Last time I blogged about cool builds, they disappeared on me. So for this trio, I’m picking three fairly new builds that are up and running. The underlying color scheme of all three are black and red.

Lets start with black. Above is a cool themed build called SICK, It has a dystopian Japanese Anime feeling about it. Very dark, with lots of glowing neon signs in both Japanese and English. There are some cool shops selling anime style clothing and accessories. Many of the people on this sim are bots, which are there to add to the atmosphere I guess.

Moving on to both black and red is the Jabberwocky sim, which just opened this month. It is designed around an Alice in Wonderland theme, crossing between the Lewis Carroll version and the American McGee version.

There are various rooms, some with paths made from playing cards, others made from childrens books. Still others featuring plywood, indicating the build is still a little on the incomplete side. There are 4 or 5 stores in place selling neo-victorian clothing, mostly female. I plan to check back when it is more complete.

Finally, moving to pure red, we have the new build called Rouge, featuring a fancy dance club called Code Red. This was the subject of an elaborate ad campaign earlier this month, which brought a lot of interest, though when I checked it out i was pretty much vacant. Couldn’t help trying out some
recreational pole dancing while I was there though.

Virtual Society alice in wonderland, anime, dancing, exploring, Japan, role play, secondlife, shopping, strip clubs

Having Poser and Second Life both is a good thing if you are into creating animations for Second Life. But what about going the other way?

I have been updating some pages on my website, including the modeling portfolio, and thought some new renderings would be helpful. The hard part about renderings is creating the perfect settings.

Now Second Life has settings galore, and the new windlight enabled client can generate some really pretty pictures. Can I use Second Life settings to create great Poser art?

In short, no you can’t. I first tried a couple of years ago with the above picture. This picture was done before windlight, the sky was created using another atmosphere rendering program. The lesson learned then was that I can render shadows for the Poser figures, but shadows in Second Life have to be drawn in.

Shadows, and “ray tracing” are the two things missing to make Second Life truly look realistic. That’s probably the way it will stay as both things require excessive amounts of rendering time, or computing power. As pointed out a few essays ago, the code to render shadows
(sunshine shadows anyways) is already in the client code, just not enabled due to the hardware requirements needed. I have not heard about reflections coming to Second Life, but Twinity has them already (as seen in this video).

File this for the future: How about an enhanced rendered screenshot option in the Second Life Client that will create shadows from sun and other light sources, cloud shadows, depth of field focus, ray trace reflections in “shiny” objects, etc. These would be screenshot enhancements only as they cannot be rendered in real time. Probably not something Linden Labs would spend time doing, but looks like a challenge for a 3rd party developer.

I doubt that will be coming soon, but in the mean time there are ways to fake it. The picture at the top of the post is a perfect example. To hide the fact that there are no realistic shadows in Second Life, I can do a depth of field blur of the background. The further back, the more out of focus you get.

The result is a stunning picture that I hesitate to point out the flaws: the lack of shadows in the archway to the right, and the lack of detail in the ground texture makes the asphalt look out of focus in the foreground.

This last picture is the best of the three, probably because I limited Second Life content to only the background. The car, the model, and the wooden deck are all rendered in Poser. Only the background fence and sky are Second Life.

Interesting technique used on this one: I rendered the foreground with a blank background, then imported the picture into Second Life as a tga file (so the background would be transparent) then created a HUD with this image and stratched it to fit my entire screen. That way I could match the background perfectly with the foreground before taking a snapshot.

Metaverse News 3D art, poser, realism, screenshot photography, secondlife

So the theme is “Twilight Zone”, builds based on obscured reality. I recently found a cool street scene, colored entirely in black and white like some old noir film

Unfortunately, when I finally get around to blogging about it, its gone. It was on the Silent server, but the owners are starting over working on something else. I thought it was cool, but oh well.

Speaking of disappearing sims, The above picture was taken at a temporary build, an incredibly cool flower build that was only up for a day. Here’s the story with more pictures. According to the latest, the build will be put up somewhere else soon. I’ll keep an eye out for where.

So one obscured reality you can visit is the Greenies Backyard sim, a followup to the Greenies Living Room sim. In these two sims, everything is about 10 times bigger than normal and populated by small alien like creatures. These are two pretty original builds. Part of the Rezzable group of builds.

I try to blog about cool places to visit, this entry is kind of a tease as two of the three don’t exist anymore. Hey, not every blog entry can be perfect.

Virtual Society exploring, Rezzable, secondlife, surreal, twilight zone

The latest Aspiring Video Game Star comic. I so rarely make new ones may as well blog them when I do.

More Comics

Media, Metaverse News 3D art, ageofconan, comic, mmorpg, poser

With the soon to be released version 1.20 client of Second Life, they will be adding support for 3D mouse navigation, specifically the 3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator. Here is the official info as well as video tutorials.

