ir a principal |
Ir a lateral
Meanwhile back at the ranch...I rethought the whole interaction with the media panels paradigm. The panels were just not appearing fast enough with the whole detect avatar sensor. So I decided that we would place some type of object in and around the village (something that is commonly seen in El Cerrito that wouldn't detract from the appearance of the village) that would indicate to visiting avatars that these are learning opportunities that they could be activated by touch (which is a left click in Second Life). For now these objects are white pylons, later they may be chili peppers or something else that is somewhat common in El Cerrito. When touched, the media panels resize and become visible.With the help of Emin, Steve and Tony, we authored some web pages with the embedded video and some links for further exploration on various topics featured in the video. In order to activate the panels, the avatar must now answer a question (the answers can be found by exploring the village and accessing the media panels).We used the quiz tool in TRACs to generate the question, and discovered that by doing it this way we could theoretically track a student's progress on the sim by having TRACs record the answers. This is really cool because it means we can collect data about usage, etc. And, students could be graded on their work, automatically.So basically, an avatar touches the sensor object whose script tells the media panel to appear and launch the web URL in the parent (sensor) object's description. The panel appears and the student sees the question web page in TRACs. After answering correctly, the URL with the embedded video is launched. The script allows for the avatar to touch the sensor to make the media panel disappear, or it detects that the avatar has walked away and disappears on its own.
If you want to see what this looks like, you can access the html from this URL:http://tiny.cc/5lvb8The following are screen shots of what it looks like in Second Life:
So last time, my panels were not rezzing fast enough, along with some other problems. So I turned to Emin for a few pointers.At first, we thought that having the script actually "rez" the object was causing the delay (as well as lag). So the next thing we tried was a script that would resize the media panel object whenever an avatar was within range of the sensor object. In other words, it would already be rezzed already, just sized so small that you wouldn't be able to see it until the sensor told it to get big. Likewise, it would get small again as soon as the sensor no longer detected an avatar presence.Unfortunately, it would seem that the whole sensor deal just wasn't going to work like I wanted because again, there was a delay. I decided I would think on it some more (as well as let Emin think on it some more!), and decided to build Joe's next door neighbor Luisa's house to help fill-in the area.
I tried to build this house using as few prims as possible, so this was my first mega-prim building, and I knew that the challenge would be in figuring out how to texture the mega-prims so that they would look correct and not all stretched out.
I found that "painting" the textures in Photoshop using 2560 X 2560 pixel canvases, and then scrunching them down to 512 X 512 worked really well for me. I also found out that mega-prims with alpha layers are a little tougher. I am now on fence version 2 billion, and I still don't have it right. It looks very fuzzy unless you are zoomed in very close, and the fence posts kind of glow because of the stretching. I also had problems with the roof because you can't just stretch mega-prims to a new size, as they revert back to the normal parameters of Second Life and become small. So I never could make the roof parts merge together correctly. But these are things that can be corrected later if needed.
For now, though, we have a somewhat filled in section of the village by Joe's house. Now I need to get back to the scripting of the media panels.
I found this neat script generator that gave me a good start to compiling the script that I wanted to use for my shared media panel objects. You select what you want your script to do via radio buttons, and it generates the script you should paste into your object.
http://www.3greeneggs.com/autoscript/
I generated a script that would rez an object (from the scripted object's inventory) when an avatar is detected within 3 meters of the scripted object. And it worked pretty well, except for problems with lag.
I had the scripted object very small and hidden in the ground. I didn't want "media screens" standing around my simulation of EL Cerrito, yet I want the avatars to be able to interact with the videos when they are in the part of the village that the videos were taped. So I wanted them to appear and disappear as avatars arrived and left. What happened was that if you walked over the sensors, the script didn't have enough time to start, and the avatar might never even see that anything had happened. Plus, the script didn't have offer a way to make the panel go away when the avatar left the area. Another glitch was that it would continue rezzing media panel after media panel until my avatar was away from it.
I keep using the word "media panel" and I wanted to make clear what I mean by that. With Viewer 2 in Second Life, any object can become a fully-functional web browser by simply adding a URL to its texture properties. They call this a "shared media object" because it allows different avatars on different machines to see the same thing at the same time. (or at least close to it) I want avatars to access video footage of the real El Cerrito that I have on one of our streaming servers. So a "media panel" means a flattened cube with video URLs that the avatars can watch.
