Josh Susanto

I know someone whose RL death has been imminent for a while due to spinal cancer, and yet he continues to spend a great deal of time in SL. Shall I tell him you're interested in following the process? It seems like a sick, morbid thing to do, I know. But some intellectual people are surprisingly open-minded about such things. In fact, I suspect he'd be happy to help make internet history by having his RL death closely followed in SL as a cybersocial experiment.

I wouldn't tell people not to use it while there's nothing better. I'm just saying that when the new function comes out on Lunapic, it'll take a fraction of the time for a cleaner result. The admin recently added a function that swaps RGB layers, allowing me to turn brown wood into very believable patinated brass and vice-versa (for example).

I don't use Blender, but the end issues will be essentially the same no matter how we sculpt. The surface will always be a rectangular image wrapped onto something else or into something else. With objects that have a seam, you can get the edges to come together on one axis, but not also on the other, unless you are willing to accept pleats. I tend to assume the ends of blocks and cylinders are going to look like crap anyway, so I use tempates for those that are open on both ends and which close up when I use a smooth function. For spheroids, I actually use templates in which the whole frame has been pulled to a single point. I still get a pucker, but there's no seam, and I no one has to deliberate about which end of the thing is more important ti hide, because the distortion simply increases toward one point on the object where the edges of the image meet. From many angles, the pucker will not look like a pucker. In fact, I also have a template I never use in which the pucker point is countoured flat and the surface image appears to radiate from it as if from the center of one face of a cube.

[People buying sculpt maps and textures and using them in creative ways are in fact being creative, not just pretending. The fact that they lack the skill or talent to create these from scratch does not take away from the fact that it does takes a certain amount of creativity to be able to put them together and create something unique, useful or simply beautiful.] VERY true. As much as people like my sculpted building components, I really do not have great ideas about how to use them, and I'm almost always surprised by how well they are used, and in ways I wouldn't have imagined. If I had to install them personally in order to sell them, I'd probably just quit the whole operation. Anyone who uses imagination to make something more useful is creative, and we should not fail to recognize this.

When I was new to SL, it was my finding that a lot of freebie boxes would not open no matter where I rezzed them. I see that not much is changed. My suggestions are: 1) Ask people to give you copies of stuff straight from their inventories. Don't be shy. 2) Start making your owns stuff sooner, rather than later. If nothing else, this will slow you down buying stuff that you realize you could eventually make by yourself - especially if you think you can do better.

