This way leads

Teleport Home

2010-09-06T13:05:00.000-07:00

Strange event for me, I decide to go to the UWA august awards, set my alarm for one in the morning and go to bed...I catch the last five minutes after crawling up at twenty past the hour. There's a DJ on afterwards and a large crowd, only i'm not in the mood for either, it was great to be a part of UWA if only for just the smallest of moments but now is not the time... I lean back and hit Teleport Home.

A wash of morning light floods through the garden, along the walls and down past the cylindrical keep in front of me, this is where i've called home for the past two years. A spot somewhere in the middle of the mainland, a nowhere in particular owned by two SL and RL friends, good times here.

Earlier in the evening over a glass of wine they casually mentioned they were selling the land, having spent less and less time in world recently and complaining that when they are there it's impossible to find anywhere to get to (surprise, surprise), they decided it's time to go.

I took the news with the humour and congratulations it deserved but it was not until later when I stood staring into the windlight sky with the virtual breeze passing over me that I began to realize how much this fantasy has sunk itself into my mind.

When I first arrived at the land my friends showed me around the keep and all it's floors filled with their personal belongings, but over the months my behaviour changed, I would not enter the keep or cam inside, I tidied up after myself in the garden and I tucked my belongings away where no one could see them.

Somewhere along the journey i'd pulled in these virtual items and this house and built a framework of mental rules to fit around these coloured pixels. It makes me wonder, if at any point we do bring any part of our psyche into lands, avatars and creations then what is it to stand inside part of someone else...what do we bring away from that?

Anyway, perhaps i'm just a melancholy fool, contemplating my future and where i'm going to settle but sometimes it's so good to sit back, escape and Teleport Home.

Sociology of objects, disability access to viewers

2010-08-30T13:43:00.000-07:00

Following on from my previous posts I have been playing with scripts and the ways in which virtual plants may react to avatars, in particular I played around with the idea of trees that could react to an avatars height by lowering their fruits so the avatar could reach them. All potentially just theory since an avatars SL range is well beyond their physical reach, but the idea of using data gathered from an avatar to create reactions and interactions or even help via object changes sparked this memory:

Many years ago I studied the sociology of objects for a year, in particular computers and other tech, we were shown black and white photos of the first computers that filled whole rooms and in front of these chairs. We discovered the chairs were used to stand on by the operators to reach the top dials and controls, but the surprise was this, the computers were designed by men who never expected anyone other than tall males to control the computers, in reality a large majority of the controllers and programmers were women.

It just made me think about the way objects in virtual worlds are programmed and in also how the viewers themselves are perhaps enclosed to a particular user base, which led to a few ideas I thought I would throw out there:

Why not have a viewer side option to allow the remapping of colours? A simple screen showing the colour along with a text description to allow people who are colourblind to alter what they need.

Profile options for "hidden" disabilities, e.g hard of hearing, which a scripted object could the pick up, for example an object could sense an avatar with hearing problems and increase its sound volume output when they are near. These options could be hidden from people viewing your profile but I guess by allowing scripted object access to these "flags" could lead to some dubious programming.

More movement options, there are very few real movement control alternatives built into sl, this caught my eye on Philip Lindens love machine site for their own loveviewer: http://dev.sendlove.us/worklist/workitem.php?job_id=11715&action=view

The ability to move an avatar just by moving the mouse forwards and backwards! how simple!

Mouse controlled chat HUD, I realise that there is already software available for this such as built in GUI keyboards on operating systems and voice controlled text etc but I always see SL as an operating system in and of itself, the ability to layer huds and avatar controlled objects on to this keeps it a concise package. A graphical GUI hud for sl text chat along with programmable keys for set sentences/phrases would fit, or even to save more screen space a txt chat option with fewer keys could be shown. Again, no reason why this could not be created in the viewer itself, there are already a few chat huds sowing some of these features.

Very small option and one that some more builds could really benefit by, when an object is interactive it's sometimes hard to see just where? why not add context sensitive options, when hovering near or over click-able parts, increase levels of glow for example.

One final thought was on using windlight settings to create high contrast options for the visually impaired, I've had a quick go at doing this but without great success.

Anyway, I may have sidetracked myself from my previous posts objectives and maybe alternatives already exist for the above options, but it did lead me to looking at the GUI/viewer itself and IT's usability for the majority.

Virtual Nature Evolution Part 2: Whispering Tree's

2010-08-25T11:55:00.000-07:00

The idea came for this when I began thinking about the modification of RL plants and trees to enhance the world for communication advancement, more specifically the idea that genetically modified tree's could be produced that not only grew faster but were also irradiated to enhance the range and strength of wireless signals for use in public parks etc.

I've been playing with the idea of a virtual tree that not only communicates and interacts with Avatars in an abstract way but can also react/affect the environment and objects around it, the other point was that the tree had to be able to communicate with other trees of it's type as well to create a communications mesh.

Whisper Trees (a concept design for nature communication in SL):

Disclaimer: I appreciate that none of the code ideas may be possible or practical in any way, that there may be a much more efficient solution to this and that yes, I may be entering into my own little head space :)

The central idea is that each tree sits and listens, scanning across the range of chat channels, listening for signals between objects, chat from avatars etc. The tree then locks into that channel and replicates the signal over a set period of time, with more trees each listening to the signals and each other this would essentially create a mesh spreading across a sim.

The trees would allow objects to communicate across sims, random chat would be picked up and repeated throughout the nature of sims and repeated to any passers by, essentially broadcasting out through "Whispering Trees".

For example in the above pic, object A sends out a signal on a chat channel, the nearby tree would be scanning through the channels and would eventually pick up the signal, repeat it and slowly it would pass throughout the network of trees in the sim (perhaps lighting up each one as they communicated), until the signal repeated by the trees reaches object B that could react to it.

For another application the trees could listen out for avatar chat, then if a tree receives to different chat signals it could splice the two together, once the chat has been merged and spliced throughout a forest say, the resultant chat being received by avatars entering the forest could produce quite bizarre stories!

The idea behind this concept is not to produce necessarily something that can be replicated in world but perhaps to spark a series of evolutions on an idea, that nature in virtual worlds can expand and integrate to a greater sense with the world around it...

Virtual Nature Evolution Part 1

2010-08-24T12:35:00.000-07:00

First we had flat prim plants and trees, then multi prim followed by sculpty plants leading on to some amazing one prim plant/trees.

All of these advancements or versions of SL nature have been in the visual or artistic sense, the variations in creativity and evolutions of plant design are so varied it would take months to track them all down and classify them, but where does VW/SL nature head from here, or does it even need to go anywhere apart from the visual.

SL and it's use of scripting and interaction could be used to modify nature in such a way that would not be possible in the RL, by injecting abilities into organic objects we could potentially create an evolutionary design model that could communicate not only with the avatar but also with the surrounding environment and objects.

Example 1:

Creation of a simple sculpt plant with free scripts injected into the leaves (natures plants/leaf design provides an almost perfect 3D menu system to choose from).

In this example the scripts were all freebies to show the potential of the designs, eg a plant on an avatars land parcel could be used to track avatars movement on the parcel, or a communications branch could provide newsfeeds, sl to rl email, drop boxes for busy avatars etc. Media/Entertainment branches could contain online status for visiting avatars, parcel media stream options for radio/video.

Bouncing these ideas seemed like fun, like the design was going somewhere, but when I looked hard at what was there, is it not JUST an object, by adding scripts and options to a once visually organic shape are we not removing the essence of its nature? It may as well be a plastic model with the same menu, just passing it would look like any plant or tree but closer inspection would show it to potentially be just a gimmick.

For all this, after asking a few people about the design and options they came back to say that something like this would be "cool" and perhaps could replace a number of items in their SL homes into one plant. Which kind of went against my whole ethic for VW nature creation, when you can create the marvellous and fantastical in the true sense why not take the ideas to a greater level?

Which led me on to using VW nature as a communications system that can interact with the Avatars/objects/environment around it and essentially mesh together with itself (oooh, just realised how very AVATAR that sounds!.:)), anyway, will continuen in part 2, The Whispering Trees.

Playing with my mind

2010-01-12T10:44:00.000-08:00

Not having any space in the house to do any painting until I can sort out a small studio in the freezing garage i've been using Brushes on my ipod to play with a few ideas that i'll hopefully bring together in a piece in March.

It's a pretty personal piece based on a conversation I had years ago that's been playing on my mind more and more, now's the time to get it out into a creative form that should put it to rest.

To keep myself balanced I bought myself a Trudeau JaqCat boat to take on the water, it's rare that I buy anything inworld (Prefer to make my own items) but this is something else! It's one of the few things i've experienced in SL that feels...interactive? Immersive? the feedback from having the sim wind changing and the sails moving is great. I've spent the past few days just sailing along near the mainland with no real aim, just very relaxing, good times :).

A bare nature

2010-01-06T12:10:00.000-08:00

Almost every week a new sim hits the grid and everyone goes wild for the first peek but sometimes it's nice to just sit back, strip away all the work and glory in a vastly populated invisible world.......

Tempura Island

Chakryn Forest

Bentham Forest

Drowsy

Peeling back the layers of complexity, the multitude of prims, alphas and sculpties to a sim in it's most primitive form. Imagine being able to scrape back a painting to a canvas in an art gallery, what lies beneath and is it possible to relive the process of the artist in reverse..

Simple homes of the near future

2010-01-03T11:18:00.000-08:00

With the recent introduction of the Lindens home scheme there has been a fair amount of backlash from the community regarding the sim city style housing project sims and apparent cattle marketing of residents into homes. I appreciate where the lab is coming from with this, I myself was put of from becoming a premium member after the removal of the 512 land plot but at the same time wasn't the lab explaining almost a year ago that while premium membership was falling it didn't make a real difference since the majority of money was being brought in by land sales and rentals?

Which got me to thinking that perhaps by enticing residents back to premium membership and into homes they aim in the future to try and promote the growth of in world/xstreet sales? I mean if all of a sudden thousands of residents have homes and (assuming they use them) start furnishing them, they've got to get the product from somewhere?

I'm not against this move but in my head the idea of a sim full of resident homes would never be a flat down blueprint, I always imagined a number of layers variously disjointed yet never chaotic taking up the land and sky.

I've had various sketches of homes I thought would befit SL and recently knocked these up in a sandbox:

The open aired playful mansion

The idea behind this was to take a stately home and remove the elements not needed, the doors, the roof, walls etc but keep a sense of home still, the entrance, the horizontal and vertical and add the magical, the play on physics and scale. After building this someone noted it looked alot like a neko build, with scratch posts for seats etc, perhaps they have a point.

The Organic Home

This was really rough, but it comes in under 25 prims with seats and again plays with the idea of fantasy/scale/height, why not have a home as a series of flower pods that can be flown into?

The Alice in Wonderland

I liked this one the most :) it's house sized, has windows, the reminisce of doors and is open befitting an avatar that can fly. For me it's a sense of space and possibilities, if the walls are brought down how do you decorate a home like this?

