Quite enough holiday cheer

I feel like a slug for not creating anything in SL or posting here in what seems like forever, but alas, the holidays intruded.

Just getting back into the swing of things (and undertaking my first paying SL job, refurbishing some scripts for someone to cut down on lag and permit multiple instances of the object to coexist), so not really much to show from recent times.

However, I did make this necklace today:



Before the holidays, I also got around to trying to make some movies from within SL, and (once I'd found a codec that actually wrote something to disk!) made a clip showing one of my earlier accessories in motion and uploaded it to YouTube. And I'm just now getting around to putting it on the blog.

My first day in SL, I raided the freebie store on Help Island for everything they had, and among them were some prim wings. "I wonder if I can make wings which flap?" I asked myself. The answer was "yes, but not very well". I'll skip the boring explanations of why my first two versions didn't work, and skip straight to Johanna's Bat Wings, Mark III.

They're flexi prims, scripted to flap in a way which will resynchronize them within a few seconds if they get out of synch, and they appear and disappear based on whether or not the avatar is flying. These were kind of tricky; flexi prims get really weird when you rotate them via a script. When you turn on flexi, the "handles" move from the center of the prim to one edge. You can rotate it manually with the handles — and it rotates from the edge, like you'd expect — but if you try to rotate it from the script, it'll still rotate from the center. But if you cut the prim in half, like you do to make a swinging door open along one edge, it doesn't react the way you'd expect. So I ended up having to do both a rotation and a translation in order to keep their edges "anchored" on the shoulder blades.

And, hey, comments on my other entries! Time to go answer those...