Elinah Iredell

Hi everyone. I just wanted to start a thread discussing how miserably hard it is to find some stores in second life. They do not show up in a search, often the landmarks are outdated and they may not have any presence on the sl marketplace. Many times I have had to find a group that supports them look up the owner of the group and click on their profile picks which usually has a link to their store and yet even that may not work. Sometimes I was searching to find the creator of an old demo in my inventory I liked, and sometimes I saw it featrured on a website about second life . I can tell yiou some stores are very hard to find, while others show up in search quickly and easily. Occasionally while they did not show up in a search they had an advertisement that did show up but that is rare. I just want merchants to realize that their stores may be hard to find and that it is keeping customers away. Often when I had just about given up that the store was gone I find it., but other times the store actually is gone. How do I know the difference between a store that is out of business and gone from sl and a store that is just difficult to locate?

I worked on it yesterday and had much better results. I will also use your suggestions on the size of the texture. What I did was change the font from a fancy calligraphy font to a simple stronger font that was much easier to read. I also got rid of the side decorations and made the paragraphs larger. That also helped a lot. It is not as elegant and fancy looking as it was before but the test results I uploaded are much more legible I can see the words much clearer.I lrearned from this that if you want to use a fancy calligraphy font make sure the words are large, but if you need to use a lot of small words go for readability over looks. Much easier to read and much clearer looking text . I had created it in 512 x1024 to approximate the poem's long rectangle shape but i will try your suggestion of a squashed 1024x1024. I noticed on my full perm picture frames I bought that one has a separate face for the photo or artwork to be put into while the other has the area for the art image shown on the same texture along with the sides of the picture frame and I must fit the art image onto the texture by making it much smaller. I would think that would not look as good in sl, as a separate face for the art image. I do like that frame though. My research online shows that png is much smaller for the exact same images as tga , I was using tga. I would bet then that a 1024 texture using png creates much less lag in sl then a 1024 in tga. Of course since everything is changed to jpeg 2000 here (I think ) maybe it does not matter? I will visit the place you mentioned, the Forgotten City.thanks for the invite.

Thank you both for your replies. The idea of splitting the texture in half is interesting but I do not know if I can do that or not since it must be used as a rectangular shape inside a mesh picture frame. I chose mesh because I can get less land impact that way .I would llike to experiment with the idea though. I did purchase a full perm frame in the long rectangle shape to match the length of the long poem. My math is not that good. Is approximating the shape of the texture good enough to get the clearest results? I will ask for further help if it is not. Do you also know if there is a difference in clarity of textures with words put on prims, sculpts or mesh objects? I have started looking around but it is harder to compare since most things do not have a long poem with many small words that I need to create, but I did see one poster for an upcoming event that looked more clear compared to others.

Hi. I have been tryting to put some artwork with words inside a mesh frame and the words in it come out too blurry. There is a poem and I want it to look clear even close up so it is easy to read , I used png textures. I have tried both normal and very high resolution but they sill look too blurry to me. I was wondering if anyone knows the best way to make words in a texture come out looking crisp and clear?Is there a difference in clarity depending on which format is used .tga or .png? I do not want to give up on my project, but I do not like how it looks so far . .I would appreciate any advice . Thanks .

I saw one skin that cost $5000 at the skin fair. Unless I misunderstood the reason for the cost that is very expensive. While others are around $300 or $500 . What is a reasonable cost for a skin? What is too high? It is hard to tell. I know this I do not like to pay for demos. Do skin makers price them too high because they want to generate snob appeal? Luckily I did not want the skin. I notice some skins look better at higher settings . I remember being advised in linden tech support info to keep my settings low for less lag. And also I assumer different viewers make the same skin look different.. Not to mention different sun levels I always try my skins on at noon sun because that is the harshest so if it looks nice in that setting it will look nice in the others. I just felt some of the new skins from one of my favorite skin sellers were not as nice in many ways as the older ones. Oh well. I mean some aspect of the skins I liked better but some I felt got worse.

Thanks for your reply. I do not understand how an applier can put a skin on a mesh head ? I thought appliers just basically put on only one color like with the slink feet and hands how can they apply all the colors and shading in a skin for a face?

I just looked over the skins featured in this years skin fair. I have to say I was a little disappointed. While there were a few standout skins I liked and I now have some new stores I didn't know about I found most of the skins to be just mediocre . Just the same old thing. Some of the best skins stores are not represented there anymore for some reason. And maybe some nice skins stores have simply faded away and disappeard from sl completely, And it seems like some of my favorite skin stores also have been coming out with new skins I like less then their older ones. Some of the skins from last year were better. Of course last year I was actively searching for a new skin and this year I actually like my skin. I do not know what I was expecting. maybe i was expecting too much. I was hoping that they would come up with some new way to make a skin look fantistic .I didn't find it. The subject of mesh heads and bodies is confusing to me. I see appliers for slink in stores but do not know if it is possible to actually apply a skin to a mesh head and body or not? I cant even seem to figure out how to try a mesh head on in most stores. Either it does not rez properly and I can't see it or it tells me it has been uploaded to some mysterious place somewhere and I can go find it? What? I was interested in a mesh head because I can never seen to get the nose right on my skin but mesh has issues.. When I go somewere and look at other avatars I ofted see their hair in the air and their dress next to their bodies. I do not want to know what I would look like to them with a mesh head. Anyway I learned that if you find a skin you like you do not have to change it . A good skin is timeless. .

