SL versus other creative outlets

I'm always in a tug of war between SL and other creative outlets, and I'd be interested to hear if other people find themselves in similar positions.

SL is for me basically a shared space for making and experiencing art, but it's not the only place I can create. I'm in a drawing class. I have 3DS Max, Premiere, After Effects, and Photoshop (for work). I've made Medal of Honor maps. If I make a cathedral in SL, I'm severely limited by the available forms and the space and number of objects I can use. If I make a cathedral in Max I can do anything I want and also use lighting, shadows, etc. But I couldn't walk around inside the Max version with other people, which is a huge attraction to me. Or I could make an FPS map, which would fall somewhere in between. (These comparisons are simplistic) And to some extent SL is always a guilty pleasure because I could be practising drawing for 3D design or polishing my polygon skills.

It's not just that SL competes with other parts of my life, it specifically competes with similar mediums. So I always have to weigh spending my time in SL, with its limitations, against working on other projects, which will be static and isolated in comparison.

I am in exactly the same position as you, Cadroe.

It's kinda funny though - If I wasn't on SL, I would be socialising and working on my own 3D artwork - in SL it's almost like having the best of both!

But yeah, as you say, one of the main draws is that other people can walk around my builds, and interact with them, which you can't in 3dsMax. Although I have used 3dsMax to rough-out a few of my build ideas for SL, which has led to much quicker builds.

The time I spend on my own artwork has dropped by at least 50% since I got into second life in July. Gratification levels are just as high as before though!

SL has a far superior "showing off" factor to any of the other forms. Sure, you can put your rendered pix on a webpage and point your friends to it, but it is extremely unlikely that other random people will find it and even more unlikely that they invest the time to tell you how cool they think it is.

In SL, thats more likely to happen. More people are likely to spot your creation, and sending a quick IM is easier than emailing a stranger. Online games are alot about showing off, with your high level character with the godlike robe or sword, with your cool new dress, or with a dark cathedral :)

Eddie - I've been sketching out my next SL project in Max too, which has been a big help. Sometimes I'm building in SL trying to twist, deform, or threaten prims into some form, and think, "Dangit, I just want to move some verts!" On the other hand, I sometimes catch myself instinctively wanting to "drop into" a Max scene and walk around. Doh.

Have you ever messed around with baking textures for SL? I've been thinking about making a sort of showcase room where light sources were faked by baking textures for every surface in a parallel scene in Max. So you'd get the shadows, highlights, etc. What would be really slick would be synchronizing animations across surfaces to fake flickering candle light, but I doubt you could pull it off. I wonder if a future SL could even include a baking tool, so you could place a light source and take a single snapshot of handpicked surfaces for use as textures.

Ezhar - What kind of weirdo would make a cathedral? I agree about people seeing your work, and it's not just with finished projects. There's also the collaborative aspect, or even just the satisfaction of creating something in real time right in front of people. I wonder if environments like SL will ever start to influence applications like Max? I could imagine a plug-in to Max that allowed coworkers to work on a scene file together online, with edits appearing in real time, and with immersive qualities. At least for team reviews and stuff.

Cadroe - there already is collaborative tools for 3dsMax, but I havent used it, as I don't work in a big team. I know they don't work in realtime like that though, sadly.

But wow, if we could collaborate on 3dsMax projects in an environment like SL! Man, that would make me happy! I shan't hold my breath though lol.

Baking textures for SL - to be honest I havent gotten around to doing that, but I too have some neat ideas that will eventually happen
The flickering candle light is a cool idea. Do it!

If you can afford the prims, you might try making a few alpha-gradient anims, and place them on very thin planes against the walls/objects where you want flickering shadows. Not the most efficient solution, but I've seen Valroth Grimm use this with static alpha-gradients to great effect.

I'm gonna have a triple-sided dichotomy tonight - whether to load SL, or 3dsMAX, or go and do something else instead

You could easily bake textures for SL with max, but if you want to have a contiguous animation across the walls of a room for something like flickering candlelight you'd have to make the room a cube and render out of max with a 6 camera setup with 45 degree FOV's which is a bit limiting. If you want to see this in action IM me in game and I'll show you my holodeck with seamless animations across the inside polys of a cube.

SL does have baking. The lighting isn't real time. Ever notice when you create a prim or rez something that it starts out evenly lit and then after a second or two acquires the correct lighting for it's location? I'm not sure how often it recalcs, but textures are displayed with baked lighting (albeit rather rudimentary baked lighting).

edit: come to think of it you could probably do any size room, but setting up the cameras in max for proper coverage would be a pain.

