Rick Nightingale

Should that say "Double-sided"? (Took me a minute... my brain instantly thought double sized (2048x2048) textures, then got stuck on that as I read the rest, then went AWOL.)

I've used the the nVidia normal map maker in PhotoShop, and Photoshop's own, for years to make normal maps. For simple things it's fine and can make some nice results, but anything complex can take hours of playing about with different parts of the image: inverting some, masking others, increasing/decreasing contrast... thank LL for local textures! Sometimes I've even made a model in Blender just to generate a normal map for something else. Can't wait to play about with PBR when I get chance (currently fixing the RL roof then insulating the loft). One question that keeps bugging me... I suppose our existing diffuse/normal/specular textures are still going to work after PBR is introduced, are they?

That does sound somewhat similar. I have a dedicated SSD for SL... when I get back later I'll scan it, and maybe run a memory scan as well if I can find my memtest stick. Just in case.

This has happened now three times since I installed the latest FS 6.6.3.67470. I have never experienced this before. To fix it I have to delete my inventory cache and relog. If it was just once I wouldn't bother saying anything, but it's now the third time in a week. I have had successful logins between those three failures. At login, I get a pop-up error message "Could not put on outfit. The outfit folder contains no clothing, body parts, or attachments." and my avatar stays as an orange cloud. My inventory is not empty but is missing a lot (down from 70,000 ish to 37,000 ish - same number each time it happened (at least I recall the 37,xxx), and the same inventory seem missing in the same places every time this has happened. All Outfits folders are empty, even though the clothing items themselves are where they should be and in bold as if I'm wearing them. If I look in the Worn tab in the Inventory window, everything I should be wearing is listed there. All Objects content is missing, although subfolders (now empty) are still shown. Likewise the Favourites, Scripts, Settings and Sounds folders. Others are partially empty, for instance in Animations all the items in the 'root' Animations folder are there, but all subfolders (lots) are empty. Thoughts, anyone? (Edit: please forgive poor spelling; there's no spellchecker on this and I have dyspraxia (my brain can spell, my fingers are jokers).

That's what it looks like if you try to modify rigged mesh; it cannot be resized or moved even though it looks like you can. It can be resized if rezzed on the ground but snaps to rigged size again when you wear it. It might have a central, unrigged prim which you are seing being resized, many do. You need unrigged hair. Yep, furry clothing is a pain if it's a custom body. The advert says the body isn't modified apart from hands and feet. Maybe it will fit the old style 'standard size' mesh clothing that comes in five sizes. It's always worth trying anything; you never know. My male Jomo werewolf fits Aesthetic clothing very well, for instance (lucky me I have Aesthetic too). Just get lots of demos and try them out before spending money. You might have to get used to rezzing the body and modifying the underlying 'skin' texture, manually making parts transparent so it doesn't clip through the clothing and reuploading the modified texture. The preset alpha areas rarely suffice. That's another thing I've done with several bodies. At least furry stuff usually has mod perms (everything should have IMO!) I notice the advert for that body says all textures are included in the pack, so you can mod them. It'a always best to check out what sort of 3rd party support a product has, like clothing, and making sure it's sufficient before dropping L$ on it. (Everything is easy in retrospect.)

I often use projectors for doing illumination through stained glass windows (or an entire stained glass roof in my latest build). While they don't replicate time of day (I could move the projector but I usually don't bother) it's much better than just baking the texture onto the floor.

Hmm... nothing, I would imagine. "I see naked people".

That... is fantastic! There have been a number of times I've wanted to make something that would fit perfectly in an existing scene or terrain. This will make it much, much easier instead of frustrating and expensive. In fact, I think it's made me want to start making stuff again... I haven't for a while.

I've noticed the orange clouds a lot more since I updated to the latest FS too. (Not saying it's definitely because of the update... I hadn't been on much for a couple of weeks so maybe something else changed as well). If they persist, perhaps asking for an option to choose one's own cloud colour wouldn't be amiss. I want atrovirens please.

Agree with all the above. I used to be a bit of a flight sim buff, flight/mission planning etc. (but not in SL). Trying to get realistic in SL is simply not going to happen. I tried flying here for a while. See it for what it is - a bit of unrealistic and unreliable fun and as mentioned, helicopters or something slower is probably more fun in SL than an F-16. Going down the PC-based flight sim rabbit hole can get costly! (I used to compete with a guy, three decades ago, on combat sims and we actually learned to fly (real) light aircraft together. He had money, I didn't so much - he bought a share in a plane and I helped him through all his training with physics and maths etc.. He's now flying around somewhere as a captain for some airline or other. I'm stuck here typing messages into a forum. Hmm. It helps if I just think of him as a bus driver, lol.)

It uses the diffuse texture (that is, the texture you see painted on an item) alpha channel as a glow (emissive) map instead of alpha translucency. I've used it for things like making glowing spots (bioluminescence) on mermaid tails and skin textures. It can be set that way in the edit window; it's one of the options (none, blending, masking, emissive). The only other way is to have the glowing spots as individual faces on the mesh. Much easier to use an emissive map. Also used it for 'magically' glowing symbols on things that can be turned on or off by changing the alpha type with a script. The spots don't emit light as such; that is, they don't illuminate nearby objects, but they glow like setting the glow slider. A pixel value of 255 in the alpha channel is maximum glow; 0 is none.

I don't think many creators even know they exist, seriously. Like you say, they can make a dramatic difference to what can be achieved.

