Half Past Null

It’s been fun! But for now, I’m closing this blog.

Second Life has been a terrific muse. While I still take part every so often, I find I no longer have the initiative or time to develop my tools further. I feel others have done a more than adequate job of taking my place. To them, I am thankful.


Because this blog was always dedicated to my works in Second Life, this hiatus represents one of two things: either a closure, or a change in focus to my other interests.

I am still very passionate about 3D and virtual worlds, and continue to express that passion elsewhere. But I feel my time with the Linden system is at an end.


To those who listened to me ramble all these years, thanks! I wouldn’t have come this far, nor created what I had without your time and support.

The pages I’ve posted here will remain active, as well as my contact information and source code. I simply won’t be posting about Second Life any further.


One chapter ends; another begins. Here’s hoping we meet again in the not too distant future.

Given my earlier promise to bring this up, I’d like to go off the rails for a bit to discuss a guilty pleasure. Over the last several months, I’ve developed a bad habit of playing interactive fiction. Don’t panic; this addiction is entirely benign, and shouldn’t impact our regularly-scheduled posts on Second Life.

(However, other factors have impacted this a bit. More hopefully in the coming months. – Ed)



(Image via Usonian’s Flickr stream)


It may come as a shock to readers here, but in an age of increasing emphasis on visuals and 3D graphics, I feel we still have much to learn from the acetic forebears of MUDs, MOOs, and others. As true to its roots as its ever been, the IF genre has much to offer to creators in Second Life.


But don’t just take my word for it. Keep reading.

(more…)

It’s been many months since the last public release of Prim.Blender. With the summer months rapidly approaching here in the States, interest has resurfaced in this project.


As original project founder and maintainer, I no longer actively develop Prim.Blender for personal reasons. However, for those who are curious, or otherwise interested, I wanted to share my ideas and tests over the past few years.



This should be considered the roadmap that never was: feature ideas, fixes, and tasks from my agenda, and those suggested to me by others.



The basic outline is as follows:

Feature Ideas
* Textures and Render Pipeline
* New Sculpty Sizes
* Primitive Animation Sequences
* Sculpty Animation Sequences
* Light Render Tests
* Texture Projections
* LSL and Link Impostering


Bug Fixes
* Refactored Mirror Support
* Fixes to Primitive Params
* Prim Torture
* Megaprims
* UI Cleanup
* Benchmarking and Expanded Use Cases
* Code Refactoring


Dev Tests and Errata
* More Thorough Regression Tests
* Menu Integration
* 3D Model Import and Export
* Documentation

For details, see below.

(more…)

It’s been several months since my last post. I’d like to take the time to detail my thoughts and offer insight on where I’m moving next.

Prim.Blender is effectively without a master at the time of this writing. Shack Dougall has done a terrific job over on LifeRain working on Prim Composer, and floating the idea of porting it to Blender. If you support continued offline development, his work is excellent, and worth pursuing.


As for my own development status, here’s a few tidbits I’m working on that I’d like to share.

(more…)

Yesterday, America received a historic new president. The irony is not lost on me, then, that I choose this time to give a status update on Prim.Blender and this blog.

Newcomers to this site may notice I haven’t posted new material in the past six months. A large part of this was the completion of my Master’s degree at the University of Miami. But… some of it wasn’t.

In particular, I want to discuss the lapsing of support for Prim.Blender, what it means, and what I have next on my own agenda.

(more…)

(The following is an ongoing series of tutorials for my offline builder tool, Prim.Blender. For the tutorial index, click here)

—-

Setting Importer Permissions and Creator Tags


From the previous tutorial, you should have been able to import your creations from Prim.Blender.

Normally, this would be the natural end of these tutorials.

However, and perhaps irritatingly, there is a step that’s very commonly overlooked when importing objects: setting the correct permissions and creator tag for imported objects.



This is a critical step for creators that wish to receive credit for their work, and is very often overlooked when using resident building tools.

Using old revisions of the Prim Mirror as an example, I receive at least one comment every couple months attributing work that was not mine to me, because a resident used my tools and forgot to set themselves as creator.

Don’t make this mistake.

(more…)

(The following is an ongoing series of tutorials for my offline builder tool, Prim.Blender. For the tutorial index, click here)

—-

Saving and Loading Blender Scenes with Prim.Blender

So let’s suppose you have a lot of work invested within Blender itself, and can’t save all of it as .prims.

Or, let’s say you don’t feel like hitting the “Save” or “Load” buttons twice every time you want to work.

Enter the ability to save your work as a .blend file!



Actually, this is much easier than one might think.

(more…)

(The following is an ongoing series of tutorials for my offline builder tool, Prim.Blender. For the tutorial index, click here)

—-

Textures

From the previous tutorial, you should now have a decent grasp of how Prim.Blender functions.

This tutorial shall cover texturing. It’s not done yet (because texturing still requires a ton of testing), so please be patient.



The ideal workflow is to do texturing entirely within Blender and then “bake” the desired image for import into Second Life.

In practice, this must be done manually in Blender, due to the myriad texturing techniques available. Many of these are covered in Blender’s wonderful tutorials and documentation.

Once your textures are set up just the way you like them, you can save the scene as a .blend file, preserving all of this information for later retrieval.

(more…)

(The following is an ongoing series of tutorials for my offline builder tool, Prim.Blender. For the tutorial index, click here)

—-

Once the build’s done, it’s time to import your creation into Second Life!



Most of the work is completely automated, especially for sculpties.

(more…)

(The following is an ongoing series of tutorials for my offline builder tool, Prim.Blender. For the tutorial index, click here)

—-

Sculpty editing is more than a little weird.

A sculpty, or sculpted prim, is the brainchild of Qarl Linden, though the practice he uses has been suggested before.

Think of sculpties as elaborate origami; you’re given a surface with 32×32 faces to fold into any shape you please. These “folds” are then saved as an image file, where each color’s RGB data represents a direction: red for X, green for Y, and blue for Z.



If I just lost you, don’t worry: making them is easy with the right tools.

Such as, say, this one!

(more…)