The typist was on vacation the last two weeks of August, bumbling around the real-life Pacific Northwest on foot, by bike, by car, and by ferry. Oh, and by air, in that weird, awkward, and slightly intrusive way they fly in “real life.” So she missed the excellent “Exploring Second Life” meme started by Strawberry Singh. On her return, she was prompted to approve (or re-approve after an update, maybe) this old trackback about Steelhead by Inara Pey, which referenced this post about Steelhead Shanghai. Steelhead itself is the commercial centre for the community. here you’ll find the train station,…
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These are redonkulously cute, as I blogged earlier at my main site. The maker is Etheria Parrott, and they’re available on the Marketplace as Dinkies Kitty Avatars. She provides simple templates for making squee li’l outfits for them. Makes me want to dust off my workshop and make hats and stuffs. There are some extremely cute outfits for them made by Kamasa Kutanaga at the Marketplace.
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My SL acquaintance Mr. Crap Mariner is going all artistic-like, along with other builders and creators, in the latest LEA (Linden Endowment for the Arts) round. I expect great Crap art, and lots of creative Crap as well. His builds for the last few SL Birthday celebrations have generally centered around the literary and spoken-word performance genres, but who knows what Crap we’ll see with an entire region to play with. He certainly gives away loads of Crap to members of his announcement groups for readings and such, mostly fun scripted attachments or things you can display that are reminders…
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I’ve been absent from friends’ events and missed most of SL10B, though keeping up on blog posts and Twitter – it’s literally been a pain lately as I’ve been trying to deal with a case of Mouse Elbow, or Avatar’s Not-So-Funny-Bone, or whatever. I have a work computer that’s set up to be pretty ergonomic – finally. For the first 6 months that I was working from home, I was NOT using the mouse in an ergonomically correct position, and I’ve been paying for it for the rest of the year. It came on slowly, but then started peaking about……
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So, you want to learn more about how materials – that’s normal maps and specularity maps in addition to the regular textures, which will now be called “diffuse,” will work when Second Life enables the new features. Well, they’re a way to add eye-popping detail, if you do it right. When the shiny part happens, it’s pretty spectacular. The tutorial from TheGameCreators.com was my original starting point for a Second Life-specific tut on how to create the extra textures using GIMP that can be used to add depth and shine to objects inworld once the new Materials Project viewer is…
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Oh, THIS is a nice tutorial for Materials – using xNormal, though I’ll probably stick with the normalmap plugin in GIMP for now. Because I have to agree, the xNormal interface is as if a million user interface designers cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. Or, it’s as if young Anakin Skywalker was handed a LeapPad to design his pod racer on, and then pulled it out to tweak a design on the Death Star decades later.
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UPDATE: I’ve found slightly less opaque instructions and gotten the InsaneBump plugin working for GIMP (and also the fully InsaneBump program working, but it’s really old). I’ll start a new post because I’ve since found yet another tool for quickly generating different kinds of maps for texturing, Knald. This might be worth installing the Materials Viewer to test in a SSB-enabled region. I’m usually well behind the curve on changes with Second Life updates and enhancements – see recent posts about trying to learn Blender years after sculpts (and later mesh) were introduced. But the Materials project, which I’ve been…
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It’s hard to find a nice, antique-looking blog theme, whether to use on your own self-hosted blog, or on a hosted site like WordPress.com. I’ve cobbled together a few bits over the years, but needed something better to adapt in GIMP as a text-separator. I ended up modifying one I had, and overlaying a nicer one on top of it from Old Book Illustrations. There are some wonderful antique ornaments there, and they even have a meme generator: This site is dedicated to providing our visitors with a wide range of illustrations scanned from old books. Most of these vintage…