Andy Greenstein

Loco Mycron wrote: Yes like any business, if you buy in bulk from the supplier you can negotiate good discounts. This is what I was assuming. Thank you!

Nova Convair wrote: 7000 L$ a week is not 28000 L$ a month but approx. 30300 L$. (how many weeks has a year hmmm?) That is a little below 125 US$ but of course you can't make any money at that rates, but loose a bit. So a big landowner either gets a rebate or has quite a number of grandfathered sims to keep things in the plus. I'd be interested too in how that works. Good point. Thanks for the reply.

Loco Mycron wrote: I bought my Homestead Sims back in 2007 / 2008. At that time the monthly tier was $75 / month. A few years later, the monthly tier went up to $95/ month for the people who were paying $75 and new buyers after that time had to pay $125/ month. The same tier rates apply today. The term used for the regions which are old enough to incur the lower tier rate are called “Grandfathered”. When Homestaed Sims were priced at $75/ month - they only had 1875 prims available. When the cost went up -the prim allowance increased from 1875 to 3750. Ah, that makes sense. My account is actually from 2004, so I have the gradfathered stipend of $500 L$ a week. If I purchase the quarterly or yearly subscription I actually make money because of this. I hadn't considered this would apply to land as well. Thanks.

Just had a quick question. I noticed most homesteads are going for around 7000 L$ a week (or less), which equals 28,000 L$ a month. This is about $113 a month USD. How are they making any profit, considering it costs $125 USD monthly to simply pay for the Homestead?

Ah, it was the particle burst radius. It was set to .5 and when set to 0 it lines up perfectly. Thank you all for the help! :matte-motes-big-grin:

Hello everyone. I recently modeled a coffee cup in Blender, got it textured and decided I wanted to add a bit of steam to it. After walking around the Particle Laboratory learn a bit I came across a free steam particle script. I've altered it to be just how I want it, however I am running into an odd problem and I have no idea how to fix it. As you can see (hopefully), my steam particle isn't originating from the coffee cup. I've tried adding the script into the contents of the entire cup, and I've tried adding the script to the contents of each individual part of the cup with no luck. When I use the same script on the box prim beneath the coffee cup, the steam comes from the center of the box, so I'm not sure what is causing it. Any idea how I can fix this? EDIT: I just tried to add it to a box below the coffee cup, and the particles start well above the box now. Maybe it is something with the script? The box is just a cube prim and the particles start above it like with the mesh coffee cup. The steam you see on the coffee cup is from the cube below it.

Oh LillyBeth! I'm sorry I missed your comment. Thank you so much! This is exactly what I was looking for. I had a general idea this is what was happening, but didn't know where to begin with it. You have helped me out a LOT. I just saw this post and I need to get to bed, but I will be messing around with this more tomorrow. Thank you again so much. :matte-motes-big-grin:

Hey thanks for the link. This is all way above me head to be honest, haha. I think I am going to have to give up on this one for now maybe. I really have no idea what I am looking at. EDIT: Got it! Because they are linked, I just needed to put the script into the linked object. The problem was that llSetPrimMediaParams(0 should have been llSetPrimMediaParams(2. I found that here on the wiki. I'm not even sure what that is or what it means, I just tried it and it works perfectly now. Is it just like an id? So llSetPrimMediaParams knows which function to execute? Thanks again both of you! default{ touch_start(integer total_number) { llSetPrimMediaParams(2, [PRIM_MEDIA_CURRENT_URL,"http://google.com"] ); } }

Thank you very much! I think I got the script working, but the problem is, I have 2 prims linked. I need to touch 1 prim (the TV frame) and have the other prim (the TV screen with the media face) execute the command. Is this possible? When I just try to put the script in the linked object, it doesn't work. The little clicky finger pops up when I hover over the frame, but when I click, it does nothing. Or maybe my script is not correct. I'm very new to scripting (this is my first script) so that is a possibility. default{ touch_start(integer total_number) { llSetPrimMediaParams(0, [PRIM_MEDIA_CURRENT_URL,"http://google.com"] ); } }

Hello everyone. I'm creating a web based television and I am having a bit of trouble. I currently have 2 prims for the television linked. 1 is the actualy TV screen with the media on the front face, and the other is the frame. What I'm trying to do is have the homepage reloaded on the media prim when I click the frame of the television. It doesn't neccesarily have to be menu driven or anything. The llLoadURL only seems to open the webpage in the external browser.

Hey everyone. I was just wondering if there are any settings I should be changing around in order to get a better TV viewing experience. I have a great television in game that works flawlessly, although I've noticed with certain streams it can look choppy, or a bit laggy (I would call it a stutter or micro stutter). It's just enough to be annoying and distract me from the movie or TV show. I run SL just fine on max settings so I've tried to turn everything to LOW to see if that helps but it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. I have my bandwidth set to 3000 and I've tried 1500, 10000 and everything in between. I have a 50mbps down 30mbps up connection and it usually tests quite a bit faster than that. I'm thinking maybe there are some settings, debug or otherwise that may help me. Any ideas?

Thanks everyone! This was exactly what I was looking for. I've got some basic thing going on now, but this should help me take it to the next level.

Hello everyone. I've made myself some items I'd like to offer for sale, and I'd like to be able to place a border around images of them with text information on the product like it's name, price, land impact etc (hope someone knows what I'm talking about). What are these called? I'm trying to look up techniqes and tutorials to improve the ones I am making. I'm trying to make the text look better and what not.

