Holiday Vector Tree Scene

Christmas Tree Scene (10)

Pictsy

Done in AC3D, Daz Studio, and Photoshop.

Check out Otoy, hopefully something that we’ll be seeing in the mainstream virtual graphics world soon.

OTOY is an 800k web plug-in that enables cinematic quality 3D rendering in a browser with compressed content streams that load in seconds. OTOY web browser applications include next generation games, 3D virtual communities, instant messaging and social networking applets, and application and desktop sharing tools. OTOY can seamlessly mix HTML, Flash, Java and other rich media content within its core rendering and script engines - enabling unique and powerful web applications that can be built around existing web sites and services.

I regularly take a look at what’s happening in the realm of online virtual worlds, I have a strong interest in what direction Second Life type venues are going and I participate in many of them. Any picture you see here depicting a Second Life type environment is taken in my OpenSim, which is a fabulous way to test, play and implement things you’re working on.

There are many other grids available for your virtual life, other than Second Life, notably the OSGrid and Openlifegrid.

This brings us to the purpose of this post, CentralGrid. (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.

Avatar Databank

I’m not all that familiar with trueSpace, but from my quick look it’s pretty slick. Get your free download here (registration required).

The workspace looks good, fairly intuitive, I’ve managed to manipulate my test object, change the texture, morph it a bit. So far so good, and it’s FREE!

It looks like it has a pretty extensive UV Editor, which is certainly worth taking a look at.

trueSpace