Join us in Phaze Demesnes or follow us:
Come visit Phaze Demesnes (pronounced di-MANE/ or /dih-MEEN/, meaning a Lord's region), where everything I do is free. Why free? Because I can, and I want you to enjoy the neat things I have learned from so many other helpful people. I hope you pass them on to others, too. You can Teleport to Phaze Demesnes and grab all the goodies. They are in houses and signs all over our islands and under the sea. And there are many more Free Tools, Tricks and Tips in part 2!
Ferd Frederix -
email me, Fred Beckhusen, fred @ mitsi.com
Free Avatars
I've published a group of free mesh avatars for you to make. They range from very simple to very complex. Many more coming soon.
Flash Scratch for Second Life and OpenSim
There is a new version (0.8) of Scratch for Second Life with many more commands, and it is even simpler to use for scripting for OpenSim and Second Life. It is called Flash Scratch-to-Linden-Script Language, (FS2LSL), and it entirely web-based. FS2LSLwas made by a whole bunch of brilliant people. The version I am using came from John K. Bennett, Director of the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder,( and many others) where he and his students have produced dozens of useful scripts that match the excellent book Scripting Your World: The Official Guide to Second Life Scripting, by Dana Moore, Michael Thome, Karen Haigh. I must totally agree with him, this is by far the best book on LSL scripting.
Here is a simple Seat Positioner in FS2LSL:
FS2LSL now supports dozens of useful and easy to use script blocks, and the files can be loaded and saved to disk.
For example, if you want to trigger a Pim Animation named "msg" using my free Prim Compiler, just use this block with the animation name and the number 1:
If you want your own copy for your own web site, I set up the source code in a zip for you, just extract it and put it on your own server.. It is available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) .
Linda Kellie - Open Sim Creations
I have set up a database of all my open source sculpts and DAE files, along with the files from Linda Kellie's amazing work. This contains over 1,000 items, including OAR, IAR, DAE, OBJ, and TGA files.
Linda deserves a lot of credit for her wonderful work. She has been a true pioneer of Virtual Worlds. I wish her the best of luck and success in all her ventures.
Remember Our Veterans This Memorial Day
Traditionally, we fly the American flag on Memorial Day. Here is a simple way to express your appreciation for our veterans via Second Life, by adding a waving, animated American flag to your parcel:
Standard Sizing is a system that standardize avatar shapes so that rigged mesh clothing can be created to fit most adult human avatars. This lets you comfortably purchase rigged mesh clothing and accessories. There is a zip file for designers of 5 shapes representing the 5 most common adult human male and female avatar sizes in Second Life: Extra Extra Small (XXS), Extra Small (XS), Small (S), Medium (M), and Large (L).
Download (17
MB zip). They are full permissions.
This zip file has OBJ, Maya, ZBrush and Blender files for mesh clothing and avatar designers, all set up with UV mapped materials so that standard skin templates can be used.
If you just want to wear standard size clothing, standard sized avatars are available on the Marketplace.
Standard Sizing was created by Minnu Palen & Thora Charron, Siddean Munro, Elie & Anouk Spot (of Mon Tissu) and Jaden Celoe & ShaySibrian (of Celoe)
One of the best tools for Second Life (and OpenSim) is a right mouse click to get the last scene you saw when you last logged out.
For me, it's usually a very good image because I have my camera focused on Waving girl, (always a keeper) and I would hate to lose her.
So here is how to save that last pic with a right click. (Windows only)
Just go to a regular file explorer and in the path at the top, type in "%APPDATA%" without the double quotes. You will see a window open to a folder on your hard disk. Navigate to the "SecondLife" folder (or "Firestorm" or any other viewer name), then navigate to your avatars' name. Locate the file name "Last_screen.bmp", and right click it.
Now select "Send to", then "Desktop (Create shortcut)" as shown here.
Click for a larger image.
When you log in and see a great "last pic", before you log out, just go to the desktop, click the new shortcut, and the pic will open whatever app you have associated with BMP files, ready to save it in a new folder.
