There are times when Second Life can be very much the time vampire. I pretty much wasted all of Friday evening auditioning gestures for the avatar. Big mistake. Nearly all the gestures put the avatar through some really undignified temper tantrums and gave off annoying sound effects, mostly sound bites from movies and cartoons. I thought myself better off without them.

Except for maybe “Dance Magic Dance”, by David Bowie, from the movie Labyrinth. It matches my character’s level of exuberance. It fits. Angels are indeed emotional creatures, capable of expressing joy at a lost sinner’s return to Christ, and Skye would be a poor angel indeed if he could not dance for joy.

I’m happy to report that I’ve achieved an acceptable halo of stars for my avatar, by uploading the stars in a Targa file with an alpha channel that makes all the space around the stars turn invisible. Then I applied the stars as a texture to the inside and outside of a ring primitive shape, which turned the ring invisible except for the stars. My halo is complete.

I’ve achieved so much this weekend, I would die a happy fox, If I died right now. But I’m not pushing up the daisies yet, so I press on toward putting a bear in that robe. Pantheris Mansala remarked that I learned more in a matter of weeks than he learned in two years. A great complement.

And newsworthy, too. If I had a TV news program on SL, I’d interview myself. I really would.

I had to sculpt my avatar’s head all over again using Blender. Dang it!

The sculptured prim

Now to explain why I had to do this, let me teach you a very important thing about a new kind of basic construction shape used in Second Life called the sculpted prim. “Prim”, incidentally, is short for “primitive”, another name for the basic construction shapes used to build everything in SL.

Sculpted prims are created in a 3D modeling program such as the open-source Blender 3D and uploaded to SL. I’m not quite familiar with the process, but there’s supposed to be a command there that imposes the sculpted prim’s shape onto a regular primitive.

In order to be uploadable to SL, a sculptured prim must have a hole in the top and bottom, and a well-defined seam down the back, so the program can open it out flat. Somehow, SL is able to remember the prim’s original shape. My previous head for Skye had already gotten too sophisticated for that.

Pane in the . . . head

Now what about the flips of long fur that occur over the forehead and on either side of the head? I think those are best accomplished by painting those on transparent panes and sticking them into the avatar’s head at odd angles. Of course I don’t quite know how hair is accomplished in SL, there are probably better ways of doing it, but that’s my two cents.

Reverse engineering

I bought an avatar of Gruffi Gummi of Disney’s Adventures of the Gummi Bears, thinking that with a little tweaking of the color, I might be able to use most of Gruffi’s body for Skye. Unfortunately, this avatar came no copy, no modify. But I can still reverse engineer his paws and feet.

I can see where a guy like me can get sucked into Second Life. Just getting my av to a certain look involves quite a bit of planning and execution. It’s a fascinating process, and I can’t wait to see it all the way through.

I’ve been experimenting with extruding some faces and trying to curl them into the familiar fur flips on the top and sides of Skye Goodfellow’s head.

I think we might have gotten to where we can finally use it for a Second Life avatar. Now I have to start asking around about how to chop the character up into pieces and upload it into SL as sculptured prims.

For openers, a retraction of an inaccurate statement is in order. Yes, it was indeed Phoenix Audubon who purchased the cans of silly string. I cannot adequately express my regret that such an untruth came through my keyboard. I humbly ask the white bear’s forgiveness.

Okay, only one commissioned drawing remains to be made, that of the green chipmunk angel Godessa Greenemeraldchip (of Jamie Malecki’s Thy Tame Angels), and then I can return to my work of learning Blender 3D.

The next big project on my agenda is the upcoming election, for which I will again serve as Voting Machine Judge. I will attend mandatory training this coming Friday, and work in the polling place May 5.

After that, nothing really happens until Morphicon. There’s nothing at Morphicon for which I’m responsible; all I have to do is go. But there are parties out there who disagree with that. “Greg” is once again on my case, still trying to panhandle his way in from his place near South Bend, IN. For free.

Sorry. The furry fandom is not a welfare state. No free ride, no free bed. The hot dogs are free, but that’s as far as we’ll go.

Yesterday evening, I attended a class on how to design clothing for one’s Second Life avatar. This helped me to understand how clothing is constructed and textured. This pretty much solidifies a strategy for how I’m going to make by sky blue robe that some of you have come to know so well. First, I’m going to have to find, ideally, a choir robe.

Okay, I admit that’s crazy talk. I can count on half the fingers of one hand how many people go to Second Life to sing in a choir. Hey! I’m open. I’ll take the robe of a wizard or a mage. Better than that, a monk robe. Anything that’s loose, with bell sleeves and a skirt. I’ll figure out how to color it right.

I also attended a class on how to deal with griefers, also known as trolls. The instructor told me the one thing I expected to hear—turn a deaf ear to them. Any response at all to the troll’s harassment is either the funniest or the most satisfying thing in the world. I also learned how to mute griefers, which turns off all the noise they make, be it voice or text.

While Second Life is not a game per se with a set objective to achieve by which to know whether one has won, some of the things you may wish to do here may be every bit as much a puzzle as returning a Rubik’s Cube to its original one color per side state. It’s an exercise in research and problem solving. I’m never happy unless I have something or another to figure out, and this is what Baloo Uriza recognizes.

My first and biggest problem: I don’t want just any avatar. I want Skye Goodfellow to represent me in SL, and I’m still quite perturbed that his last name is required to be Vanistok. But I think I can solve the avatar problem. The first thing I have to do is put a decent mouth on Basic Bear.

