This week we discuss some the recent controversy surrounding the mesh clothing deformer, Linden Lab’s lack of communication, mobile’s role in virtual worlds and more with special guest Valiant Westland!
This week’s topics include:
- Linden Lab Needs Samples to Test Mesh Deformer — Or May Not Incorporate It
- More on Oz Linden’s Call for Assistance
- Oz Linden Responds!
- Tateru Asks for Twenty Words or Less
- SecondLife.com Domain Expires and Then Is Only Renewed for One Year?
- Oskar Linden talks about the recent hardware failure at Linden Lab
- What If Rod Was One Of Us?
- Philip Version
- Are Tablets the Breakthrough Virtual Worlds Need?
- Google Reportedly Investing $30 Million in Machinima.com
- Sesame Street Goes Virtual
- Baby Thinks A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work
- IBM Art of Data
- Qarl’s Class
- Pinterest Announces Attribution Tool Feature For Flickr, YouTube And More
- Elder Scrolls Online
- More on the Mesh Clothing Deformer
- Building the Mesh Clothing Deformer to Ruth vs. Standard Sizing
- How the Deformer Will Effect Existing Mesh Clothing
- Happy Rez Day Berry!
- Ask SecondLie – Issue #1
Guests:
Valiant Westland is a well known Second Life user who has been involved with the platform in one way or another since 2005. He brings with him 20+ years of IT planning experience and is a two term Elected Official. In addition, he is an avid user of social media where you can find him on Twitter, Plurk and Facebook. You can also read more of his thoughts on the SL Revolution blog.
Karl Stiefvater (Qarl Fizz, formerly Qarl Linden) is visual effects artist, software developer, and interactive designer extraordinaire.
Thank you to our sponsors, Botgirl’s Identity Circus and Pretty Feet!
Just to be clear, the quote from Oz on my blog was a direct quote, not a paraphrase
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The rest was an attempt to get feedback from source and pour oil on troubled waters. Perhaps not entirely wise.
Wow. Sorry for the confusion on my part. I guess I was just hoping he didn’t say it like that. Good reporting none the less!
listen via that mobile app, or grab up the performer/venue’s stream and make a list of bookmarks of your own (I have my sister’s stream on speed-dial.)
MACHINIMA.COM
Interesting, although most of Second Life’s movies tend to be navel-gazing stuff that nobody wants to watch outside of the SL audience. Even the Month Of Machinima content, most of which is done brilliantly and well, never breaks out.
It needs to be written/designed/directed with wider audience in mind, ditch the inside-jokes, then assisted with savvy marketing and channels. (If Hunter’s a pal of Hamlet, well, why isn’t Hamlet tugging his sleeve a bit more often to toss those moviemakers a bone? Oh. Right. The archetypical gonzo journalist only tugs sleezes to get favors for himself.)
Thinkerer of Cookie island talked about Amazon’s call for content and pitches for shows on his site. A show like Lauren Live is hampered by the use of other comedian’s/Reader’s Digest material and would be a legal issue… if it’s going to get greenlit, it’s gotta be written and owned by the performers, like Morgue McMillan’s poetry and imagery.
INTERFACE SWITCH LOLs
When I’m in YouTube watching an SL machinima trying to SpaceNavigator through the venue… oops. Duh me. Fail.
SNAPSHOT TO (PHOTO SITE)
Can’t you email a snapshot to Flickr from snapshot? Yes, it’s not as easy as just clicking a Post To Flickr shot, but it still works.
(Okay, so I download everything and then drag-and-drop to Flickr uploadr tool myself, but I spray-and-pray with hundreds of shots to get one that’s perfect.)
SKYRIM MMO and PORTAL CREATOR KIT
So, about that whole Linden Realms/turning SL into a game waste of time/money/developer hours… how many more nails in the coffin does there need to be before someone at LL finally declares themselves dead in this race?
WHY I DON’T WANT TO COME BACK TO THE SHOW
It’s not because you’re crazy, Gianna. It’s because I am clown shoes, and there are so many other people/subjects you could discuss/bring on.
If my appearing on the show and rambling about pricing and how LL fails its customers as a host/provider that other companies would get bankrupted overnight over isn’t incentive enough for others to come on, then will keeping Draxtor and his beating the Tea Party/Republican/Bush dead horse interruptions while blaming frustrated customers for Linden Lab’s failures will certainly have them beating on your door.
Yeah, I can spin a good yarn, babble to fill the air, but really… you got Valiant – good pick! And there’s dozens… hundreds more folks out there who can give their valid perspectives based on experience, so don’t fall into the trap that Metanomics did with calling up the same people over and over and over to say the same damn things each time.
-ls/cm
Great thoughts! Also I am booking lots of guest so YAY! However, I do hope you’ll come back and visit us once and awhile! Don’t make me beg!
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Great show. Do invite back both Valiant and Crap despite his protests
Will do! They are both fantastic guests!
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While Valiant was talking about his ideas with the real life clothing, etc, I was thinking, boy that would take 5 years for the Lab to develop at the pace they do things.
Honestly, the screw ups, the disdain for the customers, the lack of knowledge of their own product, it just never ends, frankly Ive lost hope they will ever get it right.
