New SecondLife.com homepage

[Prokofy Neva]

16 hours ago, rasterscan said:

The chap on the far right is Patch Linden with dyed hair and I claim my 3 linden reward ..

I did note a few weeks ago when Patch did an interview with an educator which you can find on YouTube that there was a Linden literally born that day named "Nix," and I remember thinking, "this is the outworld Linden avatar he will have with a business suit to meet the suits in RL". Of course he may be completely unrelated and Patch himself said nothing to confirm this. I personally am not bothered at all by the Lindens having a fairy and elves side and a RL business side. Why not? As Eric Rice once said when I complained about business taking over SL, "We can't have separate drinking fountains." And I personally raised Cain when the Lindens created a special store, like a Soviet beriozka, where only certain creators in a specia list could sell wares that would be whisked away to closed sims. I think the world has to be open and contiguous. If someone wants a private island, great, and if someone wants to put ban lines up, that is their right, but the world should be conceived as one, a world where you teleport if not walk to other places in it in principle. 

In RL, IBM doesn't go to a special store to buy paper, they buy their paper from the same stores everyone does, only in bulk. And so on.

There should be room for every conceivable human activity.

The reality is, however, that the world we live in, so to speak, is an after thought by Linden Lab. Originally, it was designed to test the Rig, and they blew stuff up. (The Rig was an early sort of Oculus Rift). Then the world was a load test and a proof of concept for the software -- and still is. That's why the Lindens don't mind if spam cars constantly deface sims and don't close off anonymizer web sites that would reduce griefing -- it's basically a Lab, and it's basically an experiment. The idea is to make software that anyone can buy and put on their own server. The Lindens will then own the currency and the Marketplace and maybe a hookup. They may keep "the world" as it is now as a demonstration, like a model home. They made Linden Homes to placate the customers who constantly nagged and griped that they wouldn't attend to the world, you know, give it rules, maintain order, create predictability, which are the jobs of government. LL doesn't want to be in the government or governance or world business -- they are reluctant world-builders. 

The World-Builders and merchants and faire-goers who create Fantasy Faire could probably teach the Lindens a thing or two about what worlds are, but the point is, LL makes the platform for them and all of us and at a very deep level, they don't care about you, your life, your little inworld business, or anything, really. 

Edited April 23, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[Prokofy Neva]

9 hours ago, Orwar said:

   Of course. Why spend €40 on a game on Steam, when you can spend €90 to get it in a box with a map and a little figurine and a limited edition in-world pet?

   .. Or a model onager. 

I have wasted my life.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 4/21/2021 at 2:19 PM, Maitimo said:

Close enough I think. 

As far as I can tell, this look is only possible with Maitreya, as you can add glow to your tattoo layer. I did the glowy eyes with the hud on Catwa Pro but it can be done easy enough with a pair of separate modifiable mesh or prim eyes.

Skin by Plastik (with a tint on head & body), hair by Exile, arm tattoo by Even-tide, dress by Sweet Thing, headpiece by Soedara.

Funny how this ad you worked up is more attractive looking than what the Lindens now have on the front page. But my tastes may have been modified by being in SL for 17 years.

 

[Kyrie Deka]

6 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

did the same thing the Sims 4 did with their last ad campaign. They used

I was thinkin the same thing... 

[Coffee Pancake]

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Funny how this ad you worked up is more attractive looking than what the Lindens now have on the front page. But my tastes may have been modified by being in SL for 17 years.

Looking at simulated human faces breaks your brain.

We're up to our eyeballs in the freakishly uncanny and we just can't see it anymore. Maybe we should be targeting gamers, they at least have the same blind spots.

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

Linden Lab will, always and forever be chasing what they WISH their product was, rather than accepting an leaning into what it ACTUALLY IS. Its all they do. This is just the next evolution of that way of thinking. "hey.....why dont we just outright bulls*it people, maybe a few will stay anyway".

Every decision LL has made over the last decade has been driven by that. Just look at the litany of failed projects. Imagine if that had all been spent on....you know, actually investing in their successful core product. 

Sorry, I know its a dead horse. But Its kinda sad. Like a dildo designer who dreams of being a world renowned artist.

Sorry bro, you make dildos and your other art sucks. Adjust your expectations.

Edited April 24, 2021 by AnnabelleApocalypse

[FairreLilette]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Looking at simulated human faces breaks your brain.

We're up to our eyeballs in the freakishly uncanny and we just can't see it anymore. Maybe we should be targeting gamers, they at least have the same blind spots.

I have to agree.  I think real life humans have too long a chin now.  LOL  

[PixelBerry]

I honestly do not mind the new colors and the look of the page, the video is a work in process so they might be adding avatars in there to mix it up, creating videos in Second life is not easy and that might be the reason they are taking so long to finish up the video, the whole fantasy thing is probably a way to show " you can be whatever you want to be " so adding scifi and fantasy themed people in the commercial is a easier way to show that compared to just adding normal looking people.

It is also possible to make that blue elf, if you are creative enough. And that is a big part of Second life, to be creative and create, have some fantasy etc, I've seen avatars that are way more complex than that blue elf would be.

Also saw someone wonder why they are hanging, they are probably trying to recreate the flying we fellow second lifers do now and then.

In the end I do like the changes, however I do agree that it can be misleading, but most people can see that it is a real person and probably won't expect Second life to look like that, especially if they do research before joining.

[Silent Mistwalker]

4 hours ago, PixelBerry said:

, creating videos in Second life i

That video was NOT MADE IN SL. It was made in a professional studio with live actors.

[Ardy Lay]

On 4/22/2021 at 11:14 PM, Drayke Newall said:

3090TI

Mythical creature

[PixelBerry]

Silent when did I ever say that it was made in Second life? I said that they might be adding parts from second life in the finished video, since they are taking so long to actually publish the finished product.

" the video is a work in process so they might be adding avatars in there to mix it up "

 

Edited April 25, 2021 by PixelBerry

[PixelBerry]

13 hours ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

That video was NOT MADE IN SL. It was made in a professional studio with live actors.

^ Forgot to quote you, but my response is above.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

31 minutes ago, PixelBerry said:

Silent when did I ever say that it was made in Second life? I said that they might be adding parts from second life in the finished video, since they are taking so long to actually publish the finished product.

"  the video is a work in process so they might be adding avatars in there to mix it up "

 

well they should add me, for that cuteness factor mhm *wags tail*

[PixelBerry]

1 minute ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

well they should add me, for that cuteness factor mhm *wags tail*

Yeah they should! 😄 It would be nice if they added different kinds of avatars. I really do not mind them using real people in it as long as they show some actual avatars in it as well.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

  my fluffyness harms no one.  

[Silent Mistwalker]

46 minutes ago, PixelBerry said:

Silent when did I ever say that it was made in Second life? I said that they might be adding parts from second life in the finished video, since they are taking so long to actually publish the finished product.

" the video is a work in process so they might be adding avatars in there to mix it up "

 

 

You didn't and I never said you did say that. It's how I read and understood what you wrote. Apologies for the misunderstanding.

 

Even if they do eventually add something from SL itself it still won't change the fact that they used live actors in an apparent attempt to make a comparison between what goes on in SL and behind the scenes on a movie set. It's not even apples and oranges. There is no connection between the two other than "3D software".

 

[Drayke Newall]

6 hours ago, Ardy Lay said:

Mythical creature

Oh wow, did I write TI after 3090? Lol no I dont have a 3090TI its a 3090. I had a TI before XD.

[PixelBerry]

7 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

 

You didn't and I never said you did say that. It's how I read and understood what you wrote. Apologies for the misunderstanding.

 

Even if they do eventually add something from SL itself it still won't change the fact that they used live actors in an apparent attempt to make a comparison between what goes on in SL and behind the scenes on a movie set. It's not even apples and oranges. There is no connection between the two other than "3D software".

 

I don't know what they had in mind while making it, but from what I understood they are probably trying to say " Make your fantasy a reality " But I might be wrong, they are probably trying something new to see how people react to it, trying to make it a bit different compared to how they did things before to bring new people to Second life, since what they used to do probably doesn't work now days.

Even if the video doesn't really hit well with most, I do appreciate the effort of them trying to bring Second life to light again.

Edited April 25, 2021 by PixelBerry

[Lindal Kidd]

Actually I was pretty impressed with the website that you see (if you're not logged in). After you get past that first page with the blue real-person-simulating-an-avatar, there is a ton of information, although you have to dig deep to find it all. There's an extensive page about SL in work and education environments, and someone is really doing a job to sell SL as an alternative to Zoom meetings.

One could even make a case for the real-person-simulating-an-avatar thing, too. It's one way to portray the sense of immersion that SL offers. Considered as a metaphor and not an attempt to sell the actual appearance of the platform, it's acceptable, at least to me.

[Lizzy Gracemount]

I've been thinking about this since I first saw it. The image seems to mean that you could go from real world cosplay to virtual cosplay. The implication, to me, comes from her arms glowing and seeming to disappear into the background simulating digitalization of the person. Maybe that was their goal here. They wanted to simulate a real person being absorbed into the digital world.

[NiranV Dean]

On 4/23/2021 at 6:30 AM, Drayke Newall said:

HAHA. Yes of course! Flip a scene and have it reflected on a mechanical arm on an avatar that has shine applied to it, all the while the shine not shining in certain places on that arm and reflecting the world around it even though applying shine to an object cant produce a reflection.

You also literally stated in your first post that the SL homepage image wasn't photoshopped and then despite people saying it was and impossible to do in SL without photoshop then link a flikr account with photoshopped images as an example to prove your point to being able to make similar pictures from SL photos.

Also completely ignoring my point about lighting. You even went on to state that that image on the homepage could be done in BD Viewer. I give Niran kudos for what he has done, but no, BD Viewer cant produce anywhere near that quality.

Nice Try.

Can SL images look good? Yes. Not to that extent though.

Not anywhere near that quality might be a bit extreme.

It could come close but it would be incredibly hard and would require an incredible amount of setup and work.

There are several key problems i see with replicating this image in Second Life:

• The avatar itself
• The hair detail (single hair being visible)
• The post processing glow and how its spread out
• The image's softness

Hair

Let's address the elephant in the room, clearly the hardest part is the hair, not only would it require some very carefully crafted hair mesh, it would also require some carefully crafted textures to avoid repetition and have these little patches of hair stand apart. This is by far the hardest part and is completely outside of BD's control, nothing the Viewer could do here.

With hair and alpha comes another issue, ever since Materials was introduced alpha has been bugged and has been polluting the depth buffer with solid surfaces rather than alpha masked like they were before, this has caused alphas (and particles) which should not act as solid surface, act as solid surface and this will create situations where a giant surface with a texture containing a tiny little particle on it will act as a massive solid wall to depth of field, essentially rendering everything behind this surface crystal clear when it shouldn't be. I added an option to ignore alphas which can potentially help with this but will create a different kind of issue whereas solid alphas will be blurred because they essentially don't exist to the depth buffer meaning they depend on their background. These modes cannot be mixed and matched and single objects cannot be separately ignored (which is something now that i'm thinking about it i should look into if that's possible somehow). This will come to bite us later when we apply Depth of Field and will essentially destroy the single hair strands that have been carefully crafted. This is something BD has very little control over and its also a universal issue with rendering in SL and to some extend also everywhere else.

