Christhiana

AdamZadig wrote: thanks for the feedback, really good. One thing i noticed was the clouds! But i turned them off from being rendered but so far no problems at 2000-4000 feet. The first time the clouds came over it was like a fog. looked pretty amazing! If you derender the clouds, that doesn't mean your customers won't see them... One more thing. If you're near the corner of a sim, going up will make things such as prim drift worse.

AdamZadig wrote: So i noticed the SLOCCA badges on some brands and decided to apply but after two weeks of no response im assuming theyre busy or dont accept new/small brands like mine. If they don't respond to new apllications it makes me wonder how serious that group is about itself in the first place. But I really like the idea of having a badge confirming the content was made 100% by me. I guess because I spend hours/days on each little item. I made my own but I would rather be part of an official group. What do people really feel about these logos and groups? I don't think a badge of some group will make much difference from stating in your ads that you pride yourself with only making 100% original content. You can ofcourse start your own group but that would mean having to openly research every creator and his/her creations in order to give your mark any value. You have to wonder if you're willing to spend the time...

I would say now is a good time to switch to another system before they go offline again. I know caspertech has migration tools for migrating from hippo, but they rely on the Hipposervers being online. I don't know if others have a migration tool as well but trying to use them after the Hippo servers go down would be pointless.

I had the same issues when I first started building in SL. The difference being that I could and did use advanced lighting. When I first turned off ALM I was shocked at how terrible my builds looked to someone without ALM. No shadow detail and at some angles and lighting conditions all physical details seemed to disappear. After lots of reading and experimenting with shadow prims (basically a flat prim with an alpha texture of a shadow on it) I found the only way to get a good and realistic effect that works good for most graphic settings is to use baked Ambient Occlusion (NOT baked shadows). I first started out using blender and primstar to make my own sculptmaps with baked AO. Not much later I switched to making mesh (which is actually a lot easier then making sculpties). So I guess you have to ask yourself if you're willing to spend the time to learn how to make your own sculpties or mesh. If not, I think you have done about all you can (except for maybe using shadow prims, which doesn't look all that great to begin with). If you do decide to go the route of using an external modelling program I would suggest starting with blender. It's a free program and has some nice features for moddeling for SL. There are lots of tutorials on how to use blender (both in general and SL specific) to get you started. If your going with blender take your time to master things in steps: - First learn how to make objects in blender, learn the use of the basic sculpting tools. - Learn how to UVunwrap your model. - Learn how to texture and use materials. - Learn how to bake textures with AO (Ambient Occlusion). - Learn how to export from blender and into SL.

Part three is out as well... quite a hilarious conclusion to the series

It's just good practise that when you're not using the alpha channel to remove it from your textures. This goes for diffuse as well as normal and specular maps. Targa can have an alpha channel as well. After upload the image gets converted to jpeg2000 with or without alpha channel. Texture memory in SL is limited so every bit helps.

I suspect the problem is with the physics model of either your house or the balcony. If you have your physics models generated by the uploader that might be the cause. Be sure to analyze your physics and check the model in the uploader before uploading to SL and set them to prim afterwards.

Even though your problem is fixed now I would still recommend reuploading your textures without alpha channel since this will noticably reduce their filesize making them load faster and put less strain on your system.

Glad to hear it all worked out! Besides me not being very good in explaining things I thought the other thread would be a good read. It contains so much more information besides the solution to the problem. I know that "Holy Grail" feeling.... when I got the vertex normals doing what I wanted them to do I ran through the house dancing and jumping!

I think your problem is with the vertex normals on the edges of your object. I ran into this problem as well a while ago. There are solutions though! I'm not very good at making long posts that actually make sense so I'll link you to the thread I started about it. It contains some good information and solutions to your problem! https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Visible-seam-when-connecting-two-smooth-shaded-pieces/td-p/2921479 Good luck!

First off, I think free linden homes for everyone would be a very bad idea... What is the one thing that keeps LL from pulling the plug on SL? A healthy economy they can make money off. Giving everyone a free linden home would cost LL a lot of money. They have to take the costs of running the servers for all the free homes. They have to provide support for them as well. They will miss out on sim rentals from the land barons who will take a big hit because of the free homes as well. Then the problem is multiplied because people will start to create five alt accounts so they can have 5 linden homes to put all their stuff. I do have a better idea for the linden homes though.... Move some or all of them to abandoned parts of the mainland. Create some small themed villages making mainland look more atractive in the process. restore some of the roads or create new roads connecting these villages and perhaps other interesting parts of the mainland. This way LL could save some on server costs and invest that back in fixing up mainland.