I let the stairwell going to the roof/floor/top/room as I enjoy keeping part of the real alongside the unreal, it helps the brain agree to what it see's and also helps keep a sense of normality in a scene that's bizarre.

Tubes and Steel

For me aesthetically it's the weakest of the four but is again low prim and just a template to be built upon, I liked the idea of entering a home from all angles, flying up a tube from below, to a platform from above etc.

Viewing platforms for seating and building can easily be expanded upon, again try to imagine this kind of build in greater depth across a sim in vertical layers, the sea level land of the sim being used for...what?

These were pretty quick and simple builds using basic prims but i've made them available in sandboxes when I can with full perms (how do you get freebies into larger circulation?), if anyone wants a copy i'll be boxing these up and adding to a homes pack as a template to build upon, just IM me and i'll send one over :).

Snowy Hoobinoo's not at home, welcome Snowy Hoobinoo

2010-01-02T05:36:00.001-08:00

2009 ended...in a way I didn't expect, SL and RL disasters and emergencies all piled up in the last few weeks and pushed me the edge of a burnout, also being let down by people in/out world did not help.

So, how to make a new start to 2010? by breaking away from it all of course :) and making some drastic decisions:

Epistems is gone, really gone, the lands rented for a few more weeks and ALL my plants/tree's etc are in a freebie box for anyone to grab. It was taking up too much time trying to play at business in SL and paying rent/keeping people happy etc was really becoming tedious. The quick realisation that I could just say behind at RL work for half an hour and earn the same amount with dare I say it more pleasure, just killed it dead. Incidentally just after the announcement by the Lab to crack down on errant items on xstreet my sales were decimated.

I had been working on several contracts for people in SL/VW's with RL pay towards the end of the year and was feeling good, almost to the point of allowing myself to dream of maybe one day taking this off as a career path. Then it started to hit, constant harassment, miscommunication, non payment etc and all the other pitfalls of working freelance, again sitting back and thinking hard about what I was doing I realised that a lot of those in VW's, no matter how far up the tree or how many sims they own, don't know the first thing about business and in a RL situation I would of written these of as flakes a long time ago. Hey....a RL situation? where real money changes hands, yep, took me FAR to long to get there and so, gone, unless a decent contract or spec is drawn up beforehand i'm not interested.

My inventory, gone, 6000 items now down to under 2500, keeping my textures etc but the rest is history, backed up onto a drive but in 6 months time, if i've not needed it, gone too.

Snowy Hoobinoo, plant creator and plant avatar, gone.

Snowy hoobinoo, metamorphosis of stupidity/fun and goodwill, arrived.

Free from constraints and commitments has really helped me to enjoy SL again in the past week, I could of created an alt but deep down I know, Snowy really is a part of who I am even to the extent of the name sticking to me in RL. Changes like this to me are more akin to buying a new set of clothes, something not quite you but more a step towards what you'd like to be, same here too, changing slowly, trying to find a path/place in an emerging world.

Still exploring, Blue Mars and Caledon are a step in the right direction, i've not met many people there yet but it looks like the devs are listening . Ignore the buzz and just see it for what it is, content creation is a little fiddly but becomes routine easily enough. Not too keen on having to learn yet another tool in Google Sketchup so i'm waiting till blender support is fully integrated.

Took a look at the opening offers for stores in Caledon, great incentives and I bet there are a few queuing up to make the most of the initial rush for content once the monetary system is in place.

But good things for the future, creative fires are burning, art show booked for March which if I can pull it off should be something very different for me. Building a series of alternatives to Linden Homes and amassing a new persona for myself, hoping to get more involved in the community as a whole and to make a difference , perhaps i'll stop being such a hermit.....:)

Opening the box

2009-11-29T06:19:00.000-08:00

Well, the past two weeks have been all about the tech and finding out just what makes avatars tick...

Kyle G from the Reaction Grid started up http://indiemetaverse.ning.com/ with the idea of developing a meeting place for users/developers of all virtual worlds to gather, share ideas and technical know how with each other with a final aim of meeting up in the US in 2010. There's just under 90 members already and I thought i'd contribute some of findings i'd come across.

My initial aim was to try and cross over Avatars from SL/Opensim to Unity 3D and create a base system that developers could import into their worlds, I made up a few tutorials going through the process:

http://indiemetaverse.ning.com/video/blender-to-unity-part-1-basic

http://indiemetaverse.ning.com/video/blender-to-unity-part2

http://indiemetaverse.ning.com/video/opensimsl-avatar-mesh-and-bvh

http://indiemetaverse.ning.com/video/makehuman-avatar-creator-and

The really interesting point of this was that I was able to import the standard avatar along with bones and all animations into a Unity project but from within the project I was able to control avatar bones/animations using some simple scripts, this got me to thinking about how easy it would be to setup a system whereby the users could create their own custom animations in world and why haven't LL or anyone else done this yet?

For one the saving of user data in world seems to prevented for a reason, you can't write to Notecards etc but also it would remove another revenue stream. The more I played the more I could see where the SL designs came about, I was able to create my own textures in world by painting straight onto my avatar, why is this not available? another revenue stream I guess.

The possibility's that this could open up are going to be stunning and it's great to be able to de-construct this kind of work and see just how it's made, it's something I often do when looking at a new build in world, I like to work out the techniques for myself and learn in the process.

Considering the way all these areas are constructed so that to create objects everyone has to make a series of micro payments to upload texture/anims/sculpts etc it will be interesting to see what happens when Mesh imports become available on the SL grid and just whether the Lab is considering increasing the upload charges for this new advancement?

