Prepare to be astounded. No, really, sit down or you’ll fall over laughing.
This last one is in comparison to one of the sculpted walkways Linda Kellie left in a texture pack in one of my OARS:
And this is why I felt compelled to get off my ass and make something, anything, in Blender last night:
The original path sculpt map won’t even rez, this is an almost identical one. LOD is good – much better than for my crappy fedora hat (which I will eventually finish or redo from scratch). Meanwhile some exported prim builds that I have hamfistedly tried to “optimize” in Blender look bad, but that’s okay, I give myself permission to keep failing until I get them right.
I am pleased to say that mine appears to be better, the texture sits on it more accurately after many attempts to mark seams, unwrap, and pack texture islands on the UV editor in Blender. I need to keep working on it, had to give up on getting the AO to look right on it at about 2am last night).
Meanwhile, comparing the Linda Kellie sculpt to my very low-poly hand-built mesh bridge makes me feel both satisfied with my effort so far, and sad.
This… I’m sorry, this shit is everywhere in this OAR, and in every free OAR that Linda Kellie so generously provided for free, for any use on any grid. This specific stone sculpted path segment wasn’t in the pack of sculptmaps in the section of my grid that has her store on it but the wooden one I used as an example got me started “on the path,” heh. This OAR is called “Garden Center” and is full of dated looking plant sculpts and flat treewalls and, well, rather ehhh cuddle spots and poseballs scattered all over. I’ve been fooling around with some kind of opensim local host for a few years now, off and on, and what drives me up the wall is feeling unable to cope with tackling the awesome duty to create something, while surrounded by stuff that’s copious, but not really very well made.
There are some awesome OARS out there, in particular a fun Steampunk one someone else made, that I may load up on one of my spare regions (I’m running 9 in this current iteration). But mostly what I end up doing is going around deleting Linda Kellie stuff that’s ugly and literally pruning stuff out of the Garden Center, like all these dozens and dozens of sculpted stone paths. I will take great pleasure in deleting the ugly paths and benches.
There are a few items, later in her productions, that started to show some better quality textures and attention to detail. But her color palate isn’t my favorite, since I gravitate to deep jewel tones and saturated color, and she has a lighter, brighter look with a lot of light greens and oranges and blues. Not a fan.
This is good, though. I’ll keep this. I added the cartoon by Allie Brosh because it makes me happy.
I wish Linda Kellie well in her current endeavors, and I know she struggled with some health and interpersonal issues a few years back. I’d like to wean myself from the easy and cheap created content for Open Sim that she made.
I’ll hit reboot and start, literally, as a castaway on a desert island. It would mean I have to make all my own stuff for survival, in a narrative that eventually gets me off the island, while re-learning GIMP, learning Blender and also Avastar for creating poses and simple animations as I go.
Meanwhile, I’m in Second Life in St John Parish, getting ready to reopen the store with new stuff. See you there!
It’s a long time since I messed around with my little test grid, Haleakaloha. I’ve got quite a few different OARS and I’ve saved different versions of my inventories, but haven’t worked with it much after my original installation of New World Studio got hopelessly corrupted.
So months and months ago, I started playing around with Sim on a Stick (http://simonastick.com/) and got things to the point where I’d uploaded some primitive mesh, and also imported some .dae or .obj files from Second Life or Blender.
Now it’s time to mess about in there again and actually make use of it, but I’d set it up as a megaregion instead of separate regions… and I really needed separate regions so that I could load different OARS for different projects that I have, that are somewhat vague that have been on the back burner.
Unlike NWS, which allowed me to configure mega versus separate regions easily, with Sim on a Stick you have to get more under the hood. My first attempt to edit various config files didn’t work but fortunately I have the OAR I need and the IAR inventory file saved in a safe spot. So I actually… updated to the latest version of the Diva Distro (D2) and started a whole new install, and deleted the old one. So now to make sure that it’s separate regions, I have to to more messing around under the hood.
waenhir’s blogpost “Why Pay Second Life For What You Can Get Free” which refers back to Ener’s post on how to change the default AV name to your own, but also adds a simple walk script and some other ideas.
Okay, so I think I’ve loaded up the most recent OAR, and I also seem to have loaded my recent IAR, so….
Fired up Singularity, and I’ve got 9 separate regions, although I didn’t take enough care to make sure they were 9X9 in my config file, so I’ve got 8 2 by 2 regions plus the last one up in the corner:
Okay, I can live with that, and I cleverly managed to rename all the regions in order, instead of “simonastick1”. When I loaded the OAR, it did seem to load correctly and asked if I wanted to join them to an estate, which I did following the instructions in the blogposts I linked. I also managed to rename my grid “Haleakaloha” in the config file, so my wifi page says “Haleakaloha” too. There’s a way to replace the default image as well but I’ll have to play with that later.
