Radniel Padron

Second Life Final Project

What fascinates me about Second life is our ability to build and come up with amazing structures and thousands of different types, it is a world that is completely created by its residents and building structures its something that everyone in Second life must learn. To every Sim I visit I see the most astonish buildings, and most of them are just organized formations of prims. A good example of an amazingly large and complex structure is Mont Saint Michel, where it is mostly just made out of simple Second Life prims.

 My idea for the final project was about creating a room or just a small structure of one or two floors and try to achieve the same type of detail that I see in so many castles and churches and Victorian style houses all around the Sims.

 I wanted to give the atmosphere of a clean and simply detailed catacomb, basilica or a not too complex pantheon. The structure would have columns, not extensible complex, but enough, keeping in mind the number of prims allowed in each sim, these columns would be brought from Maya to Second Life. I would have an extensive variation of textures for different walls and also for the columns, doors and windows. For the window I would be trying to create gothic shape to it. The floors would have elevations, creating steps between rooms and the entrance.

My goal is to get as close as I can to the very complex buildings that we can find around Second Life. I want to create a place interesting enough where avatars from Second life could walk in appreciate its textures, inside configurations of spaces and forms of columns. I want the avatar to enter a renaissance structure, where you could find a mix of roman and gothic architecture. 

Final Project Proposal

As I mentioned last class, I am interested in Marey's chronography, especially those with people. Since poses and animations are important elements of Second Life, especially avatar, I think I will be worth to bring the motion of Marey's study in Second Life and at the same time, export Second Life animations outside SL. Last several days, I was playing with one of Marey's photos, which captures the motion of pole vault. I used Animare to adjust my avatar's position to be the same as the man in Marey's photo. Then I export each pose and export them as a bvh file. When I upload the new animation back into SL, my avatar is able to pose as pole vaulting. But I have the problem to adjust the position of my avatar when she is animated, so she is doing the poses at the same place, which looks unrealistic. On the other hand, I also did screen shots of each pose in SL, and appropriated the original Marey photo into a new Second Life version. Back in SL, I uploaded the appropriated SL motion study pic as a texture and made four transparent walls. At the center of the walls, there is a big rotating pose ball with Marey's original chronography on it. Here are the screen shots:

At present, I am not satisfied with the presence of Marey’s poses in SL, either the pose ball or the texture. I am still thinking about how to combine my animation and Marey’s original photo together. And I also want to export the SL animation as either gif or jpg to put them on web, in parallel to Marey’s work.

SL Final Project: ILRC&

I am making a video called, ILRC&.  It will combine the qualities of a news program, a music video, and Tetris to present landscapes and bodies in motion/ in time.  I plan to use mostly aftereffects for the landscapes and SL for the bodies and shapes.  I will need to focus on creating body and shape forms in maya to build with in SL (like a tower moving tower of heads), animations with avatar(s) (animare/ poseballs), and making videos  in SL (camtasia studio, hopefully set up a greenscreen room for the avatar(s)).  

There are a lot of time issues that I want to consider: reversible, indifferent, sophisticated, accurate, accelerated, anticipated, and repetitive.  I am in a class about technology and time as well as reading one essay in particular called, “The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory, & Thermodynamics” by Michel Serres.  For example, in the first page, he says, “The notion of system may also be mechanical: a set which remains stable throughout variations of objects which are either in movement or relatively stationary. Laplace speaks in this sense of the solar system. Within a set of mobile material points distributed in space and governed by a law - Newton's law, for example-it is clear that time is fully reversible. If everything starts moving in the opposite direction, nothing significant in form or state will change.”

I want to bring these things together in a sort of pseudo- propaganda narrative about time and our bodies/nature that ends in tragedy and addresses an issue raised in one of Fassbinder’s films, when the matriarch laments how awful it is that humans can bear anything.  

SL Final Project - Room Escape Game

For my Second life project, I plan to create a room-escape game within a room. A room-escape game is a point-and-click type game (as opposed to a first-person shooter, platformer, real-time strategy, or board game). As the name implies, all you need to do to play is move your mouse and click.

In a generic room-escape game, the narrative is that you wake up in a room, the door is locked, and you must find the key to get out. Getting out requires solving any number of puzzles. The player must click and interact with various objects, obtain tools, and use what is there to figure a way out.

Imagine Saw but without the blood and gore.

Or Myst, but confined to a single room.

For a sample: The Mysteries of Time and Space (MOTAS)

http://www.albartus.com/motas/

In room-escape games, the level of interactivity may differ. In most games, any tools or objects that can be interacted with will certainly be used. Sometimes there may be red herrings or the designer decides to make extra objects clickable. In this way, the amount of freedom the player has is decided by the designer. Since all actions are predetermined, the designer can think about whether or not to add easter eggs or some other course of action that has no bearing to the actual goal of the game. Or perhaps the designer could restrict the player's actions in such a way that he cannot do anything but what is intended. Of course, the player would still have to figure out exactly what that is.

There is also a degree of burden on the designer in terms of what actions can be done. If, for example, the player obtains a sledgehammer, he may decide to use that item on the door to see if he can smash it down. Obviously if this is not what the designer intends it won't happen. And, though a little frustrated and maybe disappointed, the player must nevertheless accept this. However, if the designer had indeed anticipated such action, he could work around it so that using a sledgehammer on the door will have an effect, but still keep the game on its set path. 

For example, a message could appear saying: "Smash the door down? That's rude!"

Of course, considering the player has been mysteriously locked in a room, he'd still be a bit cynical but going that extra step to include that line can greatly improve the humor and the game's mood.

Project concept - Chester

I want my concept to solely base on the idea "Second Life", because to me this isn't just a program for people to meet, social and have fun but rather, another level of identity to us, the person that is controlling the avatar, because what is second life? different identities? different forms? but they are all you in a distinct way. So I kind of want to play with this idea of identities of each individuals, my way in pursuing on the concept I'm thinking making different models (8-10 all rigged models hopefully) for people to come and play with, so eventually people can click on the model and get the full rigged and functional (I dont know if this is possible). So it's like a second life within the second life, the avatar that we control is also controlling its own avatar. There will be also some portraits that I model just for display purpose.

*I'm having some technical problems when uploading my rigged model from maya, I rigged the model in maya and it functions perfectly and the mesh itself can be upload to SL, but not the joints and the riggings, I have no idea why...

For Nov 19, please write a minimum of 300 words of what your project will be about. Be sure to explain the project's form, expression and ideas. With only 300 words, you won't be able to go into too much detail, but help us understand why you chose the project you are making.

Example of edited screen grabs from SL

                        Matzumura Radniel        Free Red T Shirt Kiosk

                                 Word made out of prims from Second life ( Gato, spanish for Cat)
 

 

Rain that follows the user. It is a particle script from The Particle Laboratory.

^ my custom face mask kiosk! (third eyes)

^ my rotating poetry 

^ my personal rain cloud, physical and representational rain drops

(was unable to figure out voice command for wearable particles/ how to script my HUD for actions)

3Missions!!!

Attach the cloud to my spine!

A wooden kiosk giving my free UV map T-shirt!

I made a little blue HUD that appears on top of my screen, but I don't know how to adjust the position of the button. It only appears half of the block :(

Trying different animations.

Work in progress-Chester

 I was trying to make the second life title to glow and animate like an neon animation...but I have no idea where to start and everything so I sort of left it here and revisit it later.

This is the copy machine I made using the prims that suppose to give out my custom T-shirt texture when people click on it. But for some reason the script that I got from the scriptme website did not work, and I don't know what is wrong with the script.

 The object that I made from Maya the previous week, it doesn't have any function right now, I guess it is just for the aesthetic purpose.

The really geometric cloud that I composed using the sphere, stack them all together and turn down the opacity. I added the rain script from the SL site, but unfortunately I wasn't able to make the cloud follow me, I tried all kinds of scripts from different sites, and all of them seemed to have some weird things in the scripts that I couldn't figure out what's wrong...




An overview of me sitting in front of my desk

Rain/Shirt/Text!

Three in one!

Text was made in Blender. Had some trouble uploading the texture along with it.