My ultimate aim for this is to create a more detailed mesh and bone system so facial expressions and hand/finger movements can be captured, I really want to create a new system of communication in VW's, perhaps a system with a very limited gui and the ability to control you av's actions via mouse expressions. With most of this stuff though it's just something I pick at when I have the time, I like to get an idea and try and implement it, just to learn how it's done. :)

A week exploring

2009-11-13T11:30:00.000-08:00

Well it's been a hell of a week with loads of new stuff and worlds/tools so here goes!

1. New Netbook Viewer: Boy Lane has released a netbook optimised viewer based on the rainbow viewer that installs with all the graphics options etc all ready set to run better on atom netbooks, tried it on my eeepc 901 and it's impressive, averaging 10fps without all the fiddly tweeking: Grab it here

2. Unity 3D: Unity 2.6 is now available to download for FREE with a FREE indie license, a few of the more pro features have been removed but it's certainly a very impressive package for making virtual worlds/game/art demos or whatever else you can think of that can run great 3d graphics in a browser, it's all pretty much drag and drop and comes with built in blender support, just import drag and drop, very easy. PLayed with this for a day or so and rebuilt the epistems sim as a test, also tried out the character control schemes which were easy enough to implement.

Unity is available for MAC and PC and looks like it's going to cause some waves in the future with the number of indie developers picking this up, there's also a race on to use unity to create an opensim client with some great work done by Dahlia here.

3. Blue Mars: I was hesitant to re download the client again but someone handed me the install file on usb and after reading that there was a Hack/workaround for importing blender builds into Blue Mars I thought i'd give it a go (check the comments in the post here).

So I logged in and was greeted by....Bots, loads of them, blah. So after crafting myself some facial hair I went exploring to meet all the new users and met....no one, not one person in all the "worlds" so it was a bit of a let down. At least the inclusion of some new worlds/sims has created some variety and there's some interesting fauna being introduced so i'll not be uninstalling just yet.

4. The MetaPlace: This was a BIG suprise! An isometric virtual world that runs in the browser and looks so twee I might be sick, but all users get their own little "world" once they login, it's more a small private patch of land to build on and invite people to. You earn money by building/meeting people and getting people onto your land which is all par for the course for these sorts of worlds but the best thing I found here was that it allows user generated content. You can create your own floor tiles, objects etc by using 2d images and then add them to your world to create whatever you want, it kind of looked fairly limited when I first logged in but it just keeps opening up, including scripting behavior for objects, hosting gigs/art shows etc.

Must admit this sucked me in and took up a little more of my time than I had to spare....i'm sure someone with good 2D skills could make something pretty spectacular.

5. Google wave - Got my invite! It's a very different way of working collaboratively and at the moment seems to be full of too many forum recreations which become unwieldy but the possibilities for project work and bouncing ideas around are exciting.

Ripping it up

2009-11-08T08:38:00.001-08:00

Organics Animations
Originally uploaded by Snowy Hoobinoo

Completely stuck in a rut for the past month or so I found myself just logging on for the sake of it and wasting away hours doing.......nothing. Sometimes I walk away from an SL session after a couple of hours with no real idea of what i've achieved or done, i'm not the most talkative and my friends list is fairly short so no long winded conversations, no building, no great explorations across the grid, I guess i'm just sat in world procrastinating.
Anyway, it got to the point where I was ready to take a break for a while and walk away, but that evening while dropping of to sleep images came to me, caves/organics/life systems colliding, must be that point in quiet stillness where your brain begins putting together all the things you've learnt/seen throughout the day that give the best ideas.

So the next day I went back into the RG sim and ripped it up, deleted the lot and leveled the land, as a cathartic action it really did wipe the slate clean in my head and the building just flowed from there, land went up, sculpted were sorted and texturing was easy, no pre planning just bouncing ideas along as they revealed themselves. I really like visiting enclosed builds or eco systems where the closeness and conformity create a believable cohesiveness.

Shortly afterwards Vlad Bjornson set through a link to this vid: http://donwhitaker.tumblr.com/post/234026846/yonder-inspiration-for-virtual-plants

The thought of animated plants and organics in virtual worlds has been on my mind for a while but after testing various anim systems etc the end result never matched the initial idea, too jerky and unrealistic, after watching the Yonder vid above it occurred to me to use my avatar as the base for the animation and the plant itself, creating smooth animations in the process. After knocking up some quick test anims using folded limbs and attaching some forms I knocked up this video, works pretty well and i've experimented a bit more since so should be showing those soon.

Epistems Experiment end of Week 1

2009-11-01T11:26:00.000-08:00

The pay what you like experiment at my Epistems store has been running for a week now and here's the results:

I posted links to the event on twitter/flickr/koinup/sl forums/in world events and linked to a flickr pic with the slurl to the store.

I got 62 views on the Flickr pic and my in world land traffic went from the mid forties up to just over 200.

12 people bought items 40 items from the store over the week (normally valued at around 4000 lindens) and 2 of them payed towards the plants a total of 110 lindens, so I made 2.75 lindens on average per item.

It was just an experiment and so nothing to cry over but it was a little disheartening to see people come in and take every item they could get their hands on for free and then just leave, no thanks, not even a token payment, nothing.

It might also be worth noting that the two payments I did receive were when I was on the land myself or just above working.

Lessons learnt:

1. Get it right, first time. I'm the first to admit the whole thing was a bit of a rush job, I layed out the land as quick as I could just to get it up and running, a better flow and some more developed items could have helped.

2. The system needs changing. As visitors arrived they were handed a notecard explaining the offer and as we all know one of the first things people do when arriving somewhere is decline any offered items. Perhaps a script on each object so that someone would have to pay something before receiving the item could have helped.

3. Size matters. thinking back, my store is way too small for this type of experiment, would be interesting to see what would happen if some of the larger clothes stores did this for example.

4. Where am I going with this? I guess it's made me think about why i'm doing this in the first place, I make just enough to pay the rent each month and realize it's just a hobby, but is it fun? When it comes down to it I think I would still be just as happy to give my works away for free if I had rent free land to build on. Also all this selling and store building really detracts from what I love to do..CREATE.

Epistems Halloween Experiment

2009-10-24T11:43:00.001-07:00

Thought i’d have a bit of an experiment on Epistems this Halloween, i’ve re made up the land with some new Tree’s/plant and some older halloween bits but made everything absolutely free, the deal being that people can pay the Gremlin on the land what they feel the items were worth or how much they liked them, if it all goes well I might open the whole store up to the same pricing.

When I grow up.....

2009-08-31T08:49:00.000-07:00

.....I want to be an Astronaut.

I asked a friend recently what they expect to be doing in SL in a few years time?

Their response was: No idea really, guess i'll be still going to gigs, maybe running a store, who knows?

I asked the question because I was wondering what happens when you reach middle age in SL, a few years on, you've seen the sights and know your way around, got a healthy contacts list, learnt a bit of scripting/building?

Stepping back and looking at paths in SL the list is fairly open:

Artist

Scripter

Land Owner

Object Creator

Musician

Manager

Co Ordinator

Comedian

Shopaholic

Mentor

Machinima creator

Blogger

Podcaster

Part goer

Hobo

the list goes on.......

The great thing is many of these vocations are interchangable and it's fairly easy to jump in and out of each one as you go along but how many of us really sit back and wonder where their really going in SL, in three years time where will you be?

While some of the ages in SL are fairly easy to map, the newbie freebie frenzy, the finally settling in with a bit of land etc, the later phases seem to be a bit blurred. With a set of skills under their belts many older SL AV's become the swiss army knives of virtual worlds able to cross over and apply them to whatever they need to.

My friend also asked me, what did I expect to be doing in 3 years time? I'm not sure, I guess i'd like to further realise a transcendental and philisophic relationship between RL and SL, both helping and attributing to the other (it's made a lot of progress so far), i'd also like to really feel like i'm involved in a wider community than now.

Quick Textures for SL Part 2: Organics in Gimp

2009-08-27T13:50:00.000-07:00

This is another process I use sometimes for creating some really nice random Organic textures, it works especially well with flesh tones but can also create some really psychdelic effects.

1. Open up the Gimp: File->New and set the image size to 512x512 Pixels.

2. Select the Gradient Tool and select two different colours for the foreground and the background (two similar tones for a more natural effect, or in this case purple and green for a texture that stands out).

Draw any gradient on the image:

3. Right Click on your image and elect -> Filters -> Render -> Clouds -> Difference Clouds

On the Tool screen that opens select the Turbulent option, this helps create a more organic finish, but apart from that just experiment with the other settings to create different results.

4. Make the Texture seamless by right clicking on the image and selecting Filters->Map->Make Seamless.

5. You can leave the texture there but sometime I like to add a little more depth to the final result by Right Clicking on the image and selecting Filters->Map->Bump Map, from within this screen play around with the settings to create the look you want.

There you go, quick easy and painless Organic textures in Gimp. :)

Quick and Dirty ways for Making Textures in SL Part 1

2009-08-27T09:25:00.000-07:00

I use this method probably more than I should at the moment because of Time constraints but it works pretty well for the organic builds I create and it's good way to create a number of textures quickly and get them loaded onto your prims.

1. Grab your camera and get outside, take close up pics of any interesting textures/colours and shapes that catch your eye - for me I usually grab shots of leaves and tree barks as they change over the seasons.

2. Download Gimp install and load up your photo's: (ideally you want you pics to be in focus better than this example :\).

3. Right Click on the image, select Filters->Map->Make Seamless:

4. Next select Image->Scale Image and change the size to 512x512 Pixels (good size for speed/quality in SL) and Voila a ready made texture!

Load your textures into SL/other grid and away you go! Simples. :)

EpisTEMS month 3 - Tenants rights in Virtual worlds

2009-07-31T08:36:00.001-07:00

Well, after another month of working hard trying to get episTEMS going and actually making enough Lindens to pay the rent, the following arrived in my mail box:

"Hi Snowy due to the unviabillity of sims in SL will be shutting down ********* in 24 hours, and leaving SL permanently. I ask the you removed your possessions. Thanks"

Well that was a kick in the ass! It was also the first time i'd heard from the landlord since moving in, I still had a couple of weeks rent left on the land so after talking to several other tenants I IM'd the sim owner asking for a reimbursement of rental still outstanding (I neglected to ask for extra cover for the loss of business during this period, maybe pushing it too far)..........no replies and no lindens returned....the land was duly wiped after 24 hours and the sim has now gone.

This is also the third time this has happened to me in 2 years, which leads me to ask Who is governing tenants rights in SL?

James Grimmelmann wrote an article in the Yale Law Journal on Virtual World Feudalism that discusses the reluctance of the Lindens to get involved in disputes between Sim owners and Tenants but that having the Lindens as a direct Lord/Land owner would have it's benefits.

While it may be easier for me to sign up as a full paid SL account and buy a patch of mainland that would be governed by myself and would allow me to go straight to Linden Labs if I have any issues, i'm not convinced that the monthly fee would cover a theoretical tenants insurance.

The fact that tenants have to agree to a covenant written by Sim owners to try and keep a Sim running smoothly and aesthetically pleasing is all well and good but how many Sim covenants include a statement of the Sim owners responsibilites towards paying tenants? Many sim owners gather together in groups/business's to offer a singular covenant across a number of sims and a management company to run these sims, but as a tenant am I now able to follow the matter up with a management company who's reputation has been tarnished by a sim owner no longer on their books?

In RL many of these disputes are dealt with an independant management agency that deals with communications and issues between Tenants/Landlords while also ensuring that lease statements and rules are adhered to on both sides, by protecting the rights of both Tenants and Landlords a management agency can provide peace of mind and security to both sides, at a cost.

But SL is certainly not RL in this case, Sim owners are not all serious money investors and many run Sims as a hobby and sideline to other work, also they can relinquish ownership and responsibility for their sim within hours. But the cost of Sim's is high (far too high for myself or indeed a group of RL friends to take ownership of) and those who decide to embark on becoming a Landlord to a large group of tenants should perhaps think twice about the level of responsibilty and time they are willing to invest, when real money is changing hands between a group of people it is almost inevitible that disputes will arise.

What solutions are on offer?

Perhaps the formation of a SecondLife citizens advice bureau to advise both Landlords and Tenants on their virtual rights and to offer a number of set processes that followed to ensure the least number of issues when renting land, also to act as a third party mediator between disputes.

A Tenants rights covenant could be written up and offered to Sim owners to agree upon and then followed among their sims, if this was widely used then anyone looking for land rentals in SL could then expect at least a basic level of insurance and responsibility among sims, this would also go both ways (many covenants on sims do appear to include the same outlines).

Lastly there are some very large business's in SL that run many Sims and run them well under their own management companies and who take land ownership and rentals very seriously. Do they not feel that these more feudal sim's cause damage to the reputation of their business? Perhaps if a number of these banded together themselves and used their financial weight they could perhaps bend the ear of Linden Labs or help produce a greater level of control throughout SL.

Lastly, I hold no malice towards my former Landlord, as a former RL landlord I more than understand the strains the current climate has put upon those that invest in property and land inworld and out, yet I can't help thinking that with a little more effort from both sides things could well have ended more amicably and less abrupt.

Opensims and epiSTEMS month 2

2009-07-07T11:10:00.000-07:00

Well epiSTEMS has made it to month 2 and so.......

...the whole gardens changed, all the plants/flowers/tree's and what nots have all been replaced with a new set, I realised with how much I build I can probably keep up with a schedule of twelve gardens a year, maybe, ish. It has made me wonder if I really do need the land though, the mojority of my SL income (say 85%) has come through Xstreet and although i'm only talking pocket money amounts, enough to cover the land rental costs and upload fees it might be worth using the lindens dollars in a more constructive way?

Anyway, most of the plants here were not built in SL but locally offline on my PC, after looking at the Meerkat viewer that allows you to upload and backup your rezzed objects my whole building experience just exploded! It really does what it says on the tin and works, ok, sometimes I need to try a few times to upload an object and that can cost when loading into SL and it crashes for a pastime doing anything else inworld but it's FREE and is exactly what I wanted to broaden my horizons...

....so my next step was to download and install opensim locally, it's a lot easier than I thought it would be (install/setup and logging in for the first time took 30 mins top) and the freedom of having my own sim to do how I want is great! It's also worth mentioning how fast it is when not connected to a grid, I was really put off last year when I tried openlife and the Rezzable PGA grid because of building/attachments/avatars/moving/talking issues but this runns pretty smoothly and i've had no problems with the builds.

After playing with the opensim for a bit I happened to add a quick twitter post about how much fun I was having, afterwards I was contacted by the Reaction grid team who run a PG grid with an educational slant that's built up to a fair old size, I checked out the grid and it's great! everyone there is really friendly and after spending a few days there and seeing all the old linden tree's I asked I approached them about offering some gardening services and hey presto i've been given a plot on one of the sims to produce nature objects just for the Reaction Grid and they're all free to grab and copy away!

Also worth checking out the saturday b movie nights with the group which have been pretty entertaining! but it really has made me think about the SL grid and the size it's become, with so many people complaining how the Lindens have lost touch with the users it's a refreshing experience to meet a smaller team who really do appear to be doing everything right.

Installing and setting up SL/Opensim on Netbooks

2009-06-21T03:55:00.000-07:00

UPDATE 14/09/10: As well as the Graphical clients there is the fantastic Radegast client, it's text based with a gui to move around, view maps, listen to music streams on land! also allows you to use a radar and interact with objects nearby all via a gui menu. No graphics but I find it fantastic for logging in for chat/gigs etc as it also allows me to run other software while logged in, highly recommended.

UPDATE 13/11/09: Boy Lane has just released a Netbook build of his Rainbow viewer, optimised for running on Atom based Netbooks. I've installed and tested and it runs VERY well, averaging 10fps wherever I went and no need for all the fiddly bits: Grab it here

Need to get SL/Opensim client up and running at a half decent rate? After playing around with a number of viewers and configs I think i've finally managed to get best out of it that I can (i'm using a EEEPC 901 and 2gb RAM).

What to expect: you won't be doing a lot of building with this but it does run with enough speed to login/communicate and to attend lectures/conferences - this is the main use for me when i'm away from my main pc to keep up to date.

Step 1: Download the neccessary files, first off is the older SL 1.19 viewer that does not have windlight and runs much better on older machines:

http://download-secondlife-com.s3.amazonaws.com/Second_Life_1-19-0-5_Setup.exe

Install this and make a note of the install directory (if you can, try and put it in the default install location).