Then I realized that my fountain sound scripts needed some work, so I found some that work fine on the SL wiki somewhere. One simply plays a loop, the other is a touch start, so now my world isn’t quite as silent as it was.
I haven’t bothered with an outfit, I’m just running around in my UV Map suit for now.
More housekeeping: test some of the many OARS I have to see if there’s anything worth keeping, dump a lot of the… generic and overly primmy stuff that I got for free, and tidy things up. I’ve been relying on the free content out there until I’m heartily sick of it, frankly, so I enjoyed deleting almost everything from this current version of my virtual workshop other than a bunch of textures. I’d like to rebuild my St Helens shop as mesh (I did a crap job exporting it, need to continue with my mesh lessons via the Gryllus website and my books). And I’d like to build a home of my own for my grid, because my building skills have totally gone to crap due to being busy with other stuff.
So there we are, back to Squares 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, the way I had it set up more or less when New World Studio was still working. Except now I’ve got Opensim 0.8, the latest version, so I’m not completely cluefree…
Another thing on my list of things to do is to figure out the environmental editor in Singularity (which I’ll use for OpenSim to keep the settings clean in my Firestorm viewer for Second Life). It’s got some presets, and it’s got even more presets that are under the “key” or “day cycle” section. Hmm. Wish Singularity had the quick pick thing for Windlight.
So now, on to loading up old OARS and plundering them.
Here I am, on my standalone grid Haleakaloha, which isn’t very interesting and isn’t open for visitors, and up until yesterday, it wasn’t working very well because of a texture-reloading bug. Also, I’ve been struggling with Blender again, trying to learn it and not get discouraged.
Yesterday, SUCCESS, after getting some help, I installed an update that fixed my Open Sim grid. Today, SUCCESS, I made a blob. You may not think this is a big deal, and it’s a badly textured blob, but I made it, and I figured out what I wasn’t doing right that made it turn itself inside out (it was something called “flipped normals,” which will make the cool kids smirk knowingly). Tomorrow, SUCCESS at something, even if it’s rearranging the virtual furniture. I am unstoppable now, eh.
I bought a couple of books, and I’ve downloaded some tutorials to make a decent effort to finally teach myself Blender, and also Gimp, and also Open Sim/New World Studio. In the past, I’d progressed to the point where I’d made a mesh object that’s supposed to be a big rock, but got bogged down in trying to texture it correctly. Modeling it wasn’t difficult; where I got freaked out was in the tangle of steps to add a material, ASSIGN it, add or create or load a texture, and somehow get it all on the actual object, in the Blender window, and then to have it show up to the party when uploaded to my grid. I’ve watched many tutorial videos, and what I really need is to make a fricking CHECKLIST of steps and settings, that I can refer to, because so many of the important tips are buried in videos that I don’t want to track down and re-watch yet again.
I’ve gathered the most recent “keyboard shortcuts” I could find (one that’s specific to Blender 2.5, and one that appears to be more recent from an online book, and there’s good info at Kat’s Bits, too). The online book, which I loaded into Dropbox so I could keep it handy on my iPad, is called “Blender Basics: Classroom Tutorial, 4th Edition.” Oh, and here’s another online book I’ll stick in Dropbox: Blender 3D: From N00b to Pro. Finally, I had worked through almost an entire class curriculum via videos at Grylllus.net called “Blender 3D Design,”and that one can downloaded/subscribed via iTunes with an app from Tufts University. In looking at the course chapter headings at Gryllus.net, I see that, yep, I bogged down in the section covering materials and texturing. Insert favorite quaint anachronistic blasphemous oath at will. And that is where I’ll stop in Blender tonight, too – I can’t remember how to get from assigned material and loaded texture to a textured object – remembered to try to UV unwrap, then got lost, but at least was able to paint (crudely) some shading. Meh, tomorrow. I think I needed to save the image, do some stuff with baking shadows, and Gawd knows what all to apply it.
Gathering all these links in one place makes me feel like… yes, I’ve been muddling along for a long time, but I really have tried. And I’ll try to get some kind of step-by-step checklist pulled together this week.
