Tag: Bagnaria

New Second Life Product: the Medhue Animesh Pet Chihuahua

Medhue and his partner Bagnaria (who together run a business called Full Spectrum, creating and selling 3D assets and animations for virtual worlds) are people I first got to know through Sansar, whom I interviewed in an episode of the Metaverse Newscast, focusing on the many wonderful, interactive worlds they created there:

You might not know this, but Medhue is well known for his work in Second Life, too. For example, for four years Medhue did the rigging and animation for a number of Zooby products, including the Zooby cat avatar (which I created an alt account for, just to wander the grid as a tuxedo tabby!) and the Zooby animesh baby (which I also own).

Medhue recently gifted* me one of his latest creations, a very cute animesh pet chihuahua:

Vanity Fair and Goliath the chihuahua

Using it could not be simpler. All you have to do is unpack and attach the HUD, and rezz out your first chihuahua pet. You will be prompted to give it a name (I called my first one Goliath!):

Everything is controlled via HUD: rezzing and derezzing pets, issuing commands, setting options, etc. In addition to holding them as shown in the picture above (with a wide variety of male and female Bento poses, including very nice petting animations), you can have them follow you—even play fetch with them! If you ask them to sleep, they will curl up in a slumber position, walking over to their pet bed if it is located nearby.

Here’s a closeup look at the dog, with a look at the commands menu on the HUD:

Here’s the notecard that comes with the product, explaining how it works:

Features:

  • Rez from the HUD
  • Name your Pet
  • Wander, Follow, Auto Rez, Name Tag, Mute
  • Force Sit, Stay, and Sleep
  • Fetching Toys
  • Holding options – go anywhere with pet
  • Tricks
  • Clothing Options

Instructions:

  1. Rightclick/Add Chihuahua Pet Hud from your inventory.
  2. Click on New Pet> , and Name the Pet in the dialog box pop up.
  3. If the Pet is already created, then choose Find Pet, or Select Pet, then select the pet you want to control.
  4. Click on Options to set the different options to your liking for the pet.
  5. Click on Commands to control your pet directly.
  6. The eat/drink options in Commands will only work if you have Medhue food bowls near.
  7. The Sleep option in Commands forces your pet to sleep where it is.
  8. If you have a Medhue Pet Bed, then when selecting Sleep and the bed is near, the pet will walk to and sleep in the bed.
  9. Hold the pet to be able to bring the pet anywhere in Second Life.
  10. Click Hold, then click Yes in the dialog pop up options.
  11. Click Next Hold, to cycle through the holding options.
  12. Click Unhold, to put the pet back on the ground when you are in areas you can rez items.
  13. Click Fetch to be able to throw items for your pet to run and find.
  14. Once you have clicked Fetch, you must go into first person mode, leftclick hold, and let go to throw the toy. A meter on the HUD will show the strength of the throw.
  15. Click Tricks, to be able to play a pet trick animation. More tricks can be purchased and added to the pet.
  16. The pet also has clothing and collar options, but those must be purchased separately.
  17. The pet works best on real Second Life ground, and also best when pathfinding is properly set up on the land. This is not required, but the pet will perform much better.

Contact Medhue Simoni if you have any problems with this product.
Mesh design, rigging, animation and texturing by Medhue Simoni.
Product coded by Ariu Arai.

You can rezz as many pet chihuahuas as you like—as many as your parcel can hold! If you wish, you can have a herd of chihuahuas follow you around! Here’s a 16-minute YouTube video from Medhue, explaining how the product works and demonstrating several chihuahuas in action:

The Medhue Animesh Pet Chihuahua is available on the SL Marketplace for L$1,499. It comes in two versions: a regular chihuahua or an apple head version. Medhue also sells coats, collars, beds, and bowls for the chihuahuas on his store, Medhue Animations. (Medhue also has an in-world store; here’s the SLURL.)

I have already fallen in love with Goliath! Expect to see him as my latest fashion accessory as I travel around Second Life!

And here’s an exclusive sneak peek at Medhue’s next animesh pet—a kitten, which presumably will work the same as the chihuahua:

I think Medhue Animations could have a hit on their hands!

*Effective immediately, my blog policy on accepting unsolicited gifts from content creators is as follows: If you give me the gift of a product (for Second Life or any other social VR platform or virtual world), I reserve the right to write or not write a review as I see fit. Accepting a gift puts me under absolutely no obligation to write a review, or to write a positive review.