Step 2: Download the latest Boy Lane Windows Cool Viewer release from here:

http://coolviewer.googlecode.com/files/CoolViewer_i686_1_19_0_5_Release_59_exe_xml_only.exe

Install this over the SL 1.19 viewer directory, it will automatically try and pull in the neccessary DLL's and such so no need to mess.

Step 3: Fire up the cool viewer and go to edit -> preferences and make the following changes:

Under the Graphics tab ensure it's set to run in a window at 800x600 (auto detect works well).

Set your draw distance to 64 - as low as it can be configured from here but we'll change that in a mo.

Under the Graphics detail tab set all the sliders to as low as they will go, Avatar rendering to normal, Lighting to sun and moon only and terrain detail to low.

Under the Adv graphics tab set Max Particle count to 0, outfit composite limit to 0.

Optionally: goto the audio and video tab and deselect streaming music and video then mute the master volume - this speeds up the fps a fair bit and is fine if your not using voice.

Step 4: Login to the grid and press CTRL+ALT+D to bring up the debug menu's.

Go to Client->More->Debug Settings and in the window type renderfarclip -> this should be set to 64 but change this to whatever you want, the lower the better. I've set mine to 16. This alters how far ahead of your avatar objects are rendered - in small enclosed spaces this makes no real difference to what you can see.

Nextup change the rendering options: Client->Rendering->Features

Turn off everything in here apart from the UI - this should add 5fps or so to the speed.

Next go to Client->Rendering types and turn off the following:

Alpha

Tree

Water

Grass

Clouds

Particles

Bump

Also if your attending a lecture etc then once your sat in place turn off character as well, this make a huge difference to FPS, in my case it adds 10 fps.

ok, thats all the settings i've found that needed changing, at the moment i'm walking around at 10-25 fps depending on where I am, it's also worth altering your AV, the less attachments and extra's the better. You can also go though the above steps on any other viewer to speed it up a bit.

Overall it looks OK - your not going to be going around taking in the vistas but in a classroom or conference situation it's perfect for communication and getting points across.

Hope this helps!

And so it starts....

2009-06-11T13:12:00.000-07:00

.....after living off of other people's land for so long and waiting for handouts and scraps for week long half assed art projects i've finally decided to invest a bit of money and get myself my own corner of the world, or my own 4096. I don't care what anyone says, land in SL is BLOODY EXPENSIVE but i'm fed up of saving up for a year for a piss hole in titsville.

Anyway, with my own land, my own world! my rules! and so here we have epiSTEMS:

A wonka esque land of bright colours, farcical designs and Nature - plants, flowers, tree's, grass, purple hills and roaming toadstalls. I really wanted a basis and name to start pushing the alternatives to SL tree's and the god awful photo on a prim plants that seem to be everywhere and still selling by the thousands.... and so here we have it:

and the flickr goup: http://www.flickr.com/groups/1139645@N21/

and the koinup group: http://www.koinup.com/group/epiSTEMs/

and the twitter account, and the in world group - epiSTEMS.

But here it is and hopefull every week there will be a new plant/tree/flower on sale untill all the linden tree's are gone and the world looks purple!

I must admit I never realised just how much work is involved in setting up a business in SL, land scaping, rentals, the building, making adverts, dealing with customers......but the hardest part i've found is making epiSTEMS "interactive" people keep asking "what's there to do here?" and for the moment it's sit around enjoy the colours..........:)

Oh, and the LM!:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/edinburgh%20mile/119/253/23/?title=epiSTEMS

A sense of scale

2009-05-20T11:12:00.000-07:00

Scale in SL is a hard thing to quantify, when you can move so fast and fly there are no real measures by which you might judge the epic of an object or the grand sense of your surroundings. There are a few examples that begin to improve upon this, such as Comet Morigi's Mt.XXYYZZ (talked about here on NPIRL) which provides a real boundary by the avatar not being able to reach the object itself which in turn makes you stand back and really look at what's there in front of you.

Anyway, i'm still painting by numbers in/out world and so i've started looking over what i've created to try and gain a scale of what i'm trying to achieve. I've recently been creating a few pieces that are on the large side (300ft upwards) such as this worm garden:

It's still not what i'm looking for, I need a real awe moment, when you come across something fantastical for the first time and you can't quite get your eyes and head around whats in front of you, but then again in a world where anything is possible where is the TRULY fantastical?

Well, this has crossed over to RL as well almost in the reverse, subconsciously I revert my sense of scale to deal with the larger issues. When faced with grand decisions and dead ends where do you go? Into myself and Fimo apparently:

A sense of scale can be subjective really wherever you are, when boundaries are put up and the world gets a little smaller where does the scale slide?

I'm not dead yet...

2009-05-12T12:18:00.000-07:00

....but I seem to have lost all my impetus in SL, i'm still logging on and exploring/building etc but it feels like i'm going through the motions on autopilot. Nothing for me to worry about though, this happens every few months, I stray away to other things and come back slowly.

Moss and Lichen Plants on Rock wall.

You see I have this state of mind that fixates itself on a subject or a form and won't let go until the objective or image has been finished, it's frustrating because I can't concentrate on ANYTHING else during this time. At the moment it's technology or I should say a particular item that's caught me, stopping me sleep at night, that I have to learn about inside out outside in before it eventually runs out of my system, or I buy or my mind catches itself on another fancy.

Lilium Flower

Luckily for me there are ways around this that help make daily life a lot more easier, SL helped a lot with the continuous idea of building nature, the background line that I explore there helps me keep a balance in what I do when I log on, instead of standing around....

