An abstract sculpture I created on a whim. It’s 8 prims, created it in Blender in about 1 hour.

You can view it at my friend Skitty’s flower shop in Second Life. The sculpture is not for sale (but the pretty flowers are!).

5 builders × 3 prims/day + 0 plan = ???

Want to see it up close and personal? You’d better hurry, because it’s coming down in a week to make room for the next one!

Today, I was messing around with the llDetectedGrab() function, which returns a vector telling which way someone is pushing or pulling on an object. I’m planning on using it for controls in some upcoming projects, so I wanted to get a grip on it (pun intended).

So, I put a script in a box, and tried using the vector in various different ways. The first, way was simply to move the box around; that was enough to confirm my suspicions about how the numbers worked. Then I went on to try changing the color of the object, based on the vector. When you drag it along the X axis, it turns red; along the Y axis, green; along the Z axis, blue. If you drag it along multiple axes, it turns some combination.

Then, I was showing it to Chrysocolla and hya. The land was no-rez, so I improvised by wearing the box on my head! Then I got the idea that I could allow other people to drag my avatar around, by pushing myself based on the vector. So, some scripting later, Chrysocolla was dragging my avatar and throwing her against walls and other hard things. Ouch!

Here’s a composite time-lapse snapshot of the brutality:

Overall, it was very silly.

UPDATE: hya passed out poking sticks, so I got my revenge.

• Get friendly feedback, tips, and suggestions about your works-in-progress!
• Be inspired by seeing what other people are making!
• Teach or attend workshops to hone your skills or broaden your horizons!
• Challenge yourself and make the best content of your Second Life!
• Meet interesting and creative new friends!

More information and fewer sentences ending in exclamation marks, after the fold!

This is an idea I’ve had in my head for a while, in various forms. I first thought of a long-term series of building classes, meeting with the same students week after week, like a RL course. Another idea was a mentorship program: taking young newblets under my wing, teaching and challenging them to guide their learning, the Mr. Miyagi to their Daniel. Another was an apprenticeship program, like the artisan guilds of yore. But each of those was missing something: the teaching was just going one way, from teacher to student, master to apprentice. I wanted something where everybody would grow and learn, even me!

From past experience, I knew several things:

• Creativity stagnates in isolation.
• Seeing what other people create often gives me inspiration to create my own things.
• Working and interacting with someone else helps me see things from a different perspective.
• Teaching or explaining something to someone else helps me solidify my own understanding of it.
• Knowing that other people will see my work helps to keep me from slacking off.
• Historically, communities of artists interacting and working in proximity have yielded fantastic results.

Thus, the idea of a community of SL content creators, working side-by-side and interacting with each other. But it sounds so serious when I phrase it that way, so I prefer to call it a play-group: just a bunch of creative people meeting regularly to play around and have a good time!

There was just one problem: me sitting alone on my mushroom and poking at a torus doesn’t count as a community. I’d have to get other people involved. But who?

Well… you, maybe, if you’ve read this far and you are (or have interest in being) a content creator of some type: building, scripting, fashion, texturing, animating, etc.

But the thing is, this is supposed to be a small, close-knit community. I’m talking 5 or 10 people, tops. I’m not looking to form a huge mass of people who don’t get along together. That means I’m going to be somewhat selective about membership, to keep the size manageable and ensure peaceful co-existence. It may fill up fast if a lot of people are interested, so please contact me (Jacek Antonelli) in-world or leave a comment if you’d like to participate!

The theme was “Space”. We had 40 minutes to build something using 40 prims or less—so, quite a different scale than the rules I’m used to from Building Shelter, 10 minutes and 25 prims. I had a ton of fun building! A couple days ago, I had noticed that I hadn’t done much building for fun as of late, so this was a great opportunity to dust off the ol’ torus-twisting finger.

Here are the entries after the 40 minutes were up. Can you guess which one is mine?

If you said, “That twisty, colorful one in the corner, of course!”, you’re right!

It’s a fun and relaxing build to look at, especially with the sun set to midnight (World -> Force Sun -> Midnight)! Several slowly-spinning swirly shapes to stare at, plus lovely luminous light-prims to lure you in! It’s called, “The Colour Out of Space”, after the short story by H.P. Lovecraft. Thankfully, unlike the titular essence of the story, my build won’t slowly consume the lifeforce of everything nearby!

I’m quite pleased with how it turned out, so I’ve set it up in my garden:

Want to see it for yourself? Please drop by my garden in Hallasan and take a gander!

You might notice a new entry in the Tools menu for SL 1.17.1.0: Edit Linked Parts!

That’s right, the feature I added back in March and submitted to the JIRA has now made its way into the official client release! The menu item works just like the checkbox in the Build/Edit floater, allowing you to switch between editing whole linked sets of prims, or editing the individual members.

Not good enough? You want more?

Well then how about I tell you guys how you can add your very own keyboard shortcut… in just 3 easy steps?

1. Open the Second Life/skins/xui/en-us/menu_viewer.xml file in your favorite text or XML editor.
2. Go down to line 695 (or do a search for “Edit Linked Parts”) where it says shortcut="", and type in your shortcut between the quotation marks! For example, to bind it to Shift-L, you’d type in shift|L!
3. (Re)start Second Life, and enjoy!

A word about the format for shortcuts: Put the modifier keys first, separated by the pipe character, | (Shift-Backslash, above the Enter key). The standard order for modifiers is control|alt|shift, but I’m not sure the order matters too much. For Macs, “control” means the Command key.

In addition to being a darn spiffy development in itself, this tweak has revealed an interesting little factoid about prim position and prim drift… which I will reveal after the fold!

It seems that very minute (roughly, < 0.001m) changes to position won't stick on the sim—they aren't considered significant, I suppose. But there's an easy work-around: if you make two significant changes which almost cancel each other out, you can make an insignificant change stick! So instead of trying to move from 42.000099 to 42.000000 (which won't stick), you should move to 42.100000m and then to 42.000000. The two changes, while significant in themselves, add up to the desired insignificant change. Magic!

So it turns out Second Life is just like that age-old saying: One step forward, approximately-but-not-exactly one step backward!

Also, another bonus-mega-awesome tip for those of you with less precise edit windows: I’m 90% confident that you can enter much more precise numbers than it will display—and it will have an effect! Try it and see!

Here are some of my lovelies, with the sculpt texture applied for the normal texture for your colorful viewing pleasures!