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Scylla Rhiadra

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Everything posted by Scylla Rhiadra

  1. Scylla Rhiadra
    Oh, sorry! I certainly wasn't implying that you were. I think we've all inadvertently left ourselves standing or hovering somewhere at one time or another. My griefer was on SLRR land, which adjoins my parcel. It seemed odd to me when I first saw him there that he was just off the parcel, but facing into it, but I sort of shrugged and went about my business.
  2. Scylla Rhiadra
    Ironically, when the first incarnation of this thread first appeared, I decided (rather primly, with tightly drawn lips and nose in air) that I wasn't going to post in it, because I didn't want to participate in something so focused on negativity. /me looks at the list of top posters with a sense of reservation
  3. Scylla Rhiadra
    The last time I noticed someone on the outskirts of my parcel hovering, he turned out to be the alt of a griefer who had just attacked. He was there to watch my reaction, and when I didn't spot what he'd done quickly enough (because I was on my sky platform), he was kind enough to draw my attention to it.
  4. Scylla Rhiadra
    Pretty sure you won't be the only one. Implementation of this is going to be spotty at best.
  5. Scylla Rhiadra
    I'm starting to panic (mildly) about an upcoming show in August, so I'm focusing now on pieces for that. This is one of them, called "Entropy"
  6. Scylla Rhiadra
    Long ago, I once had a bf who called bumpy nipples "pre-chewed." EX-boyfriend, I should have said.
  7. Scylla Rhiadra
    I think commercial structures will increasingly come with them built-in, and a few already do, but if you want to add it to older builds, you'll need to create and calibrate it yourself.
  8. Scylla Rhiadra
    Apparently the release of the FS PBR viewer is imminent. Whatever that means. A week or two maybe?
  9. Scylla Rhiadra
    Agreed. And it's going to be the response of the vast majority of SL residents. As Zali has pointed out, I think, you shouldn't need a background in computer graphics to play Second Life. On the positive side, I think this is true: A great many of my friends literally don't know what "ALM" is, in large measure because they don't care all that much. Most of them have their graphics low enough that it's turned off, because avoiding lag is more important to them than nice graphics. Those people aren't going to learn how to use reflection probes, obviously. But they also won't care that much about the graphic quality that it can produce anyway. So they'll be fine.
  10. Scylla Rhiadra
    Woohoo! You sure know how to have a good time!!!! Will there be music and dancing? ETA: Sorry, I didn't mean that to sound sarcastic or critical. I just find the linking of "PBR" and "party" pretty hilarious. Not even party hats and cake are going to make PBR fun. I DO take your point, however, about communication. LL is not good at that, as you note. What I think would be actually useful is a kind of "Dummy's Guide to PBR," that avoids most of the techie stuff and focuses squarely on what PBR will mean for the average user. And a more advanced guide for creators would sure be useful. The wiki sucks.
  11. Scylla Rhiadra
    I think this is true of a great many people, including to some degree myself. I don't know that it's true of the majority of residents, though. Most of those in my circles in SL are neither techies nor gamers, and have in past found things like BOM challenging. 95% of people of my acquaintance will be assiduously avoiding having to even think about reflection probes.
  12. Scylla Rhiadra
    No, they really don't. Why would you expect them to?
  13. Scylla Rhiadra
    Finding them now in this forum would be . . . difficult. Paging @Qie Niangao!!!
  14. Scylla Rhiadra
    Excellent, and convenient indeed! Thank you! That's undoubtedly part of it, but it also seems, on the basis of both my own messing about, and Qie's experiments, that not all of the parameters work exactly as expected. But it may be they've adjusted that -- it's been a while since I played with it.
  15. Scylla Rhiadra
    Yes, dahling. There's money in them thar hills!
  16. Scylla Rhiadra
    Yeah, kinda. @Nagachief Darkstone's video does show quite well what they are and what they do, although he doesn't address the fine-tuning of the ambient light within the probe, which is glitchy to say the least. ( @Qie Niangao has done a number of informative and sometimes discouraging posts, some time ago, on his experiments with this.) Honestly, although creating and setting a probe isn't all that difficult in and of itself (and it's got easier since they first introduced them), this is going to be waaaaaaaay beyond what most residents are going to be capable of doing for themselves. In fact, I suspect it will be years before most residents even have more than a very foggy idea of what a reflection probe is. In practice, we'll all be depending upon creators to start including well-calibrated probes with their builds. Some are doing that now. But until that happens, probes will, I suspect, be something of a rarity within SL.
