Finally, something is (mostly) done! It's undoubtedly lagtastic, but whatever. It looks fabulous.



Oh, and in totally unrelated news, the newbie guide to sculpted prims cracked me up.

How do I make a sculpted prim?

[...]

You then convert the model into a sculpt map, which looks like a strange rainbow image. The shape of the object is encoded into that picture using magic.

Hah!

Today, I would like to get all the foliage done (all the foliage I'll be making, anyway) and build one thing. I suspect I am aiming too high, but wish me luck anyway.

Oh, and I've stumbled across this truly gigantic list of texturing resources. Not everything is applicable to SL, but much is. (For those who are wondering: no, I am not modding Oblivion. Yet.)

I have a question, for those of you inclined to answer.

As you probably know, much of my new sim will be taken up by a puzzle game. Many of the clues and backstory are going to take the form of diary pages. (Please, spare me your praise for my boundless creativity.) So now I've got a choice: do I actually make images out of the pages, do I just use notecards, or do I do both?

The images would be more immersive, but they'd take time to load. Doing both seems like a decent idea, but I don't want to confuse people. What would you prefer?

Bite me, Blender.

Help! My eyes turned funny colors!

Have your eyes turned black/brown/blue/white/some other color they shouldn't be? It's probably a bug. Here's what has fixed it in the past:

1. Go into appearance mode, and go to the eyes tab.
2. Move the eye color slider. This shouldn't tint the eyes -- as long as the eye lightness slider is set to 100, it won't have an effect. (If the lightness slider isn't at 100, move it there; you may be dealing with normal tinting, instead of this odd bug.)
3. Save and exit. The problem should be fixed.

You can also move the eye lightness slider, but that will tint your eyes, and tinted eyes are what you're trying to change, right?

I learned something today! For certain definitions of "learned," that is.

Today in FashCon Cafe, someone was asking for confirmation that textures are resized to 512 x 512 when worn as clothing. Now, I've heard this is the case, but I couldn't confirm it, and neither could anyone else in the chat. Since I was tired of texturing my store and had a few moments, I decided to go ahead and test it, just to be sure.

I made a black texture, 1024 x 1024, with a single white pixel. When I applied this texture to a box, the white pixel was there and was white. When I wore the texture as a shirt, the pixel was there, but it was now gray. I was standing in front of about four bright lights at the time, canceling out all the environmental shadowing, so this wasn't a shadow issue.

So, if you were ever wondering about this issue: yes, clothing textures really are resized to 512 x 512 when baked onto the avatar.

The sim opening has been postponed. The new dates are:

Saturday, February 23: Sim opens to Miriel's Latest members.
Sunday, February 24: Sim opens to the public.

Sorry, folks, but I was just too stressed with the earlier opening date and it really wasn't good for me.

Okay, so I've built all the sculpties for my store chairs. Or at least I think I have -- I can't get in world to check them. I'd wanted to finish the chair and build the store in Blender, but I was exhausted. (I started exercising again a week and a half ago. I frequently feel lousy now, and a massive disturbance I had to my sleep schedule a few days ago just adds to things. It's really not helping when it comes to finishing all this stuff. This is why I'm so worried about finishing in time. Things take three times as long as they ought to because I'm just so tired.)

Oh, yes, and I did some more mucking around with trees, too. Nothing to show for it yet, however.

I am genuinely worried about not finishing in time -- in which case the opening date will be pushed back. I'm not going to open while half (or three quarters, or ninety percent) done, period. But I've got a bit under five weeks, so maybe I'll be able to finish.

Meanwhile, I'm still messing around with trees. I'm considering tree shadows now, and whether or not to animate them -- and if I do animate them, whether or not to change the animation rate with the wind speed. I'm leaning towards still shadows, because it's less laggy and I don't think it takes away much.

Once I've got the trees done, the next hardest piece of foliage should be the roses. After that, plants should be relatively easy: generate, render, slap on a prim.

Such a disappointment.



It looked so much better in my head. Needs tweaking. Or tossing, but I don't really have time for that...

UPDATE: Okay, so much for the birch forest. I tried and I wound up with that... thing. Time to try making oaks.

I have two tutorials for baking radiosity in front of me, and I still can't get it to work.

I hate you, Blender.

Not feeling very inspired today. I've got stuff to build and I'm still drawing a blank on what much of it should look like. Oh, well.

I'm still working on the trees. I'd have them done by now (in theory) if I could just figure out how to make my leaves not look like silk ones when they render.