There's some really rubbish stuff around, LOD-wise. Lots of it based on the same source of full-perm meshes. I ended up making my own tables simply because the one I liked turned into a mess if I stood at the far end of the room unless I set my LOD factor all the way up. LODs should be designed such that the object looks right at any distance, within reason depending on its intended purpose and at a reasonable viewer LOD factor. I tend to design for factor 2, and at that, my stuff will look the same shape at any distance, even when it drops to much lower detail. You'll be hard pushed to see the change, but I can still get very low LI. My tables and chairs are 1LI, quite detailed up close, and in any reasonable size room (even at SL giant scale) you'll never see them look bad. That's how it can and should be done.

Ignore the instructions some sellers still give to set your viewer's LOD factor at 4 or even higher in order to 'see their wonderful creations properly'. Furthermore, don't buy anything from someone who says to do that.

No. Every AI created, supposedly artistic image I've seen looks wrong. Sometimes it takes a moment to see where and why, but it always looks wrong. I don't care if it has pretty colours and some fancy bits pulled from elsewhere and merged into a conglomerate of rip-offs. Art is something created by humans (and maybe other sentient or nearly so beings). And no, I don't think typing a handful of key words into an AI pool classes as creation. Beauty is something that's in the eye of the beholder so I guess someone might find an AI produced image beautiful, but I don't. I'm happy for pictures of urinals and welded-together bits of scrap to be called art, even though I don't generally appreciate it myself. But I draw the line at something produced by an algorithm out of a database. Frankly I'm sick of seeing it on DA etc. They should have a filter so it can be excluded. It isn't art. Fine if others like it and want to see it, but it isn't art and shouldn't be presented as such.

I'm very far from an expert in either Blender or Avastar - purely an amateur who uses them maybe once or twice a year and forgets how to drive the things in-between. I've found the support for Avastar on their Discord server to be superb and invaluable though, both from other users and the staff. If you need help, that's the place to go I suspect. I seem to recall some new videos were published just some weeks ago too.

Not so sure about that. I can't speak for very recently, but a year ago I read similar to the above so often that when I wanted a dev kit, I nearly didn't bother asking. My first Lara mermaid tail was rigged by trial and error. I did ask though, and had a kit within a week with no trouble. I'm hardly a big name maker; I only dabble in it for fun (and didn't pretend otherwise) although I also take it seriously, with regards to licensing and product quality. Like I say, that was almost exactly a year ago so maybe things have changed but back then, there was no problem getting a dev kit.

Out of morbid curiosity, where is your constituency, and were you voted in there as their local MP/representative?

Hmm... that's a situation we haven't met yet but yes, if a body add-on uses the BOM texture then the alpha layer won't be useful there. Will remember that one, should she get any. (Otherwise I would likely have had a "D'oh" moment, lol)

My wife has had endless problems with Maitreya's auto-hide for years, to the extent that she (well, I, I did most of the hard work for her) set up individual bodies, ready-alphad and script-removed, saved with each outfit. Total pain in the backside when an updated body came along but the auto-hide was so unreliable it seemed the only way to be sure (the 'nuke them from orbit' approach). Then there's clothing with poor alpha settings (or ones you would rather change), and poor rigging so you either get a gap, or a clip because the clothes don't line up with an alpha band. For some outfits I went as far as using an RLV script to control and synchronise the clothing change, with multiple auto-alpha 'dummy' attachables. We finally solved it in a much more usable manner, although it's still a bit of a pain to do initially (for me - she just 'plays'). I'm pretty sure is was Qie who reminded me, in my thread on the matter ages ago, that BOM worked with system alpha layers, just like system clothes. Now, we either use pre-made alpha layers that happen to work (Slink has a box of free ones in the store), or I make one myself in photoshop and upload it. It's easy enough to do with very basic editing skills. It still means you have to remove the scripts from the body if you can't remove the script from the clothing (>=v5 script but there's a lot of clothing that predates that). It's much better than the way we were doing it though and the alpha is often an improvement on what the clothing's auto-alpha did. Yes, an option to just turn off the auto-alpha in the body would be a godsend and mean we could keep the rest of the scripts in it. Finally, it is always worth asking the clothing creator to update to V5. A few are responsive (most are not, in my experience, but a few are). One even went so far as to remove the scripts altogether for her and send her a copy like that (this was pre v5). They of course have had a lot more of my wifes L$ since.

I don't sell much (can't take money out due to RL situation/tax etc) but have had a fairly constant earning in SL for years. I've also added quite a lot more to my store over the last year or so. Always made enough to cover membership for two and a bit of land. The last six months has been my lowest earning for a long time, by a large margin. And yes, in Britain prices are becoming ridiculous for everything. We should be self-sustaining in gas and almost in oil, but the companies moved out all the storage and most of the refining so we have to sell to Eu, then buy back at Eu prices. Of course the big companies make a fortune doing it this way but the country can't look after itself the way it could a few decades back.

Assuming the IM is something worth answering, I'll usually answer and then read/cam out of curiosity while waiting for a response. I rarely ignore an IM unless it's clearly objectionable and sometimes than I play with them for a laugh. I've no objection to random IMs as long as they are interesting, or at least not just begging for something.

You got it!

Oh, wait... it's not 42 days logged in constantly, but 42 days where I logged in every day, is it? I misunderstood. I bet my stayed-logged-in time is still a lot though. I did used to just leave the viewer logged in all the time on my server. @Ceka Cianci Yes, I just realised that and was typing as you posted.

Yes, my stats are for one alt only back then. That 42 days was just me. I used to run on a server, which was on all the time anyway.