This has been coming for a while now. They have stopped responding to support tickets ages ago. It was only a matter of time before their services stopped working altogether. I'd suggest switching to CasperVend. It works better then Hippovend. They have great support as well!

I would suggest you have a look at the builders brewery. They have some good (free) inworld classes on creating mesh.

Even if you set the avatars on your parcel to be invisible to outside avatars, they still appear on the minimap. There's no way around that I'm afraid.

When I created my first avie (2007) I went to the freebie dungeon where I spend hours digging through boxes to see if there was anything usefull in there. Later on I went to the freebie warehouse. With my second avie (2013) I found the freebie galaxy and I was blown away with the quality of the free stuff at the time. I have two premium accounts now and don't shop for freebies anymore. Nowadays with lots of great freebies on the MP I think it has had it most usefull days. The place tends to get very laggy when crowded. But a place I'm very thankfull for nonetheless!

I have my LODs on different layers as well. Whenever I want to duplicate and move them I select the layers the models are on to all be visible, select the objects with box select (b) and copy them (shift-d or alt-d) and then move them. I don't know about grouping or parenting options, I never use those.

When you bake the interior lighting onto the texture it works best to set them to full bright. you can keep the outside of the building without full bright so it will work with your windlight settings.

You're very welcome Marcov. I love the song about tinies, had me laughing!

This link works, great song too! Thanks Dres...

The Duran Duran video seems to be blocked for my country (NL). No other one on youtube either.

Whenever I'm working on the beta grid and don't have my parcel stream to listen to I like to listen to a collection of songs I've found (mostly) about SL. Some of the lyrics have me lmao everytime I hear them, so I thought I'd share them with you. These are the songs I've found so far: Avatar, A rockstar parody - Foolish Frost https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX6uLlWdxZo Lindens Lament - Foolish Frost https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_HjFVFkSe4 Second Life - TARSHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epkPUDHv76E This Second Life - David Huckvale https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV0aMfrBtGo Do you wanna date my avatar? - The Guild https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urNyg1ftMIU Second Life confession - Ey Ren https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIomyanWmEg Second Life is where I want to be - Niko Donburi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7LxRZ-saUI If you know of any more please post a link...

Thank you so much Arton! I didnt know about how mipmapping works. That explains a lot. I managed to get the effect down to an acceptable level by baking the textures with a 0 margin and setting the background to a grey color between 128 and 144 value. I'm still tweaking the grey color to get the best result. the boardwalk textures are also in grey and colored by the face color in sl. If only I would have asked 2 days ago... The 6 parts to the left are with the newly baked textures, the three on the right are the old ones. A big difference already!

I'm having another problem with the modular boardwalk system I'm creating that I cannot seem to solve. Maybe someone has a solution for me, or at least can tell me if this is expected behaviour. I am creating a modular boardwalk system that has a length in multiples of one meter so they can be easily aligned with the snap function. When I connect two pieces together the edges where they connect look fine upclose. However when I zoom out the edges of the boardwalk seem to get "wider" showing a thicker line where the two connect. It gets more visible the further I zoom out. The textures of the boardwalks have no alpha channel and are baked with a margin of 6. In the image below the edges are where the lamp posts are. It still looks good from this distance. In the image below you can see how the edges start showing when zooming out. The distance between the planks are the same everywhere as you can see in the first image, but when zooming out the seem to get bigger. I did notice that if I use the alpha channel to create a transparent background and set the margin to 0, everything looks fine upclose but when i zoom out a small transparent seam appears between the two edges as if the texture is scaled down a little more then the face it is on. The same happens when I have a texture repeated in the length of the boardwalk (dividing it in 2 sections and mapping the two parts on top of eachother on the UV map to save on textures). I really hope someone can shed a light on this because it's driving me nuts.

Regarding the physics, could it be that you have physics type set to prim on the betagrid and convex hull on the main grid?

In blender, make sure you only have the object selected that you want to export to dae. Then in the exporter check the box labeled selection only.