Machinima Artists Panel - Saturday, May 30, 2009

MechanizedLife, in collaboration with The League of Muses, presents the Machinima Artists Panel.

We have invited five of Second Life’s most creative and prolific Machinima Artists to participate in this interactive discussion about the art of machinima in Second Life.

Moo Money, Pyewacket Bellman, Samlowry Hawks, Osiris Pfalz and CodeWarrior Carling will be on hand to answer every question you’ve ever had about machinima.

Join us Saturday, May 30, 2009 at 2:00 PM SLT. You don’t want to miss this one-of-a-kind event!

The FilterCam HUD, created for all Second Life photographers and machinimists, both amateur and professional, virtually eliminates the need for post-processing by allowing the user to create artistic and dynamic SL(tm) photographs through a simple to use, menu-driven HUD.  One of the most notable features of the FilterCam is the ability to personalize in-world snapshots by using the included texture masks or by creating and uploading your own.

This contest gives Second Life’s artists an opportunity to create unique texture masks, suitable for use with the MechanizedLife FilterCam HUD, and upload them to the FilterCam Xchange Flickr group .  Masks will be judged by Flickr users based on the number of times each Mask is marked as a favorite.

Individual entries may also be selected to be included in a future FilterCam HUD update, will proper credit given to the mask designer.

Entries will be accepted beginning