Scooter Hollow

The most important thing to fix with SketchUp files is to take it into Blender and do a Remove Doubles on all of the components. Also, in addition to sketchup files sometimes just not importing at all, sometimes the scale will be ridiculous, and it will be so large you might not even see that it got imported. SU is definitely a lot easier to learn and use than Blender, though, so there's some value in using SU for some things and Blender for others.

You can use public domain images (such as http://www.public-domain-image.com/) but I don't know of any public domain sources that have already done the texturing work for you, you'll need to put out your image editor and cut them up yourself.

Gaia Clary wrote: Some of you think that a change of the TOS can not happen because even if they wanted to do , LindenLab can not provide the necessary attribution for CC content due to technical and practical reasons. If they changed the TOS back to what it used to be, LL wouldn't be in a position where they needed to worry about attribution anymore. They would no longer be claiming the right to take the content and re-distribute and re-sell it elsewhere and everything else. Attribution for in-world exchanges would be handled by the uploader.

Yea, I think we're past the point of asking LL what they mean. It doesn't matter what they do or do not say in chats or forum posts or whatever, the TOS would have to be directly changed.

I haven't been real thrilled with their responses on the topic so far. The best we've gotten is that they have no 'intention' of doing any of the things that prevent us from using 3rd-party content, but so far this intention hasn't gone so far as to re-word the ToS so that we can legally go back to using them again. I'm no lawyer myself, but I don't see how the ToS being retroactive would be at all workable. Even if everybody had perfectly understood the ToS the very first day they went up, and everybody who had ever uploaded 3rd-party content had never logged in again (which would have been their only legal option in a retroactive interpretation), all of that content would have still been in world and still been used by other people. There would have to be two classes of content no matter how you sliced it.

Terms of Service wrote: Except as otherwise described in any Additional Terms (such as a contest’s official rules) which will govern the submission of your User Content, you hereby grant to Linden Lab, and you agree to grant to Linden Lab, the non-exclusive, unrestricted, unconditional, unlimited, worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, and cost-free right and license to use, copy, record, distribute, reproduce, disclose, sell, re-sell, sublicense (through multiple levels), modify, display, publicly perform, transmit, publish, broadcast, translate, make derivative works of, and otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of your User Content (and derivative works thereof), for any purpose whatsoever in all formats, on or through any media, software, formula, or medium now known or hereafter developed, and with any technology or devices now known or hereafter developed, and to advertise, market, and promote the same. The key words are unconditional and unrestricted. Requiring an attribution is a restricting condition. Edit: The ToS are not retroactive and could not be, from a legal standpoint. It only applies to content uploaded after the new ToS went up (August 2013 iirc).

Drongle McMahon wrote: I think the situation with CC BY licenses is unclear. The TOS requires you to waive YOUR attribution rights when you upload, but it doesn't say anything explicitly* about third party attribution rights. So I can't see anything in the letter of the TOS that stops you uploading a CC BY asset, as long as you attach the required attribution. If that is so, then when they proceed to exercise the other rights they claim, they are presumably still bound by the CC BY attribution reqirement. However, that's a very odd situation. They would be free of attribution requirements on content that was entirely yours, but bound by third party attribution requirements for content you got under the CC BY license. I suspect this is a drafting error, as it appears to be inconsistent with the evident intent is to be free of anyone else's moral rights with all content. I am not a lawyer. So none of this constitutes legal advice, It is merely puzzled reflection. *or implicitly, as far as I can see (which isn't very far, of course). You cannot use CC BY in SL under the current TOS. Either you have to be the owner yourself, it's public domain (CC0) or almost public domain (the owner allows it to be used commercially and without attribution and to be re-sold as content etc etc etc). Second Life is not bound by the CC BY requirement because when you upload it, you are claiming that it has no such requirements. Or rather, they're only bound to remove it once someone files a complaint about it being uploaded against the TOS.

Perrie Juran wrote: Scooter Hollow wrote: MIstahMoose wrote: RL property seems silly to bring up when your Sim rests within an expensive server box. Servers are extremely expensive and how SL works is very intensive to run and have up to 50 avatars in real time. You're paying for the cost of server, maintenance, bandwidth, support, etc. Not property value. The problem seems to be the distribution of those server costs. In an MMO, you can have hundreds of people in a spot at one time, but those costs are spread out to $10-15 a month per person (on average, or maybe less depending on how much of a free-to-play MMO it is). The MMOs don't go, okay, we've got a couple hundred people in this city hub, and these five guys are making the most off of the auctionhouse, you five need to pay for the subs of at least thirty people each. But aside from that I can't help but feel the costs are hugely inflated from what they should be. I might not go up to 50 people, but I can run an opensim server for a couple dozen on a local machine for essentially free, and if I wanted to go bigger with it I could rent out an amazon server for what I'm pretty sure is a fraction of the cost. There's no way it should be costing a thousand bucks to set up a sim. First of all, right out of the starting gate Open Sim really had no or very minimal start up costs. Essentially the software was handed to them on a silver platter when LL made the Viewer open source. How many millions of dollars in R&D are you benefiting from for free now? How much does Open SIM still benefit for free from LL's R&D? Secondly, what are your support costs? If your local machine goes down, how much will it cost you to replace it? How much are you paying for Bandwidth? How much are you spending on Legal Counsel to ensure that your business is in compliance with Federal & State laws? Tax Attorneys are certainly not cheap. While my personal take on things is that SL does earn a healthy profit, I still don't think it's as huge a profit as some people like to make it out to be. Most who claim it's a cash cow seem to ignore that there are more costs to running SL than just having a Server with some software on it. 1. I find it silly to claim that SL is still trying to recoup the costs of initial R&D after, what, more than ten years? The occasional patch (including work they get for free) is hardly worth hundreds or thousands of dollars. 2. The cost of replacing my machine is the same as it would be whether I was running a server on it or not. And...legal counsel? How much am I paying in legal counsel to run a minecraft server for some friends? How much am I paying in legal counsel to play Wildstar? Tax attorneys? I want a place where I can create with my friends, not open a competing business to LL. I feel like you seem to be under the impression that I want to create a virtual world system as a company or something, but I'm just a user who wants to make stuff.

MIstahMoose wrote: RL property seems silly to bring up when your Sim rests within an expensive server box. Servers are extremely expensive and how SL works is very intensive to run and have up to 50 avatars in real time. You're paying for the cost of server, maintenance, bandwidth, support, etc. Not property value. The problem seems to be the distribution of those server costs. In an MMO, you can have hundreds of people in a spot at one time, but those costs are spread out to $10-15 a month per person (on average, or maybe less depending on how much of a free-to-play MMO it is). The MMOs don't go, okay, we've got a couple hundred people in this city hub, and these five guys are making the most off of the auctionhouse, you five need to pay for the subs of at least thirty people each. But aside from that I can't help but feel the costs are hugely inflated from what they should be. I might not go up to 50 people, but I can run an opensim server for a couple dozen on a local machine for essentially free, and if I wanted to go bigger with it I could rent out an amazon server for what I'm pretty sure is a fraction of the cost. There's no way it should be costing a thousand bucks to set up a sim.

I don't know if I agree about creating multiple classes of users, especially by potentially subjective definitions, but I do feel that Second Life's pricing structure is one of its biggest problems. I work in OpenSim, and every time I feel tempted to take a look at moving into Second Life I take a look at the prices, and decide there's no way I'm getting that value out of that money. Although even that's a moot point since I can't see myself switching over for as long as the current content TOS are in place.

With Sketchup, one thing I do is use an obj exporter (I believe it's this one: http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=33448 , been a while since I grabbed it though). The obj files seem much cleaner when moved to blender. If I do use collada, the biggest problem is usually that I have to do a Remove Doubles on things.

I don't know if you have more of a workload that would make it unfeasible, but for something like the example picture I'd probably just fix it in gimp. There's no details in the problem area, just a slope, so it'd be relatively easy to get the correct colors off a simpler image and fill them in.

It requires UV mapping. You would first want to mark seams around each face (in this case, the shelves, doors, etc). Then unwrap it. Then comes possibly the tricky part, where in the Blender UV map you would want to arrange each 'island' to overlap for all of the surfaces that share images, one corner for the shelves, one for the doors, etc. Then when that's all exported, you use the UV map to paste your individual textures into the proper places and scales on a single texture. The rough part can be lining up the islands right, depending on how well you seamed and how Blender unwraps it. Note that I'd guess in this example there's probably only 4 or 5 actual different images, so you could probably do it the individual material way as well.

