Miriel

2009-06-13T01:54:00.001+14:00

A headss up: Saturday the 20th will be the last open day for the sim.

2009-05-21T15:57:00.002+14:00

Some time in the next few weeks, I will be permanently closing the shop and getting rid of the sim.

If you want anything -- eyes, jewelry, pictures of the forest -- it's best to do so soon.

2009-03-05T11:14:00.003+14:00

*blows dust off everything*

Hey, folks. Just a note to let you know that my computer died last week, and it won't be fixed at least until tomorrow -- maybe longer, since something appears to be very wrong with it. So if you send me an IM or a notecard, you won't get a reply for a little while, I'm afraid. The computer I'm using to type this can't run SL.

2009-01-19T04:46:00.000+14:00

Heart of Love Limited Edition Necklace!

Designer Shir Dryke, of Ornamental Life, needs a heart transplant, without which she will die. Unfortunately, she can't afford it and has only three weeks to raise the necessary funds. So a few of her friends have started the Heart of Love fundraiser, which needs to raise around L$700K. They're trying to do this through donation boxes and charity items.

You can read more about this at Flutter Memel's blog.

I've put up a donation box in my store, and I'm also releasing a charity item. All the money will go to Shir. This is a limited edition: it will only be available as long as the fundraiser is running, and will never be sold or given away after that.

Heart is a simple, elegant necklace with a sculpted heart pendant and pearl. It's been made with care, designed to strike a balance between flowing like a real necklace and hugging the contours of the avatar (which is blockier than you might realize!). This is a classic design, perfect for Valentine's Day or year round.

It's available in five metal colors: gold, antique gold, black, silver, and a new color, rose gold. It's no copy/modify/transfer, so you can give it as a gift or pass it on if it goes unused. Because it is a limited edition, and because it is for charity, it's L$150 for a single color.

Demos are available for all colors. Simply click on the main sign.

Slurl to the store.

2008-12-12T10:11:00.004+14:00

New from Miriel: Sculpted Holly Bracelet

Yes, a new release!

Holly is a Christmas bracelet featuring, well, holly! These carefully sculpted and textured leaves, accented with jeweled berries, wrap around your wrist elegantly. In addition, like all jewelry from Miriel, these bracelets are scripted: shiny and full bright can be turned on and off, for jewelry that looks good in every situation.

This bracelet is available in both gold and silver versions, and the berries come in diamond, jet, emerald, and ruby. (Gold and ruby shown here.) Permissions are your choice: copy/modify/no transfer, or no copy/modify/transfer.

Single colors sell for L$50, while a collection of all gold or silver pieces (four colors in all) is L$125. Each copy comes with both a left and right version. Demos available for all colors, so that you can know you're getting the right color.

Get it here.

2008-11-29T20:39:00.002+14:00

I hope all my American readers had a good Thanksgiving!

As for me, well, I'm hoping I'll be able to finish in time. I spent a few days trying to perfect the tree branches. The joints of real branches are smooth; the joints of my sculpted branches look like tubes jammed into other tubes. Which is, after all, what they are.

I believe I've figured out the problem (roughly), but the explanation is long and boring, so suffice to say I don't think it's fixable. I recreated what was happening in Blender, and only managed to fix it by doing something flat out impossible with sculpties. Insert standard whine about meshes here.

So the bad news is that the branches can't be fixed. This is also the good news, because this means that (aside from a bit of tweaking), I don't have to mess with the things anymore.

2008-11-24T05:02:00.002+14:00

So, I've had to cut back on projects. I'd hoped that I'd be able to push myself, but it was not to be. I'm only able to work for a few (non consecutive) hours on good days, and there's just not much that I can get done in that time.

I'm focusing on my plants in the time I have. Even just doing these, I won't be able to get all that I wanted done, but what can I do about it?

For the curious, here are the trees I've got so far:

There are still things about them that I'm very unhappy with (such as how the branches join the rest of the tree), but most of these can't be avoided. I could do a much nicer -- not to mention faster -- job if we had meshes, but we don't.

2008-10-29T02:45:00.001+14:00

So, I suppose I owe you all an update.

It's not a really big secret that my business doesn't do fabulously. Some of this is my fault, but some of it is that I'm not terribly lucky. I'm about ready to throw in the towel, but I'm going to try giving things six more months. I'm working on some things now -- landscaping things, jewelry stuff, eye stuff, and possibly another project -- and will shut the sim down for a few days in mid-December; when I reopen, all the new stuff will be out, and I plan to get back on a weekly release schedule after that.

2008-10-20T03:43:00.002+14:00

Jewelry Expo raised US$256.81 total for Heifer International. (The total is so much lower than last year's mostly because sim rental is expensive. The auctioned jewelry didn't pull in quite as much, either.)

When donating, I rounded up to an even US$260. This bought us a water buffalo and a share of a rabbit trio, though I'm not sure that the money isn't just dumped into one big slush fund.

2008-10-15T14:05:00.001+14:00

Still working on the trees. I don't know if I'll ever finish them. I keep thinking that if I were just more clever, I'd be able to come up with trees that look better than a bunch of flat alpha planes, use fewer prims, and aren't overly full of polygons. There's always something that trips me up, though (right now it's the horrendous alpha sorting of sculpted prims), so I keep floating ideas and shooting them down...

I'm also toying with the idea of switching over to a system whereby all my jewelry (and hair, maybe) is color change. You'd buy one piece and get all the colors of it, effectively. I'd have to raise my prices, though. Thoughts?

2008-10-05T23:43:00.001+14:00

JEWELRY EXPOSITION IS OPEN!

TP now!
Come enjoy dozens of jewelers in one of SL's lowest lag fashion expos. We have merchants you've heard of and merchants you haven't, so drop by and discover someone new. You won't even have to move around on a box to do it.

When you're done browsing, try your hand at our treasure hunt. We've got a dozen free, aquatic themed items scattered around the sim, some in places that are easy to find, and others that... aren't. Or do some good with our charity auction. Several truly beautiful sets are up for grabs all week, with the proceeds going to Heifer International.

Visit Jewelry Exposition 131, 129, and come see what made last year's fair such a success.

2008-10-04T03:19:00.001+14:00

All these product images at Jewelry Expo are making me realize just how blah my own are.

Ah, well. Back to checking booths and bitching.

2008-09-22T13:28:00.002+14:00

I'm still sort of working on the trees, though I'd let them sit for a few days. They're not going so well. I do one thing, go "no, it could be better," do something else, go "no," do the first thing again, and on and on and on.

I've got a question, in case anyone wants to answer. The newest release candidate supports "oblong" sculpted prims. (They're sculpted prims that aren't square, in short.) These would allow me to make trees that looked better and used fewer prims. However, outside of the release candidate, they're a total mess. I'm hoping that LL will do a forced update when oblong sculptie support migrates to the official viewer, but they may not, and there's no guarantee of when that will be.

So, here's my question: if you were in the market for trees, would you be interested in buying one with oblong sculpties, even though they may not display correctly for everyone?

2008-09-13T04:27:00.002+14:00

If you haven't been by lately, you might want to check out the Jewelry Expo Flickr contest. There are some great pictures up. Out of the actual entries, I'm especially fond of this one, this one, and this one. (The contest was the idea of and is being run by Shelby Ziskey, who's been a wonderful help and deserves much credit.)

The contest ends on the 28th, so you've still got time to send an entry in if you're interested!

(To my regular readers: yes, I'm going to be pushing the expo pretty hard for the next few weeks. I know it gets kind of tiresome.)

2008-09-11T15:42:00.003+14:00

It's time for another Jewelry Expo pimping! (This is done to catch the attention of people reading the Fashion Planet feed.)

Do you like jewelry?

We do! We like jewelry so much that we're having an entire fair dedicated to it. Jewelry Exposition is a week long showcase of 76 jewelry designers, some you've heard of and some you haven't. In addition to that, we're also hosting a free, ongoing treasure hunt (find the pieces at your own pace!) and an auction benefiting Heifer International. So come do some good, find some freebies, and discover a new designer or two.

Oh, yes, and we're doing our best to be low lag. Strict rules about merchant content mean that you can spend more time shopping and less time trying to move around. These rules are tested, too: they were used for last year's exposition, which had relatively little lag.

Jewelry Exposition runs from Sunday, October 5 through Saturday, October 11. To learn more, click below!

2008-09-07T06:09:00.003+14:00

For those of you that are builders, you may find this helpful. (Or invaluable.) It's a HUD that allows you to search through a database of over 30,000 megaprims, and sends you the size you ask for. Apparently, if it can't find the size you want, it suggests something close, though I've not encountered that yet. It's very easy to use, too, with no obnoxious dialogue menus or buttons to deal with it.

Oh, yes, and it's free. HUDs stress me out, but I swear, I'm never taking this thing off.

2008-09-04T19:57:00.002+14:00

You may have noticed that I didn't have a release this week. I likely won't have one next week, either. I'm busy making trees, see.

2008-09-04T00:32:00.004+14:00

Hey, jewelers!

UPDATE: We're full! To be added to the wait list, contact Miriel Enfield. The wait list doesn't require an entry fee, though you will be asked to pay if a slot opens up.

We've only got ~~two slots~~ ~~one slot~~ zero slots left for Jewelry Exposition, a weeklong exhibition of dozens of jewelry designers. Come show off your wares along with 74 other jewelers, and all for a good cause: an auction will be held to benefit Heifer International, and all leftover expo funds will also be contributed to them. It's a great way to spread awareness of your brand, pick up some new customers, and do a little good in the process.

And we're aiming to be low lag! A series of strict rules about rezzed content will help keep client side lag low, ensuring that customers don't leave in frustration. And our lag guidelines aren't just guesses about what will work and what won't: we used them for last year's expo, and they were very successful.

Want to know more? Click below.

2008-08-29T15:23:00.002+14:00

I'm working on putting together some landscaping and foliage to sell. I'm starting with trees, because those are the biggest pain and I'd like to get them out of the way.

It's... not going so great so far.

2008-08-26T03:07:00.000+14:00

This week's new item from Miriel is actually two items: a pair of anime eyes in new colors. These eyes are stylized and extra large, and are entirely hand drawn.

L$50 for a single color. Copy/modify/no transfer or no copy/modify/transfer -- your choice. Eye demos are available, in the form of ten free eyes.

Get them at Miriel 135, 64.

2008-08-24T15:25:00.000+14:00

Some Notes on ARC

I'm hearing a lot of talk about ARC in regards to Hair Fair, and it's a huge peeve of mine. ARC is not reliable. There are serious problems with the criteria it uses; it gives a ballpark figure only.

What's wrong with it? Well, you can read how it works here, but I see at least three problems with it:

1. It ignores polygon count. For those of you that don't know, more polygons means more for your computer to render, which means more lag. All prim attachments get 10 points, regardless of how many polygons they have. A box (very few polygons) generates the same ARC number as a sculptie or torus (lots and lots of polygons), despite the fact that the actual lag created by these prims is quite different.

2. It ignores texture size. The bigger a texture is, the more lag it creates, and big textures are quite a bit bigger than small ones. (A 1024 x 1024 texture, for instance, is as large as 16 256 x 256 ones.) Nonetheless, ARC gives 5 points for texture, regardless of size. A 1024 x 1024 image is significantly laggier than a 32 x 32 one, but both will rack up the same ARC number.

3. The accounting for size is a bit too crude. Attachments get one point per meter of size, per axis. While bigger prims do lead to more lag, I wish the scale were a bit more refined. A hundred prim hair and a hundred prim necklace are unlikely to generate the same amount of lag: those necklace prims are probably so teeny that they're quickly culled (i.e., not rendered at all) as you zoom out. I know that the jewelry I make tends to lag me less than the hair I make, even though it usually has more prims.

ARC is not entirely useless. Someone with a very low number is unlikely to be generating a lot of lag (above and beyond what all avatars generate, that is), and vice versa for someone with a very high number. But the numbers are very, very rough, to the point of -- in my opinion -- being misleading.

So stop quoting them, 'kay? It's making me twitch.

Oh, and one more note on Hair Fair: people and their attachments are, at this point, not entirely to blame for the lag. Oh, they're lagging you, but Hair Fair would be painfully slow even if they were all bald and naked. The sims themselves are slow right now, as they struggle to handle all the avatars. When I went yesterday, my frame rates were fine, and I still could barely move. That wasn't my computer having trouble rendering Blingy Lady #55 and her hair, it was the sim server faltering.

2008-08-24T09:11:00.000+14:00

I'm sure you already know about this:

(You can read more here if you haven't.)

I just now donated something. (I am slow.) This is what I donated:

I don't know when it will be auctioned off (or if it'll get pushed back to another auction), but there you go. I made this item as a freebie for someone and I've given out a few copies, but it won't ever be for sale or widely distributed.

2008-08-19T21:53:00.000+14:00

In Blender 2.46, I can't figure out how to get alpha channels to work, something I could do in previous versions. (Obviously: I wouldn't have been able to make my trees if I couldn't.)

What is wrong with the people that write this program?

(One minute of fiddling later.)

Oh my god. Blender has a "use alpha" button in one of the texture menus. I've complained about it before, because it didn't work the way I thought it would. Guess what? It now works the way I originally expected it to, and I had to uncheck it to make things work. Blender is the monkey's paw of software.

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with the programmers? The labeling on the button hasn't changed in the slightest. Absent digging through the release notes, there's no indication that it now does something entirely different from what it did before.

2008-08-19T02:33:00.001+14:00

This week's new item from Miriel is Classic, a versatile, tasteful sculpted necklace. As part of the Miriel Everyday line, it's priced to be affordable, at only L$60 for a single copy. And like all jewelry from Miriel, it's scripted so that you can turn shiny and full bright on and off.

Available in five metal colors (antique gold, antique silver, black, gold, and silver) and ten stones (amber, coral, jade, lapis lazuli, malachite, onyx, red jasper, sugilite, turquoise, and white jade).

L$60 for a single color. L$450 for all ten antique gold, antique silver, black, gold, or silver pieces. Copy/modify/no transfer or no copy/modify/transfer -- your choice. Demos are available for all colors.

Get it at Miriel 135, 64.

(This is what happens when I can't think of anything else to make.)

2008-08-15T16:30:00.000+14:00

Jewelry Expo Flickr Contest!

Shelby Ziskey is helping me with promoting the expo, and she's doing an awesome job. One of the things she's suggested is a Flickr stream, and you can go here to read about it.

2008-08-12T06:38:00.001+14:00

This week's new item from Miriel is Bird of Paradise, a piece of head jewelry with pearls, gemstones, and carefully sculpted feathers. Like all jewelry from Miriel, it's scripted so that you can turn shiny and full bright on and off.

Available in three metal colors (black, gold, and silver), two pearl colors (black and white), and seven gemstones (amethyst, citrine, diamond, emerald, jet, ruby, and sapphire).

L$125 for a single color. L$1200 for all fourteen black, gold, or silver pieces. Copy/modify/no transfer or no copy/modify/transfer -- your choice. Demos are available for all colors.

Get it at Miriel 135, 64.

(For the curious, this was VERY loosely inspired by Jeanne's headdress here. I was originally going to have it be a single piece that wrapped around the back of the head, but thought that would cause issues with different head widths. The end result can probably more accurately be called a hairpin than a headdress, but eh.

Oh, and I had a bit of a disaster when I first put this out. Only after I had the vendors all set up did I realize that -- oops! -- I'd forgotten to make the alpha channels 100% transparent on the sculpt maps. Took me an hour and fifteen minutes to fix, and it would have taken much longer had I not known how to script.)

2008-08-07T22:31:00.000+14:00

Thank you to everyone who's said nice things about the sim. I've gotten a better response than I ever expected. :)

I'm puttering around on various projects now: a couple necklaces, some foliage for sale. (Yes, I'll be selling trees and grass and rocks and stuff.) I also have a burning, idiotic desire to redo my skybox workshop.

2008-08-05T03:42:00.001+14:00

So...

I was going to make a big announcement about this, but somebody blabbed first. *shakes fist*

Anyway, click the picture for new shinies, an impossible puzzle, and lag.

2008-08-03T01:42:00.000+14:00

Fine jewelry vendors are set up. Hair vendors are set up. (Then again, there are only two of the latter. All the other hairs I'd planned to sell, or been selling, no longer measure up.)

I'm working on the casual jewelry and eye vendors. They're not working at the moment, and I can't figure out why. It's probably some stupid typo I'll discover tomorrow, when I'm less tired. At least, I hope it is. I had a script once that just didn't work, even though it genuinely should have (and the trick I used to get it working again made no sense whatsoever), and I hope this won't be a repeat of that.

Oh, and I've finally found some ambient sounds that are working for me. Hopefully, the vendor will be willing to sell me copy/no trans versions, instead of the no copy ones he's got on display.

I've got a new piece of jewelry I made a few days ago, too. And I'm working on a long, delicate chain, though it's looking less nice than I'd like, thanks to the bumps and hollows on the avatar. If I follow them too closely, the chain looks lumpy. If I ignore them too much, there's way too much empty space between the avatar and the chain. There's no perfect middle ground, but I'm trying to find the happiest medium I can.

2008-07-29T19:52:00.000+14:00

2008-07-26T02:53:00.000+14:00

Prim cliffs are done. They're not 100% perfect, but they're good enough.

I don't know when I'll be open. I only have a few more non-script related things I need to do: I need to make a vendor image for my eyelashes, retake one product picture, set out sound objects, and set up black lights to counter light bleed. Unless I'm forgetting something, that is, literally, all. If I have time, I may (in order) set out more sunbeams and fungus, try making dust mote particle emitters, and try making prim waves. (I found some beautiful waves for sale, but a couple things dissuaded me. One, the textures were 1024 x 1024. Uh, no. Two, the person was also selling basic sculpted prims for L$3000, along with an animated water texture I swear I've seen outside SL. And if this stuff is a ripoff -- and it is -- who's to say the waves aren't, also?)

The real issue now is getting my vendors set up and in place. I'm waiting on something for that, and it's out of my hands. Yes, that's right: for once, my slowness is not my fault.

2008-07-23T01:35:00.001+14:00

Preview snapshot of the sim. Not that you couldn't get a peek by camming over, mind. :)

That's Nouveau in the background. And yes, there are a lot of boulders. If Oblivion has taught us anything, it's that rocks = good landscaping. ;)

People who have been by are telling me that the lag is not bad at all, something I don't understand. I'm not complaining, but it strikes me as very bizarre, given the prim and polygon counts I have.

2008-07-20T17:23:00.000+14:00

Miriel's Windlight Settings for Pictures

I shared these settings in FashCon Cafe, and people liked them, so I'm making a post. You need a Windlight client to do this (you need the advanced sky options), but you don't need to have the Windlight shaders enabled.

1. Go to World -> Environment -> Environment Editor. A new window will pop up.

2. Click on the Advanced Sky button. Yet another new window will pop up.

3. Go to the Lighting tab.

4. You see the Sun/Moon Position slider? Move that towards sunrise or sunset. If you move it too far towards night, the light will get a little orange; if you move it too far overhead, however, it will cast unattractive shadows. Feel free to play with it a bit, and find a setting you like.

5. Right above the Sun/Moon Position is a series of sliders called Sun/Moon Color. These control the color and intensity of the sunlight and moonlight. (The R slider controls red, the G slider controls green, the B controls blue, and the I controls the overall intensity.) Grab the I slider and move it all the way to zero. This is just to quickly set the RGB sliders to the same value. Now move the I slider up to around 0.15. Sunlight and moonlight are what actually cause "shadows" in Windlight (I put shadows in quotes because they're not true real time shadows), so turning this down minimizes unpleasant shading. It's kept a bit above zero to prevent things from looking entirely flat.

6. To the left of the Sun/Moon Color sliders are another set of sliders, these labeled Ambient. This controls the color and brightness of the ambient lighting, as you may have guessed. Grab the I slider and drag it down to zero, then raise it to around 0.75 or so. Turning up the ambient light is a way of brightening the scene without added "shadows."

7. Once you have a setting you like, click the New button, name your present, then click Save. Now when you want to use it, you just have to repeat steps 1 and 2, and then select your sky preset from the dropdown menu.

8. It may be a good idea to turn off local lighting. Lights can cast harsh highlights and shadows, and get really bright around sunrise and sunset. To turn off local lighting, go to Preferences -> Graphics. The lighting settings are near the bottom; you may need to click the Custom checkbox in order to access them.

For reference, here is what my Advanced Sky window looks like when I'm using this setting:

And here is what photos taken with it look like:

One last thing: If the sky or light in this setting is too boring for you, you can always try adjusting existing Windlight settings. Use the Sun/Moon Position slider to get the light at an angle you like. Move the Sun/Moon Color I slider down, and the Ambient I slider up. Just be sure to grab the I slider (unless you want to change the light color), so that the RGB sliders all move in proportion.

2008-07-17T13:49:00.000+14:00

I recently updated to Blender 2.46. I was very hesitant to do this, for fear of being unable to find UI elements, but there's a particular file format I want to eventually use, and I don't think 2.45 supports it.

