Hideously Ugly Christmas Sweater by Pandora Wrigglesworth. Available at Curio Obscura.

This is a Hideously Ugly Christmas Sweater! That’s what Pandora Wrigglesworth calls it, ok? But this has an importance way beyond its Hideous Ugliness. It’s mesh, in a single size, that fits all body shapes!  Credit to Pandora for working out how to do this, doing it, and demonstrating it at today’s Show & Tell at Builders Brewery. I have Really Muscular Shoulders and this is the first mesh item ever that fits me there. When all the designers pick up on this, I might be able to shop for mesh.

Snowglobes

•

Snow falls endlessly

On the night before Christmas

In the toy village.

•

In the snowy fort

No soldiers patrol the walls

Are they all on leave?

•

Snow on online pines

If no-one logs in to see

Did the snowflake fall?

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Presents! All for me?

Take as many as you like

They're copiable.

I wrote about getting 64 boxes from a single sculpt, for a row of dentils. The boxes end up being connected by unwanted strips, which can be hidden in the beams that the dentils are attached to. But to make separate boxes with no visible connections, you need to make sure that the interface between them in the sculpt map consists entirely of quadrilaterals that collapse to a single line or point.

Tura has made some snowglobes.

There are four different scenes, each made as either a table ornament, or a bauble to hang on a tree. Particle snow falls endlessly.

This is the full size version of a picture I sent Crap Mariner for his arm brace. Get well soon, and remember, the secret to rehabilitation is enjoying the pain! The more it’s hurting, the more it’s working! Er, don't go overboard on that. This is not medical advice.

”Waking up in the future was all very well, but I wasn't sure about the new body...”
Photographed at In Silico

The robot arm comes from this build I did for the recent Single Frame Story challenge on the theme of ”objectification”.

Tura runs. Tura always runs.

MadPea Base

LSL tutorial: Communication between parent and child

Back when I started to write complex scripts, one of the first puzzles I needed to solve was this: Object A rezzes object B out of its inventory, and needs to send some startup information to B. How can it do this?

When A rezzes B, the only information it can pass to it in the call to llRezObject is a single integer. When object B wakes up, its on_rez event receives that integer as the start_param. But suppose you need to send more information than that? Then A has to send it by encoding it into a string and speaking it. The channel it is going to speak on can be sent as the start parameter.

This won’t work:

In A:
llRezObject( channelNumber, ... );
llSay( channelNumber, ... );

In B:
on_rez( integer channelNumber ) {
   llListen( channelNumber, ... );
}

The reason is that A cannot assume that B is listening, or even exists, by the time that A speaks. Spoken messages are never queued: if no-one is listening, they are not heard. How can A make sure that when it speaks to B, B is already rezzed and listening?

My entry this week for Crap Mariner’s 100 Word Story Challenge. The topic was ”sparkle”, and I also used ”turquoise” from the Writers' Dash, but it wasn’t written at dash pace.

"Waiting for Twilight Sparkle"

A play in one act

by Tura Brezoianu

"The sun does not shine above us, but within us."

My entry for this week’s Single Frame Story Challenge on the theme ”Illumination”.

Whiskey Day and Botgirl Questi have started a new challenge, to create a single picture that tells a whole story, based on a word or phrase.

The first challenge is ”Last Words”, entries due by this Friday night, 10 August.

This is my entry. (Also on Flickr.) It's best viewed at full size.

Tura has written a story about an elf.

The Writers’ Dash is held every day at 6am and 6pm Pacific Time in Second Life, which works out to 2am and 2pm in my timezone. Which means I can only participate in real time at 2pm on Sundays. But I can have a go any time for practice. This is my first attempt. The subject is ”Elf”. It took 40 minutes, not the prescribed 15.

Tura is very drunk.

Tura rarely wears mesh.

This is one reason why. There’s a set of standard shapes that have been worked out from analysing many avatars’ proportions (which you can get for free on the Marketplace). The nearest one to my shape is ”small”, for which the non-bone body settings are:

Body Fat: 7

Torso Muscle: 35

Breast Size: 52

Love Handles: 28

Belly Size: 3

Leg Muscle: 50

Butt Size: 38

Saddle Bags: 33

As it happens, all of my sliders are within a few points of these settings, except one: Torso Muscle. Mine is 85. ”Small” is 35. I tried dialling it down to 35 and...no. No. Tura Brezoianu is not that shape. Tura has really strong shoulders and arms, and 35 looks skeletal to me. This is a basic part of what Tura is. Even the ”large” size of this dress isn’t big enough at the top, and then it’s far too large lower down.

...carnal nightmares of rooted flesh that wallowed and fought and coupled in noisome ooze...

— Clark Ashton Smith, ”The Maze of the Enchanter”

A build in progress I glimpsed on SL. I wonder if there will be foul things with chancrous blossoms flaunting themselves on infernal obelisks. Shall living parasitic mosses of crimson crawl on vegetable monsters that swell and bloat behind the columns of accursed pavilions?

I finally finished the tower of St. Mary-le-Bow, and presented it at MadPea Show and Tell today, temporarily held in a skybox while the sim down below is being remodelled.

Jernberg

Mayfair

I recently chanced on the Mayfair sim, which is the location for the Celoe and Mon Tissu shops. It's modelled on the prosperous London district.

