Optimum Actor

The collar would only change the underlying skin colour (which helps establish which podling it is), which would be set as the colour of the neck object. It wouldn't be changed much so I could set that manually. A machinomic is actually a comic rather than a video made in-world, so that involves static shots rather than video. But because that's the case there's more empasis in expession and body language. That being teh case the 2nd option - responding to touch was what I thought would work. That code looks good, but I don't know how to find the Link_Number or integer face.

I'm creating a new set of characters for my machinomic Seconds. They are all alien type clones and only differ by the colour of their skin and clothes they wear. Their head is an attachment of a linkset of two spheres - the face (base of the linkset) and the neck. The neck is slightly smaller than the face and is set back slightly from the front of the face. The face has a 128 x 256 px texture that has the expression of the character, which is mostly transparent except for details like eyes and mouth and wrinkles, and this is positioned so that it faces front and back of the head in relation to the character. The neck has blank texture with a colour that determines skin colour, and because it's set back slightly obscures the second copy of the face texture (the combination give the effect that they are wearing a transparent helmet). The concept is based on the Salad Fingers avatar. Now what I'm trying to do is load a head with several textures for different emotions and toggle through them by touching the head. I have ones for blank, sleep, anger, fear, sadness, surprise, joy, and disgust (the basic emotional states) but I might have less or more of these depending on th story. I can change the expression and skin colour manually by editing the linkset but it's time consuming to do so. I know I can add the expression textures to the linkset or face prim, but I don't know how to swap to the next texture when touched, nor do I know how I can determine the texture face in the face prim to replace. I suspect if I added the collar (see above) to the head linkset, I could put a script in that so that if touched it, the skin color would be toggled in the neck but once again I'm not sure how to do that either. Can someone point me in the right direction(s) on this?

So very true. I've learned most of that in the last four years I've been making "Return to Secoind Life". Along the way I came to realise that many of these problems match those in TV and film productions. Sourcing locations, sets, props, costumes and organising shoots and people, while managing a budget is what Producers, Directors and others all do on those for real world productions, and we do as well in Second Life. I've also come realise that making either also involves lots of "modding" as well as building - buying cheap stuff for modification as props, and then re-using them in ways not expected by the seller! For example, I bought a set of pipes for a set I was building which also hade a couple mesh "rivets", and these did double duty as flashing lights on a helipad. Also, there's a difference between most builds and sets. A regular build in Second Life might be static and more or less permanent, but a built set exists only for one or more scenes - so it needs to be stored and rebuilt for later use. I've sorted tout that issue recently by using Builder's Buddy to store scenes - it's free, open-source and works. A boon for continuity in my stories. Machinomics may have one advantage over Machinima - you can do it with less people. Because it's static shots rather a video shoot you can take your time setting things up. Actors can be posed for an exact scene, and if you're doing it by yourself you can can actually do it it with a camera lock and one avatar (though that's an awful lot of mucking about).

LepreKhaun, it turned out not to be so bad after all. The linkset I had to search was a complex of six rooms + fixtures and furniture. I knew that I made certain prims like walls and windows so they were eliminated, and then I went room by room (after I unlinked everything) and relinked individual bits of furniture and tested each one before re-adding them to the linkset. The offending items turned out to be a mesh chair, the castors on another chair, and the testure of the back plate of a wash basin. I deleted the chairs and swapped in a new texture on the backplate and it was fine.I was able to take a copy and put everything into a Builder's Buddy (I added the texture on the box for my own reference): But you're right about pre-checking permissions. I started adding COPY and MOD filters for stuff bought on the marketplace but the chais and wash basin were things I already had and I forgot to check them. Sometimes things aren't what they seem as well. I bought a mesh wind turbine for the build which was marked COPY MOD on the Marketplace, but when I rezzed it the only way to get a copy was to Take it back into the inventory. When I contacted the seller they said that it was a fault with the inventory server and that there was nothing wrong with the product (caveat emptor obviously)! I shall have to learn to make my own sculpties and mesh. I've been looking at In-world makers and exports using Singularity, but it seems clear that this is more of art than a science, asd the post about geometries above indicates. Plus it seems that exports can be improve with a little editing in a program like Blender (I've noticed the latest version's interface is much improved).What's been holding me back is that as yet I don't have a good understanding of either mesh or sculpties. The in-world tools look like fun but it may be that they could be redundant if I use an external program instead. This build though has shown me the real motivation of doing either - cutting down prims to a minimum. Deleting those chairs got rid of 20 prims! If I learn to make my own then builds should be more managable and less laggy in future.