But at least I feel less foggy and angry about it; I’ve given up on trying to attend classes in Second Life from a particular instructor who shall remain nameless, because every time I attend one of [Redacted]’s classes, I end up either quitting in a rage, or having some normal interruption prevent me from getting the concept, or getting it down in written notes clearly. No notes are provided by the instructor, so if you’re not present, on voice, and paying close attention, you’re screwed. I just couldn’t learn like that, but it’s time I stopped blaming myself and just teach myself the way that works best for me. I will say that anytime I was lucky enough to catch one of Eleanora (Ele) Newell’s classes at Builder’s Brewery, I did make progress, but didn’t retain much because the classes I needed are offered infrequently. I’ve got some of her “class in a box” things in my Second Life inventory; even though they point to the older version of Blender, I could still use them for journeyman practice. She also spends a LOT of time in the official Blender/Primstar support groups, answering questions. So props to Ele! I’m her worst student, but I appreciate her efforts.
Anyway. The blob what I made. With Blender. Textured with a tileable rock texture what I made, created from a photo what I took.
As Mr B, the Gentleman Rhymer says at the end of many of his quaint televisual offerings, “I thank you.” MUSICAL INTERLUDE!
The other thing that I wasn’t doing right was kind of hard to figure out; I recently upgraded to Blender 2.67, and when refreshing my memory on the process of creating a simple sculptie, I ran across this at Machinimatrix on their Primstar-0 page:
Short Instructions
Preliminaries:
Copy this blend file to a convenient place (for example to your Home folder or to your Desktop) and if possible make it read only, so that you never make unintentional changes to the templates!
Critical: Blender 2.5/2.6 uses an advanced color management by default. While this is a good thing for texturing, it will break the Sculpt-Map bake. Hence you must disable color management for Sculpt-Map bakes. You do this as follows:
go to the render properties menu
locate the shading tab
uncheck “Color Management”
It’s a measure of my own cluelessness that following these very simple instructions completely baffled me; for one thing, where is the render properties menu, and once you find it, the shading “tab” (it’s under a twisty arrow) didn’t have a box marked “Color Management” to uncheck. I looked at , Blender.org docs for 2.64 color management, not that helpful and much too technical (and outdated). Still, I started to get a vague idea of where to look and what to look for.
Two years ago, it was a simple matter of unticking a box marked, wait for it, “Color Management.” Most of the rest of the process on that page is handled by the Primstar scripts I paid for 2 1/2 years ago (I know, I checked my customer download inventory just now). But there are a still couple of settings on that I should double check, they may be important later.
It took me a day and a half of occasional Googling around to figure out that in Blender 2.67, the relevant section is this:
I’m still not entirely sure how, but changing the device setting to “None” worked for me. Also, the bigger problem was “flipped normals,” meaning the faces I was trying to bake the UV map from were facing inward instead of outward, because something was checked that should have been unchecked.
Ugh, sorry about the teeny type. Here’s another helpful tip I ran across, this is on the Object Data tab:
There. Notice how in this post I’m also brushing up on somewhat rusty Gimp skillz (another excellent program which also got upgraded to the latest stable version lately). I’ve been offline a lot the last few months, trying to deal with some RSI problems which are now on the mend. My next major hardware purchase is probably going to be a decent trackball mouse.
So today after my moment of angelic choral zen when whatever I did made my blob sculpt map go from something that was either completely black, or a rainbow sculptmap with a black background, to this:
I knew it was right, it looked like the ones I’d managed to make last year. At that time, I’d even managed to set up Blender to generate the alpha mask automatically, which is not only a security feature, but is damn handy if you don’t have a sculpty rezzer on your texture organizer.
I’m feeling much, much better about my progress. However, we won’t talk just yet about my complete lack of modeling skills, that’s next on my List of Lists. I can kind of remember some of the basics – S, G, R for scale, grab, rotate. I even remember E for extrude and W for the “specials” menu… and something about how to box model, add an edge loop… and how to load up a background reference image, which helped when I was working actively on a simple mesh rock slab that’s meant to be stuck in the Spirit River in Steelhead St Helens eventually (I’m obsessed with geology, apparently).
And, oh God, every time I try to figure out materials and texturing… well, I’ve been here, too. Looking for just such a step by step guide, that is NOT a series of videos, which neither I nor the OP got.
All this agita over a blob/blog… anyway, getting over these difficulties gives me the confidence to tackle real modeling, like an interesting old-fashioned candlestick in a hurricane glass I spotted on an aetheric televisual show about the U.S. Constitution. I’m not interested in making rigged clothing in Blender (though shoes might be interesting, since the shoes I have in Open Sim are pretty crap). I don’t know if I’ll invest in Avastar, more scripts from Machinimatrix.org that make the process of setting up rigging and shapes and whatnot easier. I’ve dabbled with Qavimator and could certainly use my private island(s) as a convenient way to test uploaded animations, since I tend to get distracted just trying to find a place to be on the Second Life test grid.
