Final Review and Last minute touch ups

After receiving an email from Clare and Isa today, I found out that my objects were to big and stopped other people from building. I had no idea it would be able to effect others around me because I thought the platform we were given to build has its own limits so it wouldn’t effect others from building but that wasn’t the case. Ive emailed them both to mark my work and then found something online that could help my build a lot so I quickly jumped into second life to apply it.

It was a simple piece of script that I needed to enter in to finalize the purpose of my build to allow avatars to get information about the organs. I added the script so that the avatars with be given a link to a website to learn more. It is very simple but I had run out of time to complete what I had set out to do and with the complications of the sizes effecting others I needed to get it working ASAP so it could be marked.

After searching for awhile online to figure out how to change the land impact of some of my mesh objects, i found out there was little I could do without going back into sculptris and blender to re-size all my objects. Due to the fact each of my mesh have so many polygons that make up the mesh I couldn’t do much at all. I tried going back into second life to give my objects a more detailed once over and I met Isa there. He said each of the objects were to large so I needed to scale them down but not enough to compromise my builds look. The good thing was that after I had scaled each one down it made the build look better because  you could see each organ in full from the platforms provided but before you could only see some of each of them because they were so big.

I hope I haven’t truly effected anyone’s builds by having this happen. I just didn’t know it was happening and due to the fact know one else had tried to achieve this before I had know one to talk to about it. Fingers crossed  I have completed everything asked of me in the assignment and that I haven’t stopped anyone else’s learning.

The process of learning new things and making them into real objects with second life has been challenging but great to see I can achieve them. My main goal was to make a build that could be educational and immersive and I think I have the immersive side of the build done quite well with the textures of the blood shining etc but the educational side of things was hard for me to achieve. I wanted the avatars to be able to click an object and receive a file that had information within it but I couldn’t figure out how to do this so I have set the objects up to send the avatar to a link containing that information.

Overall this has been one of most enjoyed classes, its not often you get to combine your creative side with I.T. I had a lot of big learning curves while creating this build and there is still so much more I have to learn but I am going to carry on with second life and 3d mesh building even after this class has been completed because I can see virtual environments becoming a massive part of new technology in the future and I want to see where these skills can take me in the way of job prospects.

Finnishing build

I solved all my issues I had with my textures. I had to take them out of the unity file that i had downloaded import it into a Pdf file then copy and past each image one by one so that I could save them as an image file. Sadly putting a texture on a mesh item within second life makes the texture stretch across every angle and start the texture again meaning the texture is unrecognizable.

Once I had the textures on the mesh the best I could then i started the build around the mesh to create a box to in case the project completely. I placed a simple box prim and hollowed out the center to do this. Now that I can covered my whole project it meant I wasn’t able to enter the build with ease so I created a teleport both outside and inside to enter and exit. Rezing my torso I built and entering a script within it that will allow a user to right click and select teleport. Sadly I didn’t work with other avatars other then me so I had to edit it once again. I added a extra script to the heart object within my build so that when a avatar clicks on it, it would grow in size and decrease in size like it was beating. I wanted to enter a timer to it so it would beat on its own and have a sound effect entered but I could get it working properly with the script or get a sound file that would allow me to upload it in.

I created a walkway throughout the build with simple prims so the avatars can explore the insides of the build with viewing platforms as well.  Each platform was giving floating images of how the organs look within a real body so that the avatars get a sense of where they are. I was planning on entering a script that allows the users to click on them and receive information about the organ. Sadly I didn’t get to this due to other classes getting ahead of me and my time management.

I have applied textures to each of the walkway prims so that it looks like the inside of a human body, with blood and shinning colours. I would’ve liked to do so much more work within this build I have run out of time. Overall the build looks good and I have put a lot of time into the way I wanted it to be. The biggest downside is that I haven’t put the information within the objects to really complete it. I hope others enjoy exploring my build and hope it gives them a sense of the way our organs sit within our bodies.