Light through the forest

The other is art in RL, painting really helps as I completely switch off for up to hours at a time, so lately i've been doing this and hopefully moving into some new media and textures soon.

People buy the oddest things.

Scripted plants

2009-04-29T13:40:00.001-07:00

Tethered Plants
Originally uploaded by Snowy Hoobinoo

After playing with some kinetic scripts and plants/flowers there was an idea that I had sketched (more doodled) a while back of flower heads being tethered to a rooted base.
I had the idea after coming across a couple into bondage, the mistress was leading her slave around by the collar with a chain link that appeared to sag in the middle and had physics. After looking all over for a tether script I went back to the source and went on the hunt for a bondage tether script, and guess what?! There's a whole group dedicated to bringing open source bdsm equipment to the SL masses (just search for opensource bdsm), anyway one collar and it's script later and a few hours messing with it I managed to come up with the above. I really wanted to sort out a nice hover script for the flower heads, I tried the swarm scripts but they all sort of clumped together, the ones in the video are controlled using an RC helicopter script!

The point of all this is that I wanted to create a serious of kinetic and interactive plants/tree's and flowers that provide a base that can be built and layered up to produce some really stunning nature pieces in SL, at some point i'll box all these up and make them available, hopefully someone might pick them up and really run with it..

Kinetic Tree's

2009-04-19T11:14:00.001-07:00

Fluid Tree
Originally uploaded by Snowy Hoobinoo

While looking into the organics and movements of squid I was playing around with a few prims and scripts to try and replicate these movements in SL. The original idea was to use these across a plane to create the idea of a moving mass along the land but once I got it all moving it just looked so out of place that I had to use them in other structures.

So I decided to form them together into this tree structure, i've been wanting to produce kinetic trees and plants for a fair while but couldn't find the movement I wanted. This is almost exactly what I wanted, the concept of a tree that's constantly writhing, always reforming itself.It's a little script heavy at the moment (about 30 odd!) and needs refining, i'd really like to get the tree to randomly rez itself.

While I was looking at the finished tree I decided to have a play at filming too, I was suprised at how easy it was! using xfire and windows movie maker I was able to knock up a quick vid of the tree in minutes.

Window to the Avatar soul, a zero prim SL art display.

2009-04-16T12:31:00.000-07:00

The above image is of my Avatars eyes in SL, it's a cliched reference but I needed it to make my point......the past few weeks i've been looking through people's profiles and exploring the Ascii art within, most of it is the usual hearts or neko ears but it got me thinking about what I wanted to communicate through my profile. How to show/tell someone who I am through a few lines of general text.

Squint closely at the above and you'll see the ascii text, click through to my profile and the story begins to unfold....

I ended up hand typing an ascii tree to fill the about me and continued up through the the photo with the beginnings of the tree's branches......

Carry on through to my interests a few lines of a poem appear (why not Haiku's for interests!:)) and hint at the meaning to the piece......

In my 1st life is the branch holding the hidden sapling that glows it's light through the profile and out through the eyes of my av, below is the edge of the tree placing the small home into shadow but looked over by the sapling above.

The story carries on, parts are tucked away throughout SL and come out into prims when they need be.....;) It could all do with a polish but I wanted to experiment pushing out through the boundaries of communication in SL and what it could do.

The hidden lives of furniture

2009-04-14T10:43:00.000-07:00

When I was younger I would often lay on my back looking up at the furniture in our house and imagine walkways, ladders and the homes of whoever or whatever lived there, etching out their existence on the unused and unseen surfaces. Then one day I tacked along on a trip to the dump and came across the huge pyramid of abandoned furniture there, I stood looking through the legs of chairs, bedside cabinets and into the darkness that was the heart of the pile, looking for the hidden city that must be tucked away inside.......

Anyway, for a long time in SL i've been looking at the relationship that the home, house and furniture have upon the avatars that own or use them. Many houses in SL are exact copies of their RL counterparts along with the living spaces and furniture used to fill them, as avatars we are expected to navigate these spaces and interact with the object within in much the same way that we physically do in RL.

This has been playing on my mind for a long time, almost since my rez day as to how, in a world with near limitless possibilites we are still expected to live and work in a set template of structures, why do homes have roofs when there's no rain, no privacy and everyone can fly for example?

Perhaps a thinktank could be brought together to produce an architectural housing structure that would fit and specs and needs of avatars in a virtual world with SL's abilities.

In the meantime I have been working on this piece based on old sketches and ideas of how we may live in a world with no rules or cares, how would we adapt to fill these spaces when physics and shape can be morphed into any form? Perhaps at night when you go to bed the kites begin flying from under your tables....

Meat Landscape

2009-04-10T11:12:00.000-07:00

A while ago someone gave me some art magazines they were throwing out to flick through, among the articles were a few pages on the artist Paul Emsley and his amazing water colour paintings of Rhino's, in the interview they described how he approached these paintings as landscapes.

White rhino by Paul Emsley

This got me to thinking as to how I might be able to transfer this technique in reverse towards creating a work in SL, by taking photo's of parts of my body and using these as textures for a landscape scene.

Build based on fingers and knuckles

The result is a very alien almost obscene look to all the plants and parts of the scene, while I kept all the usual repetition/symetrics and based each part of the build loosely on a RL concept (such as fingers) the textures add a new layer that helps change the viewers perception.

Overall i've tried to link myself to my work in a macabre way which is what i've been looking at doing for a long time.

This was origionally meant as a temporary experiment and so has no permanent place to really expand upon the theme, though for the time being you can find it under the Brooklyn is watching sim here for a short time.