Day: January 20, 2017

Illogism at MetaLES in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
MetaLES: Illogism
MetaLES: Illogism

Now open at MetaLES, curated by Ux Hax and Romy Nayar, is Illogism (from the French Illogisme, or illogicality), an exhibition of 55 images by Chimkami. These are presented in large format within a bizarre environment visualised by Romy Nayar, designed to represent disproportionate, or diform, doll’s houses of enormous size, and which are themselves contained within a large doll’s house.

“At all heights, outside as inside the houses, “Chimkami notes in her introduction to the setting, “you can discover the photos in this universe freed from any constraint, exposed with [the] nonsensical. Each corner and nook will reveal photos and rest places. Will you have nerves to find them ? Walk, fly, use your camera, relax, laugh, observe, discuss, as you want. Only one thing matters: take pleasure in it!”

MetaLES: Illogism
MetaLES: Illogism

It is a curious, bewildering environment where gravity plays no part: a dance floor is located on a ceiling, objects occupy roof tops and floors, images hang from walls or occupy the clefts and cuts through objects. Houses stand and float or sit at the end of disembodied stairs and plank-like walks, their shapes twisted, squeezed or bent, the photos in them, on them and around them.

The best way to get around is to join the MetaLES group at the installation’s landing point. This will give you local rezzing rights, so you can grab a Walker from the neighbouring board, rez it, and then sit on it. This will allow you to freely explore the space – use the standard WASD keys of arrow keys for navigation – and will also allow your to walk up walls, cross ceilings and along the various twisted paths through the exhibition. Along the way, there are various points where you might also enjoy rides, take a seat, and so on.

MetaLES: Illogism
MetaLES: Illogism

The images themselves are an eclectic mix, focusing on avatar studies, but not exclusive human in nature. Some are stylised, others more direct, others lean towards monochrome, others in bright, bold colours. All are subject to individual interpretation and appreciation. Such is the size of things, that getting around to everything can take time.

Illogism is an interesting piece. Quirky, a little out of the ordinary, a space where we are presented as tiny explorers, and where everything is being close examined from “outside” – look out for the eyes staring through the windows of the enclosing doll’s house. It will remain open through until February 28th, 2017.

SLurl Details

SL project updates 2017-3/2: texture uploads, Content Creation UG

Posted on by Inara Pey

An Uncertain Destiny, Mystic; Inara Pey, January 2017, on FlickrAn Uncertain Destiny – blog post

Server Deployments – Recap

  • The Main (SLS) channel was restarted on Tuesday, 17th January, but there was no associated code deployment
  • A new server maintenance package was deployed to the RC channels on Wednesday, January 18th, comprising a partial fix for (non-public) BUG-3286, “Can’t move object” fail notifications (fixes for regions/objects with longer names are pending) + internal server and logging enhancements

SL Viewer

No further updates to the current viewer pipeline list.

Texture Uploads and First Time Rendering

The Lab has been making some hardware (/communication?) changes to the texture upload / delivery mechanism (e.g. both the handling of texture uploads from the viewer to the asset system, and then from the asset system back out to the viewer via the CDN). When deployed to the main grid, these should see improvements in the uploading of new textures and their appearance on in-world objects, whether uploaded individually or in bulk (e.g. hopefully little / no grey panels in new texture upload previews when viewing them from inventory, and few / no grey object faces when uploading a texture and then immediately applying it to an object face).

Content Creation User Group

Summary of General Points

  • No further movement on the potential “Bento follow-up” project ideas (see my Content Creation UG notes for week #2).
  • The next Avastar release is in advanced testing, with a potential release around late February / March, but will include devkit support and a large number of bug fixes.
  • Appearance sliders:
    • A question was asked whether the slider system could be updated to allow for easier scaling for smaller avatars utilising Bento (as not all Bento bones are linked to sliders). Vir noted this is unlikely, as it would require a change for the base slider scaling which could break existing avatars.
    • However, Vir noted that suggestions to offer new sliders for sizing things like wings and tales have been discussed at the Lab, but nothing has as yet been decided.

Pain Points / Blockers to Bento Content

A general question thrown out by Simon Linden was whether people are experiencing particular “pain points” in producing Bento content: what they might be waiting for tools-wise or in any other way etc. this quickly spilled out into a much broader discussion on various tools and suggested tutorials. However, core points raised were:

  • Available time, learning to use external tools such as Blender,
  • Waiting on Avastar, plus tutorials, both generic and on using specific tools (e.g. Avastar and Mayastar) – which will hopefully come in time
  • Mention was made of making people more aware of SL-specific areas such as level of detail (LOD), managing physics, LI calculation rules, etc.

It was also noted that possibly having idea of having some for of sample content (e.g. wings, hands), which creators could use as an example / baseline for their own creations, together with a broader selection of documentation / tutorials / videos.

Simon pointed out that in terms of Lab developed tutorials and documentation, there are only limited resources. Many third-parties also produce tutorials (Mehdue Simoni, for example is waiting for the new Avastar to reach release before working on his video tutorials for it).

Others have also put together documentation, but are finding it hard to get that documentation seen heard above the broad range of misinformation on content creation which is  in circulation. Vir has suggested that meaningful documentation and tutorials could be linked to through the SL wiki.

In terms of the wiki, there are a range of resources available for content  creation / Bento: