Still in Kitely...

2013??? Has it been that long since I posted here?  Been swamped with other issues and have only very slowly been working on Simone's World in Kitely. The other day I was trying a swarm program and had written a little program to rez swarm members that were pre programmed to die. Well apparently that caused probems in part because the swarm members are physical and that was casuing problems with the server...which attracted the attention of Ilan Tochner who sent me a message basically saying to fix this, which I did. At any rate this forced me to check out some of the tools Kitely has to check sim performance. The details are here on the Kitely site. https://kitely.atlassian.net/wiki/display/doc/Optimize+World+Performance

So here is what my world looks like now.

I have an early premium account which Kitely no longer offers so I am grand fathered in and pay just under $20.00's a month and  that is with 100,000 prims. But there is a good range of options and you should check www.kitely.com for details.

Setting up your account is a bit clunky since you have to sign in with facebook or twitter. I set up a twitter account just for that. Fortunately once you are set up and can access Kitely from your viewer (Firestorm seems to work best) then you can sign in through the viewer and get to the Kitely web site through the back way.

One thing you might not like is that your world is isolated from other sims so there are not interconnected regions as in Second Life. You can theoretically get to other sims through the world map, but it is a bit of trial and error. When I get a bit more done I may link to the hypergrid. I think the privacy is well suited to educators who may not want to be griefed when they take their classes into a virtual world.

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: