Da5id Weatherwax

I will say up front that the comparable project I'm working on at the moment is not yet complete so I have nothing to compare against. However, before I see what my project ends up as, I'd like to see what the real experts on here would come up with as a guess for the final weight of a similar building. The brief is a 4-bedroom stone-built scottish mansion over three floors with drawing room, large dining room, grand hall (double height), kitchen, conservatory, library (double height with gallery), study, ballroom (double height), master suite to include an additional bathroom and a private balcony. There will be an additional stairwell downwards to a wine cellar but the wine cellar is not included in this buildings budget as it will be a separate construction accessed via an experience-TP half way down the stairs. The question which I invite you to answer is this: If you were contemplating making this, before you even put a single vertex into Blender, what would you guess would be the sort of LI budget you'd be shooting for? You can assume land constraints are not a factor, so you have no hard target to aim for, you just want to be as efficient as you can while still making it look good and it being a seamless experience walking through the main building.

I'm pretty much on board with all of Coffee's pet hates around creators abuse of the grid.. So she can use MY "list" as a pagefile anytime she likes.

You know how it all works, two heads and only enough blood to run one of them at a time

my profile pic here and my RL photo in my SL profile are the same, and both real. I've been on the internet too long (since before it was called "the" internet or it became effectively synonymous with something that didn't exist back then, the WWW) to have any hope of anonymity and I'm too old and curmudgeonly to give a rat's... Oh, and get off my lawn

Normally 128. When I'm performing, though, I scale it back to 64 and (sorry, all you beautiful people) crank the graphics down and jellydoll almost everyone. I want SL using as little computer resources as possible, so that even if it all hits the fan the streaming software will still keep the server's buffer filled and my audio wont glitch and skip. I am running on a better machine these days than I was when that was a necessity, but I still have the "performance" graphics preset and as a matter of habit it gets loaded up and then reverted as soon as my set's done. The other reason to do it still remains - that showing everyone in full-pretty mode generates more heat and means that my FANS are running harder. That noise does get picked up by the mic, so I want them spinning as quietly (ie slowly) as possible

I can see the (future site of) my house from there... (I'm now in one of the regions immediately to the north of the "here be dragons" blank zone on the map) - As an "original native Zindran" from the days when I owned a nice chunk of Vallone at the continents creation I've always maintained a presence there and I dont see that changing anytime soon. There's just too many good memories such as participating in the "scarlet letter hunt", one of the many protests about segregating us that way, where to actually find one of the hunt items the hunter had to make use of one of my demo items for long enough that one of its moving parts would shift far enough to expose the hunt box I would love to see the continent completed some day....

This is just entitled Bravo Sierra on the part of the folks griping. The covenant says "don't encroach", the estate settings say "encroachments can be returned". "landscape" over somebody else's boundaries and you should expect your landscaping to be in your lost&found folder sooner rather than later. Whatever happened to the old technique of mapping out your parcel at ground level with a megaprim then moving it to your skyboxes height and just building so everything is sitting on that megaprim and not overhanging its edges. Then you delete the megaprim once your build is complete and it is no longer required for reference. The old "parcel megaprims pack" is still out there, people, and covers all the possible sizes a rectangular parcel can be in 4m increments of each dimension. Mark your bounds at ground level with "show parcel boundaries" enabled, move the markers to your build height and build within those marks. There is no excuse for encroachment and if you do it you should EXPECT to get your intruding build returned. It's been that way since the dawn of the grid and the only way it's changed is that it can now simply be returned instead of it getting you an AR, after which the Lindens would return it and slap your wrist into the bargain.

@ChinReyI've just "moved house" and will be landscaping the parcel as soon as I've finished building the house. I will be hunting down and buying your trees if they are for sale anywhere

Virtual hugs to another "SL luthier" I got into making guitars almost by accident - I wanted to be standing on the SL stage playing the same guitar I was playing on the stream IRL. So I fired up blender and made copies of both of mine. Then I went nuts and made a copy of my RL stage rig too (with a little artistic license, I'm too much of a cheapskate to buy trussing in RL, live IRL I use a rig constructed from scaff) and packed in a flight case rezbox it works pretty darn well. (I sneak around in "off hours" before my first gig at any SL venue and measure up their stage so I can customize the rezzing params). Since then it's become a bit of a "bad habit" for me to ask other SL musicians what they are playing and make them mesh copies of their RL instruments. Along the way, I've retired both of the guitars I regularly performed with at the start and pretty much the first thing I did after each replacement was to mesh up copies of the new one (regular dreadnought bodies are SO much easier to mesh well than bowl-backed Ovations)

Allow me to mention that making bento fingers animate into chord shapes is a monumental and profound PAIN IN THE A........ I got as far as making three before I screamed, threw my mouse across the room and said "F realism" then made loops out of combos of those three that were "good enough" along with the other hand doing a basic fingerpicking "roll" What the heck, you can play anything with three chords, right?

Molly's hit the technical side right on the head here. Both overcoming the limited number of controls that LSL scripts can detect and generating them in the first place. You would need to have some kind of programmable MIDI "virtual keyboard" that would translate individual keys into a unique combo of the limited controls an SL viewer can respond to and send to the server (way back in the day I put in a feature request JIRA for being able to designate arbitrary keystrokes as "controls" and make these user-defined controls scriptable - ie, if configured, they would raise control events when pressed - but it never went anywhere. hey ho.) Even if there was a reasonable chance it would work right at the end, it would be a lot of code and not a project I'd want to take on.

Want it? Will enjoy having it? It fits where you live? Go for it. You'll find a use for those extra rooms. Somewhere down the line you'll come across some thing where you think "that would look good in (empty room you haven't found a use for yet) Unlike RL you don't have to dust and clean it, paint and repair it, so why the heck not? I've just relocated in SL and I have a big enough space now I'm building myself a house. Its going to be a bigger house than I'm going to use to its full potential at the moment but as a technical exercise in efficient building and stretching my meshing skills I'm building it anyway. As far as furnishing it and uses to make of the spaces, I''ve firm plans for about a third of it - the rest is a blank canvas on which my future imagination can paint

Indeed- it's a tool that in the sysadmin trade we used to call "powerful and sharp" - can do a lot but you can really hurt yourself with it if you use it unwisely

On the few occasions I've owned beachfront and other parcels that overlapped navigable water it has always been a point of pride, as an old RL sailor, that I bouyed navigable channels and marked hazards to IALA standards, including installing leading lights on a couple of occasions. They were scripted to have unique and compliant light patterns too!

I'd have to pick different ones for each of the appearances I routinely wear. Leaving aside the body aroma which is kept under control by regular showers, I'd have to think about lifestyles and what they would make their clothes smell like. The anthro feline I wear most of the time would probably smell like a mixture of pipe smoke, whisky and the rest of the "ambience" you pick up performing in dive bars several nights a week The human, well, that's easy. There is a particular "auto shop smell" that seems to seep out of the very concrete of an old-school motorcycle shop. A mix of gasoline, oil, two-stroke exhaust. degreasers and something else not quite identifiable.. If any of you have smelled it in RL you will know EXACTLY the aroma I'm thinking of. Car shops manage to not quite generate it, motorcycle shops sure do. The borg, on the other hand, given his RP history, would probably have little to no aroma at all, unless somebody puked on him in sickbay

Totally likewise - Like yourself, when I signed up you had to pick from a list of surnames and then find a first name that wasn't taken with it. I wanted to use my real first name but, predictably, both "Dave" and "David" were already taken with any surname I fancied. Hence the 5 which can be read as a Roman V

Hate 'em. Use 'em and to me your name is either your username or - if I'm feeling uncharitable - "Mr/Ms Gobbledi*****" Guess the forum filters pick up Golf Oscar Oscar Kilo as a racial slur against Vietnamese even if its part of a word Well, since it WASNT that, I aint changing it.

I love the RL version, and if the Big Easy is in SL, well, as a musician I gotta visit , right?

Don't have a worst In terms of SL "jobs" - as in something that involves a RL time-sink and that you can potentially make money from - I have worked as a performer and as security manager for a club. I'm still a performer, the club's on hiatus but will be back. As a performer, I've had some bad gigs though. The places that just dont promo their live artists, the ones that rave at your audition audio and say "yeah we want you on our stage" then drop you the NC a week later saying "you dont fit here, we're cancelling your sets" But for the most part I've been lucky, I guess, playing at places where the hosts are a joy to work with, the bosses appreciative that I treat their venue with the same professionalism as I would one IRL.