Aire in awesome mode
Now thanks to Aair Resident, you Mac owners can do this too. Just navigate to Home->Library->Application Support->Second Life->Your Avatar Name, and you will find the same thing.
Aair also made a nifty little chart to show you where it is: Just click it for a larger image:
I've updated ScripTastic to make it easy to use with my free prim animator compiler with a lot of new building blocks.
Here is an example of a tip jar:
ScripTastic now supports dozens of useful and easy to use script blocks that work in both Second Life and OpenSim.
Aili is a half-sized Anime girl with blinking eyes, a mesh dress and mesh hair. She is easy to make and colorize. There is only one script required.
This article shows you how to make an animated zombie walk around waving his arms threatening people. If you click it to death, he falls apart into pieces, then reassembles himself to shuffle on his way to the next victim.
You can ride the zombie and command it to carry you anywhere, too. When you hop off, it will fall apart, reassemble itself, and stumble home. This system works in Second Life only (not OpenSim) due to the vehicle-like controls.
Workflow for making a new UV map from an existing one.
Sometimes you want to change a the textures on a mesh in Second Life or Open Sim, and you have a modifiable mesh object. You may have a UV map for the mesh. Maybe not. So how do you figure out the map?
Here is a workflow for working on new UV map for any arbitrary mesh.
Second Life and Open Sim Color Picker for Scripts
The color picker in your viewer is a wonderful tool, but it only works in-world, it sucks for scripts, and it's friggin Immy useless when not in a virtual world. The only alternative I have found didn't show many colors. So I fixed up the JQuery color picker and made it do the work for you Second Life and OpenSim scripters. License is MIT (Open source), so anyone that knows JavaScript or JQuery can swipe it from me for your own web site.
Drag your mouse over the color palette, or enter a value in the boxes, and you will get the LSL color vector in the bottom, ready for use in any script.
Permalink: Color Picker
Top 10 things here in 2012
These are my top post for 2012 from 1,419,770 pages viewed last year, by 156,642 unique visitors, excluding robot web crawlers.
Top Posts in 2012:
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Top 10 Scripts in 2012:
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Tandy the Fairy Nymph
Tandy the Jewel Fairy needs your help! A demon has been sexting her with nasty chat messages and chasing her around the virtual worlds. She had a night-mare, caught it and rode the mare away, and is now hiding in my computer in a zip file. She needs an Ogre like you to rescue her from my virtual world, and bring her to yours.
Here is a complete set of tutorials on how to make a very tiny avatar, including clothing, scripts, AO and much more!
Royalty Free textures
I was out looking for a nice wood texture to use in Phaze Demesnes, and as usual, could not find what I needed. So I fired up Wood Workshop by Spiral graphics and made one. This is a wonderful free tool for making wood and brick textures that I have used for years:
Then I got curious to see what else they make, and discovered that they have a equally wonderful (and free) texture viewer with access to hundreds of modifiable and useful textures for Second life and OpenSim users.
How to free Lucy the Angel, and allow her to live in a dragon-egg house
Lucy is an angel that wants to fly and live in a dragon egg. She has been stuck in the Stanford 3D Scanning Repository as very large 116 million triangle angel, but she really wants to be a 2-prim angel and to be able to fly. She wants to live in a 5-prim dragon egg.
So she needs your help! Once you have brought Lucy into your virtual world, just click her dragon egg home. It will open like a flower and let her roam around. Clicking her home again calls her back, and she will wait for you to summon her again.
Lucy can fly in Second Life and OpenSim grids, or any other virtual world that supports mesh objects.
So lets go free Lucy!
If you like to make clothing for OpenSim and Second Life, you need the right tools. Things like John Durant's' SL Clothing Previewer are great, but you need tools to paint on the clothes. But the Lindens don't provide OBJ files with the correct UV mapping for clothes.
But the Avatar Databank does!