Flowing Ideas

I was looking into how I can make my build be immersible but with reducing the amount of complicated sculpts and Clare gave me the great idea to allow the avatars to enter the body. At first I was going to make a full torso outside of the organs and allow avatars to just walk straight through the front and inside the body but using sculpts means i wont be able to achieve this very easily. Clare suggested that I just allow avatars to teleport inside the body and that would solve a lot of my problems.  I have now created a 3d torso in Sculptris and imported it inside second life. The next step I will need to achieve will be trying to make a shell to contain the organs and creating walk ways to let the avatars walk up the inside and view each of the organs.

Im still dealing with some serious problems to do with rendering my sculpts within second life, applying my textures to my sculpts and also being able to make my build just look the way I had envisioned it. Sadly I am running out of time to get this assignment in and I might need to compromise with some of my ideas to actually get this completed on time.

Texturing

After creating the basic 3d sculpts I need for my build the next thing I needed to get were organic textures to make them more life-like. I found an amazing texture pack on the Unity 3d app store that I had to purchase myself but it came with a full selection of different types of blood, flesh and gory textures. Once I had purchased it, I found that I couldn’t open it without downloading unity itself and once I had downloaded it and opened it up I could export the files out of unity into the correct file type I needed. Due to the textures all being in a .Tiff File type and Second life cant take that file type I hit a wall. Ive tried all sorts of exporting from unity but they still stay linked to Unity.

Ive spent countless hours searching how I can get these textures in the right file format and asked many people about it but not many people no how because they haven’t tried anything like this before. hopefully if I put a question on the Unity forum I will be able to get some answers but if not im going to have to find other textures I can use. It will be a real shame not to use the unity textures but if I run out of options im going to have to resort to that.

Building 3d

Building in second life wasn’t an option for me after I tried countless times to create something as difficult as building lungs. Anything organic is extremely difficult to build within second life so I decided to create them within a 3d sculpting program called Sculptris.  By doing this I will be able to create exactly what I want and have some good detail on them, I will then import the meshes created into second life as normal objects.

I have Created my stomach, Liver and lungs within Sculptris and they have turned out great, the only set back is I cannot import a file type of .obj into second life. After doing some research online about how to import into second life I discovered that I will need to import the .obj files into another 3d sculpting program named blender to export them once again into a .dae file. By doing this my sculpted files can now be imported into Second life.

  

I was able to import the files into second life but I needed to research how to put them in without the detail resolution being to high, otherwise I the object would be to large for me to place onto my build platform. Once I asked Clare for some $L (Currency within Second life) I was able to import each sculpt into second life and play around with the setting to get them just right. I had one problem with my lungs unfortunately, I lowered the resolution because my lungs were to large but because it was lowered, there were parts missing from the build. I think the problem with this was that it had to much detail in the first stage of sculpting so I might have to go back and recreate a simplified version of them to make them work.

Blog two: Starting to build

This week I started creating my first organ that will be apart of the main build. The Heart took me at least 2 hours to try and get the way I wanted it to look. Using sketches I had draw of anatomically correct organs I was able to recreate the heart to the best of my ability using only basic modified prims e.g. Spheres and cylinders. Using prims that have edged sides was out of the question to make sure the organs have the most realistic and lifelike forms.

Each cylinder and sphere took its own type of modifying to make sure they didnt over lap and look non-realistic. Hopefully having once this has been textured and scaled to fit the rest of my build I will be able to put a script on it to create a “pumping” motion like a real heart would.

I Started my second set of organs as swell, The Lungs. They were extremely difficult to create and after a lot of basic prim modifying and trying to make them look realistic as possible I came to the conclusion that each I wasnt going to be able to create what I wanted within second life. I have now started my build within a program named Sculptris. Sculptris is a 3d modeling program that will allow me to import my builds from there into Sculptris. The only catch is that I need to download another program called blender to import my build into so that I can change the file type and be able to import it into second life.

