like the ghosts of yesteryear, our home was again visited by the supernatural on halloween night. while we handed out candies, specters haunted our window scaring the hapless trick-or-treaters.
many thanks to Brad Larson for making the implementation a breeze.
i just deleted my sim. i’ve had it for what, eight years now? i am forced to. i have no choice. because the second life terms of service, as it is currently written, lets LL steal all of my intellectual property.
shame on you LL. shame on you. shame on you. shame on you.
i can imagine nothing more despicable. truly, you have become the most craven of the internet low life. i can hardly imagine where you might go from here – nigerian scam spams to your users, perhaps?
nor am i comforted by your statement “oh dear me, no, this is all just a misunderstanding.” there is zero chance your legal department is so incompetent. even if you retract your “misunderstanding” tomorrow, it is impossible for me to believe your behavior here is an accident. instagram nearly went out of business less than a year ago on an identical scheme. you guys don’t read newspapers?
literally disgusting.
meanwhile, with the deformer project – you have begun completely ignoring my requests for information. it’s been two years, and a company of 200-ish employees can’t find the time to review a couple hundred lines of code? or answer an email asking about it? nice.
…
fellow citizens of the virtual world: next time we do this, we absolutely must be more careful. no matter how cute and earnest our rulers appear in the beginning, we cannot accept their promise “trust us”. we need DEMOCRACY. we need it in the foundation. and we need it in writing.
see you on the other side.
my friends forwarded me an interesting article. in it, Palmer Luckey from the rift project was making some dubious claims about rendering hair. when i found out he’s the founder of the occulus rift, and that he was advocating obscene pixel resolution for realistic imaging, i felt i had to reach out and see what was going on.
after a day of back-and-forths it turns out that the article was quoting him correctly – he sees a problem with rendering hair to pixels which are larger than hairs. when i asked him if he can see jaggies in the hair of pixar movies, he said no, but that’s because they don’t do split ends. to which i said “say what?” and the conversation degenerated.
to resolve matters, i suggest we crystalize the issue to a bet. my claim is that it is perfectly possible to render a single human hair to normal resolutions without any visible distortion (aliasing/jaggies.) winner to be determined by independent graphics professionals. what say you, Mr. Luckey?
the team over at inworldz recently asked if i could help them integrate the clothing deformer into their new mesh viewer. which is nice, i think, because people really want to fit their clothing. and so far they can’t.
but the inworldz guys took it a step further – they asked if there was anything i could do to improve the code. and i said yes, it could be made faster. and they put-up a bit of money to make it happen.
attached is a patch to the deformer code which (by my quick estimates) makes the deformation process 21 times faster. many thanks to David and McCabe for making this possible.
quick announcement – i’m releasing version 0.3 of the deformer code. primary changes: 1) should now apply cleanly to recent linden viewer code, 2) deformation tables are computed in the background on another thread, so no frame stalls.
EDIT: version 0.3.2 fixes several issues detailed in the comments.
i had a pretty positive response to my node last week – so here’s another. qChameleon lets you steal the coloring of your neighbors.
PS: take my class to learn how to make your own nodes.
as a part of the class i teach – i wrote a maya node which is fairly useful to the unwashed masses. so here you go: qDisplacement.
a lot of people have asked me what i think of the new TPV policy.
honestly – it’s hard to know what to think – because it’s hard to know what the heck the policy is. the only thing that is certain is that the rule as written doesn’t begin to describe what the rule as enforced will be. nor does it explain the endless list of exceptions to the rule.
in fact, the only thing i know for certain is that the rule applies to my deformer – and that if LL doesn’t like my work – they will reject it and NO ONE will be allowed to use it. this (of course) is a dramatic change from the situation when the project was launched.
the other thing that is very clear from listening to the announcement is that Oz is pleading with us to trust him – trust the new LL – to do the right thing.
i’m headed out on vacation next week but i want to get another release of the deformer code out for testing.
it has a fix for the problem of “crumpling.” (thanks to Elie Spot for helping me debug the problem.) it turns out that looking at the closest vertex isn’t enough – we need to find the closest point on the closest triangle – and determine what mixture of three corners makes it. deforming is now a much smoother effect.
it also contains the on/off switch, settable at upload time. (it’s next to the “Upload skins” checkbox.)
