My chosen community in Second Life is going through some exciting changes – Sheriff Fuzzball Ortega is reorganizing things, and a crew of folks are working on various remodeling and rebuilding projects around Steelhead City. There will be parcels available for rental very soon, and my shop is probably going to move across the street to make way for a civic improvement project.
While thinking about these changes, I rezzed out some of the buildings I have in inventory to see if I’d want to change things completely. Most of my DFS items are packed and ready to sell in another platform sale, probably this weekend, but a few things like seeds and so on will still be sold at St Helens Dry Goods, as they’re “in theme” for the shop as of yet. New products are in the vapor-pipe that is my brain. Updates are planned. Stuff happenin.’
Here are the buildings that I may swap around, or lend out for the big civic refresh. Some of them I included just because it was a long time since I’ve seen and evaluated them – the best of the lot are the mesh “Soho” ones, which are modular, and the Trompe l’Oeil ones.
While doing homework for the coming #glTF workflow in #SecondLife I struggled with #channelpacking textures for manipulating how light reflects off of materials in a game engine. It’s easy in Photoshop, harder in GIMP.
There used to be a plug-in for extracting different kinds of “maps” from images, but it was easy to screw up. The manual method is tedious; you can’t just plop a texture into an RGB channel, you have to make each greyscale.
This open source tool might be helpful, and the aiaicapta.in is cited in the SL wiki as authoritative. The same site also has a good explanation of the pending PBR workflow, but for backwards compatibility, it’s good to know both.
Now some more fundamentals for review. If you find this series of posts tedious – please filter on #BlenderGoon as I’m trying to watch all his instructional videos in order.
Goon (Goonther Blackcinder) is a #SecondLife resident who teaches at #BlenderSchool inworld at (SLURL) GoodVibes
This is Goonther Blackcinder’s walkthrough for how to sign up for a free Second Life account. Personally, I recommend that you set up your account to go through the “community gateway” that most aligns with your area of interest – Firestorm Viewer’s is good, and my favorite is Caledon Oxbridge University (a Steampunk/Victorian mini-nation within Second Life. There are other community gateways listed here.
Goon gives instructions for how to contact him, how to find the Blender School classrooms, how to access the Aditi “beta grid” to upload mesh models, and even a bit about how to earn Lindens (the inworld currency) rather than buying them. He also recommends downloading and installing the Firestorm viewer, which is much better for creating, building, and uploading mesh from than the standard SL viewer.
Interesting – that “Gentleman Jim (boxed) is a free Animation Overrider – my business associate Dhughan Froobert used to make prim-built walking sticks that were compatible with that AO. He’d better get “on the stick” and start making mesh ones!
The next video in Goon’s series covers Object Mode tools.
I’m going to try to speed up for these and spend less time looking for funny Blender memes to replace the “featured image.” BUT THEY ARE SO FUNNY…
Ten or thirty minutes later I finally watched the video! And then started playing around with the Annotate tool and got horsed up trying to get a Wacom tablet working. More watching, less going down rabbit holes.
Goon (Goonther Blackcinder) is a #SecondLife resident who teaches at #BlenderSchool inworld at (SLURL) GoodVibes
The next video in Goon’s tutorial series goes over viewport navigation, whether using the gizmos in the upper right corner, or keyboard shortcuts. I have struggled in the past with some of these and with some shortcuts, they just don’t “stick” in my head, like Shift-C to re-center my cursor. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Other shortcuts (the numpad keys to change from front, right, left, top, bottom views) come easily.
Goon has a pleasant presentation voice – and has a quirky sense of humor. He often hosts live workshop videos on Discord that are a lot of fun. You can support his work at Patreon at this link, and get access to exclusive tutorial content. He tries to do all the #SecondLife mesh creation without paid addons, which is commendable, and a little bit crazy. Just now in Discord he was editing a cute female outfit for Second Life, and doing some weight painting – something WAY OVER MY HEAD at the moment. Previously he made a really nice men’s leather jacket, working on it in live videos. You really get a sense of how the process works when you see someone trying different methods before hitting on the right workflow.
He also uses really good screencast keys that are very highly visible, and has the scale of his installation of Blender set a bit higher than normal, with large-size vertices. It reduces the frustration level you get with some “speedrun” Blender vids that are just… not very helpful for learners.
As I start to get to the meatier “Let’s Make A…” videos I’ll post images of my attempts. There could be some comedy gold there to mine.
I’m going to watch every one of #BlenderGoon ‘s #Blender tutorials in order, because I keep getting frustrated by my lack of grounding in the fundamentals.
Goon (Goonther Blackcinder) is a #SecondLife resident who teaches at #BlenderSchool inworld at (SLURL) GoodVibes
There’s an active Discord group – there’s an invite link in the school landing area. There are 2 schoolrooms – Goon’s and also Celestine Ghiardie has a dedicated schoolroom that’s geared more for clothing design and instruction.
