Okay. Â I’ve messed around with Blender on and off for, well, years. Here is yet another attempt to collect resources and notes. If anyone other than I ever reads this, I’ll apologize in advance: this post is likely to always be far less coherent than anything I set out to write for other eyes. Continue reading “Learning Blender (in my copious spare time)”
Perfect petite hair from biggee hair (and other stuff too!)
New product from Motley Tech: a script to drop into any mod hair (and other objects too) to resize for petites, tinies, or other small avatars. Here’s the link: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Petitify-Resizer/5987341 L$50 (copy, nomod, notrans).
Why bother? Well, you’d know why if you ever tried manually resizing hair from standard to petite size – the drag handles get “stuck” when you try to shrink an object when any prim in the linkset gets to the point where any dimension gets to 0.01m. This is a serious problem for hair because designers (and customers) like nice, thin wisps of hair for maximum realism. How does the script avoid this problem? it keeps shrinking all dimensions that it can, while keeping them positioned and rotated properly. This works well for most wearables, at least down to petite/tiny sizes… while, strictly speaking, it isn’t perfect, you will probably not be able to tell the difference unless you try shrinking something much smaller.
Of course, you can use the same script to shrink other things too. I’ve used it for hair, wings, utility belts and sculpted clothing (obviously, anything with system layer components isn’t going to work). Also trees, vehicles, and buildings. Warning: vehicles can act very strangely since prim size interacts with the physics simulation. Also, remember that just because your small avatar looks small, doesn’t mean that the SL server thinks it is really that small – if you shrink a building that you actually want to be able to walk through, you may need to make it phantom (so you can go inside) and then add transparent prims for the floor and walls (so you don’t pass through the building)
Keep your transaction logs forever!
Yes, I’ve turned the transaction log automation system I’ve been using for years into an actual product. Â Heck, I like the new version much better than the old – it was a great excuse to hack on it and I might even sell a few copies.
The interesting thing is what was holding me back… well, two things really: Â First, I reallllly didn’t want to be responsible for having anyone’s credentials (read “SL password”) going through any of my systems. Â What LL really ought to do is implement a nice API where you can grant read-only access to your logs… think Facebook, Google, Twitter… well, just about any system that would like to interoperate with other web apps (yes, yes. Â I know). Â Anyway, it took some pondering and I’ve got a solution that does in-world generation of a per-user registration key for validation, and then the user installs and runs (and gives their password to) a small external program that checks the registration key against the account. Â Simple and the truly paranoid can run a network sniffer to confirm that my program only talks to secondlife.com and not some shadowy password hoarder.
Second, getting it to work right was more effort than I wanted to give away for free. Â Yes, I did it for myself, but there’s significant value in it (I think) and I don’t want to undervalue the effort required to get it to work right as a product.
So, I’m probably going to turn on the marketplace vendor soon and see what happens. Â Should be interesting.
BTW: here’s the marketplace link:Â https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/TrackTrans-v10-Registration-Box/5471168