Jump to content

Fluffy Sharkfin

Resident
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content Count

    287

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Community Reputation

228 Excellent

1 Follower

About Fluffy Sharkfin

  • Rank
    Advanced Member

Recent Profile Visitors

The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.

  1. Fluffy Sharkfin
    Honesty! Anything else is just icing on the cake.
  2. Fluffy Sharkfin
    The situation is indeed alarming, fortunately the OP is not alone in their concerns and others have already begun ringing the alarm bells as you can see from this thread... Petition against new SL economy policy (of course that was from January 2005, but just because SLs final gasp has been going on for the last 15 years doesn't make the situation any less dire!) Seriously though, for anyone actually worried about the future of Second Life, I'd recommend heeding the words of one of the posters in that archived thread when he said thanks @Cristiano Midnight for the sage (
  3. Fluffy Sharkfin
    Local textures are available in Firestorm, you simply need to open the texture picker in the build window and select the Local radio button (see image below). Once there you can add textures located on your hard drive and apply them to objects in world and every time the texture is changed locally (i.e. each time you save the texture in your bitmap editor and overwrite the original) the texture on the in world object updates almost instantaneously. It's basically a 3D term that's been shortened for expedience, but retopology literally means the rearranging of the topology or "layo
  4. Fluffy Sharkfin
    A commendable goal, and one which other would-be creators should take note of and learn from, SL content would be all the better for it if they did!
  5. Fluffy Sharkfin
    Yes, that seems the most likely explanation. There are two fairly simple solutions to your problem, the simplest of which is one you've already discovered i.e. just avoid applying the texture to that area and have the edges of the texture end just before the deformation of the UV begins. The alternative would be to take that same UV grid texture and add it as an underlying layer in your bitmap editor. Then, using the grid texture as a guide, you can distort your texture so that it matches the distortion of the UV map you're seeing in the last screenshot you posted (in this case it looks
  6. Fluffy Sharkfin
    Applying a UV grid texture (like the one below) can help you discern if the UV mapping is uniform across the entire mesh or if some areas have been squashed or distorted in some way. That will give you some idea of the extent to which you'll need to distort your textures to fit the UV mapping of the mesh correctly when creating custom textures for it. As for deformations that occur due to the shape you're using try rezzing the mesh rather than wearing it, assuming the creator has uploaded it at the correct scale it should conform to the default shape used to create the mesh. A
  7. Fluffy Sharkfin
    Since texture animation works on all texture channels you can make some very nice running water effects using a seamless fractal noise generator to create normal/specular maps & alpha channels, etc and tweaking the UV mapping on your mesh to control the speed/direction of the flow of the water.
  8. Fluffy Sharkfin
    All very valid points and I'd agree that the onus is on LL to fix the issues with the lack of incentivization for creating more efficient content (and conversely the lack of penalization for those creating poorly optimized content). That being said the fact that SL content creators are, as you put it, so "good at peddling snake oil" and are often looked upon by their customers (and SL residents in general) as experts in content creation, I believe they do share some responsibility when it comes to the information (and sometimes disinformation) that they disseminate. A large part of t
  9. Fluffy Sharkfin
    The fact that the additional tails only became visible after being taken into inventory then re-rezzed is curious, and lends credence to the theory that it's using texture animation somehow (since texture animation is an object property that persists after the script that initiated it is removed, but can be broken when taking the then unscripted object back to inventory and re-rezzing it). Sorry to ask a really obvious question but you do have "Select Faces" selected in the build window and you've selected the tail face and not the face that corresponds to the body rather than the tail ri
  10. Fluffy Sharkfin
    I'm not sure I follow your math here Qie, or maybe we're thinking of slightly different methods. To illustrate here's an example tail alongside the uv layout and corresponding texture. As you can see each of the four tails use approximately 1/4 of the texture space (the other 3/4 being transparent). Adding a texture animation with the PING_PONG flag set would cause the tail to appear to move from side to side as that opaque section of the texture lines up with the uv mapping for each segment. Of course the limitation of this method is that you have to use the same texture and
  11. Fluffy Sharkfin
    Some additional information on how exactly you "broke it" may help to shed light on the method being used to animate it.
  12. Fluffy Sharkfin
    It's hard to say for certain without inspecting the object in question but the most likely explanation for what you describe is: The body is one material and has a regular texture on it. The tail(s) are all sharing the same material/texture, but have different uv mapping, with the UVs of each tail being located in a different quadrant/section of the texture map. The tail texture appears in only one section of the image, the rest of the texture is transparent, and the tail "animation" is achieved by changing the offsets of the texture on the tail(s) to change which one of them is
  13. Fluffy Sharkfin
    The basic principle for creating LOD models is pretty much interchangeable between most traditional 3d apps so assuming you're familiar with the toolset in 3dsmax then your best bet is just to find one of the numerous tutorials in this sub-forum on how to make LOD models for SL mesh and follow along, ignoring any specific information regarding the blender toolset (or whatever app the tutorial is based on) and substituting the appropriate 3dsmax tools. Here's a tutorial created by Penny Patton that covers the basics and should help you get started Optimization Tutorial: Creating Your Own L
  14. Fluffy Sharkfin
    The person that posted that image has already said that he did so because that is his personal preference style-wise. He then provided further examples of less stylized and more realistic character models (all of which you seem to want to conveniently ignore so you can harp on about the first image and how much you dislike the aesthetic). As far as animation goes, if you don't like that particular animated gif I suggest you follow the link I posted and read some of the articles, even better do a google search and learn a little about what IS possible rather than just declaring something
  15. Fluffy Sharkfin
    Sorry, I'm not going to explain the meaning of the word "example" to you, go google it!
×
×
  • Create New...