PowerPoint and Second Life

Wow. PowerPoint is a great tool for making sign textures for SL.

(Gah. A lame post. Apologies for such a blah post, but my brain is run down.)

Try Xara X great for vector images.

*nothing like text on a curve !

Then turn into jpg

Turn into a gif, png or anything OTHER THAN a jpeg - otherwise all you'll do is create horrid artefacts along the edges of your text.

JPeG files are for images with subtle smooth gradients and lots(!) of different colors and hues.

G

I doesn't really matter what you turn it into as long as it's a format that SL will upload. When you upload the file is converted to jpeg2000. Artefacting isn't a big issue with jpg as long as you set the quality high enough. 85 or higher should give you clean text. With jpg you'll notice subtle gradients starting to get chunky before you'll get edge artefacts.

.tga files.

Flawless, every time. I have never had any issue whatsoever.

Yeah, when it comes to textures, why take chances with JPEG? Tcoz knows what he's talking about. TGA is the way to upload them, plus you have to do that anyway to get alpha channels working, so you might as well upload all your images as TGA.

Wow, ok... but.. what about PNG files and alpha?

We can upload PNG files? I tried that the other day and got an error message.

.tga all the way.

A bit of a hijack but I saw vector art mentioned!

I want SVG textures. I want them editable via script. I want to make dynamic displays!

Why SVG and not Flash? I believe Flash is binary, no? SVG is (mostly) human readable XML. I could create and modify my graphic with a text editor in-world, similar to a script. Once that's done then do either text or DOM manipulation on it to get a changing display.

I only hear about "textures, textures, textures" with Havok stuff... I'm assuming we're talking about bitmaps exclusively.

Anyone heard of any vector stuff *as textures* in any 3d engine?

G

Sorry, Gavin, Havok isn't the rendering engine that Second Life uses, it's the physics engine. What's the difference? Well, the physics engine only controls motion and interaction of objects within a sim, not how everything renders.

If, as you say, you've heard "textures, textures, textures" about Havok 2.0, you've been talking to the wrong people.

As for vector graphics "as textures"... no, you can't really do that. You can draw vector objects, certainly, but by definition, a texture is a raster bitmap wrapped onto a face of a 3D object. If you were to employ some system of vector-based texture creation, such as having a script change text on a sign, (yes, please, Lindens! ) the rendering engine would first have to be given that information as a bitmap to be able to draw it. That's just how modern 3D graphics work.

Oh, and in case you were curious, Second Life's rendering engine is... well, the "Second Life" engine. It was developed by the Lindens and their minions.

Never said it was

Naturally, when I say "Havok" i mean "games which happen to use havok"


However, the 'physics vs. rendering' distinction has never been put so usefully before, and certainly explains why things "look" so much different here vs. other Havok-using programs.

So... thanks...

G

Yes. POV-Ray can do vector-based textures, but it's not a realtime rendering system -- depending on the complexity of the scene, expect frame rates in the frames per minute to frames per day range.

On the other hand, the graphics would be absolutely stunning -- true refraction, true reflection, caustics, etc.

The day we can have raytraced realtime applications will be, well, amazing. I don't think it will happen though... current graphics technology will reach almost raytraced quality long before we get the processing power to raytrace a scene in even a second. For this reason alone I see raytracing going to the wayside as standard graphics cards approach raytrace quality graphics.
BTW, if you get a chance check out Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles... the graphics are very good, but what impressed me the most was that they have largescale realtime refraction going on. I'm not quite sure how they do it, but they've got these huge crystals in the center of towns... your character (or whole party) can walk behind one and as the camera is fixed you see the character through the crystal. I haven't seen it on HD but there doesn't appear to be any pixelating as it refracts so perhaps it's actually drawing it from a different angle for each face of the crystal, I don't know. In any case it impressed me a lot to see that kind of effect coming off the gamecube. It was the first time I'd seen realtime refraction in any game, but perhaps others have done it.

I don't think you can upload .gif images into SL

What types of things are you using Xara for? Do you do anything that required masking?