My main hobby, puppeteering and video editing, is separate enough that there's little overlap, but I can say that since I started SL, I haven't filmed a single puppet.

I'm hoping to build sets for the puppets in SL before long, and make some of the projects I've been unable to make before now. I do all my bluescreening and other post production in After Effects, so the integration of SL sets should be easy.

You can see my videos here if you are interested. The best two are "I'm With You" and "Major Tom" I think. Ezhar is right in that it really helps to have live audience for your creations. I know that if it weren't for the weekly, live, 4-hour, internet puppet show that I send my videos to, I wouldn't have stuck the hobby for so long. A word of appreciation here and there really helps keep ya going.

Chip - Ah, I guess it would make sense that SL bakes the textures at rez, even if it's just ambient lighting. Of course the idea of baking in Max would be to get shadows cast by objects, etc. I've been impressed by how much ambiance FPS games can add with that sort of baking. That's very sneaky with the holodeck - I guess the inside polys of a hollowed cube are all treated as one surface? Now I'm curious about the UV map and how much trouble you had making the animations!

Tiger - I'll try to check out the puppetry some time, and I'll perster you if I have any After Effects questions

It's actually six different animations, and the holodeck cube is built out of six boxes. The UV's are planar. Polys in SL are only one sided so you wouldn't be able to see the inside faces of a prim even if you managed to get inside one

If you have max5 you can use the built in texture baker to do shadows, and both brazil and vray advanced have their own baking utils. I haven't tried bringing in baked textures yet. I'm not sure if baking an object changes it's UV type in max or not. I know in the vray bake3d util it only does cubic mapping and renders out six baked images to project back onto the object. If your object is something other than a cube it might be difficult if not impossible to get the resulting texture maps aligned correctly in SL.

Sorry Chip, I wasn't clear. I meant the interior polygons created when you hollow a box prim, not polys seen from inside the mesh. I figured if those interior polys are all treated as the same surface by SL, then you could apply a single animation as a texture to them and the "walls" would automatically be synched. But obviously that's not what you're doing, and I don't know how you're getting all the animations synched

I have Max 4.5. I put off getting 5 to avoid switching in the middle of a project, which unfortunately lasted much longer than expected. I'll be upgrading to 6 soon, and built-in baking is just one of the things I'm really looking forward to (mental ray is up there).

ahhhhh, got ya... yeah, I think my brain would explode if I tried to figure out how to do it with a hollowed prim, hehe.

I haven't ordered my upgrade to 6 yet but it looks pretty solid. I'm a bit bummed about mental ray though since I bought vray advanced less than a year ago. It's so infuriating they don't tell you what they're working on for the next version. It makes it difficult to make purchasing decisions.

I almost always leave the previous version of max installed when I upgrade in case I need to go back to an old project that relies on plugins that haven't been ported.

I saw special pricing somewhere for upgrading from 4 to 6 and it was a considerable discount. It was time limited though so you might want to give a call to your dealer.

Thanks for the tip on the upgrade price, Chip, I'll check on it soon.

As an aside, if you're interested in seeing a baked texture in SL, check out the sign I made Viola today for her store in Tan. She wanted the name to look chiseled in marble with gold inlay (her store looks Roman). I'd previously used an embossed layer in Photoshop to make engraved metal for SL textures. This time, in Max, I boolean subtracted an extruded text spline from a box to get the chiseled letters. Ten I used a free direct light to cast shadows and rendered a head-on view to crop for the texture.

I did some experimenting myself yesterday. I made a Cornel box of sorts and used max's radiosity engine to bake the textures. It worked out very nicely but it has some drawbacks...

max's render to texture feature flattens the UV's and renders the entire baked texture for an object into one bitmap. That's not a problem with boxes since each side still ends up planar. You just have to crop the texture down to make a seperate bitmap for each side. It might also still work for cyllinders but I haven't tried it yet. I don't think spheres will work.

The other big problem is that you really need to make the objects into lights to got them to ignore SL's shading. If we had the ability to make textures appear self illuminated without having to use a light it would be a lot more useful.

Interesting, Chip. You're more ambitious than I am, I had only been imagining using baked textures for flat surfaces. I guess you'd need the baked texture to preserve its UV mapping to do something like a sphere. I can't think of a way to do that if Max doesn't do it for you. What a shame. Still, I think I'm going to make an effort to incorporate baking where I can, at least as an experiment. I'm going to go ahead and do a sample room with baking to get an idea of the limits.

For me its SL and The Sims Online.