I did not see Philip Rosedale’s keynote presentation in person, but I have been able to pick up a few key things he announced at the Second Life Community Convention 2010 in Boston.
Of course my primary interest was to find out if he said anything about mesh import. Daniel Voyager was kind enough to present a brief synopsis of Philip’s speech. Apparently mesh import is still in the works and the plan is to have it in open beta by the end of the year. I am excited to hear this, but we do know that deadlines can be missed and postponed. Perhaps if we all write a nice letter to Santa Philip and mail it off to Linden Lab we might hope to have a little surprise under our Christmas trees in Second Life. Please Philip, tell me, “Yes Vivienne, there is a Santa Claus.”
Also of interest was the announcement that the Teen Grid will be closed. 16 and 17 year olds will be permitted to access the main grid, but at present time there is no access planned for those aged under 16. There was mention of some discussion with educators about potential solutions and applications for younger people.
There was more talk of fighting lag, increasing the number of avatars that can be in one place at any given time without crashing the region. They have reduced crashes on Viewer 2.0 by 50%, and working on improving sim crossings and fixing group chat problems are high priority at present.
A video of Philip’s speech has just been made available here.
I received my email yesterday with the instructions and links to upgrade to ZBrush 4. One of the things I like about Pixologic, the makers of ZBrush, is that they have given me free upgrades since I purchased version 3.1 a couple of years ago.
I am drooling over some of the new features. I cannot wait to play with Alpha Roll, available under the stroke pallet to modify your brush using the Roll and the Roll Distance sliders. You can load up an alpha, and lay it down in sequence to create rope or other interesting designs, and as you change directions, so does the alpha you lay down. See the video on YouTube. The Move Elastic brush looks great. As you push and pull the mesh about to make a shape, the polygons can get stretched unevenly, which negatively impacts on texturing your sculpty. The Move Elastic brush keeps the vertices more evenly distributed.
Not all of the new features will be able to be used to make sculpties, such as Shadowbox. Shadowbox gives you three planes on which you mask out a shape, and the mesh is created according to where they intersect on each plane. I experimented with resolution, til I was able to get to just over 1000 active points, and tried to export that using, but unfortunately Sculpty Maker choked on it and did not create a sculpt map. Perhaps someone else will have more success playing with it, but I suspect that this will not be a useful feature until (if and when) mesh import is implemented in Second Life. However, I was able to use Shadowbox to make a form, append a properly initialized sphere for sculpty making, and then use the ProjectAll button on the subtool menu to make it form to the shape created in Shadowbox. After then deleting the Shadowbox, the new mesh was successfully exported by Sculpty Maker to an uploadable sculpt map.
ZBrush is one of the lower priced 3D modelling packages and it permits you to directly paint and transfer textures onto your model and then make a texture from it that you can tweak in Photoshop or Gimp and upload to Second Life. Professional 3D modelling packages can cost $3,000 plus. ZBrush 4 costs around $600 US, but will go up to about $700 US in about a month, so if you are interested check it out now. There is a free trial of 30 days. Before spending the money, I would strongly encourage you to take advantage of the free trial. There is a bit of a learning curve with it, but the interface is still more intuitive than Blender and there are many excellent free tutorial videos on the Pixologic website and YouTube.
ZBrush exports models in .obj format. To be able to export to sculpty, you need to download Sculpty Maker from Shiny Life. There are videos available on Shiny Life that show you how to use ZBrush to make sculpties and texture them. These videos turned me on to ZBrush and made me decide to try out ZBrush.
On Shiny Life, you can also find some sculpty making in ZBrush tutorials by Pan Bunny. They are excellent, and even as one who has used ZBrush for some time I picked up a couple of things I did not know!
I would write more, but I feel the need to play with ZBrush 4!
