Very early this morning my time, Strawberry Singh and Draxtor Despres paid a visit to Adam Frisby in Sinespace. I wasn’t there (still sleeping), but Strawberry did a livestream of the event:
Another region they all visited was Race Meet – Winter Mountain, a wintertime raceway where they drove dune buggies which Adam created. The vehicle physics in Sinespace are quite good!
It’s a great video and I learned a few things about the Sinespace user interface I didn’t know before. Looks like they had a lot of fun too! They were chatting in Skype while they were in-world (there’s no voice chat in Sinespace yet).
Here’s a list of Sinespace regions they visited, according to Adam:
UPDATE March 6th: It turns out that Sinespace does have voice chat, but some regions have that ability turned off, which is why they used Skype in the livestream.
Did you know that there are now over 900 published experiences in Sansar? Today we visited the following experiences, three of which were selected at random from the Sansar Atlas:
Urquhart Castle, by Mac Rackham (selected at random from the Sansar Atlas)
Metaverse News Studios, created by Tyler Scarborough (selected at random from the Atlas)
Paula’s Hütte, by Paula 70 (selected at random from the Atlas)
Here’s Drax’s livestream of the event:
And here’s Strawberry’s:
There’s a real feeling of camaraderie at these Atlas Hopping events that has developed from the same people meeting week after week, but newcomers are always welcomed!
Update Feb. 25th: Medhue shared some wonderful pictures of our Atlas Hopping adventures, and he gave me permission to post them here. Thanks, Medhue!
Meeting on the Roof of Urquhart CastleDarkwood FoestMetaverse News Studios
Several months ago I wrote about using Microsoft Windows 10’s Paint 3D program to create content for Sansar. Using Paint 3D is so easy that a child could use it to create great-looking three-dimensional content! But unfortunately, there were some problems with importing linked objects from Paint 3D into Sansar, as well as with the huge size of the imported objects.
Draxtor Despres and Vassay have worked together to create this YouTube tutorial video which explains how to use the free Blender software to fix the problems in mesh content created using Paint 3D. Drax and Vassay used this workflow to create the fun and funky content you can see in Drax’s experience, called Meet the Draxies. It’s got a wonderful cartoon-like feeling to it, which is actually very easy to recreate!
Basically, there are six steps to using Blender to fix your Paint 3D-created mesh object:
Import the FBX-format file you got from Paint 3D;
Rescale the object (to fix any potential size problems in the object);
Decimate each part of the object (to cut down on the number of polygons in your object);
Set the normals of each part of the object using the Set From Faces feature;
Create UVs for each part of the object using the automatic Smart UV Project feature;
Select all the parts of your object and export as an FBX-format file.
This is an excellent tutorial video, which takes you through the workflow step-by-step. My only quibble with it is that Drax doesn’t give enough information about the all-important roughness and metalness maps, which you need to include so your Paint 3D-created mesh objects look the way you want them to in your experience. (Linden Lab recently released an update to the Sansar client software, so a lot of mesh objects created before the change now have an unnatural shininess to them.)
So here is a bit more information on the metalness and roughness maps. These are just PNG-format image files, which can be as small as 2×2 pixels in size. You can create them in PhotoShop or GIMP or any graphics program. They are essentially one of the 256 shades of grey between pure black and pure white. Here’s a diagram from OldVamp that shows what an object looks like when you change the metalness and the roughness maps:
Most of the time, you are going to want to use a white roughness map, and a black metalness map (the ball in the bottom right corner of this diagram). If you want something really shiny, you are going to use a black roughness map and a white metalness map (the ball in the upper left corner of the diagram). You should only use a white metalness when you want a metal object. Here’s another example of roughness and metalness maps, using a brass object:
