ValKalAstra

I'll somewhat echo @Rick Nightingale here and say that it's rather normal for Forums to sometimes have unique cultures. Sometimes you blend in and other times you're the outcast. In general, I'll say from my personal experience that some residents have got a considerable chip on their shoulder about gamers. You can see it in so many new and old help posts, especially about tech issues, that the second someone mentions that they play games, certain people will jump down their throat and intentionally derail the thread with frankly weird accusations and snide behaviour. I've had extremely poor performance ever since I started until about a few weeks ago. Whenever I've searched for help, I found old threads with the same regulars raging about gamers expecting 120 FPS when the one seeking help had only mentioned gaming in passing. I found the usual "that's just how it is, sod off!" comment and it was just a hostile environment all around. On the occasion I dared ask in world, I got smacked with being called an entitled man-child (wrong gender but eh?) and other unpleasantries. Gamer, for some reason, is a trigger word for some residents. Result: I often gave up and just assumed "yah that's how it is. 6 FPS seems to be normal, people yell at you for asking otherwise". Sidenote: It was a driver setting I stumbled across randomly. My FPS went from 6 to 45 FPS. It went from barely usable to yah I can deal with that. So my best advice to any new forum user is to never tell anyone you game. You can get help on any sort of problem you might have, there are people that know individual textures and hairstyles to the point they can link it to you in seconds. If you have got scripting troubles, there are amazing people that have kickstarted fledgling scripters forever - you can find their help dating back years and they're still active. It's an amazing place - as long as you don't mention gaming, performance or UX. Those seem to be the trigger words since politics got a boardwide ban. That said, you are really not doing yourself any favours by flinging around words like shill. That's just me but I find people that regularly use that word to be deeply uncomfortable beings ot be around, because it ascribes to a mindset that the only reason anyone might ever possibly disagree is that they're paid.

Perfect page to raise some dead!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/191119559@N02/52915483957/in/dateposted-public/

I really can't claim to have got any kind of weekly routine, nor can I really claim much Flickr success. The most attention any of my works has gotten was a couple of hundred clicks. However, just from experimenting with different approaches a little, I think Flickr Engagement mostly depends on three plus one factors. Groups. How many groups you have posted it in. I've had subjectively meh images of mine (to my tastes) reach silly amounts of engagement, because I just spammed it across dozens of SL Flickr groups. Flickr Handshake. You like mine, I like yours. I engage with your pictures, comment, chat, etc and mine get the same treatment. It's a social media website after all and thus just interacting with people usually gets you noticed in turn. In SL World Groups. Just like the first point, being active in the various photography groups in world can further bring engagement. Say, I make a new picture and then post it in various photo groups, then interact with people that replied to it. So if you're looking for a routine, I would say make it an effort to scout out groups a picture might fit in, engage with people on their works on Flickr and be active in photography groups in world. As long as your interactions have got that social element, I think it'll be a successful form of engagement and also fun. At least to me, I enjoy talking pictures with people - if only most weren't so scared of giving feedback.

Alright, let me see. It's this AO of the marketplace, right? https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/TuTy-DAILY-sLIFE-FREE-BASIC-BENTO-MALE-AO-Priority-3-and-4/7179649 Then here is a step by step guide on how to remove that animation without getting errors. Attach the HUD. Right click on the HUD (either on screen or in your inventory) and select edit. In your content tab, select the notecard named "default". Open it. You should see something similar to this: [ Standing ]TDMLstand1|TDMLstand2 [ Walking ]TDMLwalk1|TDMLwalk2 [ Sitting ]TDMLSit and so on Then like @Qie Niangao said, if your first line looks like the first line I posted here - then you can replace... This line [ Standing ]TDMLstand1|TDMLstand2 With this line [ Standing ]TDMLstand2 Please for the love of all that is holy, if your first line looks different, please paste the content of the notecard here so we can give you precise instructions - since we can't know what's in there or not. Save the notecard. Close the edit window (the one where you selected the default notecard). On your HUD, click the button labelled as LOAD. A dialogue window will open with one button in it: default Click default and wait a moment. If everything went well, your local chat should look something like this (and if not, ping back here) and you are done: [00:09] Tuty DAILY sLIFE Free BENTO Male AO -Priority 4: Loading notecard 'Default'... [00:09] Tuty DAILY sLIFE Free BENTO Male AO -Priority 4: 9 animation entries found in Notecard. [00:09] Tuty DAILY sLIFE Free BENTO Male AO -Priority 4: Finished reading notecard 'Default'.

