-Graduate Course on Game Art.
Materials Tutorial
The emphasis in this article is on Specular Maps. This is something many of us have little knowledge about. But, the specular map is going to be far more complex than the normal map. This is the area where knowledge will be key to making nice object textures or great object textures.
The Materials System Project is steadily progressing. We do not have an ETA, yet. We do have a bit of a place marker in that we are told projects are moving in the order of; Chat HUD User Interface, Server Side Appearance, and then Materials. So, we know it will arrive soon, but is still a ways off. If we want Materials to work the way we want, we need to be able to provide feedback during the coming Beta Phase of the development process.
[youtube W07H7xeUnGE]
To be able to give feedback we need to understand how to make and use of Normal and Specular Maps (or textures – interchangeable words in this case). So now is probably a good time to start learning the basics to allow us to participate in the beta testing without looking too ignorant. Continue reading
