Day: June 28, 2019

Kultivate: The Edge Gallery – July 2019

Posted on by Inara Pey
Kultivate The Edge: John Brianna

The July exhibition at Kultivate Edge Gallery opened on June 23rd and will run through until late July 2019.

Specialising in monochrome art and photography, the gallery’s roll of artists comprises aht1981, DrusillaGwind, honeyBi,  KodyMeyers, understandingcomplexity, John Brianna, Eucalyptus Carroll, Davenwolf Dagger, Lena Kiopak, Nodome Resident, and Veruca Tammas.

Kultivate The Edge: HoneyBi

As is always the case with The Edge, there is a rich mix of art on offer with this exhibition, from physical world photographs, as presented by John Brianna with a fascinating set of locomotive images featuring five diesel engines positioned around a marvellous picture of an old-style steam locomotive, through to evocative avatar portraits, such as those presented by KodyMeyers on the lower floor of the gallery alongside John’s display.

In many ways, I’ve always found monochrome studies of avatars to be more attractive than colour studies; its not that I have anything against the latter, its just that for me, the former carries a degree of life in the use of light and shadow that draws me in. This is true of all of the avatar studies presented here.

Kultivate The Edge: Nodome Resident

However, for this exhibition I found myself drawn to the physical work art on offer – John’s locomotives, together with an almost triptych of drawings by Nodome Resident and a set of eight images entitled The Blacksmith Series presented by Davenwolf Dagger.

Admittedly, part of my attraction to the latter is the fact they were taken in Launceston in Tasmania, a place (along with Richmond on the southern side of the island) for which I have happy memories. As such, the photos presented by Davenwolf piqued my curiosity and stirred those memories. But it’s not just that; each and every one of these photos is rich in detail and narrative. Similarly, Nodome’s drawings are wonderfully intricate and captivating.

Kultivate The Edge: Davenwolf Dagger

But whatever your preferences for art in Second Life, the mix of physical world photos, avatar studies, art and landscapes make this a must-see exhibition.

SLurl Details

SL16B Meet Xiola and Strawberry Linden

Posted on by Inara Pey
Courtesy of Linden Lab

On Thursday, June 26th, 2019 at the SL16B celebrations, the fourth of five Meet the Lindens sessions was held at the SL16B Auditorium. It featured Xiola Linden, Lead Community Manager and Strawberry Linden, Marketing Content Specialist.

The SL4Live TV video of the event is embedded below, with a couple of brief biographies on Xiola and Strawberry, based on comments they made during the session and in Xiola’s case, at past events.

An alternative video has also been recorded by  Pantera Północy.

About Xiola and Strawberry

Xiola Linden

Xiola is the Lead Community Manager at Linden Lab. she originally came to Second Life in 2006, and joined the Lab in 2011. Her role is broad-ranging, including elements of customer support,  through blogging and social media output for the Lab, to organising events such as the in-world get-togethers. For a period of time she was also responsible for community management work on Sansar, but has been back working full-time on Second Life for around 18 months. She will celebrate her eighth anniversary with the company in November 2018.

Born and raised in California’s silicon valley, she naturally immersed her career in technology, working for the likes of Yahoo!, with a particular interest in creative communities. It was a friend’s invitation that she try Second Life that got her started on the platform, and she remains active in-world on her personal account. Her engagement in the platform led to an interest in joining the Lab as an employee, so she started keeping an eye on the Lab’s career page and when a community related post to opened, she applied and was recruited.

Strawberry and Xiola Linden. Credit: Strawberry Linden

Strawberry Linden

Also known as Strawberry Singh, she is one of the more high profile lab recruits to come from the ranks of Second Life residents, thanks to her work in building her own brand – blogging, vlogging, fashion tips, tutorials, etc., – that has been hugely popular among Second Life users, particularly those with a focus  / involvement on the fashion aspects of the platform.

It is her personal brand that played a role in her decision to carry her fist name over from resident to Linden in becoming Strawberry Linden – although she notes that she had advice from Patch Linden and others to keep her Linden persona separate from her personal SL persona and admits to perhaps regretting not heeding it!