[The wonderful thing and at the same time terrible thing about SL is that anyone who wants to be a graphic artist can be. Pretty much the same as in RL where anyone with a computer and a copy of Photoshop or Publisher thinks they too are a graphic artist.] I don't claim to be a graphic artist. I claim to be guy who knows how to get a smoothly curved line the first time. A graphic artist is apparently someone whose job it is to keep telling me and the other person that it can't possibly work, even when we have seen it work, and seen it work repeatedly. [Good habits are easier to learn than bad habits are to break. I would much rather teach a newbie PS user than someone who has years of bad habits built up. Those are the hardest to break.] As an English teacher, I agree with that. I just don't start students by making them buy Webster's Unabridged and start memorizing it. [Josh, you sell rocks. I can see why Photoshop would underwhelm you.] Thanks for appreciating that at all. So far, I think I probably sell the BEST rocks. Of course, if I decide that I want SL to look less like the original print of The Trouble With Harry and more like Toy Story, I'll certainly change my ways. [As an aside, the word "upsize" when refering to digital graphics should be replaced by "ruin your graphic" for all intents and purposes. Start with the canvas size you need, never upsize UNLESS you are using an application that is designed especially to do that. There are a few. A better idea is to just start with a decent sized canvas.] I don't think we're disagreeing on that, actually. I think it's a question of with what we are starting. I start with photographs. Other people start with templates, other people start with a blank canvas. As I understood the original question on this thread, it was just a matter of how to make a curved line not so jagged on the edge of an article of clothing. Sizing up CAN and DID solve that specific problem, and would have done so, regardless of what software had been applied. I will consider using an amp that goes to eleven when Second Life's speaker system at least goes to 10. When is that, Nigel? [There is no point in discussing anything graphic with people who already have their minds made up and have nothing but distain for the tried and true, industry standard and used by the masses applications like Photoshop, let alone Gimp, PSP or Blender.] My disdain is not for applications that work hard for users. My disdain is for people who expect me to work for applications when I don't have to. Maybe you can sell some violins to the Beijing Opera on the premise that they have twice as many strings as an erhu. [Just because you don't know how to use those applications does not make them useless or bad or not worthy of your attention.] How much attention should I continue to give an application that doesn't even open, or an application which, once open, seems to have every single button disabled? If I have to attend graphic design school AND systems admin school to make exactly the same smoothly curved line, but in the "correct" way, you can count me out, thanks. [Photoshop is an amazing program that teaches me something new every day, even after using it since version 2.5 or so. Granted it does have a steep learning curve but the freedom and control it gives you are worth every second. Given the quantity of teaching tools and tutorials available for Photoshop these days, self-starters can become pretty proficient mighty quickly.] Photoshop IS amazing, and I have asked friends who are good with it to help solve specific graphic problems. They have also asked me how I get certain effects they can't seem to get with Photoshop. I believe I am ethically entitled to both use and speak well of any graphics tool that easily and transparently does something useful that Photoshop either cannot do, or does not do in any obvious way. "You can't do that without Photoshop" is just one of the phrases I have had to add to my list of similar things I have been hearing my whole life: "You can't grow enough food to feed yourself on a piece of land this small." "You can't successfully sue your employer without hiring an attorney." "You can't remove that kidney stone with an instrument of your own construction." etc. My standard response has become "watch me".

For a letter display like that, I might also suggest using alpha sculpted letters that are simple transparent relief planes with the raised portion (the letter part) painted in. You just won't see them from the back unless you do mirrored concavity (easy, believe me). I'm not absolutely sure why plane reliefs seem to present fewer obvious LOD problems, but it seems to me that they do. If you have any problems making such a letter, I can either make a few for you or show you how.

I'm down nothing. Because I don't buy listing enhancements for things on the assumption that they will be continuously deliverable for the duration of the enhancement. (and I'm right, aren't I?)

Maybe YOUR gloves are not hats...

I usually assume that it will take half an hour. Sometimes it is almost immediate, but it's just easier for me not to think about it until I would have reason to be confident there's a more serious problem rather than just some kind of delay. It might help if the system just told us to wait a longer amount of time in the first place. At least 5 or 10 minutes would be a little more realistic, anyway.

I can't tell you what to do, but I can tell you what I would do. I would just send the stuff and keep the rest of the issue between myself and LL. Customers are not interested in excuses any more than merchants are.

>"Leave it to the pros..." Well, even if someone is a n00b, being a model will mean they probably don't take well to being told they need amateur help getting dressed. I wouldn't make too much of such a comment. You probably saved her a huge amount of hassle just getting to a look she wouldn't be afraid to be caught dead in. Most other n00bs are not perfectionists. Not even close. >but I had just done it to help. At first, I just sculpted to sculpt. I think if you talk to most people selling scripts, they'll tell you that they used to script just to script. That's one of the great things about SL; if you enjoy something enough, you can probably at least pick up some change by it eventually. In your case, it sounds like you can probably pick up more than some change. >The thing I've always wanted to do the most is land development. You can't control the total market demand for anything. A problem with SL land is that the price can only be adjusted so far downward to meet the real market price, and that affects what, if anything, is on it in very abrupt ways sometimes, so, in addition to the teleport thing, location doesn't really mean so much in SL, whereas in RL (well..you know). If you think more like an urban planner than like a real estate developer, though, you might be able to accomplish something. Too many parcels (or whole sims) are developed as if what is next to them might as well not exist. If there are people with existing developments who have some preference about what goes in next door, you might be able to get them to provide financing to find preferred buyers or renters for abutting property. If they have a church, they don't want a sex shop on the other side of the sim line, and they might be willing to pay something to make that not happen. You could get a piece of it.