This first video is a short “How to Install Blender” instructional.
As I’m on a sort of vacation from my RL job this week and next week, I’ve been able to spend more time attending classes, fooling around with Blender, and thinking about what I want to make for fun, for creativity, and maybe for some $Lindens.
After attending the PBR class the other day in the #BlenderSchool classroom in Second Life, I tinkered with the assignment we were given – download and install the official SL PBR viewer (which is now an RC “release candidate” version), then go to the “Rumpus Room” sims on either the main grid or the “test grid,” and do a little testing of the changes to the edit floater for adding/tweaking the PBR textures. I didn’t have a “set” with everything in the new format, but I had 4 different test textures from class, so I used those.
There’s a snapshot from my Second Life profile feed here. It gives the location of one of the Rumpus Room sims where the PBR stuff is enabled. There’s a lot of interesting stuff rezzed out that people were testing, so I took a copy of a shader ball and played around with it. There was a large “SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED” sign rezzed out in the main grid
#AltText – A Gyazo.com snapshot of a jumble of Second Life objects with various reflective materials applied, with a “Safety Not Guaranteed” sign showing in the background.
When I logged in to the “test” grid and went to roughly the same area, there was a LOT more stuff rezzed out, and many people had laid things out in an orderly way, with floating text above each object giving the different settings they used in the new PBR Materials edit floater. Other people loaded up “shader balls” with textures they added. Apparently Blender is capable of exporting a single file that contains the “set” of PBR maps, that can be dragged and dropped on objects. Or we can pay to upload each of 3 or 4 maps separately or in a batch (that’s going to make uploading textures more expensive for anyone who never got around to playing with the old “Blinn-Phong” systems that is how we’ll refer to the previous SL materials system.
#AltText – a closeup of a slightly differently textured “shaderball” showing a golden inner color and a copper-patina outer color, next to a Second Life avatar wearing a top hat.
This picture doesn’t show the shininess of the 2 colors, but just changing the tints in the “Emissive” mask was fun. Other people were obviously working on more advanced objects in both the main and test grids. My old hat still shows the little golden glints in it from the old Blinn-Phong materials I had set up in it – there’s a bit of lacy texture that’s about as shiny-metallic as the old system could get, but as it’s just very open Victorian lace, it’s not too stupid looking.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been “picking up” my virtual fields as they gradually reached a harvestable state – with this game, when you harvest, you get a new bag of seed of the same kind to “plant.” Prices in the game have been dropping, and I see planted, ready-to-harvest fields out for sale in the markets, so this is a way to add value and get a little more ROI. It’s still a loss based on the original purchase prices.
This one even brought a dragon out from his wyrm lair to do some shopping. Wonder how it manages the trowels and cooking…
This is less than a quarter of the fields for sale.
Meanwhile, there were many times I’d see hundreds of fields for sale. I bought a lot of fields at this one; the former owner had so many for sale that the item names numbered in the 8000 range. WHAT?
At the moment, it’s a slow process, but the goal is in sight – in October, I reduce one of my paid alts to Basic/unpaid status, and reduce holdings in Tweddle by the amount of land “tier” that represents. In March, another one of my “alts” comes up for renewal, and by then I’ll have reduced my inventory of no-copy DFS items by a lot. A LOT. I’ve already “cooked down” or “distilled” a lot of my pantry-stuff into small, marketable items that work like lunchboxes or energy banks. Those I can sell.
I’ve built a platform to set out the tools, plants, trees, fields, and ingredients that I’ve decided to sell off. These will include all the so-called “rare and collectible” things that I can’t use or consume. After trying to market stuff recently (see Starting To Get Really Annoyed #DFS #SecondLife #BAH it seems like the only notice that really brings the buyers is a “LEAVING DFS” fire sale or platform sale type of thing. I’ve got stuff that ought to sell at auctions, but they usually don’t – even priced really aggressively.
Thinking of throwing a PARTY instead of a traditional “come buy my stuff sad sniff” sale. With music and dancing. My rezz day is in later October, after all.
The platform is currently a staging area for auction stuff but will look like a Secret Garden when I get all the stuff out.
So I’m going lukewarm turkey with this “addiction harm reduction” process. Speaking of which, I’ve got crates of virtual turkey to sell off, plus one breeding pair of 0-day turkeys, whoop-de-do. Which means later I’ll have to mess around in GIMP making a marketing/sales crate texture.
But first, had to invest in some ingredients, because OMG someone left something out at a ridiculously low price in a nearly inaccessible area and…. ::slaps self:: SNAP OUT OF IT.
Anyway, I’ve managed to do the admin “marketing stuff” that is so hard for me, and the turkey crates are in the vendor and ready to go in all my locations. After reducing my holdings, though, I’ll just have my two shops in Tweddle and Steelhead Bay.