Preparations

Rapid T. Rabbit has been taking a final roll call of all the fursuiters expected to show up at the DooDah Parade in Ocean City.

The early part of the week will be spent in finishing up drawings of three of Jamie Malecki’s Thy Tame Angels. These are ten animal angels that have the Care Bears-like trait of coming in different colors. They also have the trait of having excessively long names. Take for instance the three that I’m working on rlght now:

• Blessi Blueskybunny
• Yprayerz Yellowsunbat
• Godessa Greenemeraldchip

After that will come trying to spruce up Skye’s angel wings and getting the costume socked away in their big plastic tubs for the big drive east. The best way I have of protecting the head would be to unscrew the halo, turn it upside down on top of the head, and then wrap it all in fleece blankets.

On Second Life

I am reminded of a comic book horror story I once read as a kid where a little girl was trying to get a little boy to do excessively dangerous things that would seem to surely get him killed. Why? That’s not revealed until the last panel of the last page. It turns out the little girl had met an untimely end and was a ghost. She was trying to get the little boy killed so they could be playmates forever.

Being recruited into Second Life is probably a poor comparison to being enticed to bump myself off, but I can’t help but wonder at Baloo’s motives. After all, he had preceded me into this weird heavenlike existence where people get to wear custom-built bodies that look precisely the way they want and can teleport and fly from one fun place to the next. Come here, and you can become dead to the real world.

Come, now, Baloo. Surely you can’t want just a playmate. There’s something deeper, and I’m going to ferret it out.

Just got paid, and I took a fast trip to my local Micro Center on Bethel Road in Columbus to get me a 2 GB stick of system memory. It cost a very modest $21 and change. Now that my Dell Optiplex at a total 2.5 GB, I think it’s ready for anything that I might ask from it in terms of rendering animation.

All that needs to be done now is learn. But I’m going to be putting that off right now for two different things. One thing, of course is the upcoming trips to the DooDah Parade in Ocean City, NJ next weekend. My normal method of protecting my costume head on a long trip, that of borrowing a friend’s bass drum case, is out of the question. The case is in Toronto, Ontario with a former Columbus fursuiter who recently moved there, and we don’t know when it’s coming back. We’ll have to do something different. But what?

The other thing that’s sidedtracking me is I’m working on three commissions of artwork for Jamie Malecki of Toronto, Ontario. The first of the three commissions is already done, and can be seen at Deviant Art.

Blessi Blueskybunny

And one more thing, near the front of the Micro Center store in the “geek toys” section, I found this LED message fan for $4.99. Way cool! I just had to have it!

Thanks for reading, and keep those nice comments coming in.

My job has its own equilibrium. When I’m feeling particularly like I’m in serious trouble, a very heartening set of QA numbers would come in. When I’m feeling like I can do no wrong, a particularly troublesome customer with some business or family emergency would call, making justice and company policy lock horns with each other. I would come away from such a call feeling like an unlearned imbecile.

“Take heed, lest ye fall.” That’s KJV talk for “stay focused.”

You snooze, you lose

I slept in yesterday, until 4:30 PM. I don’t much like that, as it means not much time for schooling myself in Blender 2.48.

While I’m on that subject, I recently found out that Jeff Ringtail is a Blender user. He reports difficulty rendering a horse charactsr with 2 GB of RAM. Out of curiosity, I checked up on my own machine’s properties. Not quite 600 MB RAM. I’ll need to upgrade it before Basic Bear can have any fur.

When I brought the Dell Optiplex home late in February, I wasn’t asking for much in terms of speed and memory. It could handle the newfangled Flash animation used in most banner ads, and I was pleased with that. Now I have Blender 2.48 and my dream of bringing Skye Goodfellow to life on the big rear projection screens at my church. Since Christian Assembly was primarily a music and dancing church, I knew going in that animation would have to be done on my own time and on my own dime.

I finally have something that we can call a bear. I’ve made remarkable progress today. I learned how to properly color the muzzle and ventral areas of a bear character, and I constructed eyes, eyebrows, and a nose for the Basic Character.

The critter still doesn’t have a mouth. It’s going to be the hardest thing to put in, as it has to change shape wildly as the character speaks or emotes. That’s still a little ways down the road as I continue to learn the program. Now I have to decide where to take my training. What I do know I want to do is fine-tune that face, get the eyes to where they can blink, and I want to see if there’s any way to make the body furry and a little less like a chocolate and peanut butter confection. And I want to master lighting a little bit. The renders always come out kinda dark.

After that, where to? Do I then want to learn to build armatures and learn body animation and work on the mouth last? That sounds kind of like the way to go for me.

Keep me in your prayers. From the way I’m working, I should have no trouble animating a “commercial” advertising for help with the next Northland Jubilee in August. This should really wow the people in the church’s audio-visual loft.

Basic character face

Today I was working on a basic face for the Basic Character that will eventually become the animated Skye Goodfellow. The eyes and the nose are a piece of cake, now that I’ve found out how to some of the faces of an object a different color from the rest of the object. The face is not officially fused to the Basic Character, just placed up in front of the head. So far, it looks very good, considering my current level of expertise in Blender 3D 2.48.

The mouth is going to be a vastly different story, as it will change shape quite wildly as the character speaks and emotes. I don’t expect to be able to construct a decent mouth for quite some time. I’ll need to look at quite a few more tutorials.