markkemp

I've written some guides here: http://www.downloadtexture.com/using-textures-efficiently/ http://www.downloadtexture.com/how-to-use-materials-efficiently/

I have designed a sequins material that some advanced designers are starting to use in their clothing. This will react to the angle of the sun and sparkle just like real sequins: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Sequin-Textures-Full-Perm-DT-Material-Collection/6305288 I've also made a sparkles material: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/16-Sparkles-Textures-Full-Perm-DT-Material-Collection/6210891 I realise you said you were on a budget. But I thought I'd explain some of the posibilities of how they are doing this. Have fun with your wedding :catvery-happy:

I'm not sure I would link your pool water to the build at all. Most professionally built houses come with rezers that rez out various parts of the linkset and allow the owner to move and rotate the house while still unlinked.

1) Make the floor with 4 different linked meshes (or 9, etc). 2) Divide your AO into segments to fit the floor meshes. 3 Overlay your seamless floor texture over your AO in photoshop. 4 Apply textures to each of the segments in turn. And yes, you can get some seamless wood floor textures on the SL marketplace that will tile very well indeed.

Scripts have an event that runs on startup. That event also triggers after a sim restart I believe. If the script contains a "default" texture that is set when that event fires, then the textures will change. It might also be triggered by a timer event. :matte-motes-evil-invert:

It could be said that I know about about textures yes If you're making mesh buildings you'd have to make texture maps that correspond to your UV maps. Yes you can upload images and them apply them to objects. Problem is (I believe) that mesh objects can only have 1 texture of 1024px, so even if you pack your UV islands really well it would be quite low rez if you were texturing a whole room. Better to make seperate meshes for pillars, walls and so forth and then build the actual structure inworld. You can of course have a plan in your 3d software of what you are going to build.

It might be worth considering outsourcing certain things like textures. Then you can concentrate on the building aspect and be more productive with your workflow. Just a suggestion though.

Grunge maps, masks.....and lots and lots of layers....

No, I have built an animated water texture with about 30 frames (each with diffuse, normal, specular). But LSL currently does not support the changing of normal maps. Sadly I think they expect it to be used as a tool for griefers to crash peoples' clients.....:matte-motes-impatient:

I use some invis prims with the material textures already loaded onto their surfaces. That acts as a buffer for that problem. Or is that 1 second buffer a different issue? :matte-motes-smile:

To me it sounds like you're looking for some kind of ambient occlusion effect. You won't achieve this even with advanced materials turned on and the use to the right material textures. You'd need to use materials AND make a model in blender with the ambient occlusion baked in. Sorry to be the bringer of bad news but the "good old way" is not necessarily the "best looking way" anymore :matte-motes-smile:

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Tools-and-Technology/bg-p/blog_technology They have been doing some huge improvements to the technology behind the scenes...nice to see...

Well people are slowly upgrading their PCs so it will become more the normality over time hopefully :matte-motes-smile:

Established norms for your brand + Instinct about the product + How much coffee/alcohol you had this morning......

Yes it is possible to set repeats........but (read on).... No, the animated textures system is lacking in SL to say the least. Plus there is the fact that for every frame of the animation sequence you are effectively dividing the texture resolution by four.....with a 1024px cap it makes it pretty much impossible. Water would require at least 16fps I recon. I have developed a powerful script that will animate textures at 1024px resolution. However, currently there is no LSL support for llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast on normal an specular maps. My script currently displays the diffuse map animated, but refuses to animate the normal and specular maps. They are supposed to be working on enabling scripting of normal and specular maps but nothing new recently. I fear maybe they have moved their focus onto another project. Currently I use a scrolling animation in this product. This type of animation you can set repeats, as I remember..........If you overlap the animated textures and use alpha layering you can effectively get something very close. Of course none of this is really optimum. Ideally they should have provided a proceedural animated water shader for prims. I suspect the shader already exists, because they use it for sim water - the sim water is just a region sized prim anyway!!! But I believe they have not done this specifically because of the performance costs. Everyone would go nuts with 3D water..... That's all there is to know on this topic right now I believe. The water I've made is basically as good as it gets for now sadly. When they broaden their scripting support for materials more will be possible and I'll be updating it to a frame based version!