Charlar -
i’d like to explain to you why your statements were out of line.
one, of course, is your needlessly abrasive and combative tone. Â (my name is Qarl, by the way.) Â and two is the whole “looking a gift horse in the mouth.”
but perhaps the most disturbing thing is the fact that you seem completely oblivious to how useful this tool is. Â which tells me two things – you don’t actually use the tools in SL (have you ever tried to build off axis? are you aware of the multitude of rounding bugs?) and you don’t listen to your customers.
but all of these, i think, are symptoms of a larger problem.
i think you lindens (with notable exceptions) are outrageously arrogant. Â have you seen the research which shows an avatar’s size will influence the personality of the user behind it? Â i wonder if having an avatar with godlike powers (and godlike worshipers) has gotten to you.
in fact, thinking about it – nearly every blunder the lab has committed over years the can be seen as a direct result of arrogance, dismissiveness, and general disrespect for your customers.
or maybe i’m just oversimplifying because i’m angry.
regardless – i won’t be making the changes you requested. Â but of course the code is open, so perhaps someone else will do that work for you.
best,
K.
EDIT: i’ve gotten a few questions about whether i mean this literally, or whether i’m just being antagonistic. i mean this literally.
here is an essay Pathfinder wrote on the issue back in may:
and here is an amazing talk about the power of avatars on human psychology:
recently – a very kind soul sent me a chunk of money to say thank you for my deformer work.
it means a lot to me – to know my work is so valued, and respected.
to say thank you back – i’m releasing my alignment tool under LL’s contributor agreement, so they may include it into their official viewer, and everyone in SL can have access to it.
thank you, kind soul.
this year for christmas i gave my wife a special present: a snowglobe with a tiny copy of our home inside.
she loves it. i love it. everyone loves it. so here’s how you can make one for yourself:
1) order a custom snowglobe kit. ebay has a bunch to choose from. try to find one that tells you its exact dimensions so you can size your model before the globe arrives in the mail.
2) take pictures of your house. you probably want at least eight circling the perimeter. more can’t hurt.
i also grabbed a top-down view of my house from google’s satellite maps. it’s very low-res, but the house is going to be tiny, so it works out.
3) build a cg model of your house.
i tried a handful of the “automatic” systems to build models. microsoft’s photosynth, autodesk’s 123D catch, a couple lesser known programs. none of them worked well enough to produce a final model – they did well for 75% of the model, but then horribly mutilated the last 25%.
in the end i went with google’s sketchup – its photo match tools are great for building models from photos of buildings.
see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSuDoX8SPtU
4) unfortunately, the 3d printing places won’t accept output from sketchup (for color), so we need to convert. save your model out as a DAE file and then read it back in to maya. duplicate your model and layout new UV coordinates on the copy. bake the textures to a single new image with the transfer maps tool.
5) now that the textures are all in one image, you can use photoshop or maya to repaint them and fix any inconsistencies.
6) build a rough 3D model of the snow globe itself. make sure to add refraction to the globe (1.33 for water) and render. this will let you experiment with sizes for your model – and will also tell you how the model will look with water around it – the magnifying effect of the curved surface made my models look 40% bigger.
7) build a snowy hill for your house to sit on – size it so that your house sits at the center of the globe. also be sure that the bottom of the hill fits on the rubber plug used to seal the globe. render the image to get the shape right – my hill is absurdly steep – but looks good with refraction. at this point i realized our house looked lonely on the hill – so i added some fictional snowy trees on each side.
8) export from maya as an OBJ file.
9) import into meshlab and re-export as an X3D file. (remember to select only one source for texcoords and colors.)
10) you’re now ready to print. zip up the X3D and image file and upload to your favorite printer. my favorite printer is shapeways. they’ve very VERY good. and nice as well.
11) when you’re model arrives (in two to three weeks) make sure to coat it with a waterproof sealant, otherwise the colors will immediately wash away. polyurethane seems a good choice, but i’ve had to apply it pretty thick (six spray coatings, four dipped.) better safe than sorry.
12) if you’re using water – make sure to include a drop of bleach (to kill any future algae) and a drop of detergent (to break surface tension and make the snow float better.)
good luck.