To answer the post title question - they are pretty good. The avatars are done well and they look like who they are supposed to be. They will doubtless be animated through the live performance in realtime - the animations created in advance but somebody is going to be there with their hand on a speed jog-wheel to make sure they stay in sync with the audio (which will be made easier by the fact that almost certainly the musicians will have a click track - think "metronome" - in their monitors and will perform every song at the exact same tempo every time. In SL, though, true "virtual performance" - by which I mean genuinely syncing up visuals and audio - is VERY difficult, in many cases impossible. The visuals and audio are served from different sources, the SL region server and the stream server. Some aspects of the visuals are only rendered client-side (animations), There is usually approximately a 10-20s buffer in the audio stream so you're hearing it that long after the artist actually played or sang it. Commanding a change in a performers animation or a change in the stage rig has an unpredictable delay - usually shorter than the delay on the audio but varying from client to client... It is for this reason that more than 80% of SL "live" performers set their av into a single anim loop for the entirety of their set and leave them there. The only thing live is the audio. This is the most important thing in a musical performance and I wouldnt dream of arguing that it somehow "isn't enough" but the vast majority of the time you're getting a single dance/performance animation and a radio show. In addition to being a musician, I'm a geek and a SL scripter. When I was making my SL stage rigs meshes and mesh copies of my RL guitars I wanted to see if it was possible to go beyond that as a solo performer. It was, but I knew in advance that a true virtual performance was never going to be on the cards. The easiest part was making my stage rig use projector lights and respond to cues to change the lighting for each song. Explicitly NOT using the "light cones" built in to many dance-floor and stage lights in SL. Those are a left-over from pre-deferred "point lighting" and now only have a place for things like pinlight and laser effects. When lit by a combination of projectors of different colours an object or avatar in SL shows the combination of colours correctly and all the lights cast independent shadows. Just like you'd see IRL. This was made a lot easier by only modelling one type of light, the ubiquitous parcan. I have RGB LED parcans in my RL rig and translating those cues into colour vectors in a SL scripting is a piece of cake. I made a few custom anims for each of my guitars. You wont see the difference unless you look close, they are all a basic "12 bar loop" but the bento fingers on the left hand are making different chord shapes in different places on the neck, there are variants that change the right hind between "bento fingerpicking" and a hand action more like strumming with a flat pick. Nobody is going to consciously notice this. They do, nonetheless, introduce a feeling of being "slightly different" at a subconscious level to an observer. In practice, however, there are one or two for each guitar I use for 90% of my songs. In making cues for each song I haven't lived up to the potential I built into the kit. ABBA will, of course, have a unique and custom set of animations for each track. As a solo SL performer making all my own stuff I'm NOT going to put in a dozen hours customizing animations every time I bring a new song into my SL setlist rotation (there are currently over 100 songs I've performed in SL at least once) There's a central controller script that detects my presence, which guitar I have attached to my av at the time and responds to SL controls to step forward or backwards through the cues preprogrammed into a NC for each set. I provide those control inputs with a set of USB footswitches that emulate keystrokes. But all of this doesn't address the sync issues. From purely empirical testing I know that if I hit the "next cue" footswitch about 4 bars into a songs intro, the lighting and anim change will "more or less" line up with when my audience hear me start playing it. If they are on a slow connection and it takes a while for the new anim to start rendering on their viewer then that may lag a little behind the lighting change but thats ok, the lighting changes are the things folks notice most and so as long as THAT is mostly in sync I'm "good enough". Stopping the anims and reverting to a built-in "stand" is faster and so at the end of a song I wait no more than 10 seconds to advance the cue. (I made a practical decision that the lighting cue for the previous song will persist until I start the next, not going to try and have different lighting for the time I spend gabbing between songs) It's still not as "live" as ABBA are going to make it with a production crew part of each performance but it's about the best that can be reasonably achieved by a solo performer in SL, I think. For "live virtual performances" in SL that actually LOOK "live", the quality of your avatar is the LEAST of your worries.

Indeed, as @Wulfie Reanimator said, it does have its limitations. The further you zoom out the more opaque it becomes. Halftoning the alpha mask will not be a fix-all thing. It works best, in my experience, for indoor items or for the interior face of a window where you are never going to be viewing it from a really far distance. particularly small sections of an item will only work with this technique if the textures are optimised to not be heavily over-resolution. It also is completely non-variable - you cannot , for example, change the masking threshold and see a different result. the degree of "transparency" is hardwired by the halftone mask. But where it does work, it works really well. Blended transparency without z-fighting would be the best solution, but we can't have that... this is just another tool to be added to the box in case it fits the particular items need