It looked pretty cool, but was not sure about spending $70 for another input device. I checked out their site, and what sold me was the fact that it works on many 3D programs, including a few others I use.

So is it worth it? It depends entirely on what you want it for. Some things it excels, some things it fails. Here’s a breakdown of the three uses in Second Life:

Flycam – This is a new feature to the 1.20 client that as far as I know is only available to SpaceNavigator owners. It is freaking COOL! Basically, in flycam mode, you leave your avatar behind and use the SpaceNavigator to move your camera.

You move the camera in all directions, and go through anything. It blows throught the 40 meter limit of the normal client camera, allowing you to look at stuff three servers away, especially if you have the view distance turned up.

If you are interested in making Machinima in Second Life, flycam is the perfect dolly/crane camera utility. Flying through scenery, is tons of fun.

NOTE: You cannot spy on other avatar’s actions from a long distance, so no you cant use this for voyeurism. It does improve exploring of scenic builds (my main activity) 100%. Grade: A+

Avatar Motion – The default action with the SpaceNavigator is to move your avatar in a joystick motion. Not just walking around, but also pull up to fly, and push down to land. It also controls the avatar camera to a certain extent.

This last part can be annoying, the first "customization" I did to the controls was to set the "panning" value to 0.0. Other than making "strafing" easier (walking sideways), and the fact you can navigate one handed, there is no real advantages to SpaceNavigator avatar motion over mouse and keyboard motion controls. Grade: B

Building – if you edit an object, you can manipulate the object in 3D with the SpaceNavigator. Other than showing off to friends how you can move and rotate objects at the same time, this feature is completely useless. Trying to build in SL with SpaceNavigator is an excercise in frustration, and makes building in There seem easy in comparison.

I think it would help if the 3D motion were limited to the build mode, like only rotate in rotate mode, etc., but it wouldn’t help that much. Stick to the mouse for building in SL. Grade: F

Bottom line, the selling point for me may be the selling point for you: How many other programs do you use that can benefit from the SpaceNavigator? Many CAD programs work with it, so 3D artists may find it indespensible.

Navigating through Google Earth 4 with it is totally awesome. Try a "fly through" of the Grand Canyon for example.

I also find it useful for Poser 7, though it only controls the camera. I keep the main camera locked, but when posing hands or face cameras, the SpaceNavigator makes things easier.

Anyways thats my review, hope you find it useful to decide if its worth $70-80 to get one, or not. Its definitely not for everybody, but some will enjoy the hell out of it.

Metaverse News 3D navigation, googleearth, hardware, reviews, secondlife, sl clients, spacenavigator

I have been playing with Exit Reality for a couple of months, but I’d thought I’d wait to review it until some of the more serious bugs were worked out of it, which they have been. This is still a beta product and still has lots of annoying bugs, but it now qualifies as “useable” at least, assuming you are using IE7 or FF2 (FF3 still not working yet).

Despite the stupid name, Exit Reality is based on three really cool ideas for the 3D web, unfortunately they add up to a fatal flaw I will get to soon. First, I want to describe these three really cool ideas:

Cool idea #1: Give people who are visiting the same website the ability to chat with one another. This idea has been around a while. I found similar 2D programs like weblin which do the same thing.

Cool idea #2: Do everything in VRML (aka X3D).
Why? First of all, it has been around for years, and thus you have tons of instant content to bring to your program. Exit Reality is essentially a 3D chat program built on top of a VRML viewer. Many early 3D virtual worlds, like Cybertown, were built in VRML. Keeping with the standard means that user created content definitely has a place in Exit Reality, assuming you know how to build stuff in VRML.

Cool idea #3: Create a handy “2D website to 3D VRML website” converter, so you can surf the whole internet in 3D if you want. Now the results of such
an ambitious undertaking, will obviously not be perfect because the vast majority of the web was designed to be viewed in 2D not 3D. But the Exit Reality people have thought of that and created special templates for some of the more popular social websites.

For example, going to my My Space Page in Exit reality brings up a nice studio apartment with my picture on the wall, and doors leading to some of my friends “apartments”. I also have the ability to move the 3D furniture around, though other visitors can come in and move the furniture around for me.

So these three ideas add up to a pretty cool concept.

Here’s the fatal flaw: 3D avatars built in VRML, have always, and probably will always, suck! Avatar animations are low rez and goofy looking, this is because VRML was never designed for human like avatars, and the ones that exist are the result of hacks that were not designed to use bvh animations, or in general live up to standards set by other 3D chat programs.

Exit Reality has yet to prove me wrong, and in fact the avatar system currently in place is where a lot of the most annoying bugs exist. The default avatar is what I call “boring doofus guy” with dark gray pants and a light gray shirt. There is an avatar selection tool and the list of avatars is large, but everytime you open up the list it does not remember where you were last time you opened it, and starts from the beginning. Everytime you open Exit Reality you default to boring doofus guy, and when you switch to other 3D pages, you run a 50-50 chance of reverting back to boring doofus guy. The pictures above used the “Candace” avatar, which starting with a “C” is not too far down the list of avatars in the alphabetically sorted list.

The cheesy avatar problem cannot be overlooked unfortunately. All avatar
based chat programs need cool customized avatars. Their avatar is their identity. Selecting from a list of lame ones won’t cut it for very long.

Kudo’s to Exit Reality for a cool idea in 3D web surfing, and as a side bonus, providing a top notched X3D viewer plug in, but the 3D chat side of this program will largely be ignored due to the crappy VRML support of avatars.

Metaverse News 3D Web, avatars, exitreality, reviews, virtual worlds

On Monday, Google released their much anticipated virtual world Lively. With a big company like Google behind it, thousands of people jumped in, which caused quite a few problems.

I downloaded it first day and could not get into any room, just a persistent “Joining Room…” message at the bottom. I redownloaded and reinstalled and was finally able to get in. This is an early beta program, so I wont rag on the many bugs, since they are likely to get fixed eventually. Let me just say that this program is not the “Second Life Killer” some bloggers have called it.

 If you try the game yourself, I highly recommend going to the All rooms page, and select a vacant room. This will give you the ability to edit your avatar as you see fit.

Right now there is shopping in place but all items are free for now for testing purposes. Not sure if they will put an economy in place eventually.

The head designer of Lively is Mel Guymon, Google’s Head of 3D Operations — former There.com developer and IMVU Co-Founder. Playing in this virtual world has qualities of both There and IMVU, especially the cartoonish looking avatars.

One thing that Lively has that neither of its predecessors had is animations you can perform on others. Click on another avatar and you can hug, kiss, hi5, and a dozen other things. I have not seen this in a virtual world since The Sims Online. The only annoying thing is you can do this without the others avatars permission. So while wandering the halls of Lively High School, I got some random kisses.

Voice is also available through GTalk if you have that program.

If you are not into randomly cavorting with others, you can very easily create your own room, pick a setting, and add some furniture. There is a lot to play with here. and according to an interview, only 20% of what they will eventually have is in the game.

The downside is that there is no user created content. According to the Lively website:

Most of the avatars, clothing, and objects were created by vendors working for Google. We’re also working with a small number of trusted testers, vendors and creative agencies as part of a test for creating custom items.

We hope to enable user-generated content and even more ustomization soon, but until then we’ve given you tons of choices from the catalog to help personalize your Lively experience.

That in itself is a major negative, and why the program does not have a chance of becoming the “virtual world standard” despite the Google name. Without user created content, the program is destined to be stuck in the “novelty” category, although the Google name will assure it will be a popular novelty.

Another negative is the inability to customize avatars beyond the clothes and hair. I’m using the “Heather” avatar, and while I am able to pick my own hair style and hair color and eye color, my face looks like the thousands of other “Heathers” in the world.

Metaverse News 3D Web, google, lively, reviews

Science Fiction can be generally divided into three sub categories: Utopia/Dystopia, Fantasy, and Space. There is a bit of crossover, so its not exact, but the model fits this trio of places to visit in SL.

First you got your dystopian aka cyberpunk aka industrial themed worlds, and there are quite a few places in SL with that theme. One of the most impressive new builds in the genre is Insilico (pictured above), with its tall buildings, shopping mall area, and multiple animated video screens, it makes quite an impression.

In the Fantasy genre is an impressive build called Planet Mongo, built by Lumiere Noir who also built the previously featured Ivory Tower of Prims (excellent place to learn how to build).

Planet Mongo is designed around Flash Gordon universe and has some excellent art deco designs, and glow effects.

Finally, for the outer space sci fi fan, check out Inspire Space Park. This little build which occupies just a quarter of a server looks incredibly cool.

While I’m on the subject of space builds, I heard Privateer Space is closing down. The owner does not like the way Linden Labs supports abuse reports on private servers (they dont support them at all). So the owner is just shutting down. Wish he would change his mind, and figure out how to handle the griefers himself. (hint: script spawned loaner vehicles to die after so long, and if you allow other people to build and use their own vehicles –very appreciated btw — put a very short time limit so that their vehicles disappear as soon as they stand up).

Anyways, I am liking the “3 builds” format for a post, so I’ll stop here. I’m sure there are other sci-fi builds worth mentioning as soon as I find them.

Virtual Society exploring, role play, sci-fi, secondlife, surreal