Chic Aeon, I somehow missed your message. This is exactly what I was thinking. You can see that the shadows don't conform to an actual light source. "So EITHER the object was mapped (assuming this is mesh and not a prim build) so that each face took the WHOLE 512 texture (that would be done in a 3D program)" This is what I am interested in doing. Right now my textures look bland and odd because of the way the faces are just overlayed one large texture. I'm trying to get each face to map the whole texture but I can't figure it out in Blender. I'm not even sure if it's possible. I realized I could just assign a different material to each face then upload the textures into SL and apply them there, but we are only allowed 8 materials per object. I guess I could just import the piece as multiple objects each with 8 materials, then combine them in SL. More testing is needed I guess. Thanks for the reply.

Ah yes, I've actually started messing with that. I'm going to keep playing with it to see what I can get. Is there any way to display the texture on each face independently in Blender? Right now my mesh looks unrealistic because it looks like one solid object when there should be seperations like you would find in real life.

I;m just getting started with modeling and texturing, and I'm now trying to find ways to improve my textures. Right now my textures are pretty bland. I'm just assigning a texture to my materials and leaving it at that. I have messed around with normal mapping and stuff, but it only does so much. I'm interested in how effects like this are created: As you can see, they shaded it very nicely. I'm not sure how this is achieved. Is this something that is done in a program like Photoshop, or do they paint that all directly onto the mesh? Also, how do they get the texture to apply only to one face? By that I mean, each face has it's own full size texture, where as when I do it, it just lays out the texture over the UV map, and any of that type of material maps wherever it lands. It's like they have the full texture for each face. Are they assigning these in SL or making a UV map? I know there is no way to know this person did specifically, but I see a lot of pieces with nice shading like this, so I'm just looking for some generic advice. I don't even know what to look up for tutorials on how to do stuff like this. Could someone point me in the right direction?

Thank you, I will keep those things in mind. The good news is I'm learning a bit more everyday and learning from my mistakes. Now if I could just stop making new mistakes everything would be great... :matte-motes-bored:

Bah, dang normals again. Got it, thank you. :matte-motes-big-grin-wink:

Ok, now that that is solved, it looks like I have another problem. Now there are no faces on my object when I import it into SL. It actually looks like there are, if you pan around. It's like 1 side is translucent, while the other isn't.

Ok, the normals needed to be recalculated. Just solved every problem I was having. Not sure why I didn't think of that 3 hours ago... Hope this helps someone else.

Hey everyone. I recently built a dresser and I noticed after uploading that the feet on it are black. I checked the UV map and sure enough the texture I have assigned to them isn't baking on. You can see the mapping of the feet on the bottom middle, and they aren't mapped over anything, just black. I've tried reassigning the material to them, creating a new material and assigning it, restarting the whole process and more, but nothing seems to be working. I just ran into this again on another project as well. Any idea what is causing this?

Well my god that was simple. I actually ran across this feature a couple days ago but completely forgot about it. Well that's 3 hours I'll never get back, but at least it's resolved, haha. Thanks so much! Oh an by the way, keeping the Level of Detail on Low keeps it down to 1 prim as well.

Ok thanks for the replies. I got the railing working great yesterday, and got it installed and everything. After several more hours of work I've completed the flooring and the stairs. Now that I have pretty much everything installed, I figured I better extend the railing 90 degrees along the floor parallel to the stairs. I created the model in Blender and it came out great. Well it came out great except for one thing. Invisible box of death!!! Clearly a physics issue, so I enabled the physics render and saw this: Since finding this, I've tried everything. Every quality physics including "From File" using the mesh physics and it still comes out like this. I have no idea why this is happening. In the upload preview, the physics looks completely fine. I know I can just give it no physics and attach an invisible object for the collision, but I'd like to figure this out anyways.

Hey thanks for the reply. As for having the railings linked together and then the lighter woods linked together, they actually already are because the way I made them had them setup that way. That being said, I still am not sure exactly how I would get the texture onto the object. If I export the model as 2 pieces (1 piece the lighter woods, 1 piece the rails), will it still be 1 piece in SL or will I be able to add 2 textures to it once in SL? Or is this not what you are talking about doing? Thanks for the reply, like I said, I'm completely new to this and it's all a bit overwhelming! EDIT: I got it! http://i.imgur.com/ZSoJwxi.png I did what I mentioned above. I imported it with the 2 sections linked seperately and then in SL in the edit menu I noticed the "Edit Linked" function which allowed me to edit the pieces seperately. Is this what you were talking about doing? EDIT 2: Here it is installed! http://i.imgur.com/aqermql.png I won't lie, I am pretty proud of myself. I was so surprised it fit so perfectly as well. I did measure beforehand, but I'm still happy to see it come out so nicely. Next up, staircase

Hello everyone. I've been trying to build my own railing for a loft I am installing in my new linden home. I've actually done quite well (at least I think so for my first mesh), but I am getting held up on this last part! I've got the textures on, I've joined all of the pieces and scaled it all. This is what it looks like when I render the image: http://i.imgur.com/8BbnPGu.png So I export it as COLLADA, and then I try both the SL+Open Sim Rigged and Static, and I've also tried checking the "material textures"option, but nothing seems to work. I can import it into the preview grid just fine, but the texture wont show up. I keep hearing people talk about "baking" a texture to the model. Is there something special I need to do? I am "rendering" it, but that just seems to be more of a preview than anything. I'm brand new to modeling so could someone explain in to me like I'm 5? In the simplest way possible?