Codewarrior Congrejo

Could either be the item itself has an issue and leads to an empty entry (many people are having to change from the magic box to merchant outbox system right now, and some things aren't set up right yet) At least your money is not transfered until this step would be finished. or your firewall or a browser addon blocks for some reason this certain page or certain functions on it. Make sure to set full permissions for either of them for the mainaddress of the marketplace. 2 possible solutions: if it only happens with this speciffic item, just contact the creator in secondlife and tell him about the issue with his product, and ask for a direct exchange (linden / product) inworlds. If it happens with all items and the firewall, browseraddons, flash version, and cookies are all allowed and in the latest versions. Try maybe another browser (forefox / chrome both will be fine) and see it it helps. PS: to make sure i checked on secondlife status, but there is nothing about market place being down. Only chat channels are being maintenanced right now.

Heya Rondar, Nalates answer is correct for an easy way to export your current avatar with all its hape modifiers and deformations in place as an OBJ. which you then can edit in Blender. To texture it with your skin, i hope you have the actual image-files (jpg,png, bmp) available. Because you won't be able to apply a skin-item from SL onto your sculpt or mesh. If you have them then it's easy, since the avatar OBJ already has UVs and you just need to apply them. Should you however decide to join it into 'one mesh' / or one sculpt (and not have 3 independend objects linked). There is something in addition you will need to take care of: make sure you create 3 'different' materials and assign them to the exact area of the head, the upper body, and the lower body. This way your object will have in secondlife 3 texture-faces available, onto which you can pull the head texture, the upper body texture and the lower body texture. Cheers, Code.

i see - it was rather a pointy remark / overdrawn example to state a point from your view. Thanks for clarifying : )

These statements confuse me a bit: Maybe i am understanding you wrong here, if so : my apologies - but this here has me 'confuzzled': Let's say a game contains 5 million polygons. You pay like 50 euros for it. Another game contains 10 million polygons, you also pay like 50 euros for it. - the concept of counting a game and its value or price on the amount of possibly appearing polygons throughout all levels and game- /render -time being spend on it is new to me.. - normally you count what has to be drawn within a certain frame or a scene /level. - it don't understand the thinking concept here, to compare values and price with the amount of polygons you possibly will have to render during all your sessions in the game. - and for the 'value' of a game i normally consider things like : available ame time, replay value, mutliplayer or single player, type of game / genre, and of course : graphics and artstyle (and here i don't really count the poylgons in a scene rather the all over optical style and quality as tessellation, mapping techniques and of course the artwork / style itself.), and so on. If you want to place 5 million polygons in Second Life, you have to rent a homestead region, 125 US$. But if you want to place 10 million polygons in SL, you have to rent another homestead and pay twice as much. - i wouldn't really see that as in 'polygons' either. - you rather have to see it as : how much place will it take on a server, how much calculations will it cost the server to handle those objects. As just as we had it with 'prims' and primcount before, that is the factor being taken into account regarding: when exactly is a simulator 'full'. - And i personally would not compare secondlife with the cost of a game. My points for the 'why': - It does not have a limited playtime. Like a regular game has. (20-40 hours average to play it through for your mentioned ca. 50 dollars) - Compared to MMOs: when you watch what some people spend in terms of money on MMOs over the years including monthly payments, and items being bought, that isn't little as well. - In secondlife you don't only 'buy' a game, you rent virtual land, which you can also rent out to others and actually make money out of it. You rent the space on the server. (which is for instance, different from joining an MMO server as Player) - The serverspace is reserved for you, and you can set it up for your likes, rent it out, etc. That is quite different from joining instances in MMOs or having your little personal home there. - you have a full social network along that exceeds the regular Game or MMO forums, and the marketplace also exceeds the common game 'auctions' for trading items. - I could go on.. but i guess you know what i mean by now. It may appear expensive but when you have a look at what dedicated servers cost already for leasing: just an example: type/status/ GB/ Space/ Installing cost/ monthly fee: Dual Xeon E5680 3.33Ghz Unmetered 32GB 1000GB $25.00 $795.00 Dual E5 2690 2.9Ghz Unmetered 32GB 1000GB $25.00 $820.00 And then have a look at how many regions / simulators can run on each core: Class 5 (Quad Core CPU): 4 Full Regions per server (1 per core), 16 Homestead Regions per server (4 per core) Class 7 (8 Core CPU): 8 Full Regions per server (1 per core), 32 Homestead Regions per server (4 per core) common is around 8 Regions (if these values didn't change by now). Let's say we divide the fasted server cost through 8 regions / 8 users renting a part of it. Then we get to around 100 dollar per month. And with a dedicated server we would have to do all the service and maintenance ourself, so this isn't even inlcuded regarding the cost it has to run things. SL has to buy servers as hardware and maintain those. So the prices line up prett much with what you would get when leasing a part of a server somewhere else. They might be a bit on top of it, when the server hardware is older etc. But as mentioned above it includes the ingame and out of game services as well, plus they need to earn some income too, and pay the staff. And as Kwakk already said, and i follow up on this by adding these points, SL isn't really a 'game'. I hope you don't feel offended, i just couldn't really get a hold of your thinking concept here.

