Second Life as a CG creation platform?

[Dillon Levenque]

Browsing the news online led me to an article about Norway making plans to build a ship tunnel—a water level tunnel through solid rock—that would link bodies of water on each side of the Stad Peninsula and save the trouble of going around. The trip will take just as long (you don't go fast on a ship with a rock shore on each side) but it will avoid an extended trip in what is apparently very foul weather much of the time.

You might be wondering what this has to do with SL. Check out this picture, featured in most of the articles I saw:

That really looks like it was done in Second Life, doesn't it? Maybe it wasn't, but the quality of the textures are like pretty basic SL. It isn't a patch on the kind of computer generated things we see these days (I am old enough to remember the term "Artist's Rendition" being used to give an idea of something that did not yet exist) but on the other hand, it does the job, it allows them to show a little movement, and it's practically FREE to use.

It seems to me that Second Life could be a pretty cool place to do artist's renditions. You can even do movies, with people walking around and everything. I await an IM from some high-powered ad agency asking if I'd be willing to allow my land to be used in an advertisement. For a small fee, of course, and I get to keep all the props :-).

 

 

[Dillon Levenque]

Here's a link to one of the articles I saw; google for more if you're curious but I looked at three and all three had that image.

[wiked Anton]

well the ship and water is real, just a cropped photo, but the rest def looks sl or inworldz. I will put my hand up for "locations"

[Penny Patton]

Second Life should be fantastic for artist renderings....but it's not.

Most of SL's creative tools are broken or missing features artists consider fundamental.

 

Beyond simple prim creations, it is actually easier to create content outside of SL and import it and since that is the case you can just as easily (more easily, in fact) import into game engines or render straight out of the software you used to create.

I used to see potential in SL being a capable platform for creating architecture models people could actually walk through, but a host of entirely avoidable issues, from SL's problems with scale to the poor placement of the SL camera, make it an incredibly poor choice for such uses.

[Dillon Levenque]

 

I know from reading your many posts on the subject (and looking at the pictures of your builds that you add from time to time, like the gorgeous four island sim you showed us recently) that graphics is a far more important issue for you than it is for me. Actually 'far' is a severe understatement: I really don't care much either way. I enjoy the visuals in SL but that's not what attracts me.

Both of the things you called out as 'avoidable issues' are easily corrected by using other than default settings some of which you've posted. More than once, if my memory is correct. So while you may be absolutely right in saying LL got the dimensions wrong from the start, that is hardly a showstopper for someone building an artist's rendition. In my opinion neither is working with the defaults. Only a very few trained eyes would notice that the ceilings were too high, the doors too tall, etc.