Yeah, yeah. I’ve been writing this post, off and on, all day. And updating the now-working main blog with a better theme layout, and goofing around adding widgets from LibraryThing (I’ll probably add the Goodreads widget here, though it leads to a totally different reality).
IT ALL BEGINS WITH A BOX, they say, or in this case, with a mesh cube, some books, and a good graphics card.
My main blog is and ever shall be* at www.lelanicarver.com. But occasionally, I’ll repost things here – today, for example, our webserver was down and I needed to blog about my recent struggles with Blender, with pictures so I can remember what I did to get it working.
Sometimes, I’ll post stuff about GIMP here, or my budding Open Sim build Haleakaloha, or some new product I’ve listed at the Second Life Marketplace. More often, I may be posting reference images or background articles when I’m trying to figure something out for a problem or project I’m working on. I’ve got a Pinterest thing that’s got some cool stuff in it.
The theme isn’t really my favorite, but I’m somewhat familiar with how it works. Why can’t they have a nice Victorian or Steampunk option? I’ll stick with the current theme on my main blog, Weaver II, which is pretty customizable.
In other “hello virtual worlds” news, I got my standalone grid “Haleakaloha” set up again. I use New World Studio‘s
Community edition, although I’ve paid for the Licensed addition for the year to show my support for the project. The paid version allows one to easily connect a grid to the Net and either hypergrid from it to other grids, or open it to the public. I’m not going to be doing that, but a standalone makes a great “test bed” for uploading textures, meshes, and even animations. I’d had some problems since upgrading from the original version – the developer, Olivier Battini, recently resumed work on the project and since then has been working steadily on coding the two versions, updating the new website and forum, staying active on the Facebook page and Google+ community, and updating the blog, too. I don’t know if I have things working completely correctly and by the book, as I bobbled the original installation and was on a buggy early version, but the Community Edition is working now as of update 0006 and the Licensed Edition is supposed to be bundled with it, but I still have the old, buggy, unbundled files in a separate folder.
I’ll probably have to visit the support forum for that later, but it’s not a deal breaker, I can work with it, and Olivier is very responsive to problems (and so are helpful moderators on the Facebook page and forum).
It’s late now, but it’s been a surprisingly productive day; got a footrest, somehow broke the wooden keyboard tray on my desk (oh well! IT WAS CRAP ANYWAY), packed up some stuff to donate to a RL charity, tidied a few things (I’m off this work for my RL job).
I learned some stuffs, and I blogged some stuffs, and I heard the angels sing, for one brief, shining moment. Onward.
*as a long-time Star Trek fan, I reserve the right to insert the occasional sly reference. JJ Abrams got nothin’ on me.
I got these nifty little texture/sculpty organizers working in my private grid, Haleakaloha, a few months back. The script is by Solo Mornington; download it and the README and the base textures at GitHub.
The cool thing is that it builds itself. You basically lay out 22 box prims and link them. Then you put the textures from the Resources folder on Github in it and install the script, and WHAM, instant low-lag 20-pane texture organizer. It has texture mode and sculpty mode, it checks for perms and advises how many textures were not loaded due to perms issues so you can deal with them, it assigns access to all, owner, or group, and it can display sculpties.
That is, it displayed grey blobs that were vaguely sculptylike, but they were hard to see (the script has a “fullbright” setting that may make it hard for sculpts to show up). I had a vague wish for a way to add a texture to the display prims when they were in sculpty mode, like some of the organizers I have in Second Life (notably, the free ones by Zauber Exonar and Eridanis Boccara).
Short version: I figured out exactly which two places this code had to go: PRIM_TEXTURE, ALL_SIDES, "78a705fd-c719-43b7-800c-b5eb6fa235bd",<1.0, 1.0, 0.0>, ZERO_VECTOR, 0.0,
Not only that, but I figured out from context how this line of code works based on other lines of code in the script and recombined bits. And it compiled and worked on the first attempt! I nearly fell out of my chair!
So now I can see what sculpties I’ve either made myself (with much swearing) or gotten out of Linda Kellie’s freebies included with some of her OARS. I like the ones I made myself, at some point last year I had progressed to the point of learning how to put an alpha mask on them that is an outline of the sculpt itself (or it could be a logo, but an outline is much more useful).
