after much wailing and gnashing of teeth – i am the proud owner of a brand new island sim. thank you Fritz Linden. so now i’m breeding caves. yeah. breeding caves. welcome to our brave new world. anyway, if you want your caves to turn out any good – you need to pick a fitness […]
flight of the BLIMPCO fleet
enjoy as the blimps romp across the second life mainland. (sadly, the blimp fleet is currently off line. i’ll post again when everything has righted itself.)
spelunking the metaverse
my friend Seifert Surface has been hassling me to write a design document for my new sim. i’ve been meaning to write about it here too – so i’m killing two birds with one stone. without further ado – sim name: Q desired location: in the second life developers archipelago (SLDA) and/or oceana, near “the […]
the blimps are alive
those who follow the story of the blimps know that the grid is a very dangerous place. some parcels are full. some parcels have scripts turned off. some parcels have owners who viciously murder the blimps. each of these perils (and others) kill the blimps in their tracks. to compensate, the blimps reproduce themselves when […]
tween
the animators amongst us probably noticed a serious deficiency in the keyframe code i released last week: while it allows the recording of keyframe data, it provided no means to animate between keyframes. this interpolation is known as “tweening” – and as of today, this problem has been remedied. behold Chester, my faithful sea monster. […]
keyframe
sometimes it gets lonely in my lab in the clouds. “maybe you should try spending time with friends?” NONSENSE! i’ll create replicant clones of myself. the problem, of course, is that over time their motionless bodies start to creep me out. they need a bit of life in them. they need some brains. introducing keyframe. […]
shrinkwrap
“Hey, does maya have a shrinkwrap deformer like softimage?” “I really need a shrinkwrap deformer for maya.” “WHERE’S THE DAMN SHRINKWRAP?!” sheesh. alright already. download it here. to use it, do like so: 1. create your source geometry and connect it to the sourceShape attribute on the qWrap node. 2. create your destination geometry and […]
dome, da dome dome
a friend comes to me and asks – how can i project a video onto a big dome? he has an animation studio – and his animators have made an imax dome movie. but they have no imax dome to view it on. but he wants them to be able to experience their work in […]
get lost
like i always say – what good is virtual reality if you can’t make a hedge maze in the sky. and what good is a virtual hedge maze in the sky if the hedges don’t move around to confuse the crap out of you as you try to escape. well today is my lucky day. […]
blimps, blimps, everywhere
when i was a kid – each year the sky of my home city filled with hot air balloons. hundreds and hundreds of hot air balloons. all chasing the lead balloon in a “race”. it was a magical event. we chased the balloons, too, in our car. so did many others. when the lead balloon […]
meet george jetson!
all the cool kids are doing it – you want to be cool don’t you? jetpacks provide flight assist – letting you fly well above the 100m ceiling. and they let you fly much much faster than you otherwise can. and they look so damn chic. so why on earth wouldn’t you want one? get […]
advanced lighting
sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. that’s what i learned in an earlier post, when i said “and you can use this technique to bake lighting.” which isn’t as powerful a statement as the image above (difference of 991 words.) so here we have a box. some might recognize it as almost a […]
keeping track of the joneses
sometimes you need to know where your friends are. sometimes you need to know where your enemies are. sometimes you need to know if your friends are hanging-out behind your back. sometimes you need to know where you left your car. what you need is track.lsl and marker.lsl. track.lsl accepts positioning data. marker.lsl creates pins […]
qLab LSL library v0.0.2
new version of the qLab LSL library is now available. the qLab LSL library is a simple command-line build environment for unix-like operating systems. it provides library-like support via #include/#define (via the c-preprocessor) and makefiles. it contains libraries for command-line parsing (getopt()) and dynamic prim manipulation. changes for version 0.0.2 – Mon Jun 19 14:46:18 […]
billboards
say you want to make a big sign. no. i mean a really big sign. like, a sign big enough to blot-out your neighbor’s hideous sim. you’ll need a 256m by 100m sign – but SL constrains a prim to 10m by 10m. that’s ok. you’ll use 25 by 10 prims. but then you’ll need […]
seamless textures
painting textures by hand, eyeballing them to make them seamless? that’s SO 20th century. join the revolution – use computers to make your life easier. create your model in maya. use projections so that textures cross geometric boundaries. (for extra credit, use shape projections.) export your model to second life using a mel script and […]
stupid map tricks
for those paying close attention to yesterday’s post – you’ve noticed the qDynaScript command – which will execute and build a prim set from an input notecard. why would you want to do this, you ask? to draw large gaudy pictures on the SL map, of course. with a simple image – – along with […]
procedural prim construction
sometimes you just can’t build it by hand. and now you don’t have to. using the qLab LSL library (now available) you can procedurally build your prim beasts without ever touching your mouse. for example, you can: create a gridwork of prims, using a simple (x, y) loop. see square.lsl. create prim cage for your […]
transfering textures
a texture painter i know called it “the holy grail of texturing”. i dunno about that – but it is pretty damn nifty. the qShapeProjection node (version 0.1 available) let’s you transport a texture (no matter how it’s mapped) from one surface onto another. it’s as simple as: 1. create the source geometry and shading […]
ogres
a new version of the qOgres screensaver is now available. qOgres uses simplified facial-recognition techniques to distort a human face – areas of high detail are squished, areas of low detail are stretched. enjoy.
maps
with the advent of linden labs’ map browser – we can download maps en masse from the second life website. a perl script (requiring netpbm) to acquire these hires images is available. the above image is available as a medium sized (1024 x 1024 pixels) or super large (14,000 x 17,000 pixels) images. super-large images […]
slime
coming to us from an (ahem) unsuccessful commercial project – qSlime demonstrates how mixing both refractive and reflective distortions can make for an effective liquid effect. now available. built from nodes in qPatchLib v0.2.
qPatchlib v0.2
qPatchlib version 0.2 now available. new nodes include: qMercurialMe – screen saver node demonstrating reflective effects, camera/movie input, display logo, etc. qErrorMessage – error messages displayed in flames.