second life pottery textures

Textures are 1024 x 734.  I’ve added a sculpted creamer (the base of the cup you see to the right in the picture) for you to test the textures on.  (more…)

I needed some hair for a render I’m working on and thought someone might appreciate a tutorial on how to make hair with The GIMP.  This will work for any hair you’re trying to make, including textures for Second Life.

You’ll want to fill with which ever base color you want your hair to be, in this I’m using black.  Then you add some lines in a lighter color with a medium brush, and some in a slightly lighter color with a medium small brush:

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Been busy with other things recently, sorry about that.  If I could renovate my home with the same speed and detail I can do one in 3D, I would be a very happy Bunneh.  Alas, I can’t.

Anyway, in my spare time I’ve been working on some textures for a Halloween themed set for Second Life.  Halloween is just a fun time to build, as it can go anywhere from Gothic Grunge to Casper the Ghost.

A few quick tips for Halloween textures, FilterForge for your basic backgrounds rock/brick and Photoshop brushes for the details.  Deviant Art has a huge database of brushes and note that the newer versions of GIMP can use PS brushes also.  Please folks, read the user agreement carefully before you grab and use the brushes!

Creepy trees and a few gargoyles, maybe a bat or two and you’re good to go!

I’ll be adding feeds to blogs that showcase Second Life content be it prefabs, avatars, scripted objects, or art. Note that this does not include fashion, as there are already plenty of fashion blog aggregators out there. The list can be found under the SL Content Feeds category.

If you would like to be added, just comment here or drop me an email at bunneh at pixelbunneh dot com.

Want to know what’s going on in the Second Life science world?

Calendar of SL Health Events

Nature’s home in Second Life.

SL Science Center

hattip: Scienceroll

Virtual distance Education for Nurses

During the simulation, students role-played using their avatars to select interventions for a patient suffering chest pain and cardiac dysrhythmia. The patient’s vital signs were projected on the back wall of the ER bay and were updated throughout the session.

Students chose from a group of simulated real-life interventions, including oxygen hookups, medication, CPR, defibrillation, or IV therapy, with their avatars doing the work on screen. Then the simulated patient, controlled by either the instructor or another student, responded realistically to what the students chose.

I got curious after I wrote “FPS and Textures“, and decided to take a closer look at transparent textures to determine the very smallest size we can get with them.  Using Paint.net, I created a new image at 800 x 600, added a new layer and deleted the original white background layer.  Left with a clear alpha layer, I save it as a .tga and then as a .png.  (more…)

From the Journal of Medical Internet Research:

Second Life currently features a number of medical and health education projects. By way of example, the Nutrition Game proposed by the Ohio University simulates choices a user can make in various restaurants and informs the player about the health impacts of those choices. The Heart Murmur Sim provides an educational virtual world for cardiac auscultation training that enables clinical students to tour a virtual clinic and test their skills at identifying the sounds of different types of heart murmurs. The Second Life Virtual Hallucinations Lab aims to educate people about schizophrenic hallucinations. The Gene Pool is an interactive genetics lab and learning area featuring simulated lab experiments, tutorials, and simple videos to enhance the learning experience. The Virtual Neurological Education Centre (VNEC) demonstrates a virtual simulated online experience where people are able to actively expose themselves to the most common symptoms that a person suffering from a neurological disability may encounter, and the HealthInfo Island is funded by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) to provide consumer health information services. All of these virtual initiatives are mainly centered on the promotion of an innovative form of public health consisting of the diffusion of medical information and the education of therapists and patients.

A lot of interesting information in the full article.

We’ve all experienced it, dragging lag in texture heavy virtual environments.  It’s no fun, and any good developer wants to carefully balance a great looking build with a quick load time.   To start, here’s a list of texture sizes matched up with how much memory they consume.

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New to making skins?  Don’t overlook the obvious.  Right in your Second Life client are many very useful templates for skins and clothing.  Go to where you installed Second Life, for many of you it will be C:\Program Files\SecondLife, and open up the Character folder.

See all those .tga files?  Those are bump and alpha maps that you can use to learn where and how to texture your own skins.  Not sure how much lip to add?  Grab the lips_mask and open it as a layer in your avatar template (download available in posts below), now you know exactly where to start. 

Curious as to how you add folds into a t-shirt?  The bump_shirt_wrinkles file is the one you want.  While these templates are a bit rough, they are an excellent way to get started making your own clothing.

I’m converting the Second Life avatar templates to Paint.net for those who need them.  Head templates here, Upper templates here, and Lower ones here.

Or, if you want all of them together, the full set is here.