Fell Out Of The World Again, Hate When That Happens

It’s been a year since I last logged in to Second Life, or updated here. Why?

  • I got frustrated with trying to learn Blender yet again, with PBR just coming in
  • I got frustrated with feeling like stuff I had created was hopelessly outdated
  • I felt pressured by another resident to be! Friends! In! Voice! And felt skeeved.
  • I realized that I no longer wanted to take the time to “craft” and “sell” stuff.
  • I recognized that my desktop computer might need to be replaced with PBR coming.
  • First Life got busy over the holidays
  • My couch was much more comfortable than my computer desk
  • My laptop couldn’t handle Second Life at all, what a wheezer-geezer

What do I want to do now? 

Smol brown tabby in a wet bar sink

  1. I’d like to socialize with old online friends again and listen to music. I’ve kept up with some of their updates via blogs and Mastodon. I miss my friends.
  2. I’d have to agree to share my Mastodon account with the cat. She is adorbs.
  3. I want to downsize my multiple Second Life paid accounts. Just wasting money.
  4. That would mean cleaning up my mainland parcel, reducing the footprint
  5. I’d like to shut down all my SL Marketplace stores (Dhughan’s too). 
  6. I’d like to sell off the DFS stuff if possible – I was in the middle of that last year.

Meanwhile, an old friend is having an event in Open Sim tomorrow. The last time I tried to install and run the Dreamgrid software and get my old Haleakaloha island sim up, it failed. I didn’t feel like trying to figure it out on my own, and my in-house tech support, Rock Fall, is totally uninterested in this Second Life/Open Sim stuff, especially if it involves messing around with our household network router settings. But I feel a sort of pull toward trying to get my old castaway island OAR started up again, and restarting my tropical island mystery narrative again. 

It would be satisfiying to get stuff running again and enable hypergrid teleports so that I could pop in to my friend’s event and see who else makes it there, but… so much Real Life stuff to do today.

Bread to be baked – it’s got great riz and it’s ready to go in the oven

Porch planter mess to clean up and re-pot while weather is still nice

Postcards to Voters to write. Enough said about RL politics but there it is.

At least this blog is still working, and I’ve found a solution to not wanting to even touch my desktop machine (there’s some sort of aversion thing there, probably due to the feelings of frustration and avoidance detailed above).

Fancy new Bluetooth keyboard and my perfectly adequate ipad Mini make for a comfortable and portable blogging experience. 

What to blog in future? 

Probably my latest gaming obsession, the Habby Souls game. And fun things that I do online if I manage to get back into Second Life. I used to really enjoy photography and Flickr, but there again, is my graphics card up to the task? Or is a new gaming desktop required to really do it justice?

Hmm. What shall I do?

I may experiment with installing the ActivityPub plugin and making this blog a federated instance, but for now the little “repost to Mastodon” plugin is fine. 

Beyond that, who knows? Meanwhile, I have RL actibbities to accomplish. So many actibbities! 

Is This Thing Still On?

New Bluetooth keyboard, still getting used to the spacing.

I haven’t logged in to Second Life in more than a year, half my rezzed out inventory has been removed, I’m not sure my desktop computer can handle the graphic demands of PBR content, but I miss interacting with my online chums.

And I may have to rethink the purpose of this blog, and my First Life blog, along with getting used to the changes in the WordPress/Jetpack interface. What a bother.

Is This Thing Still On? was originally published on Chameleonic Possessions

Is This Thing Still On? was originally published on Chameleonic Possessions

Is This Thing Still On? was originally published on Chameleonic Possessions

Is This Thing Still On? was originally published on Chameleonic Possessions

Cannes 2024 Immersive Competition

Sounds interesting, were any #SecondLife #machinima works submitted? There’s a separate immersive exhibition, patronised by artist Jean-Michel Jarre.

For its inaugural edition, a committee of industry experts and Festival de Cannes representatives, under the supervision of the General Delegate of the Festival de Cannes, will select eight immersive works in competition. Additionally, a curated selection of non-competitive works, illustrating the synergy between immersive experiences and cinema, will complement the program.

https://www.festival-cannes.com/en/press/press-releases/for-its-77th-edition-the-festival-de-cannes-launches-its-immersive-competition/

Change Is Coming – Welcome to Steelhead City in #SecondLife

My chosen community in Second Life is going through some exciting changes – Sheriff Fuzzball Ortega is reorganizing things, and a crew of folks are working on various remodeling and rebuilding projects around Steelhead City. There will be parcels available for rental very soon, and my shop is probably going to move across the street to make way for a civic improvement project.

While thinking about these changes, I rezzed out some of the buildings I have in inventory to see if I’d want to change things completely. Most of my DFS items are packed and ready to sell in another platform sale, probably this weekend, but a few things like seeds and so on will still be sold at St Helens Dry Goods, as they’re “in theme” for the shop as of yet. New products are in the vapor-pipe that is my brain. Updates are planned. Stuff happenin.’

Here are the buildings that I may swap around, or lend out for the big civic refresh. Some of them I included just because it was a long time since I’ve seen and evaluated them – the best of the lot are the mesh “Soho” ones, which are modular, and the Trompe l’Oeil ones.

Second Life Buildings I Own

Aside

PBR in #SecondLife – Chic Aeon

Chic Aeon raised an interesting point on the transition to PBR:

On the plus side folks that are still building using inworld tools (prim builds) will have new options for a better look and that might encourage some new users to become simple creators. There was definitely something –well just GOOD — about building out on the sand box starting with a cube.