Another good reference resource for learning the scripting language (LindenLanguage) is the LSL Wiki. http://lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=HomePage
Which is where I am going now to look for more help with my script!
I still need tents. I shopped around in SL for some, but none of the dome tents have mod permissions and they are HUGE (I guess the purpose of their size is so that avatars can actually go inside of them.) So the only tents available are the tee-pee kind, and that just doesn't look right to me. So back to drawing tents.
I decided that I should just try making them out of cylinder prims, and then just texturing each face with a tent-like texture. I want to get the tents out of the way so I can focus on the scripting that my interactive ideas for this area are going to require. We have the showNtell meeting coming up in a couple of days and I want to be able to show an area of the sim that is mostly finished.While my prim tents were not as sad as my sculpted tents, I still am not satisfied. It's funny how I thought the tents would be so simple, but I would seriously rather build and texture a whole house at this point. So the only thing to do is go to my good buddy Steve and get him to do some "nerb" magic in the Maya application (which someday I hope to learn!)While Steve was working on the tent sculpts, I started figuring out how I want visitors to interact with our sim. I have a ton of video from past trips to El Cerrito that I used in the Google Earth part of this project, and I would like to reproduce that in Second Life on a higher level. But I don't want big video screens laying around all over the place taking away from the feel of El Cerrito.
By the end of the day, Steve has given me tent sculpt maps and textures, and I have decided to "hide" the video screens in parent objects by making them small until an avatar is detected to being within a certain amount of meters from the object, at which point it will become big and show the videos. I will start working on the scripts next week.
So, my tents or Steve tents?? ......hmmmmm....not a difficult choice. I'm going with Steve Lux's Luxury Tents!
I found out that we are going to do a "show-n-tell" next week with our boss, so I decided I wanted to fill in around Joe's house and start adding in some of the interactivity, so that everyone could see where I am going with this whole project.One of the things that I needed to complete Joe's area of the village were some neighboring houses, some foliage, and the tents that the field students stay in out in his yard.Emin had just sent me a link to a free application called PloppSL that allows you to paint your object, and it then "pumps" it into a 3-D object. It will then export a sculpt map for you to use in Second Life. So, I decided to give Plopp a try. I mean, a domed tent should be an easy object to figure out. (http://www.secondplopp.com/)
At first glance, PloppSL looks very child-like, which initially gave me hope that I might soon be turning out sculpted prims for all my Second Life needs. There is no explanation for how it works, so I had to find a tutorial, and after that it was quite easy to use.
The drawing tools are quite clunky and I had a hard time using them with any kind of precision. But eventually I painted a tent, and then pumped it up into a 3-D object. It never seemed to make anything "wide" enough, but I figured I could stretch it in Second Life.
Once satisfied with my Plopp drawing, I exported out the sculpt map for my tents. If you have never seen a sculpt map, don't expect it to look anything like what you painted in Plopp. It is a color-coded file that tells an object what "shape" to take and looks kind of like an ink-blot test. I personally see an owl or a bat in my tent sculpt map - for whatever that's worth!
I was so excited to import my sculpt maps into Second Life and try them out. My first attempt had no z-value, and no matter how much I tried to stretch it in Second Life, it was pancake flat, and did not resemble a tent in any shape or form.
I made several more attempts in PloppSL, thinking that I should try to make the shape more simple and less-detailed. That helped a little bit, but my sculpted tents never really made the grade. I could eventually get a tent shape wit the sculpt map texture, but never anything that would wrap the texture and color of a tent correctly.So I will have to rethink how to do tents. And my personal take on PloppSl is that it was a nice try, but it needs more features, such as copy and paste. Is it too much to wish for some kind of replicator application where you copy and paste an object from photoshop and it renders a perfect sculpt-map file for you to use in Second Life?
Now that I have Joe and his neighbor's house up, I think I may end up having to redo the street layout. The streets just look really thin when my avatar is walking around in front of the buildings that I have up, and I am having a hard time keeping my builds small enough to fit in the street space. There is also a problem with the competing alpha channels of various objects, and some of the stuff I have to lay out on top of the street flat panels will need alpha channels.
I think that maybe I am going to wait and when all is said and done, I will go back and fill in the mega street panels with what the ground should look like in those particular areas. That way the mega prim panels will only have to have a transparency along the edges. No sense in doing it now, though, until I have everything laid out and I can look at the big picture while I color it all in.
In the meantime, I decided it would be a good idea to organize all of my files in Phaeris Bueller's Second Life inventory, as well as all of the loose files I have floating around on my desktop while I think about what I need to do next.
I am still searching for photos and input as to what Joe's yard looks like and the layout of the surrounding structures. While I have been working on Second Life, Tony and Steve have been taking what I did in Google Sketch-Up and Google Earth and making it work in a web page. And it has turned out really awesome.
It still has a few details that need to be ironed out, such as maybe a pop-out light box for the videos, getting rid of the balloon markers since the navigation is now on the web page, and maybe a way to download and launch the KML in the application Google Earth (as opposed to the plug-in in the web page).
What is really cool, though, is that with the new shared media tool in the new Second Life client, I can create a surface that will display the web page and avatars can then interact with it. Very exciting. Can't wait to get that new computer so that I can run the new Second Life client.
Anyway, here's the URL: (You will need to have Java enabled and the Google Earth plugin installed.)
http://id.its.txstate.edu/elcerrito/gearth/version3.0/gep.html#
After building Joe's house, I decided to start filling in his part of the neighborhood so that we could start adding in some examples of the interactivity I have planned for this area. I started by building the house next door. My memory of what all is there and what everything looks like is a little hazy, so I spent quite a bit of time going through photos.The last time I was in El Cerrito, my main project was to videotape Dr. Nostrand telling the history of the village and his story of how he first started studying El Cerrito. I had no idea that I would be trying to recreate this place in a 3-D environment, so sadly, I don't have photos of all sides of these buildings. I plan to remedy that when I go out there this summer.So, I took what photos I had and began to build. This is not a structure that will need an interior, so my goal is to use as few prims as I can, and just texture the sides of solid cubes. This particular building has a hip roof, and I attempted to recreate that by shearing the top of my cube that had been cut into a triangle. Unfortunately, that made the texture I applied to it mess up, and I quickly decided that it was a detail I can live without.
So, moving on, I wanted to try and have a foundation for this building. It has a porch on the front if it, and I distinctly remember in real life having to walk up some steps to get to the front door. It dawned on me that my terrain is a lot more flat and smooth in Second Life than it is in El Cerrito. Almost all of these structures are on land that isn't level, which is why the foundation is exposed on one side and not the other. I didn't feel like trying to edit the terrain was worth the building foundations, and made the decision to add any foundations later.
It took me about a day of building in Second Life and making textures from photographs in Photoshop to finish this building. Now that it has been places, I am trying to remember what the rest of Joe's yard looks like. Time to start going through the photos again.
As you take the final curve and start the descent into El Cerrito, the view of the village opens up, and the structure that stands out the most is the residence of Jose C'de Baca (Joe). A person not familiar with the village might mistake this house for a hotel or a church because it has been remodeled with a Territorial-style facade and is well-kept by the owner.
Every summer the C'de Baca family kindly lets the field school use his place, and this is where everyone sleeps and eats. Joe's backyard becomes "tent city" as the students arrive for their week of field school, while other people grab couches and floor space inside. Because water and plumbing are always a challenge in El Cerrito, a portable restroom is available on the street near the front of his house so that the indoor plumbing won't get overloaded. Everyone gets an inside shower, though. Anyway, thanks to Joe and his family, the group is able to rough it without having to REALLY rough it.
Since Joe's place is one of the more familiar structures for me, I decided to start filling in my structure map footprint with his house. Unfortunately, I only had one photo that included the entire front of his house, and I had to do a lot of work from memory. It's amazing how many things you can forget or realize that you just never noticed while you were there in real life.Eventually, I want this to be a fully functional structure, so I built it to be easily converted later on using panels instead of cubes. I immediately realized that it wasn't going to fit into it's allocated footprint, but I decided to worry about that later.