Now, pay very close attention, because I will never, ever say these words again:

Some of the changes are actually pretty good.

There's a "lock axis" toolbar in sculpt mode now, for instance, allowing you to keep the vertices from moving along that axis as you work. Not only is it useful, but the name and mouseover descriptions are reasonable and helpful. Hold your mouse over the "x" button in the toolbar, and it says "constrain x axis." Straightforward. Sensible. It's bizarre. It's--

Oh, god, I've fallen into a parallel universe, haven't I? I bet dogs meow here and the sun rises in the west. Up is down; right is left. And back in my home dimension, the "lock axis" toolbar is signified by a plain button with a padlock and a swastika.

2008-07-15T21:00:00.001+14:00

The plants are all placed! I can't believe I actually finished that. I've got a couple more landscape related things to do (one of which can wait, if it comes down to it), but other than that, it's just Golden Cage and -- ugh -- vendor and sign stuff. Putting out vendors is such a pain. I've allotted two whole days just to getting the scripts all set up.

I also worked on my store's lighting system, and I'm pretty pleased with the results; I used a whole bunch of lights to, as much as I could, produce ambient light. The tricky part about lighting is that something that looks good at midnight or noon can severely overexpose things at sunrise and sunset. I think I struck a good compromise, though: avatars only look a little out of place at midnight (my store interior is full bright), and aren't lit too harshly at sunrise/sunset.

2008-07-12T12:46:00.001+14:00

I continue to make progress. (For months, I wasn't. I had quit in all but name, and was right on the verge of making it official.)

All the plants on the southern coast have been placed. I'm working on the eastern coast now, and then will do the north and west. I'm giving myself two days per coast. After that, there are a few more things I have to do (mostly product photos and signs, bleargh), and I expect those will take me a few days, maybe a week if I slack off. And then I'll be done.

2008-07-10T12:48:00.000+14:00

Random Thoughts on Shadows

I haven't seen a lot of screenshots from the shadow client (and it won't work with my graphics card), so this blew me away. It's gorgeous. It looks almost like a real photograph. Except...

Well, except for the shadow prims. The shadow client has me a bit concerned, because -- unlike basically all the other graphical improvements thus far -- there's no happy medium. You can't make a build that looks great both with and without shadows: add in artificial shadows, and it'll look bad in a shadow client; don't add artificial shadows, and it'll look awful in a non-shadow viewer. Given the hardware requirements for the shadow viewer (and the fact that bad is still better than awful), the best thing to do is still add in shadows prims and the like, but still. The thought of having contradictory shading in my builds pains me.

Again, the shadows look fantastic. And they had to be added eventually. Still, there's a part of me that wishes they'd picked some other area to make visual improvements in -- that we'd gotten vertex painting or more forms of texture mapping or something. SL looks a lot nicer with shadows, but it'd also look a lot nicer with, say, normal mapping. (Oh, man, and don't even get me started on vertex painting. SL would look nicer and, in the hands of competent builders, run faster.)

2008-07-08T10:50:00.001+14:00

Yes, I'm working on the sim again. I've even got all the plants made: now I just need to put them down (which is pretty awful work, actually).

2008-07-04T02:42:00.000+14:00

My new vending system is done. Like the previous version I've been giving out, it's designed as an alternative to scrolling vendors and simple product boxes. When a customer pays, instead of immediately receiving an item, they're given a series of menus that allow them to choose what they want to buy. It's based off the system I use in my store.

New features for Menu Vendor 2.1:

* Support for up to four simultaneous orders
* Simpler set up: no more figuring out which scripts you need to drop in the vendor
* No more boxes! 2.1 gives folders instead, making things easier for you and your customers

If you would like a copy, IM me. It's free. Please be aware that while I've done my best to test it, I haven't used it day in and day out and could have missed various bugs. I believe it should work fine, but you use it at your own risk.

Oh, and I don't like doing tech support. I give this out on the condition that I won't be asked to.

2008-07-02T16:35:00.000+14:00

Woohoo!

It still needs a bit more testing, but (fingers crossed) it looks like I've got Menu Vendor 2.0 working. It'll be free for the asking, just like the current vending system I give out.

New features in 2.0:
* Support for 3-4 simultaneous orders. (Probably 4, but a bit more testing is needed to see how much the script can handle before it implodes.)
* Simpler setup. Every vendor gets the same three scripts, no matter how many variables that product has.
* No more boxes! 2.0 gives folders instead.

New annoyances in 2.0:
* Support for 3 variables, instead of 4.
* Will slowly spam you with debit permission requests if you don't grant it that permission.
* Slightly less idiot proofing.

2008-07-01T17:14:00.000+14:00

We had the first jewelry expo meeting today. The summary:

The expo will take place from Sunday, October 5th through Saturday, October 11th.

There will be 75 slots, and no application deadline. Slots will be given on a first come, first serve basis, and a waiting list will be kept. If you don't show up at the expo, your slot will be given to someone else.

There will be an L$100 entry fee. To join, pay Miriel Enfield and let her know you want in, and she'll give you an invitation to the vendor role in the Jewelry Exposition group.

The charity we'll be using is Heifer International.

Scrolling vendors are banned. I'll give out versions of my non-scrolling vendors to anyone who wants them.

A new group will be made for this, called Jewelry Exposition. Jewelry Exposition 2007 will slowly be phased out.

We're voting on the theme to use this year. (The theme will apply only to the build and promotional materials, as well as to pieces made for the charity auction. Your booth and general jewelry don't have to follow it. :) ) The choices are Arabian Nights and an aquatic theme, and the vote will go out to the Jewelry Exposition group (NOT Jewelry Exposition 2007).

2008-06-29T11:35:00.001+14:00

Because only two people showed up for the meeting today, the Jewelry Expo organizational meeting has been moved to Monday, June 30, 6 PM PDT, at Nouveau 117, 202.

2008-06-25T12:36:00.000+14:00

Jewelry Expo Meeting

Yes, I'm doing Jewelry Expo again this year. I apologize for the delay; I've not been doing all that great RL, but I can manage this. (It's not actually that big of a pain to organize, believe it or not.)

I'll be holding a preliminary meeting on Saturday, June 28, 11 AM SLT (that's 11 AM PDT), at Nouveau 117, 202.

If you don't know, Jewelry Expo is/was a week long exhibit of... well, of jewelry. We had 80+ vendors last year and relatively little lag, and I consider it to have been a success.

2008-05-04T15:22:00.001+14:00

Here's something I read on a message board: avatars are all darkened by 20% by SL (at least in Windlight), effectively being tinted to a color with hue 0, saturation 0, and luminosity 80 (204, 204, 204, in fact). Meaning that if you tint your attachments to that color, they lighting on them will match the lighting on your avatar. Not so useful or necessary for things like jewelry, but very helpful for prim skirts.

I tend to be skeptical of these things, but I've been experimenting with it and it seems to actually work. There is often still a visible break between my avatar and the prims, because the two are at different angles and so receive different lighting, but it's much less. I really suggest trying this for yourself -- you can always tint the skirt back to white if it doesn't work for you, after all.

