Mesh Comes to Second Life FINALLY!

After over a year of promises, mesh objects are now importable to Second Life.  As an intrepid reporter, I learned the hoops of importing mesh objects into the world, and it is a bit complicated.  First, I found a freebie .dae file online to import, the car pictured above.  Then I downloaded the 3.00 viewer, which by the way has some bugs in it.

To even be able to upload mesh objects, you have to: 1.) have payment info on file, so freebie accounts will be out of luck.  2.) pass a tutorial on intellectual property rights (this is to dissuade people from yanking meshes from other video games, etc.)  3.) Be on land that allows building.  If you own the land you must enable building.  4.) Be on a region with mesh enabled.  The rollout started August 23rd, but some regions will not get mesh for another week.

Once you pass all those obstacles, you should see an option in the Build > Upload menu called Model.  The price of uploading the model depends on the complexity of the model. The simple car above cost me L$188 to upload.  I do not know how many prims it uses, except that I can’t use it on my own land, so it has to be about 40 or so.

The lessons I learned in this experiment is that mesh building can be expensive.  You might want to use OpenSim as an experimental platform, as well as testing stuff in the SL beta grid before uploading to the real world.  I am looking forward to going to mesh built regions and seeing some truly spectacular builds, but with all the obstacles to mesh building, it will be a while before we see it extensively in world.

Ariane gets a makeover

One of the changes I made to the 7.1 version was to replace the hostess at the strip club with a new model, because the old hostess just can’t cut it anymore.  Now after working with a bunch of new models and creating the sequel, it is becoming more and more obvious that Ariane herself needs to be updated.

I have been using Victoria 3 base for Ariane for the past 7 years, and before that Victoria 2.  Yes I know I am late to the party, but Victoria 4 is all kinds of superior to Victoria 3 model.  So if Ariane is going to have a future as a virtual character, it is time to update her for the next decade.  Its a hard choice I am reluctant to make because everyone is so familiar with her “classic” look, and change is a pain.  This is especially true because I have already created 44 pictures for the sequel using the old model.

So I decided to update the looks of Ariane, while keeping her close to the original as possible.  I went looking for a skin texture and saw one on sale at DAZ ironically called Ariana.  I lightened the skin a touch, and added the usual simple makeup (eye liner, red lipstick) and added a beauty mark that has existed on every version of Ariane just to the right of her nose.

Then came the extremely hard part of playing with the 300 sliders to get the face shape as close as possible.  Once I got the close as possible look down, I was a little unsatisfied because she is not the classic beauty I was hoping for.  I made an attempt to abandon close as possible and go with a classic beauty, but oddly I preferred the close as possible look, because the face has “character”.  It is funny how taking a second look changes perspective sometimes.

Two things concern me, one is that this may seem like a radical change to some of you.  The other is that I may be walking on the jagged edge of the Uncanny Valley with this change.  Let me know what you think.

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Update:  So far the reaction is mixed, which is what I expected. Believe me, I am of two minds on this myself.  Just to point this out, here are a couple of renders I did so far.  You can compare these to the “classic” Ariane pictures that I posted earlier.

Here is the first one, and comparing the “classic” and the “new”, I do not see a lot of improvement. In fact I’ll admit the “classic” Ariane looks better.  Maybe it is the lighting I have in this picture makes her look kind of odd.

Then I redo the second picture and that “wow” factor shows up.  The “new” Ariane picture is definitely better.  The difference between these two test images is rather dramatic, and if I go forward with the new model, I will have to pay closer attention to lighting and shadow, which means a lot of extra work.  “Classic” Ariane looks the same in all lighting conditions, so doing a thousand pictures with her was easy.

There are a couple of other factors I am also considering.  One is that later in the story there is a conversation about the last date, this conversation varies depending on the date that you import to the sequel.  I illustrate the conversation with flashbacks to scenes from the first date, and having a dramatic difference between the current and flashback pics is likely to be off putting.  A second consideration I won’t  go into details because it is a spoiler, but in the interplay between Ariane and the new characters, the “classic” Ariane looks inferior and that is what got me thinking about this change in the first place.

Decisions, decisions…

Shall we try this again?

Making another attempt, adjusting eyes, nose, mouth and cheeks.  The parts that still don’t match up simply are not possible even on V4.  And, just to put the finishing touch on, I am using classic Ariane’s eyeballs.  If eyes are the windows of the soul, then that is the biggest change of all.

Metaverse in Transition

I have not written anything in a couple of weeks because I have been busy working on the sequel.

Meanwhile…  There are many little things going on in metaverse land worth bringing up.

First, is the fast decline of Worlds of Warcraft. They are losing net subscribers at a rate of about 100,000 a month.  Currently they sit at 11.1 million and falling.  They are still the number one MMORPG out there by a long shot, but the declining numbers indicates a change in the market I figured would eventually come.

Let’s just say it: World of Warcraft is getting old.  It’s “look” is dated, and people are more attracted to the much better looking new releases like Rift and Aion.  Competition from the “free to play” games is getting tighter too.  At this point, adding new content will boost numbers some, but each “expansion” will be less and less effective.  Developing new content is expensive and time consuming, and at some point you just have to say,  “Time for a new game.”

Speaking of which, I’m getting excited for Guild Wars 2, which unfortunately still has a “sometime in 2011″ release date.  November is packed for new game releases, and I hope it does not get lost in the mix.  GW2 and Skyrim are the two games I am most looking forward to.

And speaking of “dated”, There.com is now taking preregistration for their re-release.  Right now they are opening the ThereIM client “by invitation”, and you can reclaim your old account if you remember the login and password, you are over 18, and willing to pay $10 a month.  As nostalgic as I am about my There days, I am not feeling enough desire to go back in.  I wish them good luck in their re-release, but I think I’ll be watching from the outside.

Meanwhile in Second Life, the very long awaited release of mesh is getting close.  They released a “beta” viewer dubbed 3.0, which is the same as 2.0 but with mesh integrated in it.  Second Life has been growing a bit stale lately.  Many older great builds, stores, designer, etc. have been leaving.  I believe the “mesh” age will be a renaissance of sorts, and I am definitely looking forward to new builds and new stuff to see on the main grid when it finally goes live.  Be warned that only paying members will be allowed to upload mesh objects, and the prim cost of having mesh objects in world is higher than expected too, so those will be limiting factors.  I totally understand the first restriction as it is necessary to prevent a rash of copyrighted mesh objects from other games flooding Second Life.  The second restriction can change in the future.

Still, mesh has yet to reach the main grid.  Open Sim already has it, as long as you are using a mesh enabled viewer.  The sooner it gets to the main grid, the better.

Going to the Movies with Ariane

So I mentioned last time that I had a challenge in creating a crowded movie theater.  Challenge Met!!  I have no idea if or when I will finish this sequel, but I am having a lot of fun giving myself challenges and meeting them.  It is like a really different video game, with daily new mission and quests to get around.

In the case of the crowded movie theater, it turned out that the theater prop I bought for the occasion has an audience of low resolution patrons already included, they just look kind of crappy.  So instead of a mission to create lots and lots of people to fill the seats, the challenge became, how do I make the crappy looking people look less crappy.  The solution was a two parter. First, a darkened theater where the primary source of light is the movie screen, thus making the audience backlit helps.  Second, strategically covering the round heads with low res hair models I have collected over the years makes it look better than it really is.  If you look at just the silhouetted heads it looks like a theater of unique characters.  It is only looking at the arms and further away characters that give away the cheat.  Oops, now I told everybody.