The thing that really threw me on this building was the dormer on the front of the house. I had a hard time figuring out how to make the textures fit on the pieces that made that part of the building. Also how to figure out the angles where the second story roof meets the lower level roof and how to make them meet was a little perplexing. In the end, some things just couldn't be totally exact, and I had to remind myself that it's okay as long as it is recognizable as Joe's house.
I also learned that I am much better at building textures and theatrical-type flats that don't require a straight edge or any kind of geometrical or architectural logic. For instance, I have no foundations for any of the buildings I have done so far. And that is how it is in Second Life, learn as you build, fix it later!
Now that I am fairly happy with the roads, I figured I would lay out a map of where the structures should go. There are 4 main structures that I want to have as fully functioning buildings eventually (meaning they will have furnished interiors that an avatar can go inside) : the school, the church, the C'de Baca residence, and the dendrochronology site. The other buildings will be textured solid cubes. They are no less important though, as they illustrate two major concepts: the location of the church in the center of the "plaza" characteristic of most Spanish villages, and the architecture of added-on structures to the original family house, which is indicative of inheritance practices.
I used one of Dr. Nostrand's maps, and placed flattened white cubes in Second Life to map out the buildings. I am a little concerned about the size of the structures because there seems to be a space issue, as in I don't know if I have enough. It's daunting to consider that I may have to redo the whole road thing in order to make space. So, for now, I am just going to go with the layout I have, and start filling it in. Any changes needed for the road panels will be procrastinated for later.
Came into work this morning to the same problem corner in my El Cerrito road map. The pieces just wouldn't line up the way I wanted them to. The flattened mega-prism wouldn't tile correctly, and I didn't want to hang a huge square off the side of the hill. I'm stubborn that way.
So I tried a whole bunch of different things throughout the day. Finally, I realized that I should just fill in that corner with a small panel. It didn't need to be a mega prim, it didn't have to hang off the side and it lined up fairly well. I had to do a little terrain editing, but nothing drastic. As it turns out, sometimes it's easy to make things more difficult than they need to be.
So, I solved the lining-up problem only to be faced with another problem. Everywhere the roads met on the mega prims, you could see an edge. I had run into this problem before, and had not figured a way out of it. I tried making every side but the top side transparent. No difference, except now it's really hard to see the panels and select them because of the transparency.
I tried many different things: offsetting the textures, moving the panels around, changing the texture repeats. Finally, I decided to just fix it the easy way by covering it up with the terrain. In El Cerrito there are bad spots in the roads, so in Second Life El Cerrito there are now bad spots in the road covering up my ugly seams. It was a solution that only took a few minutes and very little brain power. ;~D
I still can't get the roads to layout correctly, and while I like the texture I created "ok" - I think I could do better. So I spent the day in Photoshop trying to figure out how to make realistic tire ruts that actually follow the curve and contours of the road.While I was working on that Emin (Troy Vogel) came to the village bearing presents. We now have a chipmunk, some birds, a bird feeder that attracts birds, and a weather station. The weather station is awesome. I can now make it snow, rain, lightening, etc. It even rains blood and meteors and causes ground fires. When it rains, puddles appear on the ground. Pretty cool. It gave me an idea of how I would like to "animate" the fields being irrigated.
Also while Emin was there, we tried out a grand-daddy of mega prims (256) and put a dome over the entire island to see if we could create our own atmosphere. Emin used a texture on it that he had just found on the internet of a yellow horizon. The effect was pretty cool.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I was still working in photoshop to try and come up wioth a realistic road texture. I already had the sandy texture with the color I wanted to use from photos of El Cerrito. To make it more realistic, I went in and added some vegatation-looking stuff to the sides of the roads that would help blend it all in with teh ground textures. But I was still struggling with how to make the tire tracks follow the curves and contours of the roads.
I finally achieved the effect I was after with some help from Steve Lux. He had me use the magic wand tool to select just the streets. Using fills, and shrinking the selection, rinse, repeat, I ended up with a layer of dark lines that followed the curves. I then blurred the sandy image on the layer underneath, and then merged the whole image down. I think the road looks a lot better now. I am still baffled at how to make them meet up though in the corner by the church, though.
