Da5id Weatherwax

Jennifer Boyle wrote: Chosen Few wrote: ... every original work is copyrighted, as soon as it is created. So, unless you've obtained specific permission from the creator/owner of a photo, you can't use the image. Wrong. There is a huge amount of material that is in the public domain, notably all US Government publications. Work being placed in the public domain, either by the expiry of its copyright or by the excpicit placing of it in the public domain by the copyright holder IS such specific permissoin.

Olyphaunt Offcourse wrote: Personally at this point I wouldn't bother with sculpts unless I had some reason to need a sculpt specifically. They're so much more of a pain in the ass to make than a normal mesh model, there's so many modeling that you use when making a sculpt... I couldnt agree more about the pain in the fundament factor, however at the moment I still make both. The "projects" - where I'm really stretching myself and exploring the limits of my own abilities and knowledge, those are all mesh now. However, the results of those aint gonna see the windlight of the day outside of my workshop or an occasional test elsewhere for a while. If I'm making something for the group I RP in, then it's still sculpties all the way so that the folks who cant run a mesh-enabled viewer dont get the immersion-breaker of the "hockey puck" effect. Same for stuff I make that others are going to use in the general SL market, unless I'm specifically asked to make it mesh. We haven't hit the mesh penetrance "tipping point" yet, and we can't really predict it's arrival although I think the promised backport of mesh visibility to phoenix is going to be a major factor when it hits the grid.

Drongle McMahon wrote: "MLK Jr's lawyer stayed up all night hand-writing copyright notices on all printed copies of the "I have a dream" speech" I think that is irrelevant because it was before the USA became a signatory of the Berne Convention in 1998. Before that, copyright had to be explicitly claimed. IANAL but that is my understanding too: Explicit action to protect your copyright is not required to either retain your copright or to sue for infringement if you discover it at some later date. Under the Berne convention there is no requirement for registration, copyright notice or any other action for you to have full copyright protection for your own creative works. For the purposes of sourcing from anyone elses creative works, therefore, the above-mentioned logic should be reversed. If there isn't an explicit statement that you CAN use it, you can't unless you get the explicit permission of the copyright owner. Even editing the image to create the texture only makes the texture a "derivative work" of the original which can infringe as easily as a direct copy. Trademarks on the other hand DO require you to act to protect them if you want to retain their protection under law. Trademark protection is "use it or lose it", copyright protection isn't. That's why businesses are so hair-triggered about going after trademark infringement - they have to or the mark loses it's value.

Pamela Galli wrote: Thanks very much Drongle. However, it occurs to me that I must have the seat and back meshes separate because they have a fabric change script that depends on them being given a certain name. So I must have at least three meshes. I will try that at and see. Wow, I was getting super excited about the possibilities to cut prims with mesh, but I see now that those are more limited than I thought, since almost all my stuff is scripted. Not necessarily minimum of 3 - if the fabric areas are all set to a separate material you could easily change them by switching the script to address them by face #. It's just that as Drongle pointed out, you've got a max of 8 available doing it that way. If you're only using three, just UV unwrap chair body, cushion and back separately so you make the best use of the textures you apply to the cushion and back.

If all you ever want to make is sculpties, the inworld tools are good. However, if you want to eventually get to blender and its ilk, then you might want to look at a "simpler" offline tool. I personally started making sculpts with wings3d (before the inworld tools were available) Following that approach with whatever basic tool takes your fancy and has a plugin or other easy method to export a sculpt map will have you learning (without really trying) about important modelling concepts like edge loops, and if/when you end up making meshes you'll not be confused by things like the importer doubling your vertex count at hard edges because you'll be used to the practice of collapsing a couple together to achieve that with a sculpt... The only real issue with blender is its UI and the latest version of it seems like it would be a lot easier to get used to for somebody who hasnt used it before. For sculpts you'll only be using a fraction of its capabilities anyway and the more esoteric parts of the UI will be parts you'll never touch. You'll know when you're ready to start building meshes or to switch over to blender (or similar) for sculpts when you find yourself running into things that whatever basic tool you picked can't do or that the base geometry of a sculpt wont let you accomplish. By then the learning curve of the blender UI will seem worth it Just dont even think of trying sculpts in blender without Gaia and Domino's plugins. You can do it but the hoops you have to jump through to make a sculpt map without 'em are enough to make even an experienced blender users head ache.

I started doing sculpties in wings3d - I'd messed with CAD and with 3D software casually before and had supported servers that were used for some VERY serious graphics work professionally but that was the first time I tried to actually produce serious content doing everything end-to-end myself. Wings3d felt like an 80's autodesk product, I could just jump right in. It wasnt long though before I wanted more and so looked into blender. After running screaming from the UI several times I found the JASS spin of it, immediately dropped LotsOLindens on Gaia for the full version and suddenly there was enough benefit to make me fight my way up the everest-like learning curve to be able to do it right. Along the way I switched from using qavimator to Daz3D for animations as well. Then Blender changed the UI. I fell off the mountain and had to start climbing all over again. Currently above the Khumbu Icefall, in the Western Cwm, heading for camp 2

