A tool for creating Sculpted Prims easily

If regarding Sculpted Prims all you need is to create objects with some sort of Lathe tool (like in 3DS Max), then Rokuro might be for you. It was created by Yuzuru Jewell and takes some profile of an object in order to create the full object by rotating that profile by 360 degrees. You can even define if you want a smooth objects or 3, 4, 5 or 6 edges.

Here’s an example screenshot of the editor:

And here is the resulting texture it creates when doing a 5 edge object:

And the resulting prims (one was done as smooth object, one as 5-edge):

Get this cool tool here.

[via Eggy Lippmann]

Technorati Tags: secondlife, virtualworlds, tool, tools, lathe, modeling, sculpted prims, sculpties, rokuro, taotakashi

The Infinite Mind (Updated)

Yesterday night (for me) the second show of the SL version of The Infinite Mind has been taped and held live inside Second Life. Guest this time was John Maeda. As the stage at the Vega event was a bit empty (and unfortunately the stools have been moved after I did setup my camera angles and thus I had to improvise a bit) I thought about improving it a bit and thus Shukran Fahid came up with this:

So I used my TT Lounge Chairs and adjusted them a bit, Shukran added some carpet and finally I did some simple backdrops (low-lag ones ;-). I’ve also put my head movement animations into the chairs so that the head at least moves a bit as if they were talking although lips aren’t of course. So here is how it looked during the event:

The interview itself was again interesting but apparently it was Maeda, too, hasn’t really visited SL before that much. I hope though he does more after that event as it might be of use for both sides.

The most interesting part about this whole “The Infinite Mind” thing is though that they themselves plan a lot in Second Life. John Hockenberry (who actually also has a video blog). First of all who don’t know the Infinite Mind: It’s a national weekly 1 hour Radio program (national means US of course) being on the air for 9 years. It covers the human mind, brain and behaviour.

According to him the sim will be used for the community to listen, discuss and get in contact with the producers of The Infinite Mind. So they want discussion and residents might even be part in the planning of shows. So I am looking forward to what they gonna do there.

Ok, enough talk. The video of Suzanne Vega is finished and here it is:

Watch the Video

Update Aug 7, 2006: Robbie Dingo released his video of “The Queen and The Soldier” which can be found here.

Technorati Tags: secondlife, infinitemind, suzanne vega, stage, set, taotakashi, radio, hockenberry, maeda

Multi Gadgets – to lag or not to lag?

When you own a Multi Gadget then it might have happened to you, too, that you got asked to take it off because of lag. It definitely happened to me which usually results in some discussion whether this really is a lag inducer or not.

Now the same happened to Orlie Omegamu and he went out to do some more scientific testing on it which might bring some light into the dark of MG sim lagging. You can read the whole story here and although no final results is there we hopefully see better results with a bigger number of people.

Looking forward to these!

Technorati Tags: seconflife, virtualworld, taotakashi, multigadget, gadgets, lag, performance, research

HTML is slowly approaching

So the first signs of HTML are appearing in Second Life with the latest update (1.10.1). So if you press F1 in your client today, then a HTML based Help page will appear. This is great in itself as it’s the end of the client internal help pages which never have been that great IMHO. Additionally it’s easy now for LL to update them without updating the client.

Of course people have gone further already and tried to change the homepage shown when pressing F1. Read about it here (Chandra Page) and here (SLOG). It basically explains how to change the settings in your client to achieve this. What’s missing now would be some way to define it via Second Life itself and I actually expect this to happen soon maybe in some different way.

But things do look promising as with the new HTTPRequest in LSL and the addition of showing HTML inside the client might mean that we’re soon having HTML on prims which would be groundbreaking and opening up millions of new possibilities.

For some more analysis of what’s happening or might happen I will give over to Gwyneth LLewelyn and her post 🙂

Technorati Tags: 3d, coding, lindenlab, lsl, media, scripting, Second Life, secondlife, Tao Takashi, taotakashi, virtual world

A new search engine is around!

A new search engine is around! Created by Hal9k Andalso it works a bit like SLExchange or SLBoutique but without selling from the website and instead pointing to the shop in-world.

So here’s the procedure how to put your stuff into that search engine:

• You get a second411 box from Hal9k’s location at Takalo (138,72,401).
• You place that box in your store where you want visitors to appear (they get teleported 1 m above the box)
• You put any items you want to be indexed into that box

It then indexes the names, the permissions and the location of an item (and maybe even more metadata) which is then searchable via second411.com. It lists that information as well as link to the location of the box to which you can teleport then. So this might be handy for people who don’t want to bother with first paying money to some webstore and purchase then. They now can search quickly on the website and still buy in-world.
So it’s a great addition and it’s even free to use 😉 Hal9k also plans to add more features and refactor it (e.g. using HTTP in the upcoming 1.10 release).

So everybody go over to Takalo (138,72,401), grab a box and index your stuff!

Technorati Tags: business, products, Second Life, secondlife, usability, virtual world

Climbing at Pi

So it was only recently that a new version of multi gadget appeared and it added a grapple hook. While you first might wonder for what it might be useful I quickly found out when Timeless Prototype invited me to his land on the Pi sim where he put a skyscraper with some climbing opportunity within.
So in there is a no-flight zone so you actually you have to use your hook to get up the platforms he installed there (and I got invited to contribute some graffiti for one of the walls 🙂

So I actually must say that it was fun to climb around 🙂 and somehow this game was more open to me (btw also like the Samurai Island combat system) than any of the games in Arcadia. Maybe I just like it simple 🙂

Attached are some photos and find this at Pi and look out for that skyscraper of him.

Technorati Tags: 3d, game, secondlife, virtual world, world