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Mesh Improvements Incoming?


Teddy Wishbringer
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I've just recently got back into SL again after a several year hiatus, and the idea of building meshes really appeals to me.


Before I spend a whole lot of time investing in learning blender and such, I have to ask myself how much life is really left in SL and what if any improvements to the current design is to be expected.  It seems the SL population has dwindled substantially since I was last frequenting it, and I wonder if it's nearing the end of it's lifecycle.


Sadly, nothing has really come along to offer a suitable replacement.

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How Second Life is doing is purely a matter of who you talk to. In 2009, I think... may be 2010, the concurrent logins peaked at about 80k. Recently the peak is about 64k.

The number of private regions purchased by people has been decreasing by about 8 per day.

Some say this is a SURE SIGN that SL is dying. But, things have changed. One thing is the Market Place (MP). The MP has decreased the need to have in-world shops by removing the need for a place to store a Magic Box. Many of us have thought that removal of the Magic Box Land Demand would be a negative thing for land sales. Whether that is the cause or the world economy continuing to fail is the reason, we apparently see some decrease in the number of people using SL is hard to say.

However... the addition of mesh has added a huge requirement to be learning and creating out-of-world. I spend way more time in Blender working on clothes for SL. Rod has implied that change is why they no longer publish some stats, they are now misleading.

SL is continuiously being upgraded. Read a few pages of my blog to see what is happening. We have normal and specular maps coming, probably early next year.

We have no way to evaluate that change. There is no way to tell if people are spending more time on YouTube watching videos on Blender, using Blender, 3DS, Maya, and whatever to make things... or paying less attention to SL. So, you will have to make your own call on what is happening.

But, when it comes to whether it is worthwhile to learn Blender, the answer is yes. Because it can be used with any virual world. Whether CLoud Party takes over or OpenSim or something new... a 3D model is pretty much a 3D model.

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It's interesting, how does one measure the success or population of SL.  Is it the number of content creators, or the content consumers.

It surprised me to learn that LL is still selling private regions for the same price, as well as land use fees, as they were 9 years ago.

Ultimately you are right, I think learning blender is still the way to go as creating a mesh AV for SL or one for (the next big VR thing) is likely going to be quite similar in the tools we use.

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Are there any highly recommended blender/SL AV mesh avatar tutorials out there?  There's alot of daunting pages out there that seem quite intimidating.  I used to do alot of building and scripting, so I'm definately not afraid to learn.


Still trying to find out the answers to some simple questions, like mesh mouths and eyes, and seeing if they can be made to animate based on the default AV animations.

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This is a full video course on Blender for beginners:

3D Buzz | Blender Fundamentals

The following two links are free ebooks in PDF format:

BlenderWiki | Free eBook for beginners: An introduction to BLENDER 3D

BlenderCourse.com | Free Blender 3D Tutorials eBooks in English and Dutch

This is a full course on texturing:

You may also want to check MetaLibrary for useful tips to SL users: http://metalibrary.posterous.com/

 

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Teddy Wishbringer wrote:

It seems the SL population has dwindled substantially since I was last frequenting it, and I wonder if it's nearing the end of it's lifecycle.

Sadly, nothing has really come along to offer a suitable replacement.

I wouldn't worry about that. If Second Life gets shut down, those who are still interested in virtual worlds will likely move on to the hypergrid. Currently the biggest hurdle to OpenSim adoption is the fact that people have spent lots of time and money to grow their SL inventories. Once these inventories are gone, the prospect of starting from scratch in a truly open-ended world won't be so daunting any more.

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