As a Marketing Content Specialist,  she is focused on Second Life (no involvement in Sansar), her current focus is on tutorial videos to help incoming new users, starting with the basics: signing-up, walking around in-world, etc. From here she plans to move onto more intermediate subjects and onwards to more advanced topics, covering a broad range of subjects: buying Linden dollars, editing the avatar shape, dressing, use mesh avatars and mesh heads, etc., with videos aimed at more established users, rather than being purely for newcomers.

She had no major preconceptions about working at the Lab prior to joining, but has been impacted by the degree of love staff have towards the platform. She also loves the fact she can continue with a lot of what she did as a resident: dress avatars, create looks, take photos and make videos, and hopes to be able to carry over her blog challenges to the Lab.

2019 SL User Groups 26/2: Content Creation summary

Posted on by Inara Pey

Kun-Tei-Ner; Inara Pey, May 2019, on FlickrKun-Tei-Ner, May 2019 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting, held on Thursday, June 27th 2019 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are usually available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

Environment Enhancement Project

Project Summary

A set of environmental enhancements allowing the environment (sky, sun, moon, clouds, water settings) to be set region or parcel level, with support for up to 7 days per cycle and sky environments set by altitude. It uses a new set of inventory assets (Sky, Water, Day),  and includes the ability to use custom Sun, Moon and cloud textures. The assets can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others, and can additionally be used in experiences.

Due to performance issues, the initial implementation of EEP will not include certain atmospherics such as crepuscular rays (“God rays”).

Resources

Current Status

  • A new viewer update is due to go to the Lab’s QA team over the weekend, and should surface at the start of week #27 (commencing Monday, July 1st). This should address a number of issues in the EEP code including
    • Water transparency rendering.
    • The glow seen around facial features (freckles, lips, eyelashes, and around the neck fix for mesh heads should no longer be apparent.
    • The difference in viewing an environment with Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) off and viewing it with ALM enabled is not as drastic.
    • Daytime lighting seen at sunrise, midday and sunset are much closer how they appear in the default viewer.
  • The request is for people testing EEP to grab the RC viewer when available and test drive it.

Bakes On Mesh

Project Summary

Extending the current avatar baking service to allow wearable textures (skins, tattoos, clothing) to be applied directly to mesh bodies as well as system avatars. This involves viewer and server-side changes, including updating the baking service to support 1024×1024 textures, but does not include normal or specular map support, as these are not part of the existing Bake Service, nor are they recognised as system wearables. Adding materials support may be considered in the future.

Resources

Current Status

  • The Bakes on Mesh RC viewer was re-issued on Tuesday, June 25th, in the form of version 6.3.0.528495. This includes:
    • A new inventory icon for the “universal” wearable type.
    • A fix for a serious security issue type of bug.
  • It had been indicted at the last meeting that a required appearance service update had been made. However, this deployment did not occur until the afternoon of Thursday, June 27th.

Animesh Follow-On

  • Vir now has LSL functions to both set and get the visual parameters of slider-related bones in an Animesh object.
  • These should be enough to test the ability, so he is starting the work on getting a project viewer put together that supports the functionality.

Script Processing Issues

As I’ve noted in recent SUG summaries, there have been numerous reports of script run time issues. See  BUG-226851 and BUG-227099 as examples.

  • There are simulator updates awaiting deployment that should provide better script performance on the “more expensive [resource-wise] scripts events”, such as sensors.
  • Rider Linden has been working to eliminate the overhead of idle scripts, reducing the time they need to simply work out they don’t need to process anything by 20-30%, although actual mileage once the improvements are deployed, may vary.
  • Rider is not promising to get script performance up to 100% per cycle (Homestead don’t end to achieve this anyway due to the number per core), but is hoping to see general improvements in processing and around those scripts that can cause unnecessary bogging down (e.g. multiple open listeners, sensors, and similar).
  • Viewer-side tools are to be provided (“after July”) viewing statistics on general script usage across a simulator to help diagnose local problems. These might even include / take the form of a visual indicator, such as the visual object update option (CTRL-ALT-Shift-U).

Next Meeting

Due to July 4th being a Thursday, and July 11th the Lab’s monthly All Hands meeting, the next CCUG meeting will be Thursday, July 18th, 2019.