Madelaine McMasters wrote: Scooter Hollow wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: Trinity Yazimoto wrote: Ebbe Linden wrote: But, the edge cases and the potential cost to us in certain scenarios are quite substantial. im still wondering what are those "edge cases" you are talking about .... and what are those "certain scenarios" . What are they and what is the probability for they happen for justifying such paragraph in the TOS (what doesnt say anything else but LL can use our intellectual property as they want) LL's IP policy reads almost exactly like Google's. It's not suprising that the law can't keep up with technology. Almost nothing can. I think the best we can hope for is that LL explains their intent. I think a lot of the heat generated by the change in TOS is the result of mistrust caused by lack of communication. I found life a lot easier when I told my clients that I didn't quite know what I was doing, but I was working with them than when I just kept my mouth shut and let them wonder. When it comes to managing IP in a digital world, nobody quite knows what they're doing. Unfortunately, intent is irrelevant when it comes to using content from 95% of the content sources out there. LL could give an extremely convincing, stirring speech about how they will never use their content for their own purposes, and it doesn't matter. Legally we cannot use non-public domain content, or content otherwise not given away virtually entirely license-free. If you can craft Terms of Service that address all these concerns, yet protect LL, I'd love to see it. I'm not happy about the state of affairs in IP management (look at the hot mess that is patent law), but I've got no solution. Trust in intent may be the best we have at the moment. ...How about the ToS they've been using right up until August?

Madelaine McMasters wrote: Trinity Yazimoto wrote: Ebbe Linden wrote: But, the edge cases and the potential cost to us in certain scenarios are quite substantial. im still wondering what are those "edge cases" you are talking about .... and what are those "certain scenarios" . What are they and what is the probability for they happen for justifying such paragraph in the TOS (what doesnt say anything else but LL can use our intellectual property as they want) LL's IP policy reads almost exactly like Google's. It's not suprising that the law can't keep up with technology. Almost nothing can. I think the best we can hope for is that LL explains their intent. I think a lot of the heat generated by the change in TOS is the result of mistrust caused by lack of communication. I found life a lot easier when I told my clients that I didn't quite know what I was doing, but I was working with them than when I just kept my mouth shut and let them wonder. When it comes to managing IP in a digital world, nobody quite knows what they're doing. Unfortunately, intent is irrelevant when it comes to using content from 95% of the content sources out there. LL could give an extremely convincing, stirring speech about how they will never use their content for their own purposes, and it doesn't matter. Legally we cannot use non-public domain content, or content otherwise not given away virtually entirely license-free. Edit, to give a little more info: I work for a company that creates virtual worlds for paying client organizations. We've been leaning towards OpenSim over SL since the beginning, due to things like control over the servers and such. But the current TOS is basically the final nail in the coffin. Under the current terms, we essentially cannot work on Second Life, as A) we would have to produce every single texture and model from scratch ourselves (very time consuming and expensive) and B) all of that expensive work would be given to LL for free as soon as we uploaded it.

Using a normal or a displacement texture, you can create a bumpy mesh in Blender. Some recommended steps: 1. Start with a regular diffuse texture, with your pits colored in in whatever form. 2. There's a Gimp plugin that will get you normal maps from an image, you can probably google it. 3. To make a displaced mesh, you can use a normal map, but normal maps often have a lot of small details you don't want in a displaced mesh because it would explode the size hugely. Note that you don't neccesarily want a displaced mesh at all, I've been playing with it recently in OpenSim* to neat effect but I haven't seen anyone else doing it, and a Normal map may be enough in a lot of cases. You probably want to make a displacement map from scratch, a simplified form of your diffuse with black and grey where you want the pits to be. 4. In Blender, take a flat plane mesh, go to edit mode, unwrap it, subdivide it a few times (my computer here can generally work with up to 16k verts, maybe the 66k subdivide before it gets crashy). Go back to object mode, add a new material, add a new texture, set it to image type, and input your displacement map. 5. Add a Displace modifer. You'll probably want to drop the strength down quite a bit. If you need it more tiled or offset, you can adjust it from the texture mapping settings. When good, apply the Displacement. 6. You'll probably have a lot of leftover verts you don't need anymore. Add a Decimate modifer, select Planar, and the default 5 degrees should probably clean it up enough. Viola, a displaced mesh that you can then upload and then apply your normal map to for even more detail. Here's a one example of what I've been playing with. The bricks are a displaced mesh, with a normal map on them for the smaller details. The door is also a displaced mesh (could've been done with prims, but I was trying things out). *Side note, I started playing with this since we're working for some OpenSim users who are tied to a viewer that doesn't have materials yet, and I wanted to see if there was something else I could do.

