robin Meridoc

Hi A4, I think the right place for this is in the JIRA as a feature request for the Second Life Viewer. robin

Hi people! I've posted a description of how I made a tank top in my blog. You can find the blog here: http://robin-makingstuff.blogspot.com/ Unfortunately it is the nature of blogs to post things backwards so you'll see the last step first and the next to last next and so on. If you want to find the start of the 'making a tank top' posts you can go through the posts till you find it or start here: http://robin-makingstuff.blogspot.com/2011/04/making-clothes-tank-top-part-1.html I"ve set up the Blog Archive thingie near the top-right of the blog to help in finding the start of thing. If you look at the March posts you'll see the starting point on making a seamless tile. And if you look at February you'll see where I start the series of posts on making a skin. I don't consider myself an expert with GIMP or making clothes but I am willing to share what I have learned so far. If you see something that's wrong or could be done in a different and better way let me know. And if you have a question feel free to post it here or in the blog. I'll do my best to answer. robin

Hi! Early in my 'clothes making career' I had this problem too - and some kind soul told me about Gaussian Blur. I use GIMP so I dont know what its called in PS but I'm sure there is an equivalent. You'll have to experiment and find how many pixels you have to blur to make those jaggies go away. If your fabric has some sort of pattern or texture to it you'll need to be careful with the blur. What I would suggest in that case is to create a 'trim' that you can blur separate from the fabric. You'll have to make your fabric slightly smaller then to lay in the middle of your trim.... ifyou dont the jaggies may show underneath the trim. This is one of the two basic things you need to make clothes in SL. The other is bezier curves, in GIMP they're called Paths. I dont know what they're called in PS - perhaps someone can add a post with the proper term. I'll try to put a post on my blog on this in the next couple of weeks - using both Paths and Gaussian Blur in GIMP to make clothes. http://robin-makingstuff.blogspot.com/ robin

My guess is that the lighting is the culprit in washing out the detail in his hair. If you have your graphics set on high, you might try medium and see if it makes a difference. Windlight can also be a culprit, it changes the lighting on High Graphics. You can do other things to control the lighting by overriding the sun position. Unrelated, but another suggestion for photography in SL is to set your snapshots to high resolution. That will give you enough pixels to dosome cropping of the image. robin PS: the aspect ratio looks a little off to me. Everone looks a little too skinny. I'm not sure how that happened. It might just be a matter of how it was posted in this forum, or maybe something that happened on your pc.

I'm not sure what you mean by "added the desidered facial expression from the drop down menu, and uploaded it. ". But beyond that I did have a similar problem to what you're describing. I"ll try to describe it and let you decide if it fits your situation or not. I wrote a script add menu driven expressions to a 'smiler'. The symptoms of my problem were similar to those you describe. Sometimes the expression I selected would show up, sometimes not, and sometimes it would do surprising things involving waving of hands or something like that. It took two things to solve the problem. I had to add commands in the script to suspend my AO at the start of the expression, and then turn it back on. And I had to add a delay, make the script sleep for a second or two between turning the AO off and back on. The expressoins I'm referring to here are more than just facial. For example 'repulse' involves the whole body, not just the face. Many are like that. robin

Could someone post some screen shots of examples? Sort of a before and after thing? I'm a GIMP user and I dont think that GIMP has a Liquify option - but need a better idea of what it is. Perhaps it does. *smiles and shrugs* robin

OpenCollar gives away a free AO called OpenCollar Sub AO. You can get that and add amimations to it to personalize it to your taste. robin

Hi people! I am certainly not a professional graphics artist or anything even close to that - but i use a simple technique with GIMP to create seamless textures. I'm sure it can be used in Photoshop and other similar programs as well. Its not general... its not meant to take some arbitray texture and make it seamless. But it does let you create a nice seamless texture from scratch. I describe the technique in my blog.... have a look. http://robin-makingstuff.blogspot.com/ I've used it to create fabrics, fish/lizard scales and a kind of simple mesh or lace for stockings and other clothing. *blushes* robin

Hi Elohi, I've had something similar happen to me on occasion, and to a friend more often. In our case it also disallows making any changes to the avatar (like putting on different clothes) because it claims everything is not loaded. It's just speculation but I think it has to do with the connection. We both use wifi but my signal is strong and hers is often weak. That leads to dropped packets and while SL should figure that out and retry it appears to me that it often doesn't. Viewer 2 does add a new way of fetching things that is more reliable but will fall back on the old if the newer way fails. The newer releases of Phoenix use this new technique too (called HTTP Get Textures). And, yes even with that, I've still had this occur. So.... if my guess is right and its your connection. (probably wifi) Then the thing to do is to look into ways of making your connection stronger. If you have a wired connection, the problem is still possible, but would have to do with packets being dropped in the network itself. Much more unlikely. There are things that can be done to help with wifi signal strength, but i'll wait for you to respond to get into them. After all, if you have a wired connection its unlikely that this is the problem. If you can't fix it for one reason or another, the next thing is to recover in-world from the problem. This is a pretty drastic solution i'm about to give you - so you will want to wait a little while and see if things sort themselves out before trying it. .... the thing to do is to go to the Advanced menu at the top of the screen and choose Advanced->Character->Character Tests->Test Female (or Test Male). What happens is that all of your attachments are removed and you are put into one of SL's newbie bodies (Girl Next Door I think). So go find a private place to do this. Its embarassing for your friends to see you like this. Then put on your normal body, skin, hair, clothes and various other attachments - and you're ready to go. Good luck! robin

"Cute" is generally in the eye of the beholder. In this case... yours! *grins* What I do is get the free AO from OpenCollar. Its called OpenCollar Sub AO and all you need to get it is to join the group. If you're not into collars, don't worry, you dont have to have a collar to use the AO. Then, once you have the free AO, go shopping for animations. You can buy animations and add them to the AO, edit the notecard and tell it to restart. Then you have a personalized AO that will match exactly what YOU think of as cute. robin PS: This works for guys too.

I dont know about others... but for myself, I'd need to see a picture or two. perhaps with circles and arrows and stuff like that. robin

I dont know of a rlv door as you describe.... but ... I think you could do the inverse easily. And since what you really want to do is to sort the rlv-enabled from the not-rlv-enabled, that would do the job. There are rlv tp traps available that wil tp an rlv enabled avatar to some distant point. Here's an example of one, there are many others: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/RLV-Portal-Door/1645297 robin

Here are some eyes I made. The iris is from an image i found in a googe search. Just use Google Images and search for 'human eyes' or 'human iris'. I used GIMP to manipulate the image I downloaded and get it into a good texture and a good size for my avatar. There was a lot of fiddling and many uploads of temporary textures before I was happy with the results. Oh... and remember to scale the image smaller for the final upload when you make a permanent texture. robin

I agree, Eloh Eliot's skins are wonderful and can used to produce a nice skin or be used as the base for your own interesting and fun modifications. For those who would like to give it a try, I attempted to take them through the process in my blog: http://robin-makingstuff.blogspot.com/ Of course, since it's a blog you'll have to read it in reverse order. :-/ In the near future I plan to put the two skins made through the process described into a little freebie box in my shop. robin