Jump to content

ValKalAstra

Resident
  • Posts

    463
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by ValKalAstra

  1. Awww I love the result though! The particle effects are a really cool touch and yah I may have been wearing a lot of red at the time. Technology definitely wasn't on our side today though. Not only was the usual (somewhat sleazy) sandbox unusually full and in use - the second I got a free spot, I had just enough time to rez the backdrop and then got smacked with rolling restarts. On my way home I got smacked with "this sim is offline" so I ended up on a random snowy runway in the middle of bloody hell nowhere all dolled up in a fantasy getup and I think I might have annoyed a pilot for all of the few seconds I was there.

    It definitely was a lot of fun and also really interesting. @Momo Addams explained a lot of aspects from composition to me that I had never really thought about previously. Will be interesting to see when and how I can make use of it. One way or another, here's the image I took of her avatar:

    The forgotten library

    I struggled a bit with lighting today but it was fun nonetheless. With that said...

    Anyone else? Come on in, regardless of skill level. We can all learn from one another and it's fun to talk to all the creative minds.

    • Like 3
  2. The closest equivalent to me would be loving someone's style and then either reaching out or using a HUD Attachment Scanner to go see if I can make it work for myself. Then again I'm not one do develop crushes in RL either. When I was a teen, when most girls that age could sing the names of every Backstreet Boy, I sat there going "I know it's not lore accurate but I'll be damned if I don't slap on a full compliment of clan tech ER-PPC on my Atlas and Alphastrike immediately into a shutdown".

  3. 41 minutes ago, Momo Addams said:

    Heyo! ❤️ I'd be down for this if time allows! I'm unsure of what the processes have been so far

    Sure thing, let me hit you up in world when I next login. I'll write down the process so far in case others are also interested though.  There really is no codified process for this - so far we've just agreed on a time and date then met up in world. In both cases, I offered a stream of my Firestorm for those that were happy to chat in Discord. Really though, anything goes. It's a means to connect with others and also to see how they work - or how they view your avatar. Also doesn't have to be me - I am just the one to get the ball rolling.

    So yah - in my case, I'd be happy to just do whatever.

  4. One of the best things coming out of this Anime Season was no doubt Frieren. A masterful rendition of a heartfelt and emotional story about not appreciating life enough when you had the chance and learning to do better, dressed up in a high fantasy voyage of dysfunctional people coming together.

    EITHER WAY.

    To quote the lyrics of this song bursting with vibes, flutes, wonder and energy: "Heey heeeyy heeeeeeeey heyaaaa heeey". Okay maybe the lyrics ain't winning prizes but damn this is a catchy tune!

     

  5. I've actually had a bit of a related philosophical crisis as part of growing up (somewhat). As a wee lass, I was an avid consumer of anything Cyberpunk or otherwise dystopian. Cybernetics are a huge part of these stories, a sort of way to turn a weakness into a super power. For a girl with a disability or as I like to say "...", that was mighty attractive and the idea of rebelling against the system was just tailor-made for a teenage girl with a chip on her shoulder and too much temperament.

    For decades I never questioned the idea where those cybernetics would actually come from. Many of these stories were written in a time before Digital Rights Management (DRM) or Software as a Service (SaaS) were a thing. I've always wanted cybernetics. At least as a kid.

    Nowadays? HOLY EMPEROR OF NOPE.

    You just know some musky manchild is gonna switch off your implant over some stupid unrelated social media feud or your cybernetic arm will just flick off because wifi crashed. I can't even imagine wanting one anymore because I've got so very little trust in software companies these days.

    • Like 5
  6. Random peeve:

    Something I can never quite grasp about these forums in particular is the urge to have topics closed. If you* are done with a topic, why not just bow out? Why is there this need to derail it and run it into the ground, provoking heavy handed moderation just so no one else can talk about it either?

    * Neutral as in, not looking at anyone in particular but it's a frequent occurence.

    • Like 6
    • Thanks 1
  7. 35 minutes ago, NiranV Dean said:

    Sounds a lot like an extra input device being plugged in and automatically enabled in SL. A controller for instance, Xbox360/One, Playstation etc, they are notorious for having minimal stick drift at all times and if applications (such as SL) don't ignore these tiny drifts they will trigger movements. Most games have deadzones for that to prevent these tiny drifts from constantly triggering any sort of unwanted movement.

    This. It drove me nuts when I found myself bonking into random walls one day before realising my cat had decided the gamepad was the premier sleeping spot in the house. If you've got a gamepad wired up, do check if it ain't stick drift causing it.

    • Haha 1
  8. The response could have, probably should have been sooner. It's a standard response that I would not be surprised to find in some word prefab. Let me try... CTRL+F "do better", yup there it is. Allowing the allegation to fester for so long while simultaneously stomping out the mere mention of it has really not been all that healthy overall.

    SL has got a history of trouble with the topic yah and it has also got a history of over eager witch hunts over said topic. The silence has not only allowed the former to hunker and bunker down but also given upwind to the latter. Not good.

    I'm not getting into the other weird debate going on here.

    • Like 10
  9. There's one thing that I've picked up in therapy that has helped me throughout my troubles. It's the idea of emotional momentum, based on a simple rule for myself: Do one step a day. It doesn't matter how big or small that step was. Just do one step. There were days when I was bedridden with apathy as my head was trying to kind of not be my best friend - times when I thought even just getting up was impossible.

    And yet I did, then I opened a word document and typed out the first line of a letter. Nothing else. Just the first line. I closed it. Saved it. Went back to bed that day. But I had done one step. The next morning, I was still broken but I got up, added another line. Got back to bed. By the third day I knew I had it in me to do the one thing because I had just proven I could do it two days in a row, so I got up, finished the letter, hit save and it wasn't until I leaned back, that I realised I had let momentum carry me forward.

    That's why it doesn't matter how big or small that step is, because as long as you do one step per day, it's progress. Because with that one step, you're moving.

    I couldn't possibly understand what you go through but I try to empathise and seeing that Blog made me a smile. You made the first step and it's a lovely one too. The blog is cool and so are the pictures. You did well.

    • Like 5
    • Thanks 1
  10. 5 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

    It's called U-126 from Dura and has 2 versions.  The ears version only comes in the fatpack.

    Instructions unclear. Put cat into bathtub. Was apparently not amused!

    Cats and bathtubs

    (Thank you, love the hairstyle <3).

    • Like 20
    • Thanks 1
    • Haha 3
  11. It's kind of funny that I still think of myself as a new player in Second Life despite being here since the end of 2020. Still, I feel like I can give some input into why people struggle with the inventory as I am still fighting it to this day. After a lot of starting woes, I think I'll break it down to three issues:

    1. I'm a dum dum.
    2. Inability to rename individual objects due to No Mod.
    3. Decades of now outdated systems.

    Obviously Second Life can't do anything about the first issue. To be precise, I've got enough knowledge about computer systems to know I barely know anything and I'm the gal that grew up toying with FTP servers, learned to code basic progams using libraries like NLTK or other ML stuff, I crashed computers with Gentoo and just overall messed with things in DOS back in the day. I should in theory be able to deal with it but something about the way it is structured makes it hard to bridge that knowledge. A big part of which is my chaotic scatterbrain. Another part is the inability to rename objects. 

    I get it. No-Mod is the name of the game but the inability to rename an object is a killer for the way I would logically try to sort things. Let's say I've got this neat looking top:

    RNES Ample Flower Spring ML EXP

    I genuinely hope Random Non Existing Store (RNES for short) ain't a thing as I just made that stuff up but you get the idea. Point is, once that thing vanishes into the various subfolders, it's gone. I'm never going to find it again because I will never intuitively look for a top by typing out any combination of the words it is named. My instinct is to rename it to something I can make use of:

    RNES Fatpack, Top, Flower Pattern, Open back, Maitreya

    Only I can't do that. My options are to rename the folder or to create a notecard and drop it in that folder. Renaming the folder falls apart as I often buy outfits and dropping a notecard increases the already absurd amount of random junk in my inventory further. It can be done but very quickly reaches the point of "Nina can't be arsed to deal with this anymore". This then leads into the issue of decade old systems. It took me way too long to find out all the different ways people named their products over time. Take Maitreya.

    • Lara
    • Maitreya
    • L-Exp
    • Experimental
    • M

    Then there are skins and suddenly it's Evo, Evox, SLUV, Bom, Applier, Omega. You get to hair and start fighting alphas and flexi nightmares and you get the drift. The super cool creativity that has grown over the years and is one of Second Life's greatest strengths is also abit it's weakness as there is a stupid big learning curve to even just learn all the various terms for the same thing and to understand which technologies are outdated.

    In short:

    • There's a wild growth of different systems and divergent names for the same systems.
    • I can neither name, tag or add proper indexable metadata to them properly without weird workarounds and character limits. Heck I might be able to and just never found out how and I looked!

    Is it impossible to learn, nah. However it needs a lot of instutional knowledge to get going and systems like no-mod applying to names as well kind of throw a spanner into things. If I were to wish for an update:

    I'd create an additional data field for every inventory object and split the name into: Internal, set by the creator and used for scripting purposes, External, user facing, can be set at will. To start off, the system would initially mirror the internal to the external name to cut down on work for creators during the implementation. And see, that's why I am not in charge of coding anything at LL because fuffing with an established database like that is a recipe for disaster and it might even break some legacy code somewhere that expects data to be returned a certain way. So obviously, not an easy solution. I just want the ability to properly add either metadata or rename objects without foldernames or notecards.

    And this is where someone goes "but you can already do that, here is how, you dum dum" :D

    • Like 5
  12. So this has been an idea I've sat on for a while. I frequently find myself feeling stuck, not making any progress. Sometimes it's a technical thing, other times it's just a feeling of not progressing enough and making the same picture again and again. Be that as it may, something I've always been interested in is to see and hear about how others work, to learn from how they are doing things.

    Thus the idea was born: Two photographers take a picture of the other avatar, while talking people through the process.

    This serves a variety of purposes:

    1. Frankly, to connect with others about a mutual hobby.
    2. To learn from seeing the process and being able to ask even "dumb" questions.
    3. To also see your own avatar from someone else's point of view.