2008-04-29T15:16:00.000+14:00

My computer broke again. This time, the motherboard and/or power... thing is to blame, so they're getting replaced. I'm not exactly sure when it will be up and running again. I'm not exactly sure why I keep breaking my machinery, either.

I'm using the downtime to read up on PHP and MySQL in the hopes of having my personal vendors automatically add sales to a database.

2008-04-21T08:07:00.001+14:00

I made some novelty eyes for my own amusement, and decided to release them free to my group, Miriel's Latest. What do I mean by "novelty," you ask? Good question.

Enjoy, if they're your style. :)

2008-04-20T08:55:00.000+14:00

I've been thinking a lot about visuals lately. More than usual, I mean. And I've got a little wish list of things I'd like (but will probably not get). Besides a better night sky, I mean, which I've wanted forever.

1. Optional normal mapping for terrain textures. Well, normal mapping for everything would be nice, but you and I both know that giving people an excuse to add twice as many huge textures to things is a recipe for disaster. Terrain is limited to four 512 x 512 textures, though, so the performance cost shouldn't be too bad. And adding a bit of depth to the very smooth ground would really help with realism, I think.

2. Terrain textures that repeat more often. I think each texture repeats once over a 16 x 16 m square. Everything turns blurry and you can forget about any kind of fine detail, unless you keep things at an unrealistically large scale. I'd love it if that distance were cut down to 8 x 8. (At least I think I would. Maybe everything would look way too repetitive that way.)

3. The ability to fine tune the degree to which environmental lighting affects a face. Right now, we can turn environmental lighting off entirely (via the full bright check box -- yes, that's what that actually does, it's not really a button to make everything glow). But that's it: it's either on or off. I don't know how feasible this is, but I'd rather see it treated like glow is, where you can set a value from 0.00 to 1.00. With that and a bit of careful texturing, for instance, you could make interiors that only took some of the environmental light -- you know, like real interiors do.

4. A pony. (And a better night sky.)

2008-04-18T04:52:00.000+14:00

The sim will be done when (and if) it's done. That's all I can say now.

I'm posting now, actually, because I have a note on sculpties. I've heard that using smaller sculpt textures can lead to more efficient sculpties, even ones that have fewer vertices than normal prims. The smaller textures lead to vertices being right on top of each other, and supposedly these duplicate vertices will be automagically culled by your video card, leading to a lower overall rendering cost.

I've been doing some testing of sculpted prim efficiency these past couple of days, so I decided to test this while I was at it. I made a 64 x 64 sculpt texture of a simple cylinder, then made a copy of that texture and resized it to 16 x 16. (I tried 8 x 8, but SL seemed to have issues with that.) I turned my draw distance down to 64, went to an isolated spot on my sim (read: nothing would be moving in or out of rendering view), rezzed an object that I applied the 64 x 64 sculpt texture to, and checked the ktris drawn numbers. Without changing the camera angle, I then applied the 16 x 16 sculpt texture to the object, and checked the numbers again.

They hadn't changed.

I tried this with a variety of different camera angles and the results were always the same: the ktris drawn numbers were identical. Now, perhaps there's something screwy about the ktris measurements or about my experiment, but my best guess now is that using smaller sculpt textures doesn't lead to more efficient sculpties.

2008-03-26T06:39:00.000+14:00

I am once again slowed by health issues, but it's a new health issue this time at least. It requires minor surgery but comes with both Vicodin and an excuse not to work, so I suppose it all evens out.

2008-03-22T11:27:00.001+14:00

Computer is working again! (It was, in fact, the video card.)

I was actually enjoying my impromptu vacation. Oh, well. Back to work.

2008-03-20T02:56:00.000+14:00

After an "enjoyable" several hours on the phone with tech support, it has been concluded that the problem is with my video card. It'll be replaced sometime in the next few days.

2008-03-18T23:03:00.001+14:00

Expect further delays, as my computer seems to have decided that it no longer wants to run 3D applications. It works for about twenty seconds, and then everything freezes. And then the monitor shuts off and I need to pull the plug and restart. I'm going to give things a few more tries, though, because sometimes problems will mysteriously resolve themselves. Here's hoping, at least.

UPDATE: The problem has not resolved itself, and an attempt to boot to CD and use the magic fixit included on the Windows CD resulted in a blue screen of death. Why do I always manage to break my computers?

2008-03-15T22:23:00.001+14:00

Opening has been pushed back again. I'm sorry -- everything was going sort of okay until I found that some of my vendor scripts were running out of memory and crashing. I'm putting in hours upon hours of work a day into this, when my increasingly poor health allows it, and everything's just... going really slowly.

Comments are closed because, frankly, I don't want to talk about it.

2008-03-08T16:53:00.000+14:00

(The opening date has not been pushed back again. I am as reliable as the rising sun and would never do such a thing. Those of you who swear you saw an opening date of this weekend must be thinking of some other, slower, flakier Miriel.)

2008-03-08T14:03:00.000+14:00

I've been tagged by Shir!

The rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

I now have to regret keeping my nerdy books so close to my computer, because the closest book for me is the core rulebook for Mage: the Ascension (second edition). "At lower levels of success, this may just be 'funny feelings' about beings or objects. With more successes, she may note the specific supernatural nature of what she is studying. For example, she could discern whether or not the subject is human, alive, dead or undead."

I actually dislike tagging people, so as I'm done embarrassing myself, I'm going to break rule number five and make this an open tag -- if you want to do this meme and haven't gotten tagged, consider this your excuse. ;)

2008-03-04T09:04:00.000+14:00

As I was working on one building, I was a bit concerned about inadvertently having it too closely resemble Oblivion's architecture. I'd spent so long studying the game's aesthetics, trying to break down just why it looked so nice, that things seeped into my brain. I'm sure some of you know how it goes.

Well, the building in question is almost done, and I have little need to worry: it turns out that what I actually ended up ripping off is the Ravenclaw common room.

2008-02-29T22:22:00.000+14:00

A little preview:

As far as the build goes, I lost about three days due to feeling badly, which is... not good, though I think I can still finish on time. I hope. I'm scrapping the gazebo I'd planned to build, at least for now, because it seemed redundant and I couldn't find a good place to put it.

But I came up with a good solution for light bleed, so I'm in a good mood at the moment. Local lighting tends to show up far beyond the point where it should: I can be halfway across my sim and a little radius 5 light will still be affecting my avatar, and I can continue all the way to the other side of the sim and still detect it. (I made a JIRA issue about this, but I'm either the only person whose client does this or the only person who finds it bothersome.) As you can imagine, this is a problem; the illusion of a deep forest tends to be shattered when you can't escape the store lighting.

And then I remembered, wait, only six lights can be displayed at once. So I turned some of the tree trunks on the forest border into lights, set the light color to black and the radius to 20, and problem solved. The store interior is all lit up, and the forest isn't. Hooray for at least one thing going smoothly.

2008-02-21T20:16:00.000+14:00

The trees are at a point where I can start plunking them down. Here's the beginning of my forest, which still needs a few more rocks and plants added to the ground:

I've been a little disappointed with it so far, but I have to admit that it looks pretty good in that picture.