to add to all the answers, as long as you can't upgrade your internet connection, try also to lower the bandwith settings for your viewer a bit. Depending on the viewer you decided to keep at the end: > me > preferences > advanced / or network Normally it's best to have around 1/2 of your 'download' speed. But you could try to lower it a bit further. Especially with a slow internet connection too high bandwith settings can lead to many lost datapackages. And might enhance your experience a bit more. additionally since you said it was okay before, but all sudden started to make problems: you mentioned you upgraded your memory. so this is obviously one thing that has changed. you could run a test to see if your new RAM hardware is running correctly: memtest86+ (http://www.memtest.org/ ) (i assume you upgraded your RAM since you didn't say you bought a new computer - so it's worth a try) Also automatic windows updates can include driver updates for graphic cards and hardware, and might have changed something that now doesn't work flawless anymore. Check your windows update log and see what has been running and installed, in order to find the possible cause. And check the windows forums, there are often problems announced that came with a certain update pack.

yeah been having that issue quite often myself or seen happening with others : ) In addition to the firwalls and their own updates - my firewall even detects every update of the SL viewer itself as a new potentially risky application, and isolates it. I don't know why, it doesn't do that with most of the other programs. SL's file signature seems to change signifficant enough to not be associated anymore after a viewer update.

Works fine for me when i open : https://marketplace.secondlife.com/ In case you are getting errors this can have several reasons: - your firewall is , or a browser addon is blocking access to this site - make sure that you allow this website in either of them - Your flash plugins are not up to date - ensure that you update your Adobe Flash plugins for your current browser. - Make sure Cookies are enabled for this site as well. - Or try a different browser and see if you still get the same message. (firefox, chrome will be fine)

Windows 8 is still pretty new. You have forgot to mention your exact hardware specifications, but i can see you are using a laptop. First of, as far as i know older viewers will not run on windows 8. It has to be a viewer based on the SL official viewer code V3. So make sure you try either the official SL viewer above 3.0 or a thirdparty viewer based on this code. The other thing you can try is to run the viewer.exe in compatibilty mode: Right click>Properties>Compatability>Run Program in compatability mode > choose vista or windows 7, or try others as well. Next thing to check is your graphic drivers and make sure they are on the latest update. And since i don't know your exact specifications, please have a look here if your hardware fullfills the requirements: http://secondlife.com/corporate/sysreqs.php Additionally you can browse this forum for "windows 8" there have been many threads with this subject , which could give you more tips on fixing this. PS: if you want to update your information use the EDIT function on your post. Do not start a new thread.