Zee Pixel has put together a complete set of male and female body parts with the correct UV mappings that let you paint directly in Adobe Photoshop n a 3-D avatar.
I've combined that with high resolution open source templates into a DAE file
all ready for you to draw on. Just click the pic to get the zip with male and female
avatars and templates in Collada format ready to load into Adobe Photoshop:
Every once in a while I discover a really good free tool for Second Life, OpenSim and other virtual worlds. Tree[d] is one of those great free tools for Windows users. It is an easy to use yet powerful tree and leaf maker that makes mesh trees with just a click of a mouse:
Tree[d] is particularly useful for OpenSim based worlds that support mesh, as large numbers of mesh triangles add up quickly in Second Life.
So here is the easy way to make mesh trees
Thousands of free 3-D CAD models you can use in Second Life and OpenSim
Way too many web sites allow you get free 3-D models, but they will not let you transfer them to other people or use them in virtual worlds.
So I sought out the best places to get Creative Commons and unrestricted 3-D CAD models for you to enjoy.
Five web sites with thousands of free 3-D CAD models.
42 minute music and speech player/broadcaster for Second Life.
Ever been to a museum and been given a headset and player that speaks and plays music whenever you get next to an exhibit? This set of scripts makes that happen in Second Life or OpenSim. It's ideal for artists, exhibits, sim owners, and landowners anywhere. You can use it to tell the story of your world, to announce what a piece of art is about, give directions ("you are on the path to ..."), or anything else you dream up. You can play any length of music, spoken words, or chat to speech from my free text-to-wav file program, up to 43 minutes long, without using shared media. You can single play, or loop forever, too.
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| Multiple users can hear the sounds and music playing continuously as they walk nearby. | A set of mesh headphones lets you see who is listening to your exhibit | Privacy is gained by wearing a HUD, where only a person wearing the HUD can hear sounds played by the broadcast prim. |
More information in the post.
Sphere World Open Source
I've released my Sphere World into the Open source community. You can get the scripts for pet animals and the world (xs-pets.zip) file at my download link and the instructions and scripts at this link.
Sphere World has three versions: One is a world you can walk on by clicking a pose ball. It finds the nearest sphere world and you can actually walk on it!
The second use is a set of replacement scripts for xs_pets that lets pets live and breed on a sphere.
The third way to use them is to make non-breedable things live on a sphere.
I've got a set of robots living on a moon in the dome at Phaze Demesnes as well as some nice little elves that live on a sphere. They are up and running free, too, so visit Phaze Demesnes and grab a copy.
You can speak in female or male voices, too. A set of <XML> commands lets you control pitch, speed, and emphasis.
These are extremely useful in Second Life™. I used them a lot. Use the LSL script command llPlaySound("sound name",1.0); to play them in-world.
You can now make your pet breed with textures! This has been the most requested feature for XS_Pets for some time now. There is a plug-in script that goes into your pet, and a script that goes into any old prim somewhere in Second Life along with your skin textures. It works on simple pets are complex pets with multiple textures, too.
This new feature allows you to both color and apply any texture to any prim in your pet, and do it remotely. You can add more textures for rare breeds at any time. And it's really easy to set up.
The always awesome Torley Linden shows how to use light casting with a single prim to make impressive photographs in Second Life
This article is about free tools for making machinima movies for YouTube and Vimeo in Second Life.
Need to do some movies? Want to blog about writing web pages and other stuff? I've found the perfect choice for recording video for Second Life and for lessons. I've added tips in the article on how to eliminate HUDS, how to get rid of the User Interface, and how to make your camera movements smooth.This article is about Camstudio - a free tool for recording video of your entire desktop, a specific region, or a making tutorials. It's perfect for recording Second Life videos, and best of all, its free!
Mesh Horse is available for free!
Phantasy Equine of Phase is a rideable, poseable and free pet for Second Life.
The menu allows you to change the coloration of the hair, choose some 28 hand-made skin colors, and to wear a knight's armor. You can even swim with it! See more in this post, and teleport to Phaze Demesnes to get one.