There’s regular gSculptMode, and there’s zoom gSculptMode, and now you can really see the sculpts. One oddity that I may or may not figure out is that if it’s in Texture Mode and it’s displaying sculpt maps as UV images, in Zoom Mode the texturing grid is what is displayed, on a double-sized prim so it can give the texture to the user. So I guess that’s not that big a deal, it gives the inventory without a problem.
One odd thing about this texture viewer is that the camera bounces around a lot – I think it’s taking camera focus and when the view changes from one mode to the other you have to deal with getting your camera recombobulated.
I managed to get them working in Second Life as well – there was some tinkering that I had to do and sometimes the script itself spontaneously decides it’s no copy/no mod (maybe it picks this up when a texture with those perms is loaded). Again, quite handy for project or group work, but too light duty to act as a full-bore repository.
While I faffed around the other day in my private virtual playground, sinking badly terraformed continents, Open Sim’s Diva Canto was thinking deeply on the future.
And yesterday my graphics card appears to have cooked itself, so no terraforming in Second Life or Open Sim for me for a while. The fan isn’t spinning, so I will have to fallback on the original crap card. This will force me to do other things, while we figure out my next computer option.
The future of Open Sim is coming, although the present looks and feels a bit like Second Life from a few years ago, with a more DIY ethic. I got online at OSGrid via laptop using Dolphin last night, just to say I could, and found people sitting around helping each other at the welcome plaza.
I want to create my own personal grid, so I can learn enough to propose Open Sim as a way to provide a secure, private meetspace and training space when my office goes virtual. So I’m keeping an eye on the latest developments in Open Sim, on the Diva Distro that many use to run OS, and New World Studio, the package bundler/installer that got me started.
Here’s Diva Canto on Hypergrid 2.0:
What this amounts to is that the Hypergrid will be able to support different policies that better reflect different levels of comfort that people have regarding opening up their worlds. Grids that deal with protected content will be able to continue to protect that content while allowing their users to visit other grids, and even collect items there, and allowing foreign users to come in and mingle — without any asset ever being exported or imported from/into their main storage. Grids that deal with kids will be able to block them from hypergriding while allowing certain privileged staff to go out and get content and knowledge from other grids. Secretive grids will be able to prevent foreign visitors while allowing their users to go out. Grids can have only one or two regions available to foreigners, while the rest is off-limits. Communities can make up small networks of worlds that allow Hypergrid exchanges only among themselves. Etc.
I hope this clarifies where we’re going with the Hypergrid!
I know that the first question that everyone will ask is: when? My guess: sometime this summer, hopefully early.
That fast? Impressive. Educators and enterprise are going to have to move fast, to get out in front of the image problem they currently have with the public where virtual worlds are concerned.
They have to counter the image of virtual worlds people have, as in “Isn’t that like Second Life? Ewww.”
Meanwhile, NWS had a developer meeting today; they’ll have an upgrade out soon with some great features and an easy way to upgrade to the current version of the Distro.
As much as I love SL people and places, the brand is tainted for business and education. I can’t even mention it as an entertainment platform in polite conversation without having to add “It’s not ALL skeevy vampire pervs, and bling-bling pixel tarts with ludicrously huge boobs.”
No… it’s just not uncommon to encounter someone with ludicrously huge sculpty boobs.
It’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t know or care for Second Life how… unimportant that is. It’s an intrusive distraction to me, but to a non-Resident, it’s a turnoff.
I love the funny chats, the music, and the immersive wonders. Don’t love the stress and pressure I put on myself for not being as creative or skilled as I think I should be after nearly 5 years.
At least I got my Relay for Life vendor loaded with a few charity donations! My store SLurl is in my picks. I’ll limp inworld later and add more if possible. Please visit… there’s a “phone” in my desk cubby for sending messages, too.
I guess my brave new world-building was the last straw for my card; I could tell the fan wasn’t spinning right and it must have seized up after I powered off. It was doomed, anyway – the design of the case prevented air from circulating. I’m surprised it lasted this long, frankly.
Once I solve my hardware issues, which may include a brand new desktop that’s chosen with SL/OS in mind, I’ll be building my world for fun and relaxation (I found a terrific Hawaiian music stream).
The current machine, which is otherwise a fairly decent Gateway, will probably get turned into a media server. I hope to hypergrid, but don’t know if I’ll go fully public, or offer building rights to trusted friends.
Ironically, running New World Studio with the Diva Distro doesn’t require much; it’s the viewer that’s the power and graphics hog. So the desktop may yet have the Hypergrid in its future – as a server.
There’s other issues too – need to do a better job balancing my real and virtual lives. But I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next with the Hypergrid, the Diva Distro of Open Sim, and the next update of New World Studio.
