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:

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.

More on Avination

My initial enthusiam for the $40 price for a sim is a bit tempered by a couple of limitations in Avination. The first is minor-namely it doesn't seem to support SL's media on a prim idea. In SL I am used to being able to have my blogs and my Flickr site open on prims so that I can at least see what's going on. The second is a bit more surprising given the OpenSim background of the owner, namely that Avination does not support OpenSim specific functions some of which are really cool especially the texturing functions.

On the plus side my inquiry about OS functions was quickly answered by their support staff. I also like that you can import prims that you own from SL using the Avination viewer, including scupted prims as my picture shows. Just be aware that it doesn't seem possible to import the scripts in the object- you have to do that separately or use Stored Inventory as explained here.

https://www.avination.com/support/faq/creation-inventory.html

Of course Second Life is not sitting still what with pending rolling out of mesh and if you haven't noticed realistic shadow rendering like that in Blue Mars. Since Avination is billing itself as content creator friendly, I wonder how the introduction of mesh in SL will affect Avination.

Who knows, I may ultimately find it cheaper to set up my own Open Sim server, and link it to OSGrid. Not that I have ever done anything like that mind you. Hmm as cheap as computers are today...might be worth it to take that plunge.