  17. Scylla Rhiadra
    It's a special box or spherical object that you can create for (mostly) interior environments. The probes (it's a confusing name, I know!) should cover the entire space, from wall to wall, and are used to 1) determine what within the room gets reflected in metalic or mirror surfaces, and 2) set the ambient lighting of the space in a way that's different from the exterior. In terms of the former, the probe (as I understand) essentially creates a 360 deg image of what it contains that is used for reflections. For lighting, it allows you to set an interior as brighter or darker than the outside. (The lighting part has lots of options, some of which don't actually seem to work very well, but you can adjust the interior lighting to reflect both exterior ambient light, and interior local lights.) They're kind of a pain to set up (especially if you're not just setting them for a regular square or rectangular space) and adjust, but not in theory really very difficult to use. They do count towards your LI.
  18. Scylla Rhiadra
    Oh good! I've soooooo missed whining about PBR!!!! Good times, good times. Sorry, for a non-techie, what do you mean by this? Do you mean the way that lighting is simulated/rendered?
  19. Scylla Rhiadra
    Don't be! Who the hell wants to be right all the time? Certainly not ME! 😏 This is, I think, a pretty good analogy. For the first half century or more of the history of photography, it was viewed primarily as a "documentary" form, rather than as "art." Then came the Pictorialists, who decided it could be art, and from them we get the true masters of the medium. I sort of alluded to the idea that AI could produce tools that would be welcomed as legitimately empowering elements of the artist's toolbox. I was actually kind of thinking of a few existing platforms that I've heard about (but never tried myself) that are used now by photographers (including SL ones) as a means of enhancing images. My sense is that most SL people using these are employing them to get closer to what is still "The Holy Grail" of SL photography, shots that look like RL photography -- but I may be wrong. And I DO know a couple of SL artists/photographers who use AI well, and in really interesting ways. So yeah, I was being reductive. /me hangs her head in shame I don't know the answer to this either. And of course, there are artists who did not themselves upload their work to the web, but whose pieces appear here anyway. I do think that at some point there will be guidelines. And that will happen when huge corporate content-creators (Hello Disney!) start worrying that they are being threatened. Those guidelines will inevitably be complicated, somewhat fuzzy, and hard to enforce, just as copyright is today. But if AI does represent a "democratization" of art -- well, you can be sure that the corporate world, with the assistance of their minions in government, will attempt to do something to curtail it. We can't have people producing their own stuff, can we?
  20. Scylla Rhiadra
    And I'm not telling. 😜
  21. Scylla Rhiadra
    Yes indeed. One of the reasons I'm a little leery about using the word "art," especially in reference to my own stuff (I generally prefer "images"), is precisely that the term has a lot of cultural baggage. An analogy is in my own professional field of English lit: the term "literature" has the same kinds of connotations as "art," and tends to be read, especially by those with a more conservative bent, as meaning . . . well, a lot of things I'll get into trouble saying here, but generally "classics approved by the 'best' authorities." Most academics I know take a much more democratizing approach. I teach a lot of texts that would be defined by some as "popular literature," including graphic novels and children's lit. They are every bit as valid as anything on a prescribed list of "classics." The same is true of the visual arts, I think. When I said "coarsen," I didn't mean that it would turn attention away from "The Old Masters," or infect "taste" with merely popular art (anime, manga, comic art, for instance), but rather that there is the danger that it will flood our screens with stuff that is formulaic, hackneyed and, well, really just not very good. A simple example: doing a search for works by Edward Hopper a while back on Google, I noticed that a disturbing number of the results fetched up were AI works "in the style" of that artist. And indeed, they were recognizably "like" Hopper's aesthetic in some ways, and even seemed to sort of mimic his characteristic themes -- meaning that they were copying some of his paintings reasonably closely. And they were all singularly awful -- all surface, and zero depth.
  22. Scylla Rhiadra
  23. Scylla Rhiadra
    Oh yeesh, I haven't found this yet! A wolf's head, eh? Anyone I know?
  24. Scylla Rhiadra
    Nah, we're good! /me smiles brightly
  25. Scylla Rhiadra
    Yeah. One way of viewing this is through an ethical lens, of course: ripping off artists (and AI is going to become increasingly good at producing work "in the style of") without any compensation is frankly an appalling foundation upon which to build this new industry. And at the same time, there are the practical issues. Less work for artists means less art, which means in turn less innovation and change, and an AI that is both stuck in the past, and increasingly copying itself. I'm actually reasonably confident that "art" will continue. Artists have survived through a variety of financial models over the past couple of millennia, and I'm sure that at least some of them will continue to thrive. Maybe there will be a return to the old model of patronage? But access to the art will be increasingly restricted, and our culture's understanding of, and taste for art will coarsen. Feed everyone nothing but Big Macs, and you're going to produce new social problems and limitations.
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