Sculpties
Last night I read the forums for hours and hours to try and get some kind of a handly on the mysterious Sculpty prim. My brain hurt at the end but I have lots of interesting news from the experience. I was finally able to make a NURB object in Maya and export the bitmap into SL and make globby fun things like in the above picture. After all my reading, I tend to think the Maya export path is one of the simpler ones since the MEL script was written by Qarl Linden who is the main developer on the project. Here is the script.
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlSculpt_mel
and here is a tutorial on making a balloon by Talila Liu
http://webpages.charter.net/talilal/Balloon%20Tutorial/
I was also able to work with a sphere in zbrush, export the OBJ into Maya, run the script and have that model work in world as well. There was a catch though...I had to use a sphere made by Hypatia Callisto found here. I would like to write that person and ask why there object works but if I try and make on inside Zbrush, it blowsup...I am not clear on this yet...if it is the structure of the obj or because I need a UV mapping first. I need to play with it more. A lot of people are having luck with wings as the exporter and creator of the base sphere.
I tried a few of the 3DS Max tutorials but I get stuck at the end of them. There is a 3ds Max script out there that people seem to really like but I didn't read enough to get it working. I might do that this week. It seemed for the first few days, everyone was trying to cut the ends of cylinders rather than using nurbs. Now scripts are improving and changing quickly.
So the good news is that in a month or two, all of the problems and glitches will be solved and I would think there will be pathways and scripts for 75% of the 3D software out there. If you like some software...you will probably be able to use it.
There is not much bad news, only some limitations...these prims do not hold a lot of detail. If you want to try and make single prim objects...you will need some nicely baked, heavily detailed textures. What sculties basically do is allow us to create cool art and objects with less prims. If you want to make super detailed art...like a perfect human body statue...in the old days I am guessing that was 100-200 prims? Now it might take 20-30 and in the future if they decide to bump up the quality level...it will take even less again. So right now you can certainly make a banana, a penis, a mushroom, out of a single sculpty, but you are not going to make a super detailed race car or model of a cell phone etc...it will take a few scultpies to obtain high details.
The other sculpty annoyance seems to be LOD levels. I believe LOD means level of detail...if you ever designed crud for the game There, you are familiar with LOD since you have to make your objects at 3 levels of detail for looking at it far away, closer and then right on top of it. I always screwed that up in There and my objects would always look low poly until you were standing on them lol. Anyways...sculpties get very blocky very fast...kind of like avatar blockies in There. If you back away from your sculpty even a little....blocky. So all the art work you do is most only appreciated up very close.
If you want to see a sculpy in world on your own, but don't want to play with the software...here is a place where people are depositing the bitmaps. I think some of these are old so if you try them in-world and the thing looks inside out...open the bmp in phtoshop and flip horizontal and resave and it repairs things.
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sharing_sculpt_maps_and_textures
To make a sculpty in world, creat a box and then edit it...and you know that section where you can make a box into a cylinder etc...it now has the world sculpty in it and so just select that...then paste the uploaded bmp into the sculpty section. I know many of us are still confused so I think I might try to do some beginner level vids this weekend since there is so much hair pulling. I wish I knew more so I could make the videos better but I am as confused as everyone else.
Domain Names and the $300 Million Dollar Man
Wow! I don't really play the domain game but I love reading about the 'players' in this industry since it started just a little after the dot com porn craze and it is one of the rare interest businesses that you can make millions from, working alone at home. Business 2.0 just had a cover story on the biggest domain player ever and very few people know about this lad and he is the freaking KingPin! Here is the story.
http://tinyurl.com/36fygp
Kevin Ham is his name and he is actually a doctor (like tom at tom's hardware) and Kevin stumbled into domains, saw the future and made all the big moves. Domain names are funny since we all want to slap our heads and say "why the hell didn't I think of that!" Why didn't we all register all the names back in 1994? hehehe The story is great because it goes through how the domain industry evolved and I have been reading about it for years and the story filled in a lot of the blanks.
Back when names were getting big, people started registering all the popular words and then most of them were gone. What then started to happen was all the dot com companies failed and began just abandonning names. Network Solutions had a monopoly back then and slowly the old names that were abandonned would become available. I remember having friends like Mr Ham that would sit and write scripts that would hammer the name servers to try and register these abandonned names as soon as they became available again! Kevin and several others made small fortunes grabbing old names from dot coms that still had traffic to their sites but no companies. Ham took it a step further and made contract deals with smaller registers to give him a chance at the names first and he was able to lock most of his competition out.
It is interesting that he says this approach now sucks because too many of the type-in names and mis-spells just get you into legal copyright troubles. Many people abandonned such names as pressure from lawyers increased. After this wave of activity, Ham again even took it a step further which his most brillian move ever...many of us have thought "imagine of you could somehow capture all the .com names that are mistyped as .cm etc?" He did this. Fuck! Check this out...he flys over to the country of Cameroon and cuts a slick deal that says something like...get the cm for your country code (countries have their own codes often like canada is .ca etc) and so Cameroon get .cm and agrees to let his guys write the code that takes any name that is not registered, and brings it to his servers. Wow! He is always working with other countries to make similar deals for other .com mispelling.
You are probably thinking "he is going to be sued senseless"...and I was thinking that too since Microsoft and apple sue the pants off you for mispells...well he believes they cannot touch him and I think he is write because he does not own any of these names...he is just collecting mis-types...and the proof he probably cannot be touches is that browser makers like MS...are grabbing traffic the same way. It has always made me so mad that MS and other browsers are stealing traffic this way now.
Kevin Hams domain empire is now estimated at $300M. He believes the days of domain parking (those fake search engine landing pages) are coming to an end at some point...I think that too since we are all tired of those fake pages...and he thinks the future of great domains is to build the sites into portals with content etc. he makes something like $9000 a year from weddingshoes.com! If you get a chance...read the story since it is inspiring how crafty this lad was and it makes me continue to believe there is a lot more opportunity on the internet if you keep your eyes and ears open and try and think where we are headed and then capitalize on new directions.