Virtual land is not cheap in Second Life, and for people to keep up that investment they need to see some return, and I’m not necessarily meaning monetary return, but even just perhaps a road map for the next few years, what features they plan to work on, where THEY see themselves, but they give us nothing. They operate in silence, they hardly ever get feedback in advance, and when they do roll out a feature like mesh, the customers have to crowd source Qarl to fix it, and even that has taken now what, over 6 months to get moving? How many Call of Duty and Grand theft Auto sequels have those game companies developed and sold in the time frame since Second Life has even made marginal progress. The question is Second Life the software itself just a giant mess that adding any revolutionary features will just break it?
I agree with Gianna that even in its current state its still an amazing tool, but I think a lot of people who invest the big bucks to own land and what have you are just not seeing any return at the end of the tunnel.
and Linden Lab, it might help since you are the owner of a virtual world to perhaps have someone on staff who can create mesh, or build, or use your platform.
Sorry if this is a duplicate comment post. I originally tried to post the following comment a day or two ago but for whatever reason it is not showing up on my web brouser.
Another terrific show Kim!
I really enjoyed Valiant another wonderful guest.
I also wanted to thank you for mentioning and responding on the show to my comments that I posted. I was really hoping that you or Qarl would post a response to what I had written but as the days had gone by and no response I started feeling a bit like Jan to Botgirl’s Marsha. LOL
My two cents as far as Ruth or Standard size mesh for the base mesh people should use to create clothes on. I do have extensive experience with SL mesh in general as well as with mesh in IMVU. I know I keep bringing IMVU up but there are a lot of good lessons to be learned there.
My opinion is whatever default female mesh and or male mesh SL uses before any of the influence of the sliders takes effect is what should be the standard avatar mesh everyone uses to create clothes on. I don’t know if that is Ruth or not.
What we as mesh creators need is that default female and male mesh with the skin weights of each mesh intact with the skeleton. I am pretty sure they were originally created using Maya and are on some hard dive someplace at LL if not actually in the Second Life program folders somewhere on all our hard drives. LL should save them as a MA file not MB and release them to the public. I am sure there are plenty of Maya users, including myself, who be happy to export those mesh out in different formats so all the major mesh creating programs could have a skinned weighted mesh that they could create their clothes on.
IMVU provides the default mesh with the skin weights and skeleton in several formats. I was able to take that mesh and export it out of Max and bring it into Maya. It was a lot of work but I got it. Now I can make skin tight clothes that look like they are painted on it is that accurate once you have the weighted default mesh and skeleton.
P.S. I wanted to tell Qarl in my last post that yes you can make tiny avatars. I made test avatars that were only a few inches tall to one that was 64 meters tall. AOs kinda get messed up a bit. More so when the AO moves the avatar around. Biggest problem is no matter what size an avatar is the distance each step the avatar takes is still the same so a tiny avatar with the camera near the ground looks likes it is going a hundred miles an hour. I didn’t really walk around with my 64 meter tall avatar but I am sure it have the reverse problem. I assume you see the avatar taking these giant steps but hardly moving. Almost like it was moon-walking. An avatar that was just a foot or two tall actually was pretty acceptable in my opinion and could have some real advantages if you didn’t have the land space available to build something full scale like say a castle or ship.
Anyway just thought I throw that in. Kim could you let Qarl know if he doesn’t see this post?
Well, I love Machinima.com but there is a very good reason they ignore SL. As an animator in SL, I don’t do alot of video type of stuff. Mostly, I only post product demos and tutorials. SL’s platform lacks massively in video creation tools. It would not take much to implement some simple tools like a Timeline to input animated things in, but it’s not even on LL’s roadmap, and never has been. People have asked me to make a Jira for it, but what is the point when it will just be ignored.
As an animator, I have been looking to create some cgi movie shorts. I won’t be doing any of this in SL. Why would I use a platform that has none of the tools to actually do the hard work that is involved. Even a keyframed camera would be a huge benefit to SL machinima.
Ruth is the only way you can do virtual clothing that will fit the majority of residents. If there was a way to pick a different default, then It would only make sense to redo the whole default avatar, which I’m not against. This would not be any small endeaver tho, and the likely result would be that almost as many will still have problems with it. I think it’s a good idea for the future, but for now, the SL default is fine for now. People who have a problem with Ruth, don’t even understand why a creator needs to use it to make something that works right. So, we are throwing knowledgable people in with completely unknowledgable people and saying that the unknowledgable people have a valid point, when they do not. Unless they are just saying they SL default has issues, which it does. Talking about a different default only muddies the waters, especially from a technical standpoint.
When I heard that Oz needed mesh and few were volunteering content, I went and threw together a shirt, just to test things, and maybe submit it if all worked out. After spending hours creating this simple shirt. I never was able to upload it. I’ve made just about every kind of mesh content some1 could make, mostly for testing purposes. I’ve even created a whole mesh avatar. In 2 years of messing around with LL’s uploader, I’ve never not been able to upload a mesh. After dozens of tries and redos, I gave up. Later that week, I created a mesh gun, which I’ve made many, and tried to upload that. Again, I couldn’t upload it, and it is not even rigged. Then, I tried to upload some old meshes that I already uploaded. Yet again, I was never able to upload the meshes. I’m pretty much disgusted with how everything works in SL, right now.
Oh, and HI to Valient, a fellow Michigander. What do you prefer on your Coney dog? Nice to hear a fresh face on the show.