Last Looks At Some SLB Exhibits

 

 

While the Second Life Birthday is over for most, for the exhibitors there were a few more days to see something. And so when I had a few minutes I checked out a few. One was the Relay for Life's exhibit, whom one Relayer described as "simple." But it did the job. It was at SLB Spectacular.

 

Eric Mondrain's Second Life Topography, which had a map of Belisseria, was at SLB Electrify.

 

Holocluck Henley's "Clucky Studios" at SLB Sparkle.

Hope by Raven at SLB Fabulous, a memorial to optimism and hope.

But some exhibits were already picked up, the plots empty.

 

Today is the last day for pickups, and tomorrow the sims will be closed to all but the Moles. And so the sims will once again be shelved until the next birthday.

 

Bixyl Shuftan 

 

Reader Submitted Pictures: At The SLB

 

From Alden Cortes, "What a view! Finally a high flight over Heterocera without any fear of running into security orbs."
 
  Erik Mondrian - 3D Terrain Model at SL21B
 
  http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/SLB%20Blissful/70/216/21

 

SL Video: "Terrain Model of the Bellisseria Continent in Second Life (January 2024)"

 

 

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From Eric Mondrain on January 20, "A terrain model I made showing Second Life’s Bellisseria continent in all its topographic glory, with a total of 2,541 regions as of January 20, 2024 (counting “Sandbox Bellisseria” and the Welcome Hub regions as well, just for good measure). [https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Lind...] I gathered each region’s elevation data at half-meter X and Y intervals using an interconnected set of LSL scripts, feeding that data to my computer via a series of HTTP requests, then (re)constructed and textured the terrain model(s) in Blender using its incredibly powerful Python API [https://docs.blender.org/api/current/...]. The textures here can be downloaded individually from Second Life’s official map servers [https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Lind...]. Note: It took my revised scripts a little over 18 hours to gather the elevation data for the entire continent (compared to the 190-ish hours that it probably would have taken when I first started this terrain modeling project, before I optimized the process). At the original level of detail, Bellisseria’s topography would be over 1.3 billion triangles; for the purposes of this video (and to prevent my laptop from exploding), I decimated each region’s mesh so that the model in Blender totaled only about 13 million triangles instead."

SL Video : "Perspective and Place In Virtual Space"

 

 

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 From Erik Mondrain on April 2022, "A short video essay I made, talking about 'perspective' and 'place' and how these concepts manifest within the virtual world of Second Life"

Reader Submitted: SL Video: "A Blake Sea 360 in Second Life (built by LDPW)"

 

 (Click here if the video fails to play)

 From Erik Mondrain on March 22, "As yet another experiment in virtual cinematography (and as a nice way to relax), here is a leisurely, 360-degree panning shot that I did while floating in Second Life's Blake Sea—with my draw distance cranked up to 600 meters. The EEP Sky preset that I used while filming was [TOR] HORROR - Bloody moon. I also tweaked things a bit in my video editor, mainly in order to reduce color banding and to make the sky feel a little more vibrant, and a little less grim, than the name of that aforementioned preset would suggest. Located in Blake Sea - Hawser: (169/228/21). For more info about the LDPW (Linden Department of Public Works) and about the Blake Sea, check out the description for "escape," the second video in my MFA Thesis series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMdXU...​ My fox avatar was designed by Liam Roark of Luskwood (https://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Luskwood​) and is sold by Luskwood Creatures.​ And it floats thanks to Conrad Aluveaux's indispensable Swimmer HUD.  Filmed on Linux with the Firestorm Viewer and SimpleScreenRecorder and using a SpaceNavigator 3D Mouse. Edited with Kdenlive."

SL Video: "Tripping through Skyscrapers in Second Life"

(Click here if the video fails to play)

By Erik Mondrain in May 21, "Skyscrapers is a Second Life art installation by Gem Preiz, an artist most known for his intricate fractal images. Here, he created an immersive, scaled-down cityscape—inspired, as he writes, by his 'fascination for [these] modern cathedrals which are, like those of the past, the synthesis of all the techniques of their time, dedicated to the collective aspirations of their builders.' For more about the installation, and about the idea of 'scale' in a virtual world, please see the excellent write-ups by Inara Pey (https://modemworld.me/2020/04/22/gems...) and Ricco Saenz (https://secondsighting.wordpress.com/...). 

"I highly recommend visiting the installation 'in person' as well, by the way, since there's much more to see there than I had time to show in this video. Also, a quick note on technique: Although there are a number of elevated mass transit tunnels crisscrossing the city, there are no trains, just the flying vehicles at the landing point; I filmed by setting my camera position and angle appropriately, then going "backwards" through the tunnels with my SpaceNav after turning off (or rather, zeroing out) all the other axes in the flycam's configuration. And the color shifts and the hallucinatory, back-and-forth swaying are, of course, a result of editing, not something this or any other city does naturally... so far as I'm aware. ^ - ^ 

"Music is by SLOOM, specifically the track 'Skyscrapers' from his Mix Tape #1 album. (And yes, though it still had to fit the kind of sound I wanted, I did seek out a track with the same name as Gem's installation on purpose.) It can be found at the Free Music Archive (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Sl...) and is used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License version 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...). More of SLOOM's music can be heard on Bandcamp: https://sloomsmixtapes.bandcamp.com/ "

Located in Akimori: https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Akimori/128/128/2981