[EDIT: yes, if you really REALLY need me to i'll make one for you. email qarl@qarl.com]
happy new year!
if you compare the feature-set of linden lab’s second life grid and the various open source grids – only one serious difference emerges: the economy.
linden lab provides a robust, secure, easily accessible means for transferring small amounts of money between its users – and the effects of this fabulous tool are evident EVERYWHERE in second life.
the opensim grids are hard pressed to compete in this regard – their decentralized nature makes it almost impossible to develop a similar system – make it secure – and implement fraud-safe ways of converting virtual dollars to real dollars.
but the almost impossible has been done.
bitcoin is quite revolutionary. at least as important, i’d say, as the invention of email or the world-wide-web. it is essentially digital gold that requires absolutely no central agency to trade, over which no central agency has control.
world-shattering implications aside – it is the PERFECT solution for creating an economy on the opensim grids. the viewer acts as your wallet, and exchanges bitcoins with the seller’s wallet. done.
so how do you make that million dollars? well, you go and implement the bitcoin wallet in a third party viewer and the proper hooks for opensim.
or, you can do like i did and go buy some bitcoins. $1000 bitcoins two years ago are worth $1,000,000 today.
our second session has come and gone, somewhat successfully i think – things always go better when your audience is armed. we covered implicit surfaces, renderman/pixie, displacement shaders, and more of my wacky cellular simulation.
the turnout was pretty good too. if you’d like to attend the next one, or just receive updates, drop me a line at qarl@qarl.com.
source code and data files for this session here.
once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away, i taught a class called “computational art”. today, thanks to the miracle of the interwebs, i am able to teach once again. (be warned, the words “class” and “teach” here are used in the loosest possible sense.)
here is my first attempt – an exploration of experimentation in cellular simulation. enjoy.
download the source code here.
UPDATE: to attend future classes, register an account (and email) for this wordpress blog.
i heard through the grapevine that the lab won’t consider bringing me back because of my blog post last year detailing the unethical and inept decision making behind my termination – specifically the audio recording.
look guys – you dicked me over, plain and simple. i’m sure the recording was embarrassing for you – but the correct way to avoid embarrassment like that is to behave ethically in the first place. i’m reminded of all those corrupt police officers who become angry when being recorded on the job… ew.
and please try to be a little thankful that i didn’t seek any legal remedies – my friend over at Gibson Dunn seemed to think i have a strong case.
it makes me completely crazy that there’s no alignment tool in the second life viewer.
so i made one.
third party viewers (imprudence, Kirsten’s, etc, etc, etc) please feel free to include this code into yours. linden lab? well… my rates are very reasonable.
well, linden lab cut me loose today. they’ve been hinting at it ever since the layoffs last month. try as i might i wasn’t able to change their minds. honestly, i’m completely baffled at the decision, as are all my coworkers (and my boss, and…)
i mean, it wasn’t because i do a bad job. by all accounts, i do a FANTASTIC job. i do the work of a hundred men, i work miracles, etc.
and it’s not that i’m super expensive – my salary was slightly below average for my position in san francisco. and when i switched from employee to contractor, i cost the lab even less.
and it can’t be because i’m a contractor and not an employee. that cannot be the reason, because (a) i never wanted to switch to a contractor but i was forced to when the lab screwed up, and (b) when i did switch and was worried the switch might endanger me in any future layoffs – my exec assured me i’d be judged by performance and not status.
so it’s a mystery.
and damn, i gotta say, that sucks. because i really do love second life. SL is the coolest thing on the planet – the world we’ve all built is literally incredible – beyond belief.
but maybe things happen for a reason – and maybe i can do more good for SL on the outside than the inside.
let’s see.
it’s funny what you find while cleaning your digital attic.
herein contained digital blueprints for the construction of mechanical squid death machines.
and at a resolution perfect for poster printing.
in my office (in the real world) i have a window into my office (in the virtual world.) it stays open 24/7, so when i’m at my desk, i can see my desk.
similarly, in my office (in the virtual world) i have a window into my office (in the real world.)
depending on your point of view, the result can be disorienting.
the lighting in our renderer just got a whole lot better.
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