I read with dismay today on New World Notes about the firing of Qarl Linden, Karl Stiefvater. Karl disclosed his firing on his website, “Well, linden lab cut me loose today. They’ve been hinting at it ever since the layoffs last month. Try as i might i wasn’t able to change their minds. Honestly, I’m completely baffled at the decision, as are all my coworkers (and my boss, and…)”
It is unclear why he was fired. Tateru Nino posted a quote from his last performance review of July 2010 on Dwell on It indicating that the man is a software genius doing a great job. “Can I say how invaluable you are to the render team? You burned through a large number of crashes and critical rendering bugs. Without a lot of direction, you completed the feature/gpu table on S3 project, thought through a LOT of the complexities, and produced something incredibly useful. You enabled RenderDivisor to work on low end hardware (even if the hardware couldn’t take advantage of it in the way we hoped.). You did a ton of work to get mesh ready for public beta. You’ve fought long and hard trying to get Apple to fix their drivers while seeing if we can handle our textures better. And that was just this quarter (And you did all this while the company was undergoing a major reorg and giving us TONS of direction changes). You consistently brought things to fruition that worked well the first time. I love working with you. As does everyone on the team. You rocked it. 23 July 2010 – Q210 Manager Review” Apparently the source of this quote is Qarl’s website, www.qarl.com.
From New World Notes, “Qarl was a leading force behind Second Life sculpties, a groundbreaking building method, and more recently, COLLADA-compatible meshes, a feature currently in closed Beta. Meshes were promised to come to Second Life proper this quarter, but with Karl gone from Linden Lab, it’s unclear what that status is.”
I was hopeful that perhaps an open beta of mesh import was imminent when not long ago Linden Lab lifted the non-disclosure agreement permitting some information from those in the closed beta test of mesh to slip out. See my previous entry here.
The end of Q2 has come and gone, and Linden Labs has been silent on the topic of mesh import. With the firing of Qarl Linden, I am now not only thinking that mesh import will not come soon, but wondering if it will come at all.
Philip, it is time to tell us something! Don’t leave us hanging. Too many of us are excited about the potential of mesh import.
Maverick Schism, owner of Good Mojo, and I have collaborated on a few projects now and continue to work together. Our 16 man tournament board has proven to be a popular item, and we were often asked if we had a 32 man version of the board available.
We are pleased to release a 32 Man Tournament and Prize Board.
- up to 32 entrants
- boards designed to handle byes in fairest way possible
- board rezzed for the correct number of entrants from 8 to 32 (less than 8 on 8 man board)
- board can be reopened after closing without entrants having to re-enter
- admins can easily remove entrants or add entrants by name
- admins configured easily by notecard
Prize boards can be rezzed to display sponsors and calculate prize break down for one prize, two prizes (60/40), or three prizes (50/30/20).
This ceremonial outfit was inspired by the idea of evil queen meets Gorean free woman on planet Vulcan. How is that for an inspirational mishmash? The result makes for a truly intimidating appearance for that high caste or wealthy, high and mighty woman. She is not to be trifled with!
It can be worn with or without hair, which is not included. There is in the package a hood on the new tattoo layer. However, this hood will be visible only to those using a Viewer 2 compatible viewer which supports the tattoo layer feature.
It includes platform shoes and comes in 8 colors: black, blue, brown, gold, green, purple, red and white.
I took a look today at Google SketchUp, which will export to collada. Collada is the format for files to be imported as mesh into Second Life once that feature becomes available. SketchUp is a tool that was created by Google to make buildings for use in Google Earth. It is a 3D modelling program specifically made to make buildings. You can download version 7 free. There is a SketchUp 7 Pro version at a price of $495 US, but from what I can see this would be of interest only to those involved in building in the real world for it would permit saving floor plans with text and diagrams that would be of interest to real life builders. The free version will be quite satisfactory to build using mesh import for Second Life.
I watched a couple and saw immediately how much easier and more intuitive it will be to build using SketchUp than it is to build using prims in Second Life. I have heard some builders in Second Life voice worries that when mesh import goes live, it will render them unable to compete because 3D modeling programs are expensive and generally difficult and time intensive to learn. I would encourage these people to look at the SketchUp video tutorials to set their minds at ease. I would go so far as to predict that the introduction of mesh import, the ease of use and short learning curve of the free program Google SketchUp, and the ability to port buildings made in SketchUp to Second Life, will render building with Second Life primitives obsolete and rarely used.
SketchUp does have some limitations. It will not make organic shapes and so will not be the tool of choice to make animals or clothing meshes. However, for hard geometry it is excellent. It can make not only buildings, but furniture as well.
Linden Labs, please give us mesh import soon!! At least take it to open beta to let us learn and play with it!
Mesh import is not the only thing in closed beta at the moment. Improved lighting and shadows are in closed beta as well, and hopefully will come soon to either open beta or to the main viewer.
Take a look at some photos by Runitai Linden at the site below. Go into full screen and slideshow for the best view.
On June 18, 2010 Runitai Linden told participants in a closed beta test of mesh import that the NDA (Non-disclosure Agreement) had been lifted, and they could start blogging about their experience with mesh. A very short 5 minutes later, they were told not to disclose any more until they were given more information about what could and could not be disclosed. In that brief 5 minutes, some basic information got out to the rest of us.
The chat log of what was said is available on SLOG at the following URL. Read it for yourself if you like and draw what conclusions you will.
There has since been much speculation about what the impact of all this will be. I have read that prim size limit will become meaningless and that meshes can be full sim sized. Some speculate that one will be able to upload animations for meshes. I don’t know for sure what the full impact will be or what we can and cannot do with meshes once we get them.
From the 5 minute information spill all that we know for sure is this:
the import format will be collada;
meshes can have an unlimited number of vertices;
a mesh will not count as just one prim as a sculpty does, and prim count will be determined according to the number of vertices, but we do not yet know how many vertices will equal one prim;
someone in the beta test did rez a mesh representation of the Titanic that covered two sims but we don’t know what the final limitations to size will be or if there will be any size limitation;
we will be able to create custom UV maps for meshes;
you will be able to define “sides” that you can access through scripting to change textures;
the collision mesh will match the shape of the mesh object, which means no invisible spheres as with sculpties that you bang into;
There was mention that meshes can be rigged, which is usually done to animate a mesh, but the conclusion was about clothing and I found that a bit confusing.
<gridinterop> (grid:agni) lonetorus Habilis: rex, but with collada we can rig too
<gridinterop> (grid:agni) lonetorus Habilis: and sl support s it
<gridinterop> (grid:agni) lonetorus Habilis: so you can have wearable clothing
The Lindens had announced that they expected to release at least an open beta of mesh import by the end of the second quarter of 2010, which would be the end of June. The temporary and premature lifting of the NDA suggests to me that this is indeed imminent. I know I can’t wait!
Here is a blurry video of a mesh building and mesh ship from the test grid:
There are a couple of videos of an alien dancing and playing violin circulating that are said to be an avatar wearing a mesh. However, the creator of the video and creature had him on display at SL7B and revealed that the creature avatar is made of sculpties, not mesh.
Here are some links to more articles on this topic:
If you are wondering why I have not put out anything new for a little while, it is because Maverick and I are hard at work on a hunting system. It is a large project. The animals are sculpted, animated and move about, with animations for various states such as idle, walking, running, attack, sleeping and dying. The system will give you experience points, which move you up in level. There will be reward items given at various levels, and there will be occasional loot dropped by animals you kill as well. Here is a sneak peek at some of the animals. We are working towards a goal release date in the early fall.
In addition to making clothing, I make miscellaneous scripted gadgetry. Recently I have been collaborating with Maverick Schism whose store name is Good Mojo. Whenever you see the two logos together, Black Rose and Good Mojo, you will know that two minds have meshed to create that product. Here are some of the gadgets produced by myself and with Maverick. Check out my main store in world to see more.