one other thing here - alpha blending and z-fighting. A texture with no alpha channel set partially transparent by the transparency slider will still have alpha mode "none" and doesn't z-fight with other partially transparent objects. A texture with partial transparency in the alpha channel and alpha mode set to blending WILL. This causes unpredictable rendering artefacts. You can avoid this by using masking as the alpha mode but then that means everything will be either COMPLETELY transparent or not transparent at all. This would seem to preclude it being used for a partially transparent situation like a stained glass window. HOWEVER, there is an old technique that can be of value to you here. It's called halftoning. This technique originated in printing, particularly for newspapers, where the impression of a greyscale image was created by using a matrix of black dots of varying size to simulate the greys. On a newspaper printed by the old hot-metal process the dots were quite large, you didnt even need a magnifying glass to see them, only to look fairly close. On a 1024x1024 texture with the smallest dot available being a single pixel then you're looking at a viable technique for making something look partially transparent while its actually alpha-masked and each pixel is either opaque or fully transparent. Most graphics progs contain halftoning filters. You will want to play with them, each one is different and you will want to learn how the ones in your particular graphics prog work best, what settings to use to get the best "pseudo-greyscale" result that is still effectively a single-bit mask, black or white. Once your alpha channel is comprised entirely of 1's and 0's then you can set a 50% alpha masking threshold and have no z-fighting and still an acceptable result for different degrees of partial transparency when rendered. It's been decades since halftoning was a mainstream printing techniques and so it's something often overlooked in a graphical art education. It looks like it may have a new application though, at least in managing transparency in SL 😀

there are ways to make a "contact point" go to a place inworld regardless of the shape of the av, but they are universally a pain in the bum and require a specific approach and serious customization of anims. You CAN build a system that has several positions for each joint that are separated out into distinct anims that can run concurrently, their cumulative effect being to "puppeteer" an av's arm into a position where their hand touches a particular inworld object. You will need to make about 700 single-joint anims to get anything like close enough to puppeteering a single arm via a script. You'll also need (at a minimum)an unrigged reference item attached to the hand which can inform the script of its distance and vector to the target object and do some horrendous math to resolve 3x 3-dof joints to the most efficient way of getting the attached reference and the target object into as close proximity as possible and then run the three single-joint anims you require to achieve that result. It will also need a complex setup for each individual av it is fitted to that will need redoing after every time they wear a different set of shape sliders. I tried it as a proof of concept and immediately rejected it as impractical. Possible, yes. Practical, not a chance in Hades.

You know, if I were building "buildings" for sale, I'd be so tempted to try and design a modular system, something you could put together many similar-themed and styled builds from, maybe with some clever rezbox-and-hud system to let you put it together on the fly, and thus be able to move the deck or sunroom to a side with views you liked and put a windowless wall (perhaps the one with the external flue and the fireplace on the interior) on the side you didn't want to look out at.. it wouldn't work for the smallest parcels of course but if you had room to redesign a little it should be mostly doable and you'd get to reconstruct your themed house to fit anywhere you subsequently moved to. Maybe this is just a throwback to what I used to do with sculpties for star trek RP sets where I'd make a section of jeffries tubes and tube junctions, for example, for the set builders in the group to use or an idea that never really got off the ground for a "castle building kit" with curtain walls, towers, bastions, gates and a bunch of interchangeable levels for the main keep (stack the ones you wanted, pick one with a doorway at the bottom and then cap it with a "standard roof", the stairways will line up... of course there were dungeon levels sketched out too for those into that sort of thing and an idea for a little chapel crypt where your undead buddies could catch a quick nap...) One day I might even get enough free time to finish that project unlike some of the "good ideas" I've never had the time to bring to an "acceptably successful" conclusion....

not patience - an abundance of frustration. Even if I never use it I HATE not having a devkit for a body I wear - it feels like a violation of the SL ethos of "a world created by its residents" - I at least want the option of trying to make myself exactly what I want rather than just getting "close enough" with the products of "annointed creators" and anything rigged to the body, well with few exceptions without the "tailor's dummy" you're just screwed. As there was no chance of getting the creators devkit it was either a process like this or download a ripper and since I will not, ever, rip.... I try to get the devkits for bodies I or my partner wear. A few just send 'em out without a problem. Some don't reply. One accused me of wanting to rip off their brand and went nuts on me (I promptly trashed that body and everything I owned fitted to it and added the creator to my mental list of "if you're associated with these guys, I'll buy elsewhere if I can" )