Yes it is possible provided you have the advanced lighting model feature enabled under your graphics settings. Anyone with high graphics has it enabled automatically. There are some screenshots here if you want to see what it looks like: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Realistic-Animated-Water-Texture-Full-Perm-DT-Material-Collection/6153371

Alas, you are possibly right. Maybe I just like to see the best in people - particularly my customers...

It would be almost impossible to misinterpret. But like you said, if it was possible in any way the customer might have made an honest mistake. You cannot make assumptions about what a customer does or doesn't think or do. In this case I am certain the person made an honest mistake. As a general rule I would say 99.99999% of customers are honest, and just want what they think they paid for. That's what I mean by keeping your pride in check. :matte-motes-smile: On a final note. I would say that no matter how technically/artistically skilled your products are. No matter how clear the marketing and description is about what you are selling. You will get negative reviews. Even 1 star reviews if you sell enough units of a product. You can only make up for that with good customer service that gets those 5 stars.

I find dealing with customers in SL is a bit of an artform. I've refined my "rulebook" over time from some other businesses I have ran in SL. One thing I have learned is never let your pride create an unecessary/disproportionate dispute with a customer. And also that a negative situation is just an oportunity to create a positive situation. Like for example. Recently I was contacted by a customer who had bought one of my texture packs for 99L. He complianed that he thought he was buying a different texture pack (one that cost 499L) because it was featured in a very minor way in one of the sales images. Even though 99% of the images featured the cheaper textures. It started when he wrote to me with basically a threat to leave a negative review unless I gave him the more expensive texture pack. Now my pride was telling me to ummmmm...........but my experience told me otherwise. When I spoke to him it turned out he was actually very poor and couldn't afford the more expensive pack. To him 99L was a vast fortune. Maybe he had made a mistake. Or maybe he had just bought it fantasizing that the more expensive textures would be included. Either way he was just another human being on the end of a computer. I gave him the more expensive texture pack for free. And he left a very positive review on the 99L pack he had bought. I didn't even have to ask. So you see by turning my pride "inside-out", I turned a negative into a positive. I don't pretend to be some genius that always gets it right. I am definitely still making mistakes with customers. But by communicating and setting my pride to one side I find things can often go better than expected.

I would IM them and then copy the IM to a notecard and send them the notecard as well. That way they are guaranteed to get it. Plus if they check their emails they will get the IM notification too. Best of both worlds. Some very large merchants have helpdesk ticket systems on their site too but that is very rare. Usually they will tell you how they want to be contacted on their profile.

3D coat is a software I think a lot of designers will soon be using because of its powerful sculpting tools, easy interface (sorry I find zbrush horribly confusing) and support for painting materials onto mesh surfaces. (series worth watching)Workflow would work as follows: 1) Sculpt out your creation 2) Paint it with 3 layers (diffuse, normal, specular) 3) Export model as collada .dae file. 4) Import the .dae into SL as well as your 3 UV map textures which should contain diffuse, normal and specular information. I have some advice on my site about what resolutions to choose to avoid straining people's viewers.

I would not assume linden created game assets are the best available. The lindens leave me constantly in awe with this virtual world they created. But they are not the best at making game assets. There's some incredible talents on the SL marketplace worth checking out. Probably some free stuff better than LL assets too. The only thing I would say is that trees etc are probably hosted with the native viewers, so probably don't have to be downloaded. One benefit I guess. Please correct me if I am wrong on that. Just a usual case of value for money I think.

I totally understand what you are saying. :smileyfrustrated: But the marketplace back-end is very very slow to use and if you have 100+ listings updating the SLURL can take several hours of work. I personally would make sure I fixed all SLURLs. But there are many casual creators that just do it for fun. I say yes, factor that into your buying decision definitely.....but also realise merchants are not doing it to you out of spite. :matte-motes-stress:

Well, at least they were working with some real merchants. I feel good that there is a manual migration as frankly I don't trust my listings to some random linden person. Sounds like there was some consultation....... :matte-motes-shocked: And yes, the merchant outbox is the bane of my existence and I have always wondered why I couldn't just put it in a special folder somewhere in my inventory. It's all just different databases after all anyway.....

All part of the fun of Second Life :matte-motes-sunglasses-3: Try typing in very small adjustments into the vertical and horizontal alignments. That's how I usually do it. Make sure you have them to the same scale though or it will never align. Or you could use planar mapping like these guys are advising to do. I never like to use that though.