Now I have thought about “going to the movies” as an option for a date since I started working on the first dating simulator, and I had always had it where, you talk for a bit before the movie, then two hours go by, and then you talk afterwords.  But since the theater turned out so easy, I took up a new challenge of doing fake stills of the movie you are watching as an entertaining way of saying “time is passing, and all you are doing is watching a movie”.  If you go to the movies, you choose between three movies: A romantic comedy, an action movie, and a sad drama.  The still above is from the romantic comedy (just kidding).

The action movie and romantic comedy consist of 3 screens each, act 1, act 2, and act 3.  So basically I am reducing a 2 hour movie to a 3 panel comic strip and finding it very easy to do.  The title of the generic action movie is “The Maguffin Job 2 in 3D”, and basically consists of picture 1: a gathering, picture 2: the conflict begins, picture 3: the conflict ends. This is picture #3.  In creating these pictures, I am making use of every model I can find in my poser library.  The giant robot, the drone planes, and the machine gun are all freebies that came with either Poser 5 or 7, I forgot.  The road is the model I used for the new trip to the look put point in the dating game, I am just reusing it.  The girl is a flawed character I got cheap, and the guy doing the driving is the generic “Michael 4″ which I decided I would need later on, and DAZ was selling it this week at half price. The “jeep” I assume you recognize if you played the Dating Simulator

As for the explosion, I have wiki commons to thank.  The Department of defense likes to blow stuff up, and military personnel like to take photos of stuff blowing up, and by law photos taken on duty by any military, which is not classified, is considered “public domain”.  So the explosion you see in the background is your tax dollars at work.

Since these are supposed to be stills of a 3D movie, I’m tempted to do these as anaglyphs. Anaglyphs are easy with 3d rendering. Just re-render the same scene with the camera 5 degrees to the left, then lower the “red” on one picture (forgot which eye) 50%, and lower both the blue and green on the other picture 50%, then merge the pictures together with 50% transparency, and you have an anaglyph.  I haven’t done this yet, still thinking about it.

Finally there is the “drama” stills, and I decided to make the drama a little more dramatic, ultimately telling the story in 8 panels instead of 3.  Its a fairly generic story, and even with 8 pictures, it is still up to the player to make up their own plot for the stills.  I gave myself an even bigger challenge in that I made the pretend movie into a period piece.  The problem for the player is “Which period?”

The problem is that my 3D library is limited and that my budget for new models is small.  So in creating a period drama, I just just told myself to use anything that “looks old”. Hence the picture above features one girl in 30′s french braids, and another with a 60′s style beehive look, sitting in a 50′s diner.  The diner I have used before in version 7 of the date simulator.  The background is a street model I got on sale, and will be used later doubling as a college campus.  This picture was a complicated one to stage and render but turned out great.

A couple of the stills for the “period drama” ended up getting set in a medieval castle set (it is supposed to be a church), just to confuse time period purists. Needing an old looking house interior, I stole the wall paper from the diner, and put it on Ariane’s apartment set. So if the wooden double doors and antique hutch look familiar, they are.  I also reused Ariane’s bed just using a more traditional quilt covering and an antique looking headboard and foot board, which kind of look like they came from the 20′s just to confuse the “period drama” even further.

Not pictured are any stills from the “romantic comedy”, which I liberally used photos of my recent trip to New York.  Again only three stills for that one: The “meet cute” (at Rockefeller Plaza), the “fight” (from a high rise window with a fabulous view of the Empire State Building), and the “Makeup kiss” (at Times Square).

Anyways, my next goal is to finally finish all the pictures of ONE date from beginning to end.  With dozens, possibly even hundreds of possible dates (no where close to the tens of thousands of possible dates in the first game, just keeping it more real this time), completing the graphical work on just one of those dates is a milestone.   One of the half dozen options after the movie is a trip for ice cream, where the date can potentially end.  Haven’t built the ice cream parlor set yet, but how hard can it be? I already have an ice cream sundae model, just find a good table and chair set, one wall with a picture of a clown on it, and we are ready to go!

The ice cream parlor date is not a particularly interesting one, but it is a low hanging fruit in which to start.  One down, about a hundred more to go.