The main problem is that the August TOS allows them to, if they wanted, bundle up all the textures and models and everything else and sell/redistribute that content. This goes against virtually every content site's licenses that I've seen (free or pay), with the exception of stuff that's fully CC0/Public domain. Anyhow, to answer the question, Blender almost always works for me. Sometimes I even import other daes to clean up and export it from Blender (SketchUp daes for example are always twice the size they should be).

The main advantage of Sketchup over Blender is that Sketchup is far easier to learn to use. In the long term you can spend time watching hours of tutorials on youtube, but if you want something simple, today, like 3d text or an architectural pillar or something, sketchup is pretty handy. One reason to use mesh versions of simple shapes is you can assign the UV mapping. If you have a UV texture of a box, uploading one and slapping the texture on it may be easier than trying to manually align all of the sides correctly.

The rights LL claims are non-exclusive, meaning the uploader still has the right to use them themselves and give them to other people. It's pretty much the only right they didn't try to take. If the bvh file is converted on the viewer side then the server never gets it. Which isn't to say the animation is entirely worthless, but it'd be less so than textures and mesh models.

Morgane Batista wrote: Now that LL changed their TOS this year that gives them rights to everything we upload and can be used by them for advertisement and all. What does it mean for poses / animations creators? Does that mean that LL could pick any of our animations / poses from the server without purchasing it in-world and use it to make their own pictures or videos to promote Second Life, without our permission? I know we have kinda no choice but to accept their TOS to continue to use SL, but i would be mad if i learned that LL would use any of my creations without my permission, of course it would be an honor in a way to have a product chosen, but to not ask permission to use it?! I'd prefer having them ask me to offer them poses for ads, i'd even give them for free but i'd want to know about it. Just to point out, LL could have always done the things you mention there in your post. The difference with the new TOS is that now they could open a website called www.animationswestolefromMorganeBatista.com and sell them for money (among other things).

Textures need to be uploaded separately, though colors will usually be included. Edit: I could be wrong about needing to do it separately, although that's how I've always done it.

I have seen at least one case of this, where a blue navy digicam texture would get compressed on a military jacket and actually look green. Turning on Full res textures in the Advanced menu or rezzing the object separately in world would get it to correct itself. Which isn't entirely ideal. Not sure if it was something about the setup or complexity of the model that kept it from showing the regular texture to start with.

Hmm. That's...good, I guess, but it does directly contradict their official terms...

Actually Imageafter is not allowed, as by uploading those textures to SL you're telling LL they have the right to redistribute them, which they do not. (LL isn't currently running a textures site, but they could now if they wanted to). This is the same reason we can't use CGTextures. Public-domain-image.com/ is another fully public domain site, though.

Toysoldier Thor wrote: Flea Yatsenko wrote: ... With the old TOS, LL was completely handcuffed when it came to people reporting content. If they removed it without getting a DCMA, IIRC people were saying LL would actually get in trouble for it. That problem is now gone. LL owns it now and if they think it's stolen (or they want it gone for whatever reason), they can actually remove it because it's theirs and they're free to use their property how they want to. It's a lot of power given to LL and I don't think I've seen this point made. It's up to LL to use this for good and not evil, but considering LL runs off of user generated content, I don't see them intentionally using this for evil. Just to clarify the wording... although I believe I know what you are saying.... LL does not technically "OWN" the content but they have 100% full rights to do with the content what ever they wish to do with the content - including their rights to delete any instances of the content on their servers at their discretion. But I am not 100% convinced that this new power will in ANY WAY change or improve LL's motivation to clean up illegal uploaded content. They are NOT the IP Owners of the content nor does their position change as to the enforcement of content ownership dispute and remove as requested by the owners of the IP. Since they do not own any of the content - just have full rights to it, if a dispute were to arise from the SL community that 10 or 20 residents say.... "LL... this content on MP is stolen content because I know the real owner - remove it", LL still is not in a position to legally arbitrate who actually owns the content. This is still up to the IP owner to come forward formally and tell LL "I am the true owner and here is my DCMA instruction telling you to take actions on the SL grid on my behalf". IF LL were to change their role, they in effect become the Virtual World DCMA. I don't think LL wants this role. Just my thoughts. Correct, these changes don't affect their ability or willingness to enforce copyright laws in any way. They don't own anything, and the rights are non-exclusive (LL can do whatever they want with the content, but so can anyone else who's been given rights to the content). I also strongly suspect LL can delete content at will whether someone asks them to or not, and always could. There's no guarantee that uploading something means you can access it forever.