OK; I'll go first. I don't script. It never seems to work out for me and I give up. I know I could learn to do it, but I would probably always be at a competitive disadvantage. The tests I took with the Johnson-O'Connor foundation took all day and were very thorough. I had 2 significant low scores. One measures how quickly the eyes tend to scan a text. It's not an indicator of other things you might expect, such as the ability to remember a text or other visual record accurately; if I understand correctly, the two scores tend to correlate inversely. We can somewhat compromise speed for accuracy or vice-versa, but we are limited in that by neurology. The other score apparently measures how quickly someone stops being able to assign possible new meanings to a simple graphic shape. The more possible meanings you see in the given time, the longer it will take to settle into a career or complete a degree program. There is an upside, of course, provided you can see socially normal meanings well enough to apply the upside (nope). I think the two things are related. Some people's brains are quicker than others at reaching a conclusion about what something must mean. It's often called "common sense", but I think of it more as a kind of neurological credulity. I can alternate more quickly than most people between text in 2 different languages, and I think it's because my brain makes fewer assumptions about the pronunciation or meaning of each next word. My highest scores indicated that I have aptitude collections that compete with each other, pulling me between being a composer and doing something more "3d" like being an architect or sculptor or set designer, and in a few other directions (too many high scores, actually; yes, that is possible). It was after that test (and after not making any money as a composer before that) that I started sculpting in SL. I don't texture sculpts, though; I sculpt textures. I didn't realize at first that that's "backwards", but it has worked well enough that I've just continued with it, and I have been making at least some profit every day since I started selling the stuff. Next?

Can I get one more post if I put the lotion in the basket?