Yes, I think so. I uploaded my coffee mug today to the test grid, Firestorm PBR viewer, but using the current materials workflow. It was gorgeously glossy. Uploaded for realsies, normal Firestorm, and it was harder to get the nice ceramic satin-gloss. But possible! Old stuff looked good, and the glTF test was drag-and-drop easy.

The test grid is one big sandbox. Social building can be a thing again. glTF materials will make texturing easier for new builders. Now to provide those textures…

chicatphilsplace.blogspot.com/2023/09/thoughts-on-pbr.html

ZOMG! #glTF Channel Packer Tool for #PBR Materials

Whoa! While browsing Rei’s site, stumbled on to this open-source tool. #SecondLife is moving to a PBR workflow “real soon now,” and the big content creators will have a painfully steep learning curve converting their products’ textures. This will help, expect SL to bury this info deep in the PBR wiki.

aiaicapta.in/gltf-packer/

Channel Packing Tool #specularworkflow for #SecondLife or #gameassets

While doing homework for the coming #glTF workflow in #SecondLife I struggled with #channelpacking textures for manipulating how light reflects off of materials in a game engine. It’s easy in Photoshop, harder in GIMP.

There used to be a plug-in for extracting different kinds of “maps” from images, but it was easy to screw up. The manual method is tedious; you can’t just plop a texture into an RGB channel, you have to make each greyscale.

This open source tool might be helpful, and the aiaicapta.in is cited in the SL wiki as authoritative. The same site also has a good explanation of the pending PBR workflow, but for backwards compatibility, it’s good to know both.

aiaicapta.in/how-to-channel-pack-materials-for-secondlife/

Learning #Blender with #BlenderGoon – Edit mode tools and hotkeys

Now some more fundamentals for review. If you find this series of posts tedious – please filter on #BlenderGoon as I’m trying to watch all his instructional videos in order.

Goon (Goonther Blackcinder) is a #SecondLife resident who teaches at #BlenderSchool inworld at (SLURL) GoodVibes

There’s an active Discord group – there’s an invite link in the school landing area. You can support his work on Patreon at this link.

Learning #Blender with #BlenderGoon – Intro to Edit Mode

Next up – how to get in and out of edit mode, and also some recommendations for setting up your Blender in the Preferences menu.

Currently I prefer to use the Light theme and have the Scale for the interface set to about 1.25 so I can see it better. I may want to go in later and increase the vertex size a bit. I also took his recommendation to UNcheck the Load UI preference when opening someone else’s .blend file. Scene statistics are also now turned on – these are all reasonable beginner settings, especially for creating efficient mesh for #SecondLife (or any game engine, really).

He gets into face orientation – how to display it in Overlays, and how the “backward” facing normals of each face look transparent in #SecondLife – which bit me in the butt last night with the “build a fridge” exercise. These are all good fundamentals to get down EARLY in the learning process in order to try to avoid them.

Goon (Goonther Blackcinder) is a #SecondLife resident who teaches at #BlenderSchool inworld at (SLURL) GoodVibes

There’s an active Discord group – there’s an invite link in the school landing area. You can support his work on Patreon at this link.

Learning #Blender with #BlenderGoon – V1.5 Building in Object Mode, uploading to #SecondLife

Now we’re getting somewhere. I’ve recently created objects with the standard “primitives” in Blender, so for me this is still review. It was still a struggle but eventually I produced the required lesson objects and got them uploaded into the “test grid.” GREAT SUCCESS.

After taking a long break for some RL errands yesterday, I was able to produce the two objects from the lesson… and during Goon’s discussion of uploading to SL, he mentioned he was skipping some “checklist” steps. And yep, one of those steps was to check for flipped normals. The soda cup and straw is fine, the fancy French Door fridge, not so much. The normals are flipped on the hinges and “handles” – or maybe I forgot to uncheck an Alpha setting when going through the materials process.

#ALTTEXT 3D Objects uploaded into Second Life – a soda cup with straw and a refrigerator.

3D Objects uploaded into Second Life - a soda cup with straw and a refrigerator.

Yes, it was flipped normals, fixed it with Shift+N. I always keep my PDF copy of Blender Secrets open as it’s searchable.

#ALTTEXT – overlay view of 3D objects shows the parts of my “fridge” that have flipped “normals” and are facing the wrong way out.

Blender Overlay showing flipped normals - correct with shift+N
This is easily fixed by selecting the object in Edit Mode and pressing Ctrl+N, so now my fridge looks less stupid. This whole lesson was on creating completely in Object Mode, and eventually I got handles put on, materials assigned, and so on. It seemed the thing to do to use my own fridge as an example – I didn’t bother to tackle the ice/water dispenser!

#ALTTEXT – Refrigerator object now displays “right side out”

3D Fridge object now faces the right way out

(I’m adding extra alt text to avoid having to go into Mastodon later and update my autoposts).

Thanks to Goon, learned a few things today (that I’ll probably forget unless I make a lotta stuffs soon). It’s late so I don’t think I’ll complete the next lesson in the series until tomorrow.

Goon (Goonther Blackcinder) is a #SecondLife resident who teaches at #BlenderSchool inworld at (SLURL) GoodVibes

There’s an active Discord group – there’s an invite link in the school landing area. You can support his work on Patreon at this link.