That was very informative. Even though Photoshop can't made mesh directly it does have other uses, like creating textures the old fashioned way. It's not the only 2D graphics editor I know that plays with 3D models - I also have Manga Studio 5. I've also played around with "Fake Baking" and strange plugins! But it's abundantly clear that even if Photoshop could do more, I obviously don't know enough about Mesh yet to know the difference. I browsed Youtube after I asked the question and found this... ...so there are probably better ways to use Photoshop here, like texturing the map made in that tutorial. I should probably go off and learn lots more.

Very good. Oh, I forgot to mention Jenny Everywhere's Infinite: Quark Time which looks very much made in Second Life (or alternative grid). The character Jenny Everywhere makes some appearances in Seconds as well, but then she's a open-source character and appears in a lot of other comics as well (though not neccesarily machinomics).

After reading "Second Life Avatar meshes in AC3D and OBJ format" on the Best Tools and Scripts for Second Life page I discovered that I can load and edit OBJ and DAE files using the 3D functions of Photoshop CS5 and later. More details on Photoshops 3D functions at A Basic Guide to Photoshop’s 3D Tools. I have a LOT more experience wiuth Photoshop than I do with Blender so I'm interested in investigating this. Has anyone here had experience in doing this, not only for clothes or skins, but also with creating textures for mesh objects?

Does anyone else here make Machinomics? This is like Machinima but instead of creating a video you make a webcomic. Most of disciplines in Machinomics seem to be the same as in Machinima, only you do a photo shoot rather than a video shoot, and post-production tends to be with Gimp/Photoshop rather than a video editor. This avatar is part of athe Seconds webcomic crew that makes the webcomic of the same name using mostly Second Life. I'd be interested in hearing about other's experiences in making comics using Second Life.

I was afraid that might be the case. Fortunately because the build's been done about 2000m up, I can just slide that linkset away from the rest of the build before unlinking it. I also suspect that the smart thing to do would be to use the "Edit Separate Prims" option, select everything and then deselect the base before I unlink everything. It'll all be unlinked anyway, but this should preseve the name and scripts I have in that. Building right certainly has that learning curve. I bought one or two items that seemed just right and claimed to be mod / copy, but really weren't (you could copy them only by rezzing the original and then then taking that into the inventory as a no copy / no mod version)! Traps for players I guess.

I've been making a big build. Ithas several linksets and I'm in the procedure of taking copies of each linkset into my inventory to later put in a "Builder's Buddy" (for rezzing later). Everything's gone to plan so far except the last linkset which refuses to allow me to take a copy of it. I can only assume that at least one of the objects in the linkset has a "no copy" on it. I was careful in buying or building objects that were COPY / MOD (Transfer doesn't matter since this is only for use in my group). But, I could have slipped up somewhere along the line and used one (or more) that was NO COPY. I have about 221 objects in the linkset. Is it possible to place a script in the linkset that would go through each object in it and flag which ones are NO COPY? Or perhaps there's a workaround to this, rather than selecting each one at a time to check?

LepreKhaun that script's perfect!

