From the Wyverns nest

Abalus rises!

On the 18th of June a new sim rose from the waves, west of the new Equus sim (soon to be the new home of Lone Star Ranch).

Abalus, also known as the Island of Amber, is an Open Spaces sim. The sim is shared between the Purple Wyvern group and the Caudra Draconis group. This will soon be the new home location for the Purple Wyvern outlets. Jsindo is staying, alas delegated to second fiddle. This means that the Avendale Ruins location will be for sale soon!

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Arrr, Treasure Chest!!!

Make a Treasure Chest for the upcoming aquatically themed Isle of Wyrms Summer Festival. The idea being that the hatchies can hunt down the treasure chests, click them and the chest will open to reveal the treasure (and give the hatchie a gift).

The treasure chest itself is based on a stripped down version (from about 16 prims to 3) of Daryth’s treasure chest from one of her building kits. To save prims I decided to move the chest lid instead of having 2 chest lids and swapping them using alpha transparency. The issue with this is that setting location and rotation of a prim in SL can be a headache inducing exercise. SL uses quaternions to specify rotations. Although there are a number of transformation functions to switch to more commonly known units.
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Making a Basic HUD

Many products in SL come with a head-up-display or HUD device to control aspects of the product. These range from simple colour changes to the ultra sophisticated multi-tool do-everything type HUDS.

The reasons you might create a HUD is if you want to make some aspect of your project controllable by your customer but don’t want to have to add lots of button prims on the product or have your customer edit notecards.

This tutorial covers some basic concepts in putting together a basic hud, the basic type that simply sends commands for processing in a separate in-world device, but doesn’t show a complete example (I’ll add that if it’s requested, should anyone read this).

More complex devices that might incorporate 2-way communication are beyond this simple tutorial. Read the rest of this entry »

Building Tools - Part 1

As a builder, generally I try to make a lot of the different components that I use. I dabble in a lot of different areas, I can script, texture, pose and bash prims and get fairly good results.

But sometimes it is better to buy in the components than to make them. There are any number of excellent texturers, scripters and animators around SL, and many of them sell components at fairly reasonable rates.

Looking for reasonable rates is important. If you are looking to make and sell a Sword for say, L$50, you do not want to be buying in a component that will cost L$5000 unless you know that it can be used in many other items or you can be sure you will sell 100 of them. In the same way, a L$1000 piece of Jewelery needs something better than a plain texture.

I have compiled a short list of places to buy components that offer good value for money and are of a high quality.

In most of these I have given the creators name, this is because, although sims don’t generally disappear overnight, creators do move store locations around.

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Making A Tiny Pose in QAvimator

You may notice in Second Life that sometimes you come across these cute little tiny avatars. They come in a number of forms, rabbits, cats, pandas, hedgehogs, dragon hatchlings…  All are blindingly cute, mischievous ankle biters.

Interested in making a tiny, you try to duplicate what you have seen, but no matter what you try, it isn’t possible to create an avatar smaller than ~5ft yet these tinies are smaller.

The first tinies are acknowledged to have been created by Kage Seraph. The technique he introduced was to use a script to override the currently active default animation(s), and activate another in its place (often called an animation-overrider or ao). The animation itself folds the human avatar up into a smaller package to achieve the required “tiny” height.

This tutorial covers how to create a simple tiny standing animation using QAvimator.

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