The ktris drawn numbers of this thing are making me very, very nervous, however. Hopefully they won't be Straylight bad (1000+ in Windlight!) by the time I'm done.

2008-02-18T13:43:00.001+14:00

Back in my original Nouveau build, I had a staircase. An all prim staircase, with swirling, elaborate railings. When I redid my store build, I made it only one story, and removed the staircase.

Nonetheless, I appear to have a thing for 200+ prim staircases, and I present to you its successor, in spirit if not appearance.

2008-02-16T03:21:00.001+14:00

Due to real life issues and the work taking longer than I anticipated, the sim opening date has been pushed back to March 8 and 9. I apologize for this -- I appear to be the world's slowest builder ever.

Oh, yes, and if you join my update group (Miriel's Latest) there is a free pair of some of the new eyes, in a brand new color. They're in the standard size and are a dark green.

2008-02-14T08:40:00.000+14:00

Ah, yes, I see that turning off all shaders in Windlight once again no longer turns off the new lighting system. Thank you, LL. My desire to have my fashion photography look like fashion photography is clearly unreasonable, after all.

2008-02-11T23:37:00.000+14:00

So, I have a little under two weeks to turn this:

into something awesome. I feel like I'm back in college, with five hours left to churn out an eight page paper that will earn an A.

2008-02-09T05:03:00.001+14:00

While I take a break from landscaping (it is booooring), I thought I'd give a rundown of the various programs I'm using for this whole sim project. There are quite a few of them, and some of you may find some of them useful. Everything on this list is, for the moment, free or has a free version.

ngPlant: This is what I use to make my trees, in conjunction with Blender and Paint Shop Pro. It's a free tree generator that can export to .obj; I generate individual branches, import them into Blender, and render them.

CrazyBump: This is the best thing ever. It can generate various kinds of texture maps (such as normal maps and displacement maps) from images. It's also spectacularly easy to use. (It is the anti-Blender.) Obviously, if you're not rendering anything in an outside program, it's not going to be useful to you, but I highly recommend it if you're going to be baking textures in a third party app and plan on using normal or displacement maps.

Bailiwick: This is the second best thing ever. It's an editor for sim .raw files. I was initially forced into using this because Paint Shop Pro can't handle .raw files with the 13 channels SL uses, and now I wouldn't stop using it even if PSP suddenly could. In addition to automatically working with the required 13 channels, it will tell you things like the minimum height and maximum height in a height map, and let you see what the landscape looks like -- complete with water level -- when the height multiplier is changed.

L3DT: A useful counterpart to the above. This is a terrain generator. It does way more than you need if you're just making sim terrain, but it's pretty easy to use and will convert a crude height map into something looking like actual terrain. In other words, if you know you want a round island with a lake in the middle, you can scrawl a white O on a black background, and L3DT will turn that into something that looks like an island and not a five-year-old's drawing.

2008-02-06T18:47:00.000+14:00

Work is progressing much slower than it should be (thank you, poor health), but I did get the basic terrain shape done today, I think. (I'm happy with it now, but I'm going to sit on it for a day or so before declaring it done, since I might notice problems tomorrow.)

The terrain textures need tweaking and changing still, though that gray is a custom pebble texture I made.

2008-01-28T05:15:00.000+14:00

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!

2008-01-26T05:37:00.001+14:00

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.)

2008-01-23T06:06:00.001+14:00

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?

2008-01-22T02:13:00.001+14:00

Bite me, Blender.

2008-01-21T19:50:00.000+14:00

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?

2008-01-13T16:02:00.000+14:00

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.

2008-01-11T03:29:00.000+14:00

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.

2008-01-08T06:24:00.001+14:00

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.

2008-01-07T20:38:00.000+14:00

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.

2008-01-04T21:39:00.000+14:00

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.

2008-01-03T18:50:00.000+14:00

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

I hate you, Blender.

2008-01-01T15:51:00.001+14:00

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.

2007-12-29T13:04:00.000+14:00

Remember that hair I was (not) working on yesterday?

Yeah, it's done. So are all the shapes, all the lashes, all the jewelry, and all the eyes. (The shape, lashes, eyes, and jewelry in that image are all by me and will be for sale, though the hair has been slightly modified to show the earrings better. Those earrings are one of the game prizes, in fact.)

2007-12-28T11:57:00.000+14:00

Project update: all I have to do is one more hairstyle (already half done, but I'm not fast at this) and some prim lashes, and I'm done with making products. I'm still going to be making clothing, but it's not going to be a core product in any way -- if things go well, for instance, I'll have two pieces of clothing out at the sim opening, one new and one existing. It's not going to be getting its own department.

I hope to have the lashes and the hair done by the end of the day, and then I can start on the horrible task of learning to texture things using prim.blender.

And, in the interests of procrastination, I present:

Making Hair the Miriel Way: A Guide to Not Getting Things Done

1. Fire up SL, and begin placing wispy bits onto your hairstyle. It's boring. Really, really boring.
2. Take a break to get up and walk around. Did I mention that making the hairstyle is boring?
3. Return. Add two more tori.
4. Realize you'll need a new alpha texture for this. Go into PSP and make one.
5. Check your new texture. Perfect! You deserve a break, don't you? Go look for Oblivion mods.
6. Download two dozen mods.
7. You've been screwing around long enough: add a few more tori.
8. Click through your Pandora stations trying to find something good. Scroll past several songs without even starting them because the album covers are so cheesy.
9. Remember hearing about a mod that lets female characters wear the male version of Sheogorath's outfit. Decide that you absolutely must own this and start looking.
10. Will no one let you crossdress? Apparently not. Fail to find the mod, and add a few more locks of hair.
11. Get stuck on the hair. Get up and walk around again. Do a dorky dance at one point.
12. Focus on a different part of the hair, one that isn't giving you trouble. Get some actual work done.
13. Ponder a nap.
14. Ponder why working out always makes your eyes hurt.
15. Ponder if there's any way to get Pandora to never, ever subject you to Radiohead again. Ever.
16. Ponder actual work.
17. Tackle the tricky part of the hairstyle. You have to do it sooner or later, after all.
18. Pester sleeping dog with tummy rubs and head scratches.
19. Find that crossdressing mod you were looking for earlier. The screenshots are disappointing, and opt to go without it.
20. Consider how much work you still have to do, even after the hair is done. Panic.
21. Write a guide detailing all the ways you've wasted time today.
22. Get back to work, you slacker.

2007-12-25T08:48:00.000+14:00

I may just scrap the idea of making clothing, period. I mean, I have ideas, and I'd love to be able to churn out beautiful costumes, but whenever I sit down to make it nothing ever comes out right.

Oh, and I'm horribly behind in everything else. Thank you, RL.

2007-12-22T06:56:00.000+14:00

Ah, my leaf textures are all cursed! Even PSP is messing them up -- and these are brand new files, so it's not like I'm dealing with an already screwy .jpg. I don't get it. Is there a rival foliage creator out there with a little Miriel voodoo doll or something?

In cheerier news, all the jewelry is done. Even the joke piece*.