Nintendo lawyers be like... --- https://www.flickr.com/photos/191119559@N02/52886282114/in/dateposted-public/

Yup! To put words into pictures, here's the same identical shape using a Glam Affair Body skin. The left side is just the body skin while the right also uses the included BOM layer for medium cleavage, as well as the soft bosom layer. So depending on your skins, the result can vary quite a bit and could explain the issue of "separating" the cleavage you have got.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/191119559@N02/52875323320/in/dateposted-public/ Something different from me for a change. Still my avatar but in a fancy new shape. This Fantasy Faire was not healthy on my budget but I just couldn't resist grabbing way too much - and then further going and picking up an entirely new Avatar. ... Bonus Points for those that can tell me which semi-famous cat this was inspired by.

Listening to some blast from the past. Randomly felt like checking out The Offspring again. What do you know, they've still got it.

Aye - I do like that there's some definition on the chest that I'd struggle to replicate with either Legacy or Maitreya (I probably just don't know how). Otherwise I'm not sure I see a reason to switch, especially with the clothing struggle.

Woaah, the colors. Love it! Great picture. ---- https://www.flickr.com/photos/191119559@N02/52782440882/in/dateposted-public/

It's such an interesting topic on the cusp of several breakthroughs coming and others already made. The technology has made insane leaps in just the last months alone. For example a year back or so, Artbreeder was jaw-dropping. I loved experimenting with it but always felt it lacked fine control. Still, I managed one image with it that I really quite enjoyed. *points to my Forum Avatar and Profile Pic*. Then Midjourney got big and yah, I experimented with that too. That already offered more control than before and I dared upload a single image to my Flickr, voicing both my curiosity and my discomfort. I kind of got lucky to be an early adopter because boy, did all of that become a toxic battlefield. Since then I have dabbled a lot more and with Stable Diffusion, the level of control has increased yet again. I'm a middling artist. I can paint things, I am pretty good at touching things up and some of the new workflows have been utterly fascinating. Anyways, the original topic before it kind of drifted off: Can this turn Avatars into real people? I mean, what are real people? Physical world may be a good bit off but for anything digital I am giving this a few months at most. Progress has been stupid fast and even as someone that has followed the technology closely and kept up with each new paper and development, I'm just completely overwhelmed with the pace. So here is the current publicly available tech, I'm gonna use the terms because explaining each of these would be a process long enough that half of them are already outdated by the time this post is done. Joking but it's a lot to explain so I just glance over it here. - You can train LORA Networks on your (or a) SL character. This allows you to give Stable Diffusion models a reference as to how you want the picture to look. To be more clear: You can turn the avatar into Anime Characters, Game Art, Render stills and yes, photographs. The tech is getting close but it tends to stumble over details. There's a reason you might see a lot of hand memes lately and that's because SD struggles with that. It also occasionally trips on things like objects (such as glasses) Examples, note the sunglasses are... cursed. - You can use that to create a portrait with a good view of a face. You can keep inpainting, tweaking and yes, photoshopping too to create a good base picture. This you can throw into a Thin-Plate-Spline-Motion-Model. You can combine that image with a video capture to transfer the face motions onto your picture, allowing your picture to move like a real person would. So far this only applies to the head. Video technology outside this in general is still very wonky as it struggles with consistency. I'm not aware of any face animation generative models yet (edit: I actually just remembered you can totally use Unreal Engine for automated face animation as a basis for the video - so you would need to feed that video into the thin plate model). Example from the Github for the thin plate model: https://github.com/yoyo-nb/Thin-Plate-Spline-Motion-Model/blob/main/assets/vox.gif - Now your avatar needs a voice to be a real person. Here the tech is a bit behind. Leaps have been made though and as a mute person, I'm ecstatic about them. Still, it's quite possible to use something like elevenlabs to give your avatar an actual voice. See a demo here: https://beta.elevenlabs.io/? - And this brings us back to the loop. For your avatar to turn into a real person, it also needs something to say and here we can use technology like chat-gpt or a local install of alpaca.cpp. These models work reasonably well at giving somewhat consistent answers. Often good enough to fool people and it's only advancing rapidly too. Like for example chat-gpt 4 is already leagues above version 3 that isn't all that old to begin with. So, can you let AI turn your avatar into "real people"? Almost. You can hand over reins to chat-gpt, give it a realistic picture, show face animation and give it a voice. All of these steps are still wonky and prone to failure but at a guess? Give it 6 months and we're in for interesting times (What's the curse again? May you live in interesting times?)

Thank you two for the replies. I only really sell the one product. The original question, I should have specified, was about prizes or limited giveaways. But your answers helped me, thank you.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/191119559@N02/52737630047/in/dateposted-public/ Edit: uploaded it as an attachment because the forum blew it up to fullscreen. Bit much. For those that like to peek behind the curtains, I've added the unedited raw of the image too.

As someone who lists Full Metal Alchemist among her favourite shows of all time, allow me to give a bit more background on that! Sorry, inner nerd tickled! Most Anime is based on yet unfinished Manga. That happened with Full Metal Alchemist too. Halfway through the first show, they ran out of source material and had to create an anime only ending. Which, obviously a matter of taste, I felt did not pay off on the themes the show had set out. They also expanded on the anime ending with the movie Conqueror of Shamballa going further in a direction I found tasteless. However, many years later, the Manga finished and they decided to basically start over. Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood as a result shares much of the first half from the first show - but then continues on with the actual story. That one I count among the best shows I have watched. However the watch recommendation isn't that easy. The first show took a lot more time establishing the basics and gave early story arcs more room to breathe while almost glancing over them in the second show. You can understand the story with just the second show but let's just say, there's a reason an entire generation of anime watchers gets a thousand yard stare with the phrase "Let's play". However I'd personally recommend the second show, Brotherhood. It pays off on the themes it lays out and the narrative fits together better. It also actually has Olivia Armstrong in it (the blonde woman earlier in the thread). She is hands down... amazing. I love her character. Right - now about the thread topic itself, here's what can be contributed to it, that hasn't already been debated to death a thousand times in a thousand different places before: ... Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

That's not necessarily an unusual trait for creatives though. People put something out where they don't know if people will like it. While in theory they (well, we since I create too) should create for themselves and for the art of it, the reality is that we all crave that interaction element too. Creative endeavours are a way of reaching out to others, a means to socialise around something you made. Posting a work with no response is like entering a room to awkward stares and silence. It doesn't feel good and makes you question yourself. While your self worth as a creator should not be based around the social game, getting nothing can be sobering. Creativity is social, not solitary.