Normally you would request a new password here: https://secondlife.com/my/account/request.php Since you can't access your old email you will need to fill a support ticket : https://support.secondlife.com/create-case/ And explain your situation. Name the account you are trying to access. Be aware that you will be asked to bring valid proof about your identity. Such as drivers license, passport or similar. In future always update your mailadress in your profile and keep your password somewhere safe so you have it accessable. Then this won't happen again : )

In addition to Marigolds good answer, maybe also check your firewall and antivirus. Sometimes when they get automatic updates they tend to block applications that have been formerly allowed again. (i have that regularly with my SL viewer) in such a case make sure to create a new rule / or edit the rule for the viewer.exe, slplugin.exe, and sl.voice.exe again.(and in your personal case possibly also the yahoo messenger) : )

Once you have it, it depends if it comes 'boxed' or in a folder already unpacked. If it is boxed, you rez it on the ground (in an area where you are allowed to rez, like a sandbox ) and rightclick the item and chose open / copy to inventory. (some items say click/touch me to unpack - after doing so, they will unpack into a folder into your inventory) As soon as it is in your inventory also rightclick the items to either wear / add / or attach them. (depending on your viewer it might be also first in a folder called recieved items, if you can't find them have a look there too) Most clothing items have already a defined attachment spot or clothing layer. So this is all you need to do.

i am not sure what others might have 'told' you so far ; ) But in busy times it can take a moment. Or the lifechat might have an issue right now which is not being announced yet. And keep in mind they only have open at certain hours (8 AM to 8 pm ) since i don't know what time you had when you tried it it is worth mentioning it. Try it to contact them again at a later time, and if it does not get better or your problem can't wait: file a support ticket / including the message that you apparently can not contact lifechat.

maybe it is just small, transparent or possibly even underground / under the sim floor. Some objects also set themselves to a certain height. (depending on what kind of object you have bought there) - you could try to rightclick just any object you can see, to get the edit window open, then hold shift and draw a selection around the area where you assume it could be. Watch the showing selection borders if there appears an object that could be the searched one. - If its transparent, try to press CTRL+ALT+T and look for objects that appear with a semi transperant red surface. maybe you can see it that way. - If you have land owner rights you can also have a look into the About > Land tab and look for objects of yours with that certain name and return it to yourself. (or ask the landowner to help you) To avoid this happening again, it might also be a good idea to either read carefully (if given) all notecards that came with this object to see how it places itself. Or to contact the creator.

This seems to be a known issue: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-1002? and unfortunately is still marked as : unresolved

There should be a point to disable called *play sound from gestures* and be here : http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/preferences_audio_tab (maybe still at a similar location in firestorm - didnt check) Personal note: yes they can become quite bothersome. I'm not a really big fan of them either : )

so true ! ; )

okay. Yeah the iMacs aren't really strong computers so the older viewers or viewers based on older code like singularity work better on them.

Regarding their about page - they do support the general windlight feature - http://www.singularityviewer.org/about But i can not find an entry about parcel / region windlight for singularity. Firestorm (the newer phoenix viewer) supports both the new Region Windlight, introduced by LL, and Parcel Windlight, which was introduced with Phoenix Viewer.

It is a rather 'common problem' . The reasons could be that the baking failed, or the cache was clustered, or the streaming data can't be updated fast enough due to your bandwidth settings in the viewer or available bandwidth: http://modemworld.wordpress.com/tutorials/avatar-a-cloud-inara-pey/ In thoses case rebakes, relogs (as you did), or cleaning the cache, changing grouptags etc can help fixing it. To try some options without having to relog, ask them to rebake or change groups or other of the suggested steps in the above given link. Unless they are not playing a little joke on you by pushing their avatars with offset animations out of visual range or similar tactics ( but then you would mostly somewhere see their voice icon or name tag if enabled) : )