* No, I'm not going to tell you what it is!

2007-12-19T23:15:00.000+14:00

As I slowly finish off the various prim items, I get closer and closer to the point where the vast majority of my work will be done in Blender. The biggest problem I'm having with Blender right now is, for once, not actually Blender's fault. I'm very inexperienced with setting up lighting rigs and material reflections, and having trouble getting things to look right. This has nothing to do with Blender's UI and everything to do with me never having done this sort of thing before. I'll try my best to keep things from looking like polished plastic.

However, I'm getting better at sculpting stuff. Look!

2007-12-18T19:24:00.000+14:00

Miriel will reopen on February 9 and 10.

Under pressure from Roslin Petion of Tete a Pied (so blame her if I'm not done in time! ;) ) I've set an official opening day for the sim. For members of Miriel's Latest, the sim will be open on Saturday, February 9. For everyone else, the doors will open on Sunday, February 10.

The new sim will feature a multitude of new items, including hair, jewelry, shapes, eyes, and clothing. It will also play host to The Golden Cage, a sim-wide puzzle game with many pieces of free jewelry as prizes.

(Regular readers already know most of that, of course. Now, let's hope I can make the deadline! Actually, in all honesty, I needed a deadline -- a real one, not just a hope of being done sometime in February -- because I'm finding that I don't work well without them. Still, this one seems frighteningly soon. I'd wanted to put it a few weeks later, but with Valentine's Day and all...)

2007-12-18T03:31:00.000+14:00

Time for another update. I'm sure none of you care all that much (particularly when there aren't any pictures of upcoming goodies), but if there's one place in the world appropriate for my inane prattlings, it's my blog.

I've got three shapes out of six done -- sort of. I keep fiddling with them whenever I pull them out, and that's not a good sign.

The new eyes are done. The cat eyes weren't working very well (and never sold spectacularly), so they're gone for now. I'd love to do more novelty type eyes in the future, though, so I do plan on eventually bringing them back.

Unless I decide to redo my freebie jewelry (which I might), I have two more pieces to finish building and texturing, and then I'm done. I'm so happy with all my jewelry right now -- I really like the new scripts that let you turn shiny and full bright on and off, and I've got some new (and revised) pieces that I think you all might like.

Out of six hairs, four are built and textured, one is built and needs to be fully textured, and one is partly built. (Granted, three of them aren't new.) I'm pretty happy with all of these. They're not Armidi good, but they're not total embarrassments, either.

Which brings us to the clothing. The bad news is that I've only got one outfit partly done, and Blender is... well, being itself. It's very picky about .tga files, and frequently mangles them or crashes when trying to open them. The good news is that I'm growing increasingly comfortable with the program, and I'm pretty inspired, with all the planned items sketched out. (Plus, I got Shivering Isles a little while ago, and some of the clothing -- not the bikini armor -- is awfully nice and has generated a "I want to work hard and make something that looks that good!" response in me. Of course, nothing I make for Second Life will look that good, no matter how hard I try or how skilled I am, but a girl can dream, can't she?)

I don't have any demos done of anything yet, but those shouldn't be too time consuming to put together. A few days, at most.

And then, of course, there are the various buildings, a fountain, a semi-working armillary sphere, the writing for the game, ads, product pictures, scripting, some sculpted cliffs, terraforming, and -- brrr -- the foliage.

All of which would be a whole lot of work even if my health holds out. Which it, er, probably won't, because it certainly hasn't been. Fingers crossed, though.

2007-12-17T08:47:00.000+14:00

Bah, I'm behind. I'd wanted to get all the jewelry done by Tuesday; instead, I'm now hoping to get it all finished up today. I would have gotten it done, too, if I hadn't gotten distracted by... well, all the usual things that distract me. Illness. Birthday presents. More illness.

I'm never going to be done by February at this rate...

Oh, and to everyone telling me I have junk on my land: thanks, but you can stop now. I know. I've got my new store build floating way up high and I didn't want to risk bits and pieces of it falling prey to autoreturn. I clean it up manually every few days.

2007-12-13T13:20:00.000+14:00

Here is an interesting post for those of you interested in avatar appearance and lighting (NSFW: topless avatar images at the link). I've been complaining a lot lately about the way avatars look -- and not just at noon, where the badness is understandable -- and blamed it on the underlying mesh. I mean, if those strong shadows on the sides of the nose show up pretty much whatever you do, lighting-wise, the problem must clearly be with the geometry, right? The sides of the nose have to be angled weird or something.

Well, it seems that's not the case. Joannah Cramer opened up the avatar in a 3D program and tweaked the material and the lighting, and with the help of a skin, got a result that actually resembles a real human being. Seriously, go look. You'll likely be stunned by how much better it appears than anything in world.

2007-12-12T12:42:00.000+14:00

It appears I have won something. Thank you to everyone who voted for me, and to Tanya Book for organizing things, and congratulations to the other winners and nominees.

I'm sorry for this post being belated and short. I've spending much of my time holed up in my skybox working -- and to good effect, but it does mean I'm way more out of the loop than usual.

2007-12-09T10:17:00.000+14:00

Rant about Windlight removed because I'm a total dumbass. You know the trick of pointing lots of lights at your avatar to get rid of the environmental lighting? I rely on that trick for my product images. I was complaining that it wasn't working in Windlight and nobody cared, and that even turning shaders off doesn't help.

Well, turning shaders off didn't seem to help a few weeks ago, but I tried it again today just to confirm, and... well, did I mention that I'm a total dumbass? It works. So, those of you that want the environmental shadows to go away, do the following:

1. Go into Preferences.
2. Turn off either basic shaders or atmospheric shaders. Turning off just the atmospheric ones will leave you with just a hint of environmental shadows.
3. Stick a bunch of local lights around yourself. Go nuts.
4. Ta-da! You now look pretty.

2007-12-08T03:22:00.000+14:00

As I've been making shapes, I've been using this as a reference for proportions. And you know, I knew the SL avatar was screwy (particularly the face), but I hadn't known just how screwy until I started carefully measuring things. Why on earth the arms were made so short is a total mystery.

2007-12-05T04:34:00.000+14:00

I've been tagged by Grazia Horwitz (thank you for letting me know!).

Rules:

(1) Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.

(2) People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.

(3) At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.

(4) Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

1. I spent years being trained as a vocalist. Despite this, I am not a very good singer.

2. I grew up in a place that had sunshine almost all the time, and thought that what I wanted was rain. Then I briefly moved to Portland, Oregon, and it rained for a month straight, and I learned that what I really wanted was variety.

3. I enjoy math, and find it soothing.

4. I hate travel. Airplanes terrify me and I get desperately homesick at the drop of a hat.

5. I love symphonic metal. You can all point and laugh now.

6. I am a big sap and will cry at almost any movie or book, even if it's bad, or I didn't like the characters much, or I know I'm being cheaply manipulated into being sad. I'm sure I've cried at a commercial or two in my day. It's embarrassing.