There is a bit of a bitter truth to "success" in virtual photography (or any creative endeavour for that matter) that it's so much more about the social game than it is about the actual work. Take Flickr interactions. They're almost exclusively a factor of outside influences. First being how many groups you post it in. There's a lot of spam going on there where I see burly muscle guys post in groups for sexy ladies and likewise. Yet that spam works. It puts more eyeballs on the image. The second thing is the silly Flickr handshake. Follow someone and they usually follow you back. Like their pictures and you get yours liked back. That sounds simple enough right? Well it's more than that, some will absolutely never click your image unless you've interacted with theirs and I'm never quite sure they genuinely liked it or just randomly clicked to play the social game. Third factor is something silly like the time you post it. I've seen pictures posted at European Times get absolutely left in the dust. You get more interactions during American Times, ideally give or take centered on population hubs. SL in general just seems very us centric. Fourth factor is luck and randomness. A good friend of mine who makes amazing pictures randomly had one of hers go through the roof. Like she averages around 400 interactions and that single image suddenly went to 6000 interactions over the couple of a few days and we never found out what had made it pop off. The good news is that if you crave actual interaction, there are ways to get it. People already mentioned the subforums here. There are many people that try to be encouraging and interact with your works there. Another source are photography groups in world. Something like naturally naughty (one of the most supportive groups I know, nevermind the name), Sunny's or for example the group of the Focus photo magazine. They often have interesting discussions going on and you can see people help each other. They'd be your best bet. Last but not least, pick up photography friends. Most in world put their Flickr in their profile picks. Find someone you like, compliment them, reach out and if chemistry is alright, you found someone to share the creative passion with!

Many ways! One easy way is to have a female avatar, chat with people and then reject voice chat. Watch virulently sexist fireworks. Even easier is to hang out in popular pick up places and check out profiles. It usually takes me around 5-6 profiles before I find someone that went off the rails and decided having ten unhinged picks about some person is a healthy response.

Skipping all the whispered drama around it, because that need not be in a public forum: as far as I know, it was a co-owned venture and the creators just went their separate ways.

This is probably something fairly simple to do and I am just too blind to find the option. In short: I want to gift my own product. I've only got a marketplace presence (lack of land access) and as such it would ideally function via the marketplace. The only option I find is to use the "Add to Cart as Gift" button the same way as customers do. Which strikes me as a bit weird because I would pay myself to send out a gift to someone else. Obviously I could just give it to them directly in world but I would prefer if things were tied into the redelivery system (for... redeliveries or updates). So what are my options there? Just pay myself or am I missing a button somewhere? I reckon the other option would be to use an in world system. Are there any that operate without need of land?

One might almost think that list was made to bait people into angry comments as a form of engagement. I can't help but be impressed with that list, it's finely tuned to piss off as many capital G gamers as possible. It takes aim at... WoW Copium Inhalers right during the... Milk and Harassment moment. FF14 Bunnybois during the launch of Endwalker. Genre purists by putting SL on there. Taking a swipe at F2P games by claiming P2P is usually better. Hello Genshin, Warframe - but not Destiny, I doubt they notice (They tuned out of games media years ago). By leaving out Elder Scrolls Online, Lord of the Rings Online and Neverwinter Nights (if SL can be on there, these can too!) And then crowning it with Tibia on #1. It's a work of art.

I just realised that I might have misunderstood you. Your third image where you showed the clipping was deleted and so I could not see. I assumed you wanted to pose the tongue for pictures without it clipping. Just for clarity, are you saying it clips in normal use too? Such as normal face animations? Either way, happy if I was able to help.

Is that what's going on? Gosh, I thought I was going crazy when outfits suddenly had alpha issues. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. You're a fashion lifesaver.

That's news to me. As far as I know it's quite the opposite - aren't they the brand with the highest market share at the moment? Anyways, tongues! To my knowledge there's no easy way to have that kind of fine control in Second life. The issue comes from the myriad of options out there with face shapes, attachments, deformers, script and animation count limitations, etc. While I'm not going to say it's impossible - I'm 99% sure that when it comes to photos with tongue, those were made with the Black Dragon viewer. You can use it to fine tune poses to an almost absurd degree. That includes options to both move the tongue base and also rotate and move the tip of the tongue to change the shape. The caveat here being that only you will see it. Let me show you an example quick. I took this quick image to demonstrate this. The head is a Lelutka Ceylon and the derpy face pose was made using the Lelutka Axis HUD you've already got - and then fine tuning the rest with the poser tool in Black Dragon. To that purpose, I disabled all head bones, except for tongue base and tongue tip, then tweaked the settings until it stopped clipping. So it can be done using photo tools which only show in your photos. I'd be really surprised if that kind of fine detail could be achieved with any SL inherent means.