Sansar Store Spotlight: Custom Female Avatars by FULLSpectrum

FULLSpectrum is a brand operated by Medhue and Bagnaria, specializing in custom male and female Sansar avatars created using their FULLSpectrum Avatar Kit 2.0 (which works with Blender 2.8, and is available for sale from the Medhue Animations website):

The Male Avatar Kit is US25.00, the Female Avatar Kit is US$35.00, and you can buy both kits together for US$55.00.

The latest custom female avatar for sale by FULLSpectrum is the beautiful, fair-skinned Lou, feauring 2K skin textures, blue-green eyes, and red fingernails and toenails. She is available for S$899 on the Sansar Store.

Here’s what Lou looks like all dressed up:

Another FULLSpectrum custom female avatar I own is Audrey, which features 4K skin textures, a curvy body, and warm brown eyes (she is also L$899 on the Sansar Store). She is so detailed that you can even see the pores on her skin! Stunning work.

Here is what Audrey looks like all dressed up:

(Please note that Lou and Audrey are both custom avatars, which means that you cannot make any adjustments to the head or face features, as you can with the new default Sansar Avatar 2.0 human avatars.)

Lou and Audrey are just two of the many custom avatars available for sale from the FULLSpectrum Store in Sansar. In addition to male and female custom avatars, Bagnaria and Medhue sell animated mesh objects such as parrots, palm trees, deer, polar bears and elephants!

UPDATED! Ample Coverage on Sansar Avatars: “We’re all peacefully witnessing the sansarship”

Jesus H. Christ.

Is there a full moon? That’s the only possible explanation of the levels of craziness I have been witnessing in the past 24 hours on various social VR platforms.

First was the three-ring circus around High Fidelity’s Virtual Co-working Island Cam. And now all holy hell seems to have broken loose in the avatar creation community over on Sansar.

Apparently, a Linden Lab employee has flagged several custom female avatars for sale on the Sansar Store for lacking “ample coverage” (i.e., having enough of their breasts, vagina, and ass covered, as per Linden Lab guidelines banning totally nude avatars. I’ve already written an editorial about this overly-strict policy and what I think about it.

Furthermore, the Linden Lab staff member then issued 24-hour deadlines for the avatars to be fixed, or have them removed. This edict has gone over about as well as it could be expected. One creator who is quite upset about it, Medhue, told me:

Of course, I complained to Ebbe that all the female avatars on the marketplace don’t have enough ample coverage. So, today, all the female avatars or most [were flagged], including Fabeo’s. Fabeo tried to make an announcement about it all, in a funny creative way, and [LL staff member] removed the comment, and banned him from the Discord. In fact, the whole Avatar channel was blocked for any posting for a number of minutes, twice. You could get quotes from Bagnaria and Fabeo about it all, and dealing with [LL staff member]. They are truly a tyrant.

It’s one thing to enforce the rules, but it is another to dictate how much time you have to do it. One day isn’t even remotely reasonable. The craziness in the Discord though, is a whole other level of craziness, by a Lab employee trying to justify their tyranny.

For Bagnaria and I, it is just super demotivating to know [LL staff member] is watching us closely, for any missed step. I only complained to Ebbe to show how they are targeting us alone. All those other bodies were posted a good week before ours. So, [LL staff member] is either targeting us, or they just didn’t do their job for a week, and then chose to hit us first.

(UPDATE: Apparently, Medhue was wrong, and Fabeeo Breen was not banned from Discord. However, “slow mode” was enabled, which meant that you could only post once every five minutes on the #avatar channel. I apologize for my role in reporting untrue information. I should have checked with Fabeeo before posting that, and I didn’t. Also, I screwed up in the use of the proper pronouns in referring to the LL staff member in question. They have all been changed to they/them/their.)

For her part, Bagnaria said:

Let me just say, have never felt less motivated to continue to work on anything in Sansar.

Fabeeo Breen reported on the message he received from Linden Lab:

Hi Fabeeo, Announcing the replacement of the Daphne avatar is fine, but please make sure that your announcement does not contain language that might fall under our Community Standards against Disturbing the Peace.

