Dangerous Blog
Submitted by Dangerously on Sun, 08/03/2009 - 20:32
Secondlife - It's all about skins and clothes, apparently! So, not wanting to miss out on all the fun of creating a skin, I've recently been using the most excellent (and entirely free) open source programs Blender, GIMP and Inkscape to try my hand at skin creation.
The image above shows a composite of the Inkscape file vectors overlaid - along with a few of the latest iterations of the file as thumbnails underneath. Unsurprisingly, creating an even half decent looking skin (for me, anyway) is incredibly time consuming, painstaking work, although enjoyable with it!
Woot! - It appears a fellow French OpenSim user has posted a youtube video which features a couple of the free Integrated Technologies Opensim assets you can download here. It's nice to see other people making use of them! :)
Here's a little test video I made of SecondLife today, as I've been looking at creating machinima type videos using only free and Open Source tools and programs. I used the excellent glc program to grab the raw OpenGL stream from the running SecondLife window and the amazingly flexible ffmpeg program to convert the raw video to swf format.
I noticed that there's been a new release of the Prim Blender utility. The new version now supports sculpties, which is nice :)
There's some sparse but entirely adequate documentation in the Readme.txt file that's included as part of Prim Blender.
Although I've heard it said that Blenders users interface is somewhat less than intuitive, I found after investing a little time in learning to use it, Blenders speed of work flow and power are unmatched by any other free 3D program I've tried to-date.