Medhue Simoni wrote: Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: Medhue Simoni wrote: [...] And believe me, it takes alot longer to make animation than a model. ...] I do some animating and it takes lot less time than my modelling... that doesn't mean I am a faster animator or a better one or a slower builder or a worse or better one. All it means is I put more time into my modelling, you put more time into your animating...I'm sure your animations are a lot longer and more complicated than mine. i I can do any pose in a few seconds, but doing motion capture can take an hour to a whole day or days for 1 motion capture. Setting up, practicing the movements or hiring models, getting into character, recording the movements, setting up the scene in the program, processing the movement, processing more detail, fixing and smoothing, and then I can bring it into the actual bvh editor to loop things, clean more shakyness, and get it ready for SL. Then, I have to adjust that animation on the SL character, which there are no 2 the same size. Oy gevalt.. For the stuff I used to build I would do my anims by keyframes and then tweak the sequence frame by frame - never got the cash flow on it that would justify mocap - but yeah I can see that. Always took me at least a 10x timeframe to do the aniums over the items. Cool hybrid design of the last 2 sonic screwdrivers btw

Scaling up the model as a whole will often reduce the physics component of the cost anyway - bigger tris in the physics mesh give the physics engine much less of a headache than smaller ones do. That's why the uploader is set with a fairly aggressive limit for when it considers a tri to be degenerate (red dots on upload preview and upload fails) placing a practical limit on the minimum thickness of a mesh wall, for example. I've gotten around this by actually making the wall thicker "physically" than it appears to be - Nobody is going to notice that their av is actually colliding with the wall a few inches before they visually appear to

Moo Spyker wrote: Incorrect. If your download is lower then then 1. Adding a script will round it up to 1. So in certain examples it can have a drastic effect. For example a linkset of 50 0.5 download cost mesh adding a script to the linkset would increase the cost from 25 to 50. If the download cost is greater or equal to 1 then it has no effect on cost. What does this have to do with this topic anyways? I was responding to a comment above that mentioned "using one script instead of 8" changing land impact, and my correction was to that. I did indeed say the difference would come between "scripted" and "not scripted" as you point out here rather than from any consideration of changes in the nonzero script count. That was, in fact, precisely my point I made no statement about the magnitude of the change in server weight, which you correctly point out can be quite significant depending on exactly how the linkset is constructed. I was simply pointing out that adding or removing scripts in an already scripted object makes no difference, just as it makes no difference whether a physical object is scripted or not, since physicality invokes the exact same penalty to server weight as scripting does. Thank you for providing the example, though, because if I was sufficiently unclear that one as experienced with the mesh project as yourself thought I was saying anything other than exactly what you "corrected" me to then I certainy wasnt sufficiently clear to have provided good info to Voodoo.

Let me correct one point: changing the # of scripts has no effect on land impact unless it is removing them ALL. Your object is either scripted or not, and if its scripted will have a higher server cost. However, if it IS scripted it doesnt matter at all to the server cost component of land impact whether it has one script or 50.

Yep, the red stuff is where the physics engine sees what it considers degenerate tris. You can get this by simply making a wall too thin or stuff like that.. You dont get a visible error message apart from "errors on upload" but if you look at the log file you see lots of degenerate tris reported. Since the collision shape is not part of the rendered world, if you discover this issue on a structure you can, without harm to the hours of work you may have already put in on the thing, just make the physics walls fatter by making them extend a little beyond the visible inner surface of the wall (dont touch the outside because your physics shape has to have the same bounding box as the visible part). Nobody is going to notice, when moving around inworld, that they actually collide with a wall a little before they truly appear to. You've got a LOT more leeway in that regard than you might think. The physics wall can be significantly thicker than the rendered wall without breaking the experience.

Darkie Minotaur wrote: I love Eclipse and LSL plus as well - unfortunately it hasn't been updated for over 1,5 years, so you could call it dead, I'm afraid. Apart from the fact that is supports a large number of languages, it's implemented in Java and available for different OSes, which is a great plus for me. On lifesupport maybe, but certainly not quite dead. I just checked sourceforge and commits are still happening, theres at least one person out there still checking in source - you just have to build it yourself.

If the original song is "traditional" or otherwise in the public domain, anyone can cover it but any individual recording is still under copyright. I wouldnt be allowed to market a SL fiddle that plays either Dave Swarbricks or Ric Sanders version of "the 4-poster bed" unless I contacted the rights holder (in their case likely the record label) and got permission to do so but its the recording that is others intellectual property not the original tune.. so if I were a decent enough fiddler myself to make a recording of it that I held the rights to then seling a fiddle that played that version would be fine.

I've been handling this by building the bits I want to feature in the physics as one mesh, with a customized physics mesh so that one can step inside the hollow bits etc. Then I build the rest as a second mesh without a physics shape. Post-upload the one with the physics is type "prim" and the root, the rest is type "none"

I have been experientiing with the same thing and I find the only place to use multi materials is for face-specific features like glow or shiny. for the rest I take my high-LOD model, subdivide it like crazy to create details (usually labelling this one "insane LOD" and split it into as many materials as I want to bake the texture.. then go back to the models I intend to upload, set all faces smooth and upload as a single submesh.Get the lighting right in blender before baking and the hard edges show up just fine even though they are a smoothly rendered surface inworld.

bluescreens my machine when initially rendering the world if the graphics are set too high quality. However if I remember to set them back to "medium" before I log in I can crank them all the way up to "ultra" once I'm inworld with no issues.I think its squabbling with the latest nvidia drivers.

Medhue Simoni wrote: ...Putting even a 1 prim jump in cost is going to push creators away from making their builds interactive... This. I'm not the most gifted sculptor or builder around, I can make better looking meshes than I ever could sculpting or playing prim-lego. Thats not my big deal though, every product I've sold I marketed on the merits of its interactive nature.. penalize me for scripting an item and why shouldnt I just stick with the heavier load on the sim (more tris) and worse looking sculpted solution to preserve the interactivity without the impact on my customers parcel primcount? You have drawn a bead on your foot here, Nyx. if you can convince anyone in management not to pull the trigger I would very much advise that you do so.

Debug setting - DoubleClickTeleport