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ValKalAstra

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Posts posted by ValKalAstra

    How does your avatar look today ?

    in Your Avatar

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

    I guess I am used to it. I set up most of the shot in Firestorm, and then I switch over to BD and adjust the pose and lighting as needed. I can do it very quickly, but I know that pose editor inside and out.

    Honestly, after using inverse kinematics to pose, I just can't go back anymore. But I think we're derailing the picture thread :D

    • Like 1

    How does your avatar look today ?

    in Your Avatar

    Posted

    49 minutes ago, Kathlen Onyx said:

    I need to know how to do this!

    Oh snap, I probably should have been more clear when I wrote that. I assume you refer to the pose? The pose was sadly made in Blender/Avastar, although I hear that Qavimator works well too but someone else could probably write more about that. Either way, I made the pose in Blender, then exported it into BVH format.

    The preview allows me to essentially "demo" the pose on my end, without a need to upload it. Basically Upload -> Animation -> select BVH and you get the preview window. Set to loop, increase priority if needed and iterate away. That way I can tweak and iterate quickly, simply hitting reload in Firestorm with every change and almost getting a live preview in Firestorm. All without a need to actually upload. Saves time and money and yah, allows quick modifications.

    It's a bit of pain to setup Blender but once done, having tools like inverse kinematics greatly eases the difficulty of posing. Kind of cuts my posing efforts down from hours to fiddling and playing around to 30 minutes or so. I can't say much about qavimator but I am sure others here can chime in.

    Now if you were asking about the background, that's just some basic masking done in any image editing tool and using a CC0 stock image for the galaxy background. If you're lazy like me, you can use a Segment Anything AI model to automate the task of seperating the avatar from the background, so you don't have to mask things manually, or you use a flat background and let the depth picture version of your scene do the work for you.

    Hope this helps, even though I feel like that wasn't quite what you hoped to hear.

    (The day Firestorm gets an integrated posing tool... one can dream! And I feel like a dream it shall remain most likely).

    • Like 2
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    How does your avatar look today ?

    in Your Avatar

    Posted

    3 hours ago, SlammedSam said:

    Another perfect day

    So .. anyone ever get seriously obsessed with a song, like repeat at least 10 times in a row obsessed?

    I get that way sometimes, and it influenced the mood of the pic. Cheers?

    All the time. They get stuck on repeat until hours later I am suddenly fed up with it :D

    Worth it for the picture though!

    • Like 5

    How does your avatar look today ?

    in Your Avatar

    Posted

    Posetest Retry

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/191119559@N02/53623756327/in/dateposted-public/

    I blame @Orwar for showing me the Animation Preview in Firestorm. This started as an attempt to practice making poses by using a reference image of a falling girl. The pose came together decently enough and so I went for a backdrop. Set everything up and halfway through realised that *maybe* falling towards a backdrop might be a wee bit morbid.

    What was it about the jurassic park quote? "If The Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists."? No, not that one. "Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should." Yah that one.

    So floating Galaxy Nina it is.

    • Like 19

    How Does Your SL Look Today?

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    Literally seconds before I misclicked and closed the viewer. Unfinished, half glitched but eh - until I get enough drive to start over, good enough.precrash.thumb.png.a15a76253bc9d81eed100ec84cc2ba88.png

    But I learned either way. Been trying my hand at learning to pose with Blender/Avastar. Obviously I had to go for the Dark Souls of poses difficulty and use a fight pose :D

    • Like 7
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    Style exchange - Collaboration, seeing through a different lens

    in Art, Music and Photography

    Posted

    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 4

    Have you ever had a crush on someone else's avatar?

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted · Edited by ValKalAstra

    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".

    Style exchange - Collaboration, seeing through a different lens

    in Art, Music and Photography

    Posted

    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.

    What are you listening to?

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    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!

     

    Would you get a Neuralink implant so you could play SL hands-free?

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    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

    Oh my Gawd! - Totally unOfficial Pet Peeve Thread.

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    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
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    moves on it own

    in Your Avatar

    Posted

    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

    Official Statement from Oberwolf Linden

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    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

    Getting that feeling again :(

    in Make Friends

    Posted

    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
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    How does your avatar look today ?

    in Your Avatar

    Posted

    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
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    • Haha 3

    Why do so many new players not get the inventory system?

    in General Discussion Forum

    Posted

    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 6
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