7. The sun is not my friend.

8. Before Oblivion (my preciousssss) became my crack du jour, I played a lot of rougelikes. I've actually beaten Nethack a couple times, including one foodless win. Keep in mind that this is a game where you can easily starve to death, dying means you have to start over at the beginning, and just about everything is trying to kill you.

I tag... you know what, a million people have already been tagged, and I can't keep track of who has and hasn't been. Consider this a free invitation to do the survey if nobody has tagged you already.

2007-12-04T15:40:00.000+14:00

Here, at the moment, is my plan for what I want when my sim opens, product wise:

* 6 hairs, including old and new ones. I'm actually close to this goal, believe it or not -- I just have one more hair left to build, one hair that needs new textures made for it, and then a couple hairs need more textures applied. I'm pleased to say that hair making is becoming easier for me.

* 6 pieces of clothing, all new and made with the help of Blender, plus maybe Echo (which gets a reprieve due to not being too embarrassing). I resisted using Blender for a long time, because I used to be a somewhat decent artist and thought that having to hand draw things would be a good way to help regain that. Also, I was rebelling against the notion that you had to have a 3D program to make nice clothing, as if it were totally impossible for anyone to paint realistic texture and shading onto the avatar UV maps. But hand drawing wasn't a good way to encourage art practice, and I'm not a good enough artist anymore to have anything but a painful time when trying to hand paint everything. So out comes Blender, and I'll be trying my best to avoid the terrible, unrealistic shading that you get with bad baking.

* 6 shapes.

* About 7 or 8 new pieces of jewelry for the game (some of which are really sets), plus a couple new independent pieces. Some of these are partly done already.

* Scripting in all the jewelry that allows you to turn full bright and shiny on and off. I haven't put this in anything yet.

* New textures on all the jewelry. This project is partway done -- and no, I'm not doing it all by hand! I have scripts to help me.

I'd like to get all this done in December, and then spend January building. I'm aiming a little bit low in terms of new content because I really don't need to be stressing myself out. If I have extra time, I can make more things.

2007-12-02T05:07:00.000+14:00

I've set out the Snow Queen stuff. The Starlight and Snow hair colors are (or will be) standard, but the Ice is limited edition, and will be taken down when I open my sim.

Whenever that will be.

Oh, yes, and if you want a clumsy version of my vendors, toss me an IM and I'll drop a gigantic folder on you. Do remember that you get what you pay for.

2007-12-01T23:37:00.000+14:00

I had forgotten how much I loathe packaging things for sale. (This is the real reason I don't have items up on SLX or OnRez: too many product images to do.) But there is good news: I'm packaging things because I'm releasing them!

Tete a Pied, Nicky Ree, and I have collaborated on an outfit. It's not up in my shop yet because I need to check on how it ought to be displayed, but here's a preview, and it should be up within a day. I did the hair and the crown.

2007-11-29T04:40:00.001+14:00

Aha! Finally! I've figured out how to eliminate environmental shadows on the avatar, and I'm an idiot for not doing so sooner. It's so obvious.

Go to World > Environment Settings > Environment Editor (or just hit Ctrl-Alt-E, if you like that kind of thing). Click the Advanced Sky button. Go to the Lighting Tab. Turn the Sun/Moon Color to 0 all the way around to eliminate the shadows. If you don't want to eliminate them entirely, just turn them down until you're happy: the lower you go, the fewer shadows and highlights will be cast by the sun or moon.

That's it. You're done.

You may want to turn up the Ambient setting to make the scene brighter, or turn up the Scene Gamma. You may also want to go into Atmosphere tab and make sure the Distance Multiplier or Density Multiplier is set to 0 (one or the other, though you can do both if you really want) to keep things from being hazy. Lastly, if you have local lights on, you may want to go back into the Lighting tab and fiddle with the Sun and Moon Position slider, because the sun position determines how bright local lights will be. Local lighting will also add some shadows back onto your avatar.

There are a couple downsides to this technique, though. One, the sky itself will look pretty bad. Two, your scene will be pretty desaturated and may look washed out, though I'll experiment more to see if this can be worked around. For me, though, it at least beats the awful shadows cast by the avatar nose.

Here's a picture taken using these settings, with local lighting enabled and an array of lights pointed at my avatar. It came out a bit small, but hopefully gets the idea across.

2007-11-27T16:35:00.000+14:00

JIRA issue pimping of the day:

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3171

This is a request to fix local lighting in Windlight. It affects its surroundings less than it does in regular SL, sometimes to the point of being barely visible. This is a bit more realistic, but it also means that the environmental shading is unavoidable for avatars -- even when Windlight shaders are turned off.

In practical terms, this means that face lights and lighting studio lights don't work all that well anymore. You're stuck with the ugly and undetailed shadows cast by the face mesh. Me? I don't like that, so I voted.

2007-11-24T14:51:00.000+14:00

Work continues, albeit slowly. I'm working on some clothing right now, and trying to be faster about it than usual. It shouldn't take two weeks to do one garment.

I'd also like to share something that's been making my work a lot more pleasant: Pandora. Okay, you've probably already heard of it, but if you haven't, go check it out. You tell it an artist or a song, and it produces a radio stream for you featuring similar artists and songs (assuming your selection wasn't too obscure). They've had people sit down and categorize songs by all kinds of criteria, so it actually works pretty well, and you can tweak the station it gives you to your liking.

2007-11-18T06:37:00.000+14:00

I haven't been getting enough done lately (which is a nice way of saying I've been getting barely anything done), but I do have a couple things I want to preview for you.

Hair.

Rock circle. See, I can do things with Blender! (Oh, and those rock textures? 128 x 128. You can get away with smaller textures than you probably realize.)

2007-11-16T06:48:00.000+14:00

Windlight, I love you, and want to have your sparkly, gorgeous, horizon-reaching babies.

2007-11-14T20:45:00.000+14:00

A quite notice: Due to RL reasons, the sim opening will probably be postponed to February, at least.

2007-11-10T02:27:00.000+14:00

Something else I have decided to do is retexture all my jewelry and do several other improvements to it. Everything's getting new metal textures, and cabochons (and other round things) will now be spheres, not cylinders. Most faceted gemstones are getting new textures, too -- the only ones I might not change are those with both round and square gemstones, because getting the old round and square textures to match was the biggest pain in the butt ever*, and I've got enough to do right now. But everything else is getting an overhaul.

Here's a visual comparison. The old gem and metal textures:

The new ones:

I've used low shininess on the new metal, too. Unshiny metal looks too static to me, while shininess makes textures look bad; I've tried to strike a balance between the two, using just enough shiny to make the metal react to its surroundings while not so much that the texture is totally overpowered.

* Excluding, of course, Blender.

2007-11-05T15:43:00.000+14:00

A preview of the new hair colors. The pictures are a bit small, but you get the idea.

The brunettes. Left to right: Coffee, Chocolate, Walnut, Chestnut, Cocoa.

The blondes. Left to right: Wheat, Beach, Flax, Sand, Driftwood.

The reds. Left to right: Fox, Cedar, Autumn, Copper, Sandstone.

The black and whites. Left to right: Raven, Pewter, Silver, Starlight, Snow.

The jewel tones. Left to right: Berry, Emerald, Sea, Sapphire, Amethyst.