    Would that be something any of you are interested in? I'll make the first step and offer up myself (selfish, I know :P).

    • Who: Nina Kastra (valkalastra) https://flickr.com/photos/191119559@N02/
    • Timezone: CET, UTC+1 -> https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html?p1=1229
    • When: Mostly during the day. I'm flexible - but pushing late into the night or early morning will diminish my already limited brain capacity :P
    • NSFW: Yes and no. I don't mind but I also don't have Flickr Pro so no upload in that case.
    • Specialty/Niche: Urban, Fashion or Fantasy
    • Additional notes: All skill levels welcome. If you are interested, I'd be willing to optionally stream the process via Discord Livestream. Either way, bring time. I work... slow.
    • Like 2
  13. I find capturing emotions in SL to be particularly difficult. It's a lot of very subtle muscle movement that's hard to catch with the limited amount of animation bones we've got. You may need to compensate by trying additional expressive aspects. For example, using cold (blue) light with stark shadows that hide the eyes. Body posture can do a lot of heavy lifting, as can do overall lighting and direction.

    Here's an unedited example of one of my recent pictures. Unedited because I would feel cheeky double posting the end result. Let me walk through my thought processes for it. First, a small cutout from the unedited shot:

    image.png.b44d2fa224aab70f6bbd46c4fc42767c.png

    If you look at the face, it has got barely any expression on it. The head is inclined towards a shoulder and the gaze is cast down, both of which can convey a sense of inwardness or introspection. More or less, like I was in my own thoughts. Overall body language protects the chest with the arms, something we do when we feel vulnerable. Same reason we fold our arms when we get into an argument - we instinctively protect our most vulnerable body parts (read, organs). Sadness is a very vulnerable emotion and so I thought it would work well to cross the arms and then have the hands reach out to the shoulders as if I was trying to hug myself for comfort. Sadness is also often an emotion described as cold and we tend to wrap our arms around ourselves when cold too.

    Further on, the lighting. There's a contrast between warm light coming from the side and most of the body being cast in shadow. This was meant to create a dichotomy between the warmth outside and the cold inside, almost like these two things don't belong together. Last but not least, I'm turned away from the warmth of the light. Body language is showing a "cold" shoulder towards it.

    And perhaps in a lucky coincident, the sparkles I forgot to remove kind of added two little glitters on my cheek that might be tears. Happy little accidents, eh Bob Ross? Still what I want to get at: The face shows barely any emotion. It's the same type of boring model/mannequin stare we're all so familiar with. Bodypose, light, mood and scene composition do the heavy lifting to convey the sadness. I hope it worked but at least that was the intent!

    Hope this helped a bit.

    Oh, yah. I did use the Lelutka Axis Hud to move the head and eyes. I can't recommend it enough, it's part of every shot I take.

    • Like 7
    • Thanks 1
  14. 2 hours ago, Jordyn McGregor said:

    So if I am reading what you are saying right, I should have my snapshot window set to screen size?

    That's one possible way but you'd lose the advantages of a higher resolution. I think the preview window is accurate towards the actual end result but it's tiny. So in theory you could configure your depth of field to look right in the preview but honestly, I should probably shut up at this point and let others talk. Sorry, been too long since I used things in viewer.

    I do remember Orwar making a good tutorial about depth of field in editing, using editing and basically taking one picture normally and one of just the depth information.

     

    • Like 3
  15. 32 minutes ago, Jordyn McGregor said:

    I've been trying all this advice too, but my problem is that on my screen the background is blurred nicely, but I take the pic and its all in focus and not what my screen shows at all.  What step am I missing?

    It's been a while since I approach my pictures in a different way (using injected shaders and dynamic super resolution instead) but if memory serves, depth of field settings are tied to a specific resolution. Thus if you set it up to be just right with your screen resolution - but then go and set it to a higher resolution in the snapshot window, it will mess up the depth of field. Black Dragon at some point had a function (or still has? haven't used that in a while) to automatically approximate the settings, I'm not sure whether any of the other viewers do.

     

    • Like 1
  16. Slow day, eh? Yah, you can slam your FPS to 400 and waste energy doing so - quite figuratively burning money for no gain. I'm not getting into the human eye perception argument but I'll toss you this curveball: Monitor refresh rate puts a hard cap on which FPS you can actually make use of. Thus, sure - if you feel like you need max FPS in Second Life as you stutter lag around, turn off vsync, enjoy your screen tearing and then hard limit your FPS at your monitor's refresh rate.

    Anything more is just burning money.

     

     

    • Like 3
  17. 14 minutes ago, Orwar said:

       Hmm, of course, in a social deduction game the least suspicious are also the most suspicious. So.

    ace-ventura-thats-it.gif

       Whose alt are you then? 🚟(also why is there no 'suspicious' emoji, but one for 'suspension railway'?) 

    Heck if I know - but if you ever figure it out, let me know. My instinct tells me that since I'm a shopping addict, my main is out there financing my lifestyle. Think about it, there's loot to be had. Wait is that they why ghosted me?!

    • Haha 2
×
×
  • Create New...