[1. It's completely unnecessary. If you work properly, right from the start, to ensure that all your lines are anti-aliased as soon as you create them, then you'll never have to worry about this issue. Resizing an entire image, just for the sake of smoothing a line that should have been smooth in the first place, is nothing more than a waste of time.] Which is why I specifically meant sizing it up BEFORE you do anything else. I guess if you're not working with templates or any other starting image, that would mean simply starting with a large canvas. [2. It sacrifices control. As I said in my earlier post, I want to directly control where each and every pixel in my images ends up. I don't want to rely on automation for things like this, ever. Uncertainty is simply not in my job description, and it shouldn't be in yours either.] I don't see how making 3 more of each pixel sacrifices control; it just splits each pixel, thus allowing 4 times as much control as before. I'm also not clear on how using a smaller image means less automation or less uncertainty unless we're talking about a non-duplicative resize that moves data across pixels. [3. It can be very unnecessarily repetitive. If after resizing, the line doesn't look quite how you might have wanted, you have to do the whole damned thing over again to make it right. And if it's still not right, then it's rinse and repeat, and repeat, and repeat... This can be tremendously time consuming, especially if you're working with a complex texture, or with a series of many textures.] I agree that it's unnecessarily repetitive if you do it AFTER you've tried with a smaller image and failed. That's a reason to enlarge FIRST. [4. It's semi-unpredictable. So far, we've been discussing this as if there will only be one line to smooth in the image. Consider that a good game-quality texture is very likely to have dozens, if not hundreds, of individual layers in it, each of which will have elements that have their own individual edges. Do you really want to have every line look jagged while you're working, so you have no idea what your final result is truly going to look like until after you've finished? Not only would that be just a maddening, tear-your-hair-out, experience throughout the entire work process, what happens if you then, upon downsizing the image, discover that it looks like crap (which it likely will, if you've been working so blindly all along)? Do you really want to have to start over again from scratch, only to repeat the same kinds of mistakes, all because you never bothered to learn how to prevent them? With that approach, an image that should have taken a few hours to create could take days or even weeks. Not cool.] The results of downsizing are unpredictable, true. But if you size something up from 512 to 1024 to edit and then leave it there, I don't see how that's a problem. Most of my upsizing is just to 512 or 1024. I agree that upsizing a jagged line to smooth it rather than simply producing a smooth line in the first place is probably going to be the worst possible solution most of the time. [5. It's destructive. As I mentioned earlier, I always want to work as non-destructively as possible. I want infinite freedom to go back and change things as many times as I want, without making any sacrifices to quality and without any unnecessary addition of time. Further, I always want to make sure that as many image elements as possible are reusable for other images. For example, if I want two or more garments to have the same neck line, it would be a waste of time to have to create it more than once. I'd rather just copy the line itself from one to the next. The vector path/layer mask method I outlined is infinitely re-editable, and infinitely transferable from image to image.] Merely duplicating a pixel is not destructive. Smearing it is destructive, but sizing the elements up once to the correct size assures that they only get smeared once per image, or not at all if the size-up is a simple multiple. [6. It can be overkill. What if I've got an image in which I want smooth lines and jagged lines, both? If I apply any process that smooths out everything, I'm screwed. To borrow an expression from modern politics, we want to apply the scalpel here, not the machete. Again, I want direct control over the smoothness and jaggedness of each of my lines, in real time. The last thing I'd ever want to do is allow any automated process, be it a resizing algorithm or anything else, take away my powers of decision.] It is overkill if it adds no utility to the specific edit process. Sizing everything up regardless of what you intend to do to it is pointless. Resizing is not smoothing. Smoothing is smoothing. It just works a little less sloppily if the image has twice as many pixels on a side. I generally dislike smoothing in any case and hardly ever see any reason to use it. [7. Forgive the expression, but it's a "dummy's" way to work. I can never sanction simply covering up a mistake with a band-aid. While it happens that it will often appear to be effective for the very simplistic kinds of imagery we've been discussing in this thread, that's really as far as it goes. This kind of cover-up approach simply won't work for everything. if you don't learn how to create smooth lines from the get-go, you will fall flat on your face when you run into a circumstance in which resizing alone won't fix your mistakes. I really hate to see people experience that kind of frustration. Therefore, the only methods I will ever teach or recommend are those that are universally applicable. The smart way to work, always, is to prevent a given problem from occurring in the first place, rather than just covering it up after the fact.] I do not recommend resizing up to cover mistakes. I recommend resizing up to prevent them in the first place. [Josh, I can't stress this enough. Do yourself a favor; get better tools!] Yeah, I'll just cash in some of those bonds I inherited from... wait... I didn't inherit any bonds.I'm working for less than US minimum wage in a developing country, but thanks for the suggestion. [Lunapic is a severely limited online photo editor, not a texture creation tool.] Except that it does things with sculpts that people can't even seem to figure out how to do with Blender. It's also totally portable; I can work at print shops or cafes if I have to. [if you don't want to spend the money on Photoshop, that's understandable.] Someone actually gave me PS. I expected to be a lot more impressed with it than I actually was. It seems like a great tool for duplicating the same work