Steph, that would probably work but it has a few problems. It means I have to edit and upload an extra text with those alpha holes and I still need a 2nd prim for the lights. It was mentioned before by someoneone that I could use a mesh prim in several bits but with only one face. I found a "rivet prim" in a pipe set I bought, which has four parts set at the corners of a square. All I did was resize it and lower it to just above the floor and I have one light pretending to be four. And I don't need an edited floor texture, so I can use any texture for the floor. That pipe set also has an "8 piece rivet" prim as well, so I can use the same technique for a set of eight lights.

When you stop it don't stop the loop but change the loop to include one frame, the one you want to look at Um, that's what I thought I'd done in the revised script. It seems to work, but sometimes doesn't. Also, I happened to find a "Rivet sculptie" with four rivets at the corners of a square, which were perfect for the helipad lights. Because there's several helipads I needed one for each, with a slightly different colour code: I think the texture animation works quite well, because all I need to do is slot in the appropriate textures to animate, I don' have to change the coding.

But isn't this using the same texture? I'm only going by what others have said. I might have anywhere up to about 20-30 lights on the top deck, so this is important.

Did some more playing around. Still not used to LSL syntax. Anyway the revised script is: integer amIOn = FALSE; // Default to OFFdefault{ state_entry() { // Set the "off" texture if the script is reset, because the state resets llSetTextureAnim( ANIM_ON, ALL_SIDES, 4, 1, 2, 1, 1 ); llSetPrimitiveParams([ PRIM_FULLBRIGHT, ALL_SIDES, FALSE, PRIM_GLOW, ALL_SIDES, 0.0 ]); } touch_start(integer num) { if (amIOn == FALSE) { // We were off and someone touched us, so turn on amIOn = TRUE; // Set the "on" texture llSetTextureAnim( ANIM_ON | LOOP , ALL_SIDES, 4, 1, 1, 3, 1.0); llSetPrimitiveParams( [PRIM_FULLBRIGHT, ALL_SIDES, TRUE, PRIM_GLOW, ALL_SIDES, 0.20 ]); } else { amIOn = FALSE; llSetTextureAnim( ANIM_ON, ALL_SIDES, 4, 1, 2, 1, 1 ); llSetPrimitiveParams([ PRIM_FULLBRIGHT, ALL_SIDES, FALSE, PRIM_GLOW, ALL_SIDES, 0.0 ]); } }} And I replaced the 3 colour texture with a four colour texture: I did that for two reasons - even numbers should work better than odd when dividing up a 256 wide image, and by doing it this way I don't have to use PING_PONG, which only seemed to work once. The results were a lot better, though I got odd results when I stopped the animation. Sometimes you get a frame, and others you get the unanimated version of the four colour image. Not worried about that because I can hide this by changing shape and rotating the texture.

Actually I've just noticed that the animated text version does two loops and then stops, so I must have to add something extra there.

Your On/Off toggle is fine. That's a nice simple light switch, useful any time you need to swap one set of conditions for another. Glow = 20% is way overkill. I'll never understand why LL set the range of values the way they did. You almost never find a situation where you need glow > 0.05. Even that can produce a radioactive effect. It's hard to know exactly what's making that strange yellow line. It doesn't look as if your texture has standard dimensions, though, so it may be a an edge effect of the resizing that happened when you uploaded. For a simple texture like that, you shouldn't need anything larger than 128 x 256 pixels at most.

I'm putting together a build that's a "Sky Warehouse" and it has several heliports and and other areas where flashing warning lights - lights that alternate colours (say red/off/white/off//red/off/white...). I'm an extreme noob when it comes to scriptions. Ideally the colour of the light itself should change but from what I've read this can cause lag. I've heard that swapping texxtures is better but have no idea how to do that. I was thinking that the sequence above could be mimiced in a sequence of four coloured textures set to full bright and glow: red / grey / white / grey (again) and that when the light was turned off it'd go to grey with fullbright and glow off. That way I could set up different colour sequeces for each type of light. Only problem is that I have no idea how to do this? Suggestions please.