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Orwar

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Everything posted by Orwar

  1. Easy. Create a layer duplicate before doing invasive alterations to it, keep the unedited copy until you're finished the the process and make new copies along the way as needed. Gimp has a healing tool that works fairly well, I use it all the time for seams and glitches. Gimp has several layer modes, I'm not sure if you're looking for any specific ones - making masks by colour and luminance is easily done. Takes seconds in Gimp, too. Easily done. Well, if putting the wagon before the horse is your preferred process, who am I to judge? Also, doing a drop shadow takes seconds at most. You think the Gimp UI is junk, I think the PS UI is junk. The tool set has seen changes and advancements since I started using Gimp - but most importantly, it contains all relevant tools, and if you're missing a tool there's almost always a plugin for it anyway. And I'm not sure about you, but I don't see much point in printing my SL photos? Is that a thing? It will open and export a pretty wide variety of formats, and if you need a specific format that isn't supported in the base setup, again, plugins and converters. Again though, I don't know what type of format is missing that would somehow be relevant to SL photography? <Real Dethklok GIF because reasons?>
  2. Then get a region - after 150 days you'll be saving $2.23 daily compared to renting it. Or if you just want a piece of a region, grab some friends and buy one together and split the land and costs between yourselves. Your argument was that you'd rather rent land through a third party to save money - well, you don't. Land barons don't run charities (well, some of them actually do use their SL income to support charity work - but their virtual renters don't tend to be the recipients!).
  3. Now we just need one with a print for the patriarchy! ... I still don't get what the beef with the Orthodox Church is, though. And yes, that was sarcasm!
  4. But is it a good circumvention for the end-consumer? If you want to rent a region, the pricing for one of the larger land barons is L$17,299/week. If you want to rent a region through LL, it's a $349 setup fee and $229/month for the maintenance - if you rent the equivalent of a full region on the mainland, it's $175/month in tier. To buy L$17,299 (right now) is $69.72. If we break that down: Renting a region through a land baron is L$2,471/day, or $9.96 per day (assuming you buy the L$ for a week's tier at the current rate). If we assume a month is 30 days, the fee is $7.63 per day, meaning you would earn back the setup fee in 150 days compared to renting the land through a third party. Again, going with a month of 30 days, tier for the equivalent of a full region is $5.83 per day. The prices will vary with the exchange rate of both L$ and (for us foreigners at least) the USD, and depending on where you live, VAT may apply. Either way, even with a 25% VAT and with bank fees for currency exchange, if you're determined to own land in Second Life in the long term, going through LL is cheaper. As for whether you want a premium account or if you want to pay for land tier only is up to how much land you want and whether the other premium benefits are useful to you.
  5. There's nothing wrong with 'just kinda tossing it out there'. Sometimes, the best thing one can do is to throw stuff at the wall until something sticks. However, if you wan to show off your avatar (as many of us do), I'd suggest you either consider getting into SL photography yourself or that you consider the blogging route. I do like your style - a very similar top was a very early purchase for Neph:
  6. Well, let us dissect the rhetoric behind this overt Photoshop-elitism, shall we. Appeal to authority. Ad hominem. Faulty comparison. Another faulty comparison. I'm not going to say that you're plain wrong though, because yes, Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard. But if you're just getting into SL photography, PS may well simply be too much - to use comparison as a rhetorical device; you don't need a space shuttle to cross the street: Source But perhaps you can give me an example of a specific photo editing process that one might want to use for an SL snapshot which you don't think can be done in Gimp? I'm genuinely curious, as I've yet to find a photo editing tutorial for Photoshop that I couldn't translate to Gimp with a few simple work-arounds or plugins.
  7. 25K complexity and very comfy.
  8. You will always render your own avatar fully, regardless of how high your complexity setting and avatar complexity is. I wouldn't say that people having a limit below 200K has to do with them just having a low-spec PC; I run at up to 160 FPS at home with full photography settings - there are clubs where it tanks down to 4-6 FPS due to how poorly optimised many places and avatars are. The way I see it, why should I let anyone contribute to the rendering issues when I'm out shopping or listening to music? My getup for shopping and events is 25K complexity and near to no scripts - if others won't be considerate of the people around them, I don't really care to see what their avatars look like. There's some talk about how the Avatar Complexity is arbitrarily generated, I'm not tech-savvy enough to comment on that. But when you've got people whose complexity is >200K and 150+ scripts running, it's obvious that they haven't taken others' performance into consideration - whether it's through ignorance (how anyone could possibly be unaware of their complexity and script time usage by now is beyond me, though) or if they're simply so narcissistic as to not care.
  9. I'm not entirely sure what those are. I made my avatars to appeal to my personal aesthetic preferences, not to appeal to others. Someone should make a long-winded but detailed post about modelling in SL. The modelling bit itself isn't all that difficult, though I'd argue that it requires some building skills - aligning attachments to appear natural (earrings hanging down, if the pose tilts one's head, necklaces and bracelets hanging on the body rather than floating over or through it). But what is a model, really? Someone who's being given free stuff and have their ego stroked, possible but generally unlikely. A blogger who focuses on the blogging, fashion, avatar-styling, contact with creators and all that administrative stuff whilst outsourcing the picture-taking and/or editing to someone else, more probable. Someone who gets tricked into taking their clothes off whilst someone takes a few one-handed snapshots of dubious quality - seems to be what happens to most aspiring models, in my experience. If you want to do a fashion blog and just want to outsource the photography and photo-editing, feel free to browse my Flickr and see if my style is to your taste. If you're looking for a thinly veiled sugaring relationship, happy hunting.
  10. Gimp. It can do most things PS can, and I'd argue that the Gimp community is more inclusive and patient since, well, it's an open source program accessible to anyone - the PS community appear very elitist, almost as if they think themselves the upper class of the photo editing community; in my mind it doesn't matter if you used PS Ultra Pro Deluxe delivered with curly fries and a glass of champagne, or if you used MS Paint - it's the end result that matters, and which way you chose to get there. Just look at the difference between Gimp tutorials and PS tutorials on YouTube - for Gimp you'll usually just see the program itself and someone explains a process by doing it, but for PS there's usually a yuppie behind the largest possible Mac and with a setup of tablets and backdrops trying to look as cool and hi-tech and modern as possible.
  11. Directly translated, word by word, it turns out as 'Your damned/cursed magnificent b*tt'. It's not as easy as that, though; 'ditt' means 'your', but in this context it's used as 'you'. För(e)bannade means 'damned' (the textual spelling is 'förbannade', but in speech it's common to put an e in there as a little bridge between the syllables, giving it a smoother cadence). Now, 'praktarsle' consists of two words, prakt and arsle. Prakt means magnificence, but it's also used as a principal prefix a bit the same as 'arch-' in English (although the direct translation for that is ärke- in Swedish), and arsle means posterior - so a slightly more precise translation of the phrase is 'You damned arch-b*tt'.
  12. Especially if you say something like 'Ditt förebannade praktarsle!' (it also looks awfully funny if you run it through a translator!).
  13. Last time I watched a movie in SL, I waited for 20 minutes for the media to load until a friend pointed out that I needed to actually play the media, and then we had to start over because we were so terribly unsynced It was a hassle! ... And we watched the 'new' Godzilla movie, which was terrible. I suppose I might be persuaded with some snacks though.
  14. There might be, but if you haven't gotten an owl yet ... I think there's one on the first page of the Role Play board, and there's been several before it - I suggest you have a lookie over there.
  15. Oh, that sounds f-- Is that-- It is. The Curry-less remake. The abomination. Never!
  16. Hm, I don't recall being in any way forbidden from swearing when I was a child. Well, apart from that time I upset a nun and got banned from Sunday school. But I thought that was a reward - still do, really. But no, there's nothing in the TOS prohibiting people using child avis from swearing. Excessively swearing might be considered harassment if directed at someone, but that goes for everyone. Besides, English swear words are just cute - especially across the pond where they're spoken in baby-speak.
  17. I have that coat on Neph, never got around to shoot it though. It's from ContraptioN.
  18. As mentioned above, there's a whole forum board dedicated to the topic, but in short (and as far as I understand it); Bakes on Mesh will allow texture layering on mesh in Second Life in a manner similar to the way system clothing layers on a system body do; i.e. you can put textures on top of each other on a single layer. The way mesh and textures work now is you only have one texture (diffuse) layer, as well as the material layers (bump and specular). To compensate for this, most mesh bodies have several layers - Maitreya for example has 4 (skin on the body itself, then a tattoo layer just on top of that, an underwear layer on top of that, and finally a clothing layer); this means that you're basically walking around wearing 4 bodies worth of mesh, and have a bunch of layers whose alphas don't always want to play ball with each other, and when the body distorts through movement the layers may overlap causing an underlying layer to show through (knees and elbows often glitch through applied clothing textures, for example). What it's going to change when it gets out? A lot of people say they miss their own system layer clothing, some creators talk as if it's the coming of the Messiah, but it's difficult to tell whose estimates and expectations are the closest to reality for now (if only because there are so many different opinions and perspectives). We'll see when we get there.
  19. I've got two premium subscriptions running, the one I have on Orwar is basically just for my home - could I be bothered to move, I would cancel that subscription as I receive next to no benefits that are in any way useful; full zones I can do without (and if I want to get into an event, a little bit of patience and a TP hammer goes a long way), the stipend I could just directly buy the L$ I want when I want it, the group cap - well, I've never been close to the basic account group cap since there are so few creators whose business I want to follow that make men's apparel. Premium sandboxes, well, there are public ones so I don't really see the point. On Neph, the group cap increase was probably the driving factor, as well as getting into shopping events easier, and I figured I might as well just grab a quarter of premium before the price was increased. It was a slightly impulsive move, and whether I'll remain a premium member after my quarter runs out I'll decide on when I get closer to the renewal date. Currently, it feels as if the premium benefits are pretty much negligible - to me, the price isn't prohibitive so I might as well. Does it feel worth it? Meh. I'd rather keep up with my favorite creators through Flickr (and honestly, a lot of the groups is just to be notified of a new release - which contains a link to Flickr, which is where I'll go to get my first impression of the product), and I strongly dislike the way events work (there are people there, why does there have to be people there?!) since it's generally just a lag-fest due to horrendous optimisation and people with enough script memory to accommodate an artificial intelligence capable of genuine creativity and empathy. I haven't even grabbed a home with her, and I barely use my own home since my partners and I have more mainland plots between us than we could ever need anyway. I don't have any ideas for what premium benefits could be introduced to make it more worthwhile or attractive, to be honest. There's of course one big one which I haven't addressed, because - well, I've used it once in over eight years; live chat support. It's nice to know it's there, but I can't really perceive an issue where I might use it again. If I have an issue with a product, I contact its creator. If I have an issue with the grid being wonky, I check the grid status or the forums and usually find that it's already being investigated. If I experience bugs, there's years and years of forum threads that can be dug up to figure out what's wrong - and I've been in SL long enough how to debug many types of issues on my own, and if all else fails it's usually answered pretty quickly on the forums anyway. I think that the premium membership offers a pretty broad array of benefits as it is, but none of them feel vital. If I just want one of the features, such as having a home, I'd be better off directly buying the L$ to rent land through one of the many estate barons. Store groups, well, why should I pay someone to keep up with their releases anyway? I follow most of the creators that consistently release stuff that appeals to me on Flickr anyway, and more often than not I see the product reveal there before I see the notice for it in-world. Should LL try pushing premium harder? Maybe, but finding a feature to add which would be universally desired feels difficult. Raising the stipend or land allowance, well, we've had several posts in various threads that check out the math on that and the current stipend on its own is pretty generous as it is; raising it might give LL more consistency in income than people sporadically buying L$ when they feel like it, but it might just end up lowering the value of L$ as a currency as it would accommodate using alts like passive gold farmers (you already sort of can, if you can be bothered to and successfully buy a plot of mainland that you rent out for a decent weekly fee).
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