The mesh horse is free, and is available in the Unicorn Demesnes in the middle of Phaze Demesnes.
The Demons have taken over Phaze
To play the game, teleport to Phaze Demesnes.
The entrance is at the top of the giant mushroom, or hop on the dragon in the dome or at the base of the mushroom, and make a grand entrance.
Demon Arena is Online
I've reset the score keeper now that we've managed to kill off our first 2,000 players so now is your chance for fame! Wear the free swords and shields and click the demons to death!
OpenSim and Second Life have many wonderful artists who can sculpt and build wonderful items. Everywhere I go I see great looking animals and objects. But those objects are just sitting there! Maybe they move a head or blink and eye, but that's about all I see. It makes it far more dramatic when your critters move and exhibit animal-like behavior. There seems to be a lack of knowledge or skill on how to do simple movements, perhaps because people do not know how to script, or if they do, what tricks you can use to do these effects with.
Pets can move about using several techniques, such as prim movement, llMoveTo
physics, as vehicles using physics, and with the several new path finding commands.
OpenSim has a variety of poorly behaving physics engines, and I want to keep
this simple. In honor of the people who found
a
new species of leopard frog in New York, I made a mesh
frog
and a moving bug for it to eat and a set of scripts to animate them
This article will show you how
to do basic animal behavior and movements effects using the simplest possible
method of prim movement:
OpenSim users: Because this project is based on mesh, it requires OpenSim version 0.7.2 or higher
Make your own Animated frog that chase bugs
| UUID: c595dad5-e439-fe75-1220-9dddf6cdf4b3 |
UUID: 11e68b89-6693-e3bf-35c9-876ae2a2e78b |
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| My Favorite UV Checker, by TeroTeki.com |
UV Checker by DanielFox Abernathy |
UV Checker by Chosen Few |
| Best for painting | Shows the exact location of the vertexes | Good for prims in-world for aligning textures because it is in decimal and matches the offsets in the viewer. |
It's time to give away a bunch of my work again. I've always loved birds and bees and I love to make things that are unusual and unique. This bee was inspired by this sign I saw at the Texas State fair.
I'll show you how to make a 5-prim bee that gather honey from 1-prim flowers, and takes it back to a 1-prim beehive. I'm giving away some difficult work here! The wing sculpt alone took me weeks to figure out. Since I wanted this to work in OpenSim, too, I had to come up with a function to replace the (broken) llLookat() system call.
This project includes several neat tricks I've learned and will teach you:
1) It uses non-physical movement, so it is very low lag. Except for a small burst of script activity every 5 seconds, this script uses few resources.
2) It works in OpenSim thanks to a neat replacement for llLookAt(). If you are a scripter, you will love the function face_target().
2) This bee uses a very fast wing-movement effect that has no server-side lag at all, even for very high wing rates. This is the same trick I have used in my freebie butterflies, fairies and hummingbird projects, and now you will know how the trick works. There is a template included so you can make your own wings. I've never seen it published before. This is a zero-lag effect.
Read the post and make you own bee for collecting pollen!
Normally avatars cannot go off the edge of a sim. But a simple trick will let you move your avatar off the edge. Even better, you can dance, walk, or fly!
I made a set of sculpts and a nice demo of this effect in an off-sim dance floor. In addition, I've modified a camera control script that you can add to existing pose balls.
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| This is the original photo I modeled it from. | The result is this 9-prim stairway to heaven |
Read this post for more information and all sets of sculpts, textures and both scripts.
Want to play music on your land in Second Life? Here is a list of several thousand streaming stations that are compatible with Second Life.
These are the Top-most-listened-to radio stations on the Internet in dozens of categories.
This table of radio stations refreshes daily from the most popular stations in the world out of over 60,000 stations.
More and More Tools and tip and tricks
Wait! There are many more Free Tools, Tricks and Tips in part 2!
Back to the Best Free Tools in Second Life and OpenSim.
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