Glow

The second biggest issue i see is the glow, while Viewers offer many options for glow to be configured and finetuned it will be incredibly hard to replicate and make sure that glow acts exactly the way we want it. Since the entire image is mostly single colored (blue) it could also pose a problem to have glow configured to go off on blue light without making everything glow, we're talking about very very tiny precise adjustments of luminance, warmth and exposure values. Also the glow on the hands/arms could be troublesome but this could be somewhat achieved by making them use emissive masking and setting them (or the body) to glow, this should help achieving a similar glow that we would be aiming for in the sunlight. The entire rest of the scene has a slightly dreamy-looking ambient glow, combining this with the hard glow on the hair and arms might be already what's currently not possible unless i were to edit the shader to include a second separately controllable post processing glow solely aimed for the environment (i was already thinking of doubling the post processing glow so we can have actual object glow and ambient glow separately from each other without having one slider essentially choose how much we want to focus towards one of them).

Image

The image itself has this (as previously mentioned) dreamy soft glow and visual look to it, i know of no way (other than depth of field) to achieve something like this, FXAA is simply not nearly enough and even with better AA we would only have a clear picture, not a smooth blurry image like seen here. We'd need an artificial really tiny gaussian blur applied to the entire image. Chromatic Aberration could help to achieve this softer "camera" like look but would require shader edits to disable the progressive increase of aberration towards the middle and make it uniform, with that we might possible already get our desired gaussian blur, but adding a quick one to the shader would most likely be required for better results.

Everything else is simply Depth of Field which should be quite easy to reproduce.

Avatar

Quite possibly the easiest to achieve is the mesh avatar itself, it would need to be specifically tailored for this scene, require a lot of high quality diffuse, specular and normal maps and be split into several UV parts to use multiple of them, highly inefficient but that's essentially what we need, also lots and lots of polygons and exceptional rigging (something very unlikely to be seen in human body content creation).

But this would regardless require a tremendous amount of extra work and emissive maps too. Blender is absolutely required for high quality baked normal and specular maps which would need to be created with the node editor to make sure we're using absolutely top notch PBR stuff. This is required due to the rather primitive... SSAO that SL still has, we'll need to finetune that quite a good chunk and we need to support it with as much detail and information as we can supply it so it does its best to achieve a natural look.

 

All in all i wouldn't say reproducing this image 1:1 is obviously impossible, even with state-of-the-art rendering technology you will always have differences but in terms of SL and rendering we could get close, although at the cost of many many man hours to achieve a single picture. BD could get pretty close for what it is but i'm sure you'd still see some striking differences simply due to replicating lighting color, ambient lighting and such is hard. Most likely though the image sharpness will always give it away, SL would look simply unnaturally "sharp" and clean, too detailed to be considered a realistic image, this is simply due to the absence of imperfections created by how light is reflected, scattered and received.

[Gabriele Graves]

All seems like a mountain made out of a molehill to me.  It's nothing less than I would expect a marketing department to do, especially one under new ownership.

[Waiomao]

I'm rarely on the SL web site, so its home page doesn't bother me too much. BUT the new home page requires a Google cookie to load, and THAT pisses me off no end.

[Eddy Vortex]

27 minutes ago, Waiomao said:

I'm rarely on the SL web site, so its home page doesn't bother me too much. BUT the new home page requires a Google cookie to load, and THAT pisses me off no end.

^This.

Especially this blue bar thingy that hangs for an eternity before taking you to the main home page.

[Eggy UwU]

my two cents on this entire rebranding and new homepage of second life:

as much as i love second life and the "old school" vibes that have taken the marketing of the ways second life does things, by storms for years on end. maybe it's time for an update? 

with the updates to the homepage: if they communicated with the community more and actually took pictures from the second life community, using that to re-brand and make second life more appealing to the newer generations; then i would think people would not have an issue with it as much as they do.

taking this screenshot that someone has previously posted, i do believe it does show the new modern day vibes to second life, which is no issue.
people had an issue with the header considering this was not a picture from the actual community, which they used to do on the old homepage, by gathering pictures from the community, using them as the header to give people the idea of what second life has to offer. 

in the end, i feel that second life should be branded as a system from older times brought into the new modern days of 2021, showing off the old and new in a collaborative world, as we know.