Busy and on the Bench

 

One of the downsides to working with mesh in SL is not being "in" SL while I work. Blender is definitely a two hands sort of application, and it needs a lot of screen real estate. No bings of people wanting a chat, no group windows exploding with drama. Scripting can be lone work too, especially if I take it offline.

Fantasy Fair is starting up again soon, and I'm kind of bemused to realize it was back in '09 when I was in it. It's been a long time since I've made things that weren't either just for me and friends, or for a contracted client.

I took an afternoon earlier this week and redid a chunk of my mainland space. I swapped out the cave skybox for a floating island with a couple grassy surfaces (and a cave inside!) As you can see, I bought a (4 LI!) bench for it.

Playing with scale

Peekaboo!

Animating swordfights?

If you make animations, I recommend this article on animating European sword fighting. I've always gone more with asian styles because I found it easier to get source videos/pictures/examples.

Mirroring animations

One of the things I don't like about QAvimator is that it doesn't let me hit a button to flip or mirror an animation.

The .bvh file format that SL uses for animations isn't particularly complicated. To flip an animation is tedious but not difficult. The bottom half of a .bvh file has a line for each frame of your animation. You flip the negative sign on the Y rotation values for the center-line joints, then for the arms and legs you copy the values of the other side and flip the negative sign on the Y and Z rotation values. Not too frustrating on a pose, but on a moving animation?  Ugh.

Fortunately Tali Rosca has made this a lot easier. Mirroring an animation? Try this!

Animation article reference

Gamasutra article on animating quadrapeds.

Lowering script time when moving child prims

If you move child prims around in a link set, it used to be very expensive in terms of script time. Think animated prim animals.

Change the Physics Shape Type of all the child prims to None. It dramatically drops the script time.

Third Party Viewer Policy Drama

I'm watching the Third Party Viewer Policy Drama (there's a good round up of it here.)

Change of scene

I swapped out the garden sky-globe for a cave of dark stone with little areas of sunlit garden. It's peaceful like the garden, but sometimes one needs a change of scene.

I reused a couple elements from the Vernian Deep build (the geodes, the smokers, etc.) The three stone textures are generated with Filter Forge. The glowing balls are my papillon wisp pets.

Restarting a looped animation

I have a vehicle where the avatar does a looping animation that's in sync with some of the prim animations... When I cross sim boundaries they fall out of sync.

I thought that restarting both when the vehicle crosses a sim boundary would put them both in sync. It turns out that stopping and restarting a looping animation is more difficult that it sounds.

I tried llStopAnimation(A) followed by llStartAnimation(A). The animation continued looping like I'd done nothing. I tried adding a short llSleep() between the stop and start. No effect. I tried briefly starting and stopping a different animation between the stop and start. That interestingly did nothing as well.

What finally worked was a combination of the two.

llStopAnimation(A);
llStartAnimation(B);
llSleep( 0.1 );
llStopAnimation(B);
llStartAnimation(A);

I suspect it's related to a change intended to prevent griefing via bombing someone's viewer with animations.

Map hijinks continue

Well, the 40% alpha prim didn't do what I hoped.
It does appear on the map, but as translucent. It tints the sim map square.