For my sins I read an RSS of the JIRA. Often this is dull, sometimes fascinating, frequently tends to flame wars, but...
Every now and again you get pure gold. Ever wondered how long it takes a bug fix to propagate? Well, we have a putative number now:
In response to a bug about sculpties, Qarl Linden says: "i'll fix it asap - but it'll be about a month or so before it appears in an RC client..." Of course it will take a bit longer than that to reach the main client, but a month from a fix to an RC release.
While browsing SL Exchange for sculpties, I came across a really cool set of animals made by Timmi Allen. The appeal for me, of course, is that there were holstein cows among them! When I arrived to his shop in Neuland, I was surprised to find very realistic statues. They're even animated so that their mouths open and their tails wag!
I'm really excited to see what residents have done so far with sculpties. In conjunction with regular prims, they allow a whole new level of customization. Have you made anything you'd like to show off? Leave a comment!
Cel Edman brings us SculptyPaint. Currently at version 0.9, it already rocks so hard that strong men faint. You want a fast, free way of making sculpties without all that tedious mucking about with applications and exporters? This is it. This is totally it.
That said, you won't be going crazy with it in the first few minutes. Look at the tutorials, and fiddle with the tools a bit before you try to do much with it. The tutorials are simple, but will show you what you need to know to get going.
Grab it (for Windows, Linux, or MacOSX). You'll need Java 1.6 before you do anything, so get that too. If you like it, by all means go and feed Edman's tip jar - he doesn't have to just give this away, you know.
Art takes many shapes and sizes, and this water is particularly impressive.
The waterfall of Liger Island is the collaborative and breath-taking creation of residents Zor Zeddmore and Wisdom Streeter. These images, like many 2D attempts to demo 3D immersive environments, do not do justice to the actual build. Torley Linden has captured better impressions of it on blogHUD using the WindLight technology.
The movement and texture blend together magically, a must see for any nature or artistic enthusiast. This is a great application of sculpties!
Teen Gridders don't have many options as far as programs go. They don't have the money to invest in Maya. Their economy is ruled by very few who earn as much as 40-50 USD per day. They do know how to manipulate prims, though, and that is why sculpties make them mad as hell.
In the picture above, Jay Clostermann is showing Machinima Guru a picture of the protest sign (since I can't teleport), made by Ryou Debs, that is currently on display in Andretti. Instead of carefully building something through primwork, there will be people using objects made by others. They fear that primming will be abandoned for this new art and their little spending money will dwindle, along with the creativity of the residents.
What do YOU think about sculpties? Do you think they will affect your prim business in the long run?
Linden Lab has announced the winners of their sculpted prim exhibition. Many fun and interesting entries were put on display in the Luna sim (for the Main Grid) and the Coelacanth sim (for the Teen Grid).
The winners are Nomasha Syaka, Locke Cardway, Artisan Hawks, Pumpkin Tripsa, Zazu Zenovka and DonPain Babenko. The winning entries will be made available to all residents through the inventory library folder. Do yourself a favor though and get on down to the sims where the entries are displayed. It's totally worth seeing the invention and imagination on display.
You can see images of just the winners here, on Linden Lab's announcement, or check our huge gallery below for images of many of the entries.
With sculpties recently introduced, it was only a matter of time before items started cropping up. I've seen dolphins, vases, and even jackets. Now we can add hair to that list.
Lost Thereian, owner of Naughty Designs, has created a new style, named Nicole, that combines sculpti AND flexi. While most sculpti items so far have been a mere prim, this design comes in at 28 prims. It features a center part in the back, with hair coming around both sides on the front, with several strands being flexi.
The verdict? I like it! Hopefully more designers come out with sculpti-flexi hair. In the meantime, you can find this design on Naughty Island for 350L per 3 pack of hair colors.
Sculptable prims were released onto the main grid yesterday. Before you run out and spend $3000 USD on a copy of Maya (or $7000 USD for the Maya Unlimited package), or worse steal a copy - you may want to consider a few things.
First, if you aren't already familiar with Maya, actually having it isn't going to make you any more able to create sculptable prims than not having it. We're not talking easy here. If you're going to scale the learning curve anyway, though, there are better ways to learn it than Maya.
We'd already determined that there wasn't going to be a Wednesday update, because Linden Lab promised repeatedly that they wouldn't pull the system down with less than 5 day's notice unless it was absolutely vital. I'm guessing something in this next release has been deemed to be absolutely vital.
The grid is going down from 6am to noon SLT (US Pacific) tomorrow (Wednesday May 23) for an update to 1.16.0. So ... what are we getting? Sculpties, that is sculptable prims, that is displacement-mapped-solids; Also, group IM issues are to be fixed ... err again; llRegionSay() to reduce the need for many sorts of communication relays (almost all of which have been phased out in the last 12 months, but heck, a new lower-lag interobject communications option isn't going to cause a lot of complaints); Fixes to content loss when taking no-copy objects.
Smart money says there's a fix for a key exploit or two in there as well, hence the sudden mad rush.
What are we not getting? Voice. Guessing that's not ready yet.
The beta grid has been 1.16.0(1) fixing all the bugs that Linden Lab says they know to exist with sculptable prims - although existing sculpt textures will provide inverted displacement (your inny bits will be outed, and your outy bits will be innards). To fix that, flip your texture horizontally.
This version also introduces a new communication function: llRegionSay() which will chat to every listener in the region, but cannot use channel 0 (open chat).
If you wanted to try playing with applying displacement maps to sculptable prims, now is your chance. They're live on the beta grid right now. Also, the voice beta has been rolled into this beta release which is currently dubbed 1.16.0.
Technically, you can make displacement maps with a wide variety of tools, but it's up to you to get it right (kind of like clothing textures, really). There's already something of a stampede off to the beta grid, so even if you can't make them yourself, you should be able to see quite a number of successful (and not-so-successful) efforts on the beta grid very soon.
Yes, folks, "sculpties" will soon arrive on the preview grid. Torley Linden made a blog entry on the official Linden blog regarding this momentous occasion. SLI reader Tao Takashi was able to get some information out of Robin and Joe Linden, with the announcement that sculpties will be added to a beta client next week. I guess we'll have to wait just a bit longer to taste the forbidden fruit. *sigh*
What will sculptable prims mean for us? Watch this machinima and see for yourself. Imagine being able to bypass the 31 prim limit of a vehicle because you molded the shape. Imagine lower prim avatars and furniture. Hell, just imagine, in general! This is truly the biggest news that has come out of Second Life since flexi-prims!
The ARG ended on a positive note, with qDot explaining the reasoning behind Cubesque and CubeOverload. For those curious, Funk Schnook appears to be the "winner" for finding that old blog entry. What was your opinion of the mystery?
Wow! Information is coming in from everywhere this morning. With just a few minutes left until 9:46am PDT/SLT, it seems as if the puzzle has been solved!
CubeOverload was updated with another jumbled song, this time, to the tune of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." The text says:
THE CUBE WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA LOOKIN' FOR A SQUARE TO STEAL HE'D LOST HIS MIND 'CAUSE HE COULD NOT FIND THE SPHERE THAT MADE THE DEAL
Qarl Linden informed Tao that they would be introducing "sculpties", which are something like NURBS. Apparently the pictures from his blog entry won't be possible until revision two, but for now, he hinted that they might be on the preview grid today or tomorrow.
This will change Second Life as we know it!
[UPDATE: Some readers pointed out that there was still some block room on Cubesque. A quick look at the GDX schedule points out that calculations were off. qDot will be speaking from 12:30pm-1:45pm PDT/SLT.]
For my sins I read an RSS of the JIRA. Often this is dull, sometimes fascinating, frequently tends to flame wars, but...
With sculpties recently introduced, it was only a matter of time before items started cropping up. I've seen dolphins, vases, and even jackets. Now we can add hair to that list.
Sculptable prims were released onto the main grid yesterday. Before you run out and spend $3000 USD on a copy of Maya (or $7000 USD for the Maya Unlimited package), or worse steal a copy - you may want to consider a few things.
We'd already determined that there wasn't going to be a Wednesday update, because Linden Lab promised repeatedly that they wouldn't pull the system down with less than 5 day's notice unless it was absolutely vital. I'm guessing something in this next release has been deemed to be absolutely vital.
The beta grid has been 1.16.0(1) fixing all the bugs that Linden Lab says they know to exist with sculptable prims - although existing sculpt textures will provide inverted displacement (your inny bits will be outed, and your outy bits will be innards). To fix that, flip your texture horizontally.
Wow! Information is coming in from everywhere this morning. With just a few minutes left until 9:46am PDT/SLT, it seems as if the puzzle has been solved!