I see everyone else doing in Second Life, if I'm willing to dedicate twice as much time to learing how to use it as I currently dedicate to actually making stuff that sells. The liquefy tool, especially, is nothing like the smart-stretch function that is currently being perfected for my use over at Lunapic. When I explain the difference, you'll probably soil yourself. [but GIMP and Paint.Net are both free, and Paintshop Pro is only $99.] I installed GIMP on 3 computers in the US, but it seemed not to do anything. Is it an actual program, or is it just a thing that takes up more space on hard drives, like Blender? I won't have $99 for anything until I have some kind of account that will allow me to cash out my $L. I'll try Paint.Net, thanks, but I don't actually texture sculpts; I sculpt textures, and the results pay for themselves. If something is not free and fully portable, I'm not convinced that it's going to be any improvement in my case. My competitors are still charging many times what I do for a photoshopped rock that has only an arbitrary relation between the shape and the surface image, and while being seamless, have a pucker at each end, making them difficult to hide simultaneously. My rocks look like a rock except for one pucker, and my only clear production cost other than my time is the 20L needed to load the data, assuming I don't use a pre-existing surface image. Paying more for a better result would make more sense to me if I could see people doing that, but I mostly don't, and that's a gross understatement. [All three of those options are full-featured image creation programs, more than suitable for high quality texturing at great speed. Lunapic simply isn't. The amount of time you've been costing yourself, and the limitations you've imposed on yourself, by using such an under-capable tool as Lunapic are staggaring to think about. It almost makes me weep for you.] There's no lost time; I have multiple tabs open in 2 browsers, so the edits go through on Lunapic while I'm doing about 5 other things, including sculpting and manually correcting SLM delievery errors. Also, my time isn't worht sh## in the first place, since my M.A. is in Music Theory. The admin at Lunapic also responds to any problem I report within a matter of hours, and he actually puts in new functions at my request. Does Adobe do that for you? [if the likes of Lunapic are what your texturng experience has been limited to thus far, then I have to say it makes sense why you'd be looking to options like resizing to solve your aliasing problems. 99.99% of the tools we'd normally talk about for preventing such problems (as well as for preventing tons upon tons of other problems) simply don't exist in applications like Lunapic.] True. And I can always buy a Sherman tank if I need to kill a cockroach. Or not. [Just so you know, I've been posting on this forum almost daily for the past seven years, and you're the first person I've ever seen say they've been using Lunapic for texturing. I'm not even sure I've ever even seen it mentioned at all, come to think about it. Unless you're a very dedicated massochist, get yourself something proper.] I'm dedicated to cost-efficiency, and I'm winning. I'll go out on a limb and suggest that a lot of people buying things they will never learn how to use well enough to justify the cost are not winning, especially if they're sinking even more money into SLM listing enhancements and in-world shops. If you've seen any of my stuff, I think you'll be shocked at how much of it truly does not actually suck, especially considering that I'm using 128's and whatnot in a few cases. I don't size up everything, true. But only because sizing up is no greater a guarantee of a better result than is buying a more expensive or learning-intensive tool that all cool kids seem to have to have this year. [irfanview is also free, and it does batch conversions. If a stand-alone converter is what you want, Irfanview is considered by many to be the best one out there.] This is an excellent suggestion. Will try it. [Just about any full-featured image editor will, of course, also do batch conversion, including the aforementoioned GIMP and Paint.Net, which are both free.] GIMP has failed to do anything on any computer where I have either installed it or had it installed. I have begun to think it's pure mythology, like Blender and Wings. Tech people never cease to amaze me with how much they take for granted in terms of the million hoops that need to be jumped through in order to get anything to actually work. They also never cease to amaze me by making unavailable things that actually work pretty well. To his credit, Cel Edman at least did not actually eradicate Sculptypaint 092, but simply hid the link. Most impressive among techies is the small amount of average creative output per level of acquired technical skill. I'd rather size something up before I cut a circle into it than take out a loan and go to a technical institution where they spend months getting around to the question of how to avoid size-up, and then not really answer the question, thanks. [i've never seen that happen before. It's more than likely a symptom of the tremendous limitations of the specific software you've been using. ] I've seen it with multiple editors on multiple browsers on both Mac and PC. Possibly it's a symptom of not having equipment I can't afford or afford to learn to use. I don't mean to disparage you personally, but it's mantra I hear repeatedly from people who seem to be able to buy and learn to use basically anything. If you are productive, I can tell you that many others are not. If someone is driving half as many straight nails as I am, it makes me not want to listen when they tell me to stop using a brick and buy a shiny new hammer. [it sounds like the transparency in your PNG's isn't being generated in a way that the SL uploader fully understands. The PNG format supports multiple forms of transparency.] In other words, SL doesn't really understand PNG anyway, because SL only uses TGA, and doesn't correctly convert some types of transparency data when PNG is converted to TGA. I'm not going to stop using a free portable editor with a responsive, interactive admin just because SL can't get it's sh## together to save me one step when I load transparencies. The conversions have so far been instantaneous with Converthub; the new desktop icon appears faster than I can get my finger up from the button. Since we're already disagreeing about things, though... are you at all interested in trying to defend Google Chrome on the pixel number issue?

