Look into my Blender!

I'm redesigning my chocolate box, been sculpting a lot and finally it's ready for texturing! I thought I will give you a little sneak peak into my Blender ^^



Better than the current version, isn't it? :) It's always amazing how the quality requirements in SL change over time - a product that once was top notch, nowadays needs changes to get its popularity back... I don't mean just sculpties - look at the way skins have changed, or clothes. Crazy!

Anyway, I hope I finish the chocolates before Valentine's Day! I'm planning to re-write the scripts as well, so now it is a good time to give me suggestions for additional functionality of this item, if you have any!

PS. Show me your Blender (or any other program you use for sculpties)! I would love to see your work in progress - so treat it as a challenge! I'm hoping for some links ;)

Flexi sculpties!

I first learned about flexi sculpties over at Ana's blog a few months ago. I was very enthusiastic about them and was waiting for their introduction since then (there is a patch on JIRA that is being worked on). A few days ago Sql told me he found a viewer that already supports flexi sculpties, so, of course, we went playing with them right away. What we noticed is that they often act weird and not as you would expect, and it seems there is still a lot of work to do before they are introduced in the regular viewer (currently they look like flexi cylinders if you are logged in with regular viewer). Nonetheless, they are fun to play with. I made a little movie out of my experiments - please excuse the rough shapes and textures of the sculpties I present here, as they were only made for testing purposes and I didn't feel like spending too much time on them ;)



So what do you think? Once flexi sculpties are introduced, we're going to have swaying plants and flowers, sculpted trees moving like the Linden trees, flexi fish' fins and birds' wings, skirts (and other clothing elements) blowing in the wind, blankets, table-cloths, curtains, hair flowing in the wind, and all the other creative things people will surely make. Imagine combining flexi sculpties together with dynamic shadows. Aah, SL is getting even more beautiful!

Developer's Manual: the full collection [UPDATE]

[UPDATE: September 13, 2008] Since Flickr resized my files from 2048px to 1024px making them hard to read, I decided to make a file pack with the articles, which you can download here.

[UPDATE: October 20, 2008] I re-uploded the file pack to a new server, this time it's reliable (thank you, Sql!) :) Sorry to those who couldn't download it earlier and thanks for the heads up everyone! Here's the new link.

As most readers of this blog know, I used to be the editor of Developer's Manual section in SL'ang Life magazine. Since the magazine is closed now, I decided to make all my Developer's Manual articles available here (don't worry, I have the permission to do that ;)). They feature some useful SL knowledge that might come in handy every now and then. Another reason is that my scripting article (the one written for sixth issue of SL'ang Life) got quite popular - it was linked on a few blogs, and I recieved some nice feedback in-world, so I want more of that too ^^. I guess there's always a need for education in SL (how positive!). So without further ado, here are the articles:

SL'ang Life no. 01: It all starts with a cube





SL'ang Life no. 02: Textures explained!





SL'ang Life no. 03: Copy, modify, transfer... velocity?





SL'ang Life no. 04: Your first sculptie





SL'ang Life no. 05: Client parameters





Comments are welcome!

Plopp goes the sculptie

I came across a fun little program (free!) for those of you who want to make simple sculpties without learning Blender or any other 3D software. I'm talking about PloppSL. Creating sculpties was never so easy before.

Basically you have a canvas, where you draw your object (in 2D, just like you did as a kid). Then you flip it, and paint the other side (or just use the same picture for both sides). And then you "inflate" it. Sounds weird, so I'm actually going to make a sculptie and show you what I'm talking about.

Let's say we want to create a sculptie heart. This is what we would draw:



I actually didn't draw it in the program itself. With Plopp you can import pictures (draw them in Photoshop for example) and that's what I did. The program then "inflates" the picture into 3D:



Now you can save the sculptie shape and the texture and upload those into Second Life. The shape you get is not perfect, but these sculpties are great to use as seasonal decorations (hearts, pumpkins, Christmas stars). Here I made Mary Poppins style ballon flight helper:



Just think outside the box and I'm sure you'll find creative uses for these.

The good news is, according to the website, that the program will be developed in the near future, and this includes better conversion to sculpties, adding sculptie preview and support for sculpties with holes. Neat!