The shops exclusively sell mesh items, primarily clothes, and Mayfair is described as a mesh-only sim, the first in SL. I did detect a few prims in the vendors, but apart from that, I could believe there's not a single prim or sculpt anywhere.

Tura is experiencing mission creep. The cloudhopper balloon is on hold while I work on this:

This is a recreation of the tower of St. Mary-Le-Bow in London, which I built a long time ago, and I'm trying to get into a form that I can exhibit at a Show & Tell. Probably MadPea, as it's heavily scripted and it’s never going to work in the lag at Little Blue Fermi.

Tura does not have nearly as much time as she would like for SL projects.

Since last time, I've done some weight-painting, mirrored the half-harness, uploaded it to SL, and worn it, with the results in the picture.  The modelling and weighting need a lot of work still, but the basic workflow all works.

This is a first draft of half of the harness. I shall probably redo this completely at some point, but for the moment, after mirroring it to make the whole thing the next step will be to learn how to rig it and import it to SL.

I made this by starting with a rectangle as the cross-section of the strap, and extruding it inch by inch over the avatar's surface, painstakingly positioning and rotating the new end. There is a snap-to feature in Blender that lets me snap the strap-end to the avatar surface, but it only works on one vertex at a time. I found it didn't help much so I turned it off.  Maybe there's a faster way (automatic extrusion of a cross-section along a smooth curve?) but I haven't found one.

Even with a three-button mouse, a Space Navigator, a full-size keyboard, and a 30" display, it still feels like using one of those fairground machines where you have to manipulate a claw to pick up a stuffed toy. I have a long way to go to get to this level.

And now for something completely different.

Fae Varriale's build at LEA6.

What a friendly tree!

Tura is learning to make mesh.

After completing the harness sculpt from last time with the mirror image shoulder strap, it fitted well, until I raised my arms to shoulder height. Then my shoulders poked right through the straps. Just walking around made the waist belt bob around most unrealistically. Something like this is only really going to work as mesh. So I downloaded the latest Blender (and noticed how many older versions I had that I'd never used) and googled up some tutorials.

Tura is putting off learning to make mesh.

Picture from historylink101.com

I want to make one of these for the cloudhopper balloon. The obvious way is as mesh. That will make it deform appropriately as the avatar moves. The only other way to achieve that would be to make it as system clothing, a mere texture painted onto the avatar. But that wouldn't blend well into the straps the wearer hangs from.

Chag.

A wonderful new word, coined by Sparkaphat Doobie at the Fermi Show & Tell tonight. Chag = chat lag.

The Chag Monster. Chagged out. Feeling a bit chaggled. Got stuck in the chag.

RL back-definition: lengths of tough seaweed and old rope jammed around the propeller of a speedboat, bringing it to a grinding halt.

This word has possibilities!

Fermi Show & Tell every Saturday at 1pm SL time (Pacific time zone)

Some days you eat the doughnut, some days the doughnut eats you.

AKEYO animation shop

AKEYO sell the AO that I use, and I like their animations as well. They also sell various chairs stuffed with their poses. The ball chair below has eight, and these doughnuts have a dozen.

I want one of these in RL!

"I am Number 2."                           

                           "Who is Number 1?"

"You are Number 6."                           

Tura goes for another test flight.

North-east Sansara, from Swinside to Midge

The shoreline following sometimes works pleasingly well, but here it was a little vague, to say the least. Until I install some instrumentation, it's difficult to track down exactly what's going on. I suspect the ground gradient near the river was too flat and variable to give an accurate sense of what direction the river lay in. With the shore-finder producing noise, the navigation would be mainly driven by the contour-follower.

Clementina

Tura takes her balloon for a test flight.

Tura makes precision sculpts.

There's a trick to making sculpts that I've never seen documented.

Tura is building a balloon.

This is the canopy. The texture is just a placeholder, with repeats and offsets set to align it with the underlying structure. The real texture will be rather more bright and colourful. Tura is a daylight person. I admire the crepuscular Bryn Oh, but my own preference is for space, light, and air.

This is the canopy design in my head.

Tura takes a balloon ride along Route 9, Jeogeot continent.

Tura remembers holidays at the seaside.

LostFurest dAlliez

I chanced upon this perfect isometric view of a skybox in the distance.

Arlberg, somewhere above Deanna Genesis' temple

         The crack of doom shall swallow up this world
         And all that is upon it be destroyed
         Resolved into components unalloyed
         Its atoms rent and into space be hurled.

Tura watches a bird watching Tura.

Tura goes for a walk, and finds some sheep reading about sheep.

A fine and private place

The sea, the endless sea.

Piper Point

Tura is made of pixels.

Risk City

Tura relaxes after a job well done.

Tura dances to the butterflies.

Huntress sim by Syn Beresford; stone house by Jenne Dibou

Tura just wants to float away.

Wendy Xeno's “HuMaNoiD”

Tura finds an orrery.

Look closely and you can see the globes reflected in each other. Look closer still, in-world, and you can see how it was done.

Athan

Tura is dwarfed by the immensity of the architecture.

The church floats in the ether like a hypnotized whale, staring at the blazing moon that floods its spaces with dazzling whiteness.

The bell! The bell!

Somewhere above Chouchou V. It can be reached from the teleporter at the centre of Chouchou.

Tura contemplates the sunset.

Totoros Forest

Tura has a blog.

Chouchou