Brief for my Content Creation

The final assessment allows us to express what we have learned within Multi-User Virtual Environment’s and I have chosen a build of the human torso and its internal organs. I understand this will be a highly time intensive build but I feel like I will be able to achieve this.

Overall my main goal is to present an experience to other users through interactive objects, Textures and lighting, effects and if time even scripts. Hopefully by doing this I will be able to have other second life viewers interested and engaged within my build.

Creating this specific build I hope to give an educational 3d experience to second life users of the insides of a human body that has information about how they work together to make our body function as you walk around. I will start by building each individual organ focusing on the Heart, Lungs, Liver and stomach first, then creating the shell of the body’s skin around them. Once they have been placed correctly I will focus on the textures, scale, lighting and scripts if I have time and space. The Shell of this body will have a stairs case all the way up the inside of the body with platforms allowing the users to interact with the organs and gain information.

  Building the heart

Layout of Organs

Working out where the stairs will go

Having a learning goal is important to help you realize what you are aiming for. I hope to learn a lot from this build especially the way you scale objects to allow avatars to enter the body and walk around the insides while maintaining a full view of each organs position. Also Lighting within this built will have to be organic in a sense because I can’t just put bright glowing objects throughout the inside of the body taking away from the users experience.

Over all having the build look life like enough for second life will be my biggest challenge but I expect to spend a lot of time of this build so I will be trying to experiment with what I have learned within class and online tutorials to learn how to make it look the best it can be in all aspects.

Protecting Intellectual Property

Permissions are Second Life’s personal copy right programme that allow each user to control what happens to a prim that they have created. Much like normal copyright laws in real life preventing people from taking your content and using it for their own person gain or modifying it so they can take the credit for the work, these ‘permissions’ can stop other users from extorting the build you might have worked so hard to achieve.

Even though these copyright permission have been set in place to protect intellectual property there has been some very clever people that have used a programme that Linden Labs created to get around these permissions, it is named CopyBot.

Linden Labs designed the CopyBot programme to be able to import and export/back up creations to help develop AIs and NPCs within Second Life. After the programme was distributed on the Second Life website, some people used this tool to be able to cancel all the permission on an object exported and then imported back into Second Life. Copybot isn’t a programme within Second Life at all it is a C# coded software, that people started distributing this software through other sites outside of the Second Life websites and started charging other users with the Second Life currency. By doing this people were able to take other users creations and make profit off of them or take them as their own disregarding the permissions that were originally set by the real creator.

The Second Life community and businesses are trying to promote responsible and safe use of CopyBot. The main thing Copybot now gives to the Second Life community is the inventory Backup that helps to protect user’s creations. Even though people are trying to promote safe and responsible use for this tool, there is still a large part of the community that doesn’t agree and thinks using Copybot is theft and plagiarism.

In my opinion it is a good way to help create the world you desire faster and more efficiently but because there is real money that is involved within Second Life then there is a lot of bad points to it and should be recognised as theft.

There are permissions set in place to handle everyone’s creations so that if I wanted to give my creation away I could or if I wanted it protected then that is my choice.

Having someone from within Second Life come and take my creation after hours of hard work I could have put into it would be extremely bad because in my eyes, it is my property and they have just stolen everything from under my nose.

Protection of property rights within the virtual world is a real problem. Countries try to use current law, usually written for the real world to protect aspects of the virtual environment. As with many of society’s laws they are often only changed after a problem is identified. With the speed with which the virtual environment operates this could see many infringements take place before action on writing new laws takes place.

The virtual world is also a world without borders, meaning that laws that operate in many western society’s do not operate in many other countries; similar to the copying problems  many real life brands have with copied clothing etc coming from countries without our protections.

Two other areas are a problem for protection within the virtual world:

• Anonymous operators making it very difficult to track down the people taking advantage of others ingenuity and
• Many of the operators are small operations and do not have the influence or the resources to put pressure on governments to effect protective measures.

I believe that operators need to band together to build strength in size of numbers and collection of resources to develop influence to better protect their intellectual property rights from those that want to use other’s thoughts for their advantage.

I see Second Life as an opportunity for a virtual society to develop rules (permissions) that can replace laws currently in place in the real world. Second Life is a place where we can develop better, fairer society.

Permissions

There are three main permissions that help protect the work of each individual object or prim, Copy, Transfer and modify. Each one has its own specific set of declared rules that will help express your creative design with others on your terms.

The Copy permission allows others to copy your prim if they have already received it but if you have given the prim to another user and the objects permission has been set to no copy then once you have given or sold the prim to them then it is no longer have it, the other avatar does. Example: an object such as a lamp.

The transfer permission allows one avatar to give or sell an object to another and enables the new owner to transfer that object on to others if they do not change the already set permissions. Giving an item that has the permission to transfer but not copy will allow the object to be given/sold to the next person but you will not own that object any longer. Example: objects that you do not mind giving to another i.e. once transferred this is no longer in your personal inventory (if this has no copy attached).

The Modify permission lets the creator select if another user will be able to modify or change the creation you have made.  By doing this you can keep the work you have done the way it was without it being altered in anyway. It is also quite useful to have this turned on if you are working in a group build and letting other group members add certain things that can enhance the build, especially if you are stuck on what to do and are in need of help. Example: this enabling someone else modify your creations.

Each prim that has been rezed by you (the creator within Second Life) can have its permissions changed to suit your own personal needs. This protects your work in the way that best suits your needs.

Second Life Community Standards

Being able to relate to the Avatars within Second Life is difficult because you have no idea what the person behind the avatars Social and cultural behavior is. That’s why Linden Labs have designed the Community Standards for within Second Life to help each individual enjoy their experience within the Community.

Community standards for Second Life have been created to make every user be able to be comfortable being within Second Life and express their ideas without fear of criticism or abuse. The conditions given in the community standards are basically guidelines or rules set to stop all harassment that could happen within Second Life and breaking these conditions can result in a suspension or if repeated can result in complete expulsion from Second Life.

The easiest way to remember the community standards would be to always treat others the way you would like to be treated in real life. The standards are underlined as “The Big Six” and express each standard in detail.

1. Intolerance is the first that targets any type of derogatory language or images that can relate to a user’s gender, religion, race or sexual orientation.
2. Harassment e.g. if a user is threating, intimidating or sexually harassing other users.
3. Assaulting other users by pushing, shooting or using scripted objects to attack other users.
4. Disclosure of other Second Life user’s personal information without their consent is prohibited.
5. Any adult content is only to be displayed in adult communities and not in moderate or general communities.
6. Disturbing the peace is the last standard of the big six, it relates to any user that disrupts events, advertising undesired content and spawning in large items that slow servers and stop the enjoyment of other users.

It is interesting that Second Life has participants from many different real life cultures making the avatar experience a real mix of cultures and beliefs. With this occurring there is always the possibility of differing parts of cultures being brought forward within Second Life.

In addition people can immerse themselves in the virtual world enabling them to adopt differing personalities. This is always a potential risk where people’s avatars become a personality which does not follow society’s norms.

If a user in Second Life was not following any of these standards that have been created to keep our experience within Second Life enjoyable, I would try talk to the user through the chat to start with to make sure they are aware of the standards set within Second Life. The reason I would do this is because most users wouldn’t know about the community standards unless they had a good search through the Second Life website even though some of them are common sense, some people can get too carried away within the virtual environment and break some of the standards. If talking to them has no effect and the user continues to disregard the standards then I would report them in the Second Life environment.

These rules or community standards are here to make sure that each person within Second Life enjoys and feels comfortable within their new virtual surroundings but if someone isn’t following these standards then they should learn the hard way that it won’t be tolerated. Over all be respectful to the avatars within Second Life and in turn you will be respectful to the users in real life.

Here is a link where you can find the Second Life Community Standards:   https://secondlife.com/corporate/cs.php