ok so I have been busy fiddling with that earth walker model, and wanted to throw the next point into this tutorial, regarding: how much detail can actually be optically preserved on a low poly model - means we don't need 20 K polygons or more to achieve a certain look - Extension 6 - Textures and Lowpoly Model Note: The texture work on it is still not done,but far enough to provide the points I am wanting to make here. 1. ) High Poly to Low Poly On the left side you can see the high poly model with it's 4,5 million polygons. Used to add all the little and medium details, like the drafts, rocks, pores etc into the geometry itself. On the right side we have a model with just 6 thousand polygons (6004 to be precise) - even less then the default avatar has, and a good value for a game model for this kind of engine. And only 2 textures (the textures now taking place to visualize the former real geometrical detail) The textures are a bit brighter because I lightened them a bit, as it will add AO and shadows in SL again and would be otherwise too strong. But as you can see the visual details clearly remain, and showing how easily the eye be tricked in believing certain structural details would be apparent. now let's compare this in terms of rendercost to a basic default avatar (lower right corner): As you can see I am getting away with just 3 K more of render costs compared to the basic avatar, and I am in the green area with my 13670. (and the eyes which are just prim-spheres right now take already 500 of these points) And when you look at common avatars in SL with hair and all texture layers and attachments (prims, sculpties, meshes) you mostly see orange numbers or even up to a scary red color, when being far beyond 100 thousand. When I see discussions about the rendercost and when creators try to defend their extreme values in the red area of above 100.000 Avatar rendercost for just 'one body', with needing all the high amounts of polygons and up to 8 textures for just this one body, (or even more by splitting it into several pieces with each 8 x full 1024x1024 textures), then this is why I say it is obviously wrong and not needed. With the upcoming normal and specular maps for SL, we will be able to take this even further and for all the fine textural detail also have lights and shadows being casted correctly. And i am deeply hoping to be proven wrong in my assumption that many people will just cluster these maps on top of their existing high polygon models - instead of using them the right way to optimize their models even further. This entry here is also in addition to add something many users might be unaware of, and already have been back in the days when they only had prims and sculpties available: 2. Textures , UVs and their rendering cost. I have recently broken this subject down in another forum thread, and would like to repeat it here as well as reference for whom ever might have a look here for optimization of their models. - Drawcalls : textures and models cause so called drawcalls. To explain it with simple words this is the process when your hardware actually draws / renders them. A GPU can only handle so many draw calls at once per frame. (as reference the older Nvidia 600 series could handle 600 drawcalls, newer ones 1000 and so on) So called Drawcall Batching can optimize this, by dropping multiple drawcalls into one drawcall if certain criteria are met. Unfortunately even instances of the same object with the same texture will create a new drawcall whenever one of the object achieves the slightest change (scale etc) - Texture memory: Your Graphic card has to refresh / rewrite / update changing textures in its cache all the time. The more textures it has to load the more full the cache becomes, and the more it has to write and do. Thinking of SL you will most likely know - it's flooded with textures. Earrings, where every tiny prim has its own 1024x1024 texture. In addition we have hair and other parts with tons of alpha textures: Transparent textures / Alphas are actually also pretty cost intense, due to causing several drawcalls, and all the Z-Sorting going on trying to figure what's on top, what's behind etc. - UVs / Material Groups and their resulting Vertices Split: Wherever a UV seam is, the vertices along that seam are duplicated. Wherever a Material / Texture face group splits, the vertices are duplicated. The same goes for smoothing groups. This is the reason why so many people wonder why the count goes up more then shown in their 3D program, when looking at it in the uploader in SL. These splits are happening in the engine / while rendering / calculating etc, and can't be shown by your 3D software. And vertices are seen in terms of rendercost as even more heavy then the amount of polygons. (But of course: the more polygons a model has the more vertices it has in its base already before taking all the 'splits' into account on top of it) If you are interested in what actually causes splits and can have deep impact on render costs have a look here: http://www.ericchadwick.com/examples/provost/byf2.html ) As a conclusion to all of this, I found this had to be mentioned along with the subject topology. In general a good rule of thumb is > think about how much you can already provide by textures, and where you don't need that a certain bump or indent in your actual geometry. And also think twice on how many textures you actually need to cover an object or gain a certain amount of detail. There is a reason that most game assets like full character models are clustered with their dresses, skins and often even also their weapon or tools onto just one texture : ) And modern games are heavily into something called Megatextures, where i.e. a whole landscape and everything in it, is put onto one huge resolution texture. They take advantage of just loading certain areas of the texture into the memory and the reduction in drawcalls (if you are interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaTexture ) However Secondlife can't provide Megatexturing. So keep optimization in mind when doing your texture work. The crazy amount of textures is and has always been one of the most 'lagging' factors in SL. And texture memory as well as drawcalls and vertices are still some of the banes of our graphical existence. Just something more for you to think about when creating, and wanting to provide optimized content to give others a good experience. Cheers! Code.

Hm, Does the same thing happen when you try to parent a new testmesh to the armature? (just somesthing simple as a cube or sphere) if it does that would indicate that there is something wrong with the armature. Unless there are maybe still some interfering vertex groups in the mesh. Check in the Data properties panel of the mesh if there are any vertex groups left, delete all of them, unparent the mesh and delete the armature modifier and with the clean mesh parent it new to the armature with autoweights. If that doesn't fix it - you can if you want - send me the file and i'll have a look at it. (sending you my mailaddi via PM here in the forum) it's easier to see what could be the troublemaker especially when it would be the armature - when looking at the file.

about the shadow : correct, was considering that too, was still doing some tests before jumping to that conclusion. Updated my former post. Because now I also have tried to enable all checkboxes in the alpha layer- which is mentioned as taking each bodypart out of the baking process. And even with those enabled you still throw shadow, and also the textured 1000 remains, which shows the geometry is still there, and just rendered as transparent. Im curious if that will change when they have the sever side baking included.

I'm afraid though that the number of laughs is matched by the number of "wow that has to be the best looking car in SL" 's. Maybe it's dirty race tactics, making sure you have a great computer so you see things the way they should without lag, then distract half the other people with laughter and lag the other half into driving off the track. that statement brought a big grin into my face, lol

sometimes it's the smalles things going wrong and making us believe something big is messed up until we figure it ^^ Glad you already found what your problem was : )

Okay i'll try too to explain you what's going on: Problem 1) the sharp edge - as Kwakk already said: ..the sharp edges you can fix. I don't know how it's called in Blender, but you need to make sure every polygon is in the same smoothing group (no hard edges).. - make sure to select your mesh or its subparts (like each doughnuts, and the plate) in editmode, press A to select all faces at once and in the toolbox (left side) press once solid and then smooth button. This will ensure that the whole surface has the same smoothing going on. - should you be using smoothing-modifiers delete those. Problem 2) why it is darker in SL - Also here Kwakk gave the correct answer, SL has its own material / shader. - Depending on the viewer settings it also adds Ambient occlusion and on ultra settings with shadow enabled even a shadow on top of it. (that's why AO bakes should be very decent. - The way how blender renders it, depends on many things: lights in the scene, the AO method, Global Illumination playing in, bouncing lights , shadows and much more. (and rendering a szene is a different thing from baking a certain pass as texture, because there you have only that one pass on it's own) - To see how the outcome in SL would be is actually to apply your textures, set the material in its settings to 'shadeless', and switch the viewport shader to 'textured' (not solid) > this will give you the best insight of how it will look in SL approximately (but as said above, SL will add AO and shadows too, so keep that in mind) - And rather have a look at the texture darkness and colors itself than how it's being rendered in blender. Problem 3) Why on earth is it baking most of the donuts black? - Ambient occlusion is calculating light radiation based on the proximity of the surrounding geometry / faces. Its a global method, where the illumination at each point is a function of other geometry in the scene. (AO is independent from light in scenes) - Thus your plate and the the doghnuts themselves create stronger AO spots, where they 'touch' each other diretcly.The closer the objects are or possibly even intersecting the darker the AO in these spots. And the the whole of the doughnut has also 'close' nearby geometry thus has stronger influence. - Additionally it depends on your Ambient occlusion settings such as : gathering method and the sample rates, fall off and normalize etc. Those define how 'strong' the AO becomes / thus how dark and also how grey the all over outcome it will be. - AO maps are normally used as soft overlay over the Texturing for an object, for engines where no AO is produced insides the engine, or to strengthen the effect a bit should AO be already there. Mostly this is done to reduce rendering costs. Some possible solutions: - A settings-independent solution would be to move the objects more apart when doing the AO bake. - Different AO settings: make the most soft AO bake you feel good with, (based on the above mentioned settings) and /or use it as overlay (multiply or overlay) with low opacity over your final texture. Edit: look at Drongles reply he has made a good refference which settings have which influence. - You could also take your AO bake and manipulate the texture in an imageditor to make it brighter (adjust image brightness / contrast etc), and possibly even add a small blurr, or multiply it with a white background. And heres a video tip for AO baking: http://cgcookie.com/blender/2010/07/06/tip-baking-ambient-occlusion/