SL has basically always been a mess, and I accept that as one of the consequences of chosing to work in an emergent system. The perpetual question, though, is whether there is any grease for the squeeky wheel. If we at least know that the squeek is audible, that's some reassurance.

Good to know. The tools I have don't even work with TGA. For file conversion, I use the free download from Converthub, which only does one file at a time, but is at least free. A tip for anyone doing partially transparent PNG's is to convert them to TGA before you load them, or you'll tend to get black where you expect transparency checkerboard. But you all know that already... right?

>After I made this post, I helped a new girl get her avatar up to speed by helping her find a good skin and shape, hair and a nice outfit, and it made me smile more than anything in SL in a very long time. But, in the end - I was just helping - and other than someone being nice to her - her joy was derived from others creations - not mine. Helping people, or at least helping them WELL is an undervalued skill in SL. The system, itself, provides a lot of ways for people to learn things in SL, but it can't really address the fact that a lot of talented and enthusiastic people have innate learning styles that will almost inevitably require them to get some kind of help one-on-one. It seems to me that if you have good organizational skills, at least, you could create an agency for new users that helps them find their "thing" and connect with the right people to learn what they need to learn at a speed that works for them. You might charge them a fee, or you could do it on a donation basis and still come out pretty well ahead. n00bs don't always have any money, but most of them will see the value in what you have done for them when they meet a few other people who are still floundering after logging every day for a month or more. And people like me are always eager to meet new talent before it gets scared away by a few pointless discouragements, so I could certainly front a few people money to pay you if they show any real commitment to profitable content creation... and I think most people will if they get the right referrals the first time. If you really are interested in "all of it", then that probably makes you the perfect person to open such an agency, since you wouldn't have any strong biases and might be able to more objectively assess where someone should try to focus in the beginning. There are probably some free online personality and aptitude tests you could use to match new users with in-world activities. Step one would probably be to get some successful people in SL to take such tests, so you can see how test results do or do not work as predictors of success as scripters, sculptors, texturers, animators, etc. "But shouldn't there be more for me than just helping?". Sure there should, if you want there to be. I'm just saying that if you are actually good at helping (or can get good quickly) and you don't hate doing it, then that is one of the few things not already over-abundant in SL, and could provide you with a revenue stream while also keeping you continually exposed to new things in SL.

Sorry I implied that you had already mocked him. I was just expecting a bunch of people to jump in AFTER you WITHOUT posting anything useful as you had done. I'm assuming you've seen that before... yes?

That's a pretty substantial improvement over previous problems, I think, and I am appreciative. Thanks for acknowledging the problem. The problems may or may not continue, but my own sense of frustration untli now has mostly been in the perception that LL prefers to ignore or deny things. I can accept that things can go less than perfectly sometimes, sure, but it's a lot easier to accept when those failing recognize the failure. Assuming today's difficulty is to be understood as periodic at this point, I think it is being handled at least a little better, if only (so far) by the acknowledgement. Who agrees with me and who disagrees?

Who would have imagined that just increasing the size of the image would actually cover more of the boob? OK, I tease. But the edge does look quite a bit smoother to me. I also wouldn't tell you not to try tools that people have reported as being effective. If I have a clear reason for not using something, I will give that reason. So far, does anyone have a reason NOT to resize things larger in order to get smoother curved edges?

People often get mocked for asking such questions in places like this, but my own experience has always been that if someone wants to know how something really is, it's a lot easier to ask people who know about it than to sift through a bunch of official text that might not even be right, assuming it ever gets to the point. I personally recommend Sandbox Wanderton for n00bs. It's usually less griefy. See you there.

You can also use a poseball that is underground. This works really well if you just push the thing into a slope at the edge of a sim that has ocean on the other side of the slope, since all you have to do is pan around so that you're looking at the nonexistent back of the slope from over the ocean.

Maybe you could put the walk anim in an invisible poseball that is also scripted to start and stop directional motion on simple keystrokes?

You'll probably learn a lot more (and faster) by doing a thing wrong a hundred times than by waiting to watch someone else do it correctly once. That's SL and that's RL.