Medhue Simoni wrote: Elinah Iredell wrote: Thanks for your review of Blender. The fact that it can be free and better then the extremely expensive competition is impressive to me, but do they really need to make it so confusing? Even you an expert in your field found the interface difficult at first. Is there anything about Blender that can be improved in the future ? Are there things you would like to see added or changed about it to make it even better? First, I'm not an expert. I'm just like everyone else here, learning. At best, I can say I make a living doing this, and I have almost touched every feature in Blender. It's confusing because it does alot, and you need more time with it. In many ways, it's less confusing than SL. The added effort to get used to Blender's right and left click also make it worst. It really did frustrate me to no end, and then always moving the 3D cursor, which I didn't even know what it was for. After deciding that I would not fight Blender's right left click setup, and I embraced it, I started to see the genius of it all, and how the 3D cursor can become your best friend. Outside of clicking, the Blender UI is pretty logical, and totally customizable. The standard layouts for each task, like UV unwrapping, or Animation, are pretty good, but you can make them how you want them. I have my own layouts for both those, cause I tend to have to deal with textures alot, and a different layout makes it faster for me. That's the other big reason for much of the confusion, which is speed. Yeah, Blender could just have 1 way to rotate a bone, but that is likely not going to be the faster way for most. There are literally, 6 or more ways to rotate a bone, just off the top of my head, and the inherent Blender way, is easily the fastest. Even with modeling. You use those exact same shortcuts, like r+x-90, or s+z+0, in both animation, modeling, or any other task. That's when you really become a Blenderhead, when you learn all the shortcuts. I even connect my most used but obscure shortcuts on the extra buttons on my mouse. You know, expecially in the case of LL, I usually have all kinds of gripes and advice on how to improve things, but I really don't, in the case of Blender. Maybe, applying textures could be easier, or less confusing, but other than that, I can't really say much. I also hear alot about what the Blender devs are working on, and it's all good with me. Every single version just seems to get better and better. I do wish that Blender had a direct, already set up, 2 kinect sensor tracking for animations, so I don't have to use other mocap systems, but my workflow right now is pretty easy. Some kind of inherent 3D sensor setup would me nice tho, and some simple face tracking system for mocap facial animations, which I'm playing around with now. It would be nice to have something easy tho, like you just capture your video camera and Blender just tracks the whole shape of your mouth and other features to apply to a character. I really just want to start with the basics if I could just do some simple things like unwrapping and merging simple shapes I would be happy. What is your opiion on what resolution the textures should be?

Gaia Clary wrote: Maybe this article clarifies the rumours: http://www.blender.org/foundation/history/ Blender is from the Dutch thanks for the siste. I wnder how free software makes them any money ?

Gaia Clary wrote: Think like this: You can't play Bach within your first Piano lesson. Even if you know where the keys are and what they do, you still need to practice a lot before you hear music instead of tones. I understand but I was beginning to honestly feel it was a ridiculously hard learning curve for what will be very little gain.

Interesting. Does the calcuations for land weight as it is called take into account the affect of high resolution textures? And is that the reason why some people appear invisible longer or stay invisible when wearing mesh because they are " walking lag bombs" .?

Being a blenderhead looks painful lol

Thanks for the advice and info . I will try to take the classes. What are render costs exactly ?

Thanks Cathy I appreciate your input and advice. Interesting how Blender came to be.

Hi thanks for the info . I tried to do the shift s thing didnt really work for maybe I have a different version of the software or something like that. I have noticed that the only mesh objecst blender can see when I open them that do not show up as a cube are the blender files. Other files like ,obj or ,dae do not show up as anything but a cube.

Thanks for the post. People who love Blender are called " Blenderheads" lol ? Can I borrow that monkey to help me work with mesh?

Thank you for your help and detailed explanation.I will check out that mesh tutorial . I still do not understand though why the mesh object showed up as cube when I opened it in Blender?

I just hope that is even enough for me lol.

Lol thanks for the cute funny post. It is wonderful to know I was not the only one having problems learning blender. I didnt know you could change prim creations into mesh! That is amazing Thank you so much for telling me about that. Whaty does it do to the land impact of the prim creations? I will also try out the software wings 3d .

That makes sense. I agree with you that what you get used to will be what you are drawn to, and what seems easier. I probably would feel that way about photoshop if ever switched to something else. Thanks

Thanks for your reply. I can see why needing to use only one display and not two can be useful. What is polygonal modeling by the way ?

Thanks cool I will definately check that out.

I wonder if you have a strong graphic art background? It sounds like it comes easily to you.

Then Sketch Up does have some value for second life mesh as long as you run it through blender afterwards? That is what some others have written on this forum they do with various different programs . They use them first and then blender afterwards. I think that would be good for me to try. Get started with an easier to use program to learn the basics , then try to finish with blender. And hopefuly that way won't have to use blender any more then I have to lol.

Thanks for the tutorial link. I should probably start making a file of them all. I just still feel very overwhelmed. I read a comment a person wrote on a message board that the stress of working with blender had destroyed their desire to be artistic. I hope that doesnt happen to me.