Medhue retorted:

It is quite funny now that the Lab is using Disturbing the Peace as their reason for removing things posted by their CUSTOMERS. Ebbe, I read the post, and it was entertaining, and creative. Quite enjoyable actually. The only people being disturbed by it was Lab employees. Crap! This could fall under Disturbing the Peace too…

We were the first to get hit by the censor hammer. As Bag pointed out, we were contacted yesterday, and given 24 hours to fix it, as if we are just sitting around doing nothing and actually have the time for this sillyness. If they wanted a specific coverage, then they should have given that to us, instead of being VAGUE. They vagueness created this. I asked them several times at meetings exactly what was required, and instead of taking that question seriously, they laughed it off and said AMPLE COVERAGE. Again, they created this situation, by being vague.

I have complained in the past about the sometimes heavy-handed moderating of the official Sansar Discord. And I have blogged about how we need a return to etiquette, manners and civility in our online forums, too.

Frankly, both sides in this dispute need to take a step back and re-examine how they are approaching this situation. I am not impressed by either side’s behaviour today. Linden Lab needs to stop being so heavy-handed. And, for their part, the content creators need to be a little less thin-skinned.

But all this patent ridiculousness over “ample coverage” could easily be addressed by letting avatars be naked, like Barbie and Ken dolls. Then, custom avatar creators wouldn’t have to guess if the painted-on underwear is too revealing or not. I mean, for God’s sake, the default system avatars and the most popular mesh body avatars in Second Life are sold naked. Why is that such a big deal in Sansar? Is Linden Lab that scared of Sansar being tarred with the brush of X-rated content that they have to police this sort of thing, and go to these ridiculous extremes? Are we going to have an Ample Coverage Police Force?

The only truly funny thing to come out of this godawful mess was Silas Merlin’s comment:

We’re all peacefully witnessing the sansarship…

Perhaps it’s time to re-examine the content guidelines for the Sansar Store again, maybe even loosen them up a little. Either that, or explicitly mandate exactly how much of the avatar needs to be covered.

After all, even children are allowed to play with Barbie and Ken dolls.

May I leave you all with some sage advice from Taylor Swift?

UPDATE, 5:00 p.m.: Well, this blogpost has sparked a wide-ranging discussion on the official Sansar Discord server, and I learned quite a few things that I didn’t know before, such as the fact that the “ample coverage” guidelines Sansar has now are the result of the adjustments they’ve made to accommodate content creators over a period of years, and that the 24-hours rule (while being reviewed, internally, in response to this episode) is also a compromise to the original policy, which was to remove such content immediately without notice.

So, the message I get from Linden Lab is that these rules are not made up arbitrarily or on the spot. Mind you, Linden Lab has historically not been very good at providing the context in which those rules are formulated and updated. And, to be fair, the users and content creators often assume the very worst of intentions on the part of Linden Lab, often leaping to conclusions without evidence. Both sides can improve.

But I do apologize to Linden Lab and their staff the part I played in this. In particular, I jumped the gun and published this blogpost without getting all sides of the story. That was clearly not the best way to handle this situation, and I’m sorry.

SECOND UPDATE, Sept. 18th: I have replaced the original illustration at the top of this blogpost with this wonderful tongue-in-cheek image supplied by Silas Merlin, who told me his own stories of “sansarship”, but requested that I do not repeat them on the blog. Thanks, Silas!

Episode 6 of the Metaverse Newscast: An Interview with Sansar Creators Bagnaria and Medhue in Scurry Waters and Scurry Canyon

I’m pleased to announce that Episode 6 of the Metaverse Newscast is now available for public view on YouTube (my Patreon supporters got a sneak peek yesterday).

My producer Andrew and I paid a visit to Scurry Waters, the tropical paradise created by Medhue and Bagnaria. Scurries are animated creatures made by Medhue, who is already well known for his Zooby cat and other animated creations in Second Life. Scurry Waters is full of things to do and see: ride an airboat, shoot pistols and try to trap each other in large floating bubbles, even blow up a pirate ship!

Bagnaria and Medhue discuss their creative partnership and we even get to discussing why some virtual worlds attract an older crowd than others. We wrap up the tour at Scurry Canyon, a fun and challenging shooting game. Can you make it to the very end?

If you are looking for previous episodes of the Metaverse Newscast, you can find them on the Metaverse Newscast channel on YouTube. We are still aiming to release one episode a month.

And if you want to support the show, may I steer you over to my Patreon page, where as little as US$1 a month unlocks exclusive perks and benefits? Whether or not you are a Patreon patron, thank you for your support!