Am under the weather this week.

Been fighting a cold this week and that may be a good thing if I am well for the holidays. I start with a continuation of my last post-http://slbiology.blogspot.com/2013/11/new-clothes.html. At any rate when I rated Hosoi at Kitely's market place last week, I jokingly mentioned that the only thing missing was some nice hairpieces to go with my new Kimono. Well Amiryu Hosoi saw my post and sent me some nice hair pieces. Here I am complete with a new hair piece to go with my wonderful Kimono.

The green things in the background are not part of the hairpiece but large horsetails growing in my Kitely world.

 Today I spent a quiet afternoon building in Kitely so here are some shots of my home in various stages of completion, also showing some views of my world.  Not done yet but made a good start.

 This is a sleeping meditation loft.

Decided I needed a balcony off of my loft.










Now that I have more stuff up I want to see what happens when I make an OAR file for local use with New World Studio. I should at least get my created objects...we shall see.

New Clothes...

Finally had a chance to get back into my Kitely world and decided to try the Kitely Market place. Since I had just read that one of my favorite SL destinations , Hosoi Ichiba, has migrated entirely to Kitely I decided that this was a good excuse to pick up at least one Kimono. The market place worked flawlessly and my Kimono was automatically added to my Kitely inventory, with payment handled through Paypal.  The Kimono cost more than I expected,  $4.99 US dollars roughly $L 1300 is SL exchange rates are still somewhere around 270 Lindens to the dollar. Mind you I am not complaining, the Kimono is really detailed, and I have always tried to support good merchants in SL. I could have paid a couple dollars more for an export version for use on other Open Sim grids. Wondering what that means for me though. Does it mean if Kitely enables Hypergrid I will just need one AV for all OS where hypergrid is enabled?

Latest update on the Hosoi move to Kitely.
http://hosoi-ichiba.blogspot.nl/

More on the Kitely Marketplace:
http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2013/10/kitely-eliminates-market-listing-fees-plans-exports/

A Tide Pool in Kansas?

Ocean life has always held a fascination for me, something I suspect is not uncommon among those of us who end up as biologists. My mother gave me some of Rachel Carson's books, the The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea and several trips to Cape Cod imprinted the smells, sites and creatures of the sea. So of course as part exploring Blender and mesh had to make something with tentacles. I didn't think I was ready to tackle squid or octopuses so decided on sea anemones. Easy enough right...well it took 2 days to get something that looked sort of like a sea anemone.

Here are three of my attempts. My first attempt is on the left and my latest attempt is on the right.

 The first attempt was not meant to be realistic and I had all sorts of trouble with painting the seams out. Both the second and third attempts are more realistic, which ironically was easier than what I tried to do in my first attempt.  The tentacles were done using extrude, scale and translate tools in the mesh editor. There are I think other ways to do tentacles but I decided to stick with the the tools I best understood. The last one is still has some seam issues but pretty minor.

Of course I had to make my own little tide pool. Which resides some where in the cloud or mirrored to my home machine, alas in-silico.

Playing with Light

Today I visited Paislee Myrtle's Dragon's Teeth site which is a wonderfully lit world as shown here:

This led me to do some lighting in Simone's World. Here is the result which is not nearly as well crafted as her world but I had fun with this.

By the way she is in a group called the Devokan Story Tellers. This link is to her Kitely World Page. http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world/Paislee-Myrtle/Dragons-Teeth

This world is free to visit and lots of the materials are copy-able. In fact I could not resist the group of fern fiddleheads just to the left of where I am in the second picture. 

My Kitely World is still not open for visitors...so you can't see my experiments with OpenSim physics or me accidently donning a giant orchid.

More about the Devokan Story tellers is at Danko's blog: http://journeymetaverse.wordpress.com/devokan-storytellers-page/

Slowly getting the hang of Blender

Last night I learned how to better use the sculpt tool in Blender including showing the edges which makes the grab tool MUCH easier to work with, and also how to do symmetry across an axis so I can do things such as these orchids:

Building is Theraputic

Slowly my Kitely world is taking shape as I get better at using Blender.  Just about very object in in this view except for the blue landing pad is made from mesh. The little purple flowers were actually pretty challenging for me though I am sure more proficient people could probably make these much more easily than I currently can. You can just make out a pink bridge that I threw together yesterday...OK so it did take me an hour to figure this out.

Here is a better view of the bridge:

Taking shape...

Slowly the world takes shape. The two mesh trees are duplicates. The one on the right has had texture applied but not too successfully.

Also it may not be apparent, but I replaced the default low elevation texture with a richer green one since I really don't want my world to be a desert world.

Framework for a tree

Yesterday I decided to try something a bit more ambitious in mesh-namely to make a tree with blender. So I started with an isododecahedron sphere and uses a series of selects, extrusions, and rotations came up with this framework. I didn't texture it but simply added a reddish material since I was more curious as to how well something like this would be handled in Open Sim. No problem as it turns out.



Here is my tree's framework on my Kitely test site.  Hopefully I can get to the leaves soon.

Morning Glories in Mesh

I've actually managed to figure out enough about Blender and mesh to put these morning glory-ish flowers together today.

Adventures with OpenSim

At various times I have dabbled with OpenSim but in the past kept returning to Second Life but I have been taking a second look now that Open Sim has matured. First of all it is now really possible to have your own private world and I plunked down the $20.00 for NewWorldStudio's OpenSim generator. It has bugs being still in beta, but Hey I have my own private World for 20 bucks with 100,000 or so prims as opposed to my region in SL which costs 40 bucks a month.

I still haven't figured out how to link my private world to other grids-NewWorldStudio's connectivity test shows it as public but since I use this region to experiment with mesh and physics...well maybe I don't want any visitors just yet. But I did learn about OAR files. More on that in a bit.

Speaking of mesh-finally a reason to learn a bit about Blender. I have used sculpties but found trying to do them in Blender a bit temperamental so ended up using one of the SL tools for doing sculpties. So on to mesh. I like doing mesh but one nut that I hadn't cracked in a couple days of scratching was how to how to get the textures to render in the dae files that Blender exports and SL and Open sim support.  I had to grasp the concept of materials and also didn't notice the little check boxes in Blenders .dae export menu relating to exporting textures as well....duh.

One development I really in pleased with the Kitely. I had read about this company and its new business model and really low rates...so I plunked down money for their Bronze plan. Gives me a free region and costs 5 bucks a month. OK 5 bucks a month is definitely better than 40 bucks a month for what, an 8th of a region? Plus getting back to OAR files for just pennies I could upload an OAR file and even better can modify the terrain! How cool is that. That world is private for now. I can go public for 20 bucks a month...still a lot better than SL for the money.

Oh and it gets even better! Imagine my delight when I exported my world's OAR to my home machine and loaded it into OpenSim using NewWorldStudio and was able to watch my NWS World take shape in my viewer. How cool is that!  Now if I could only use a common AV look across all Worlds...At any rate the picture shows me in the NWS version of my Kitely World. One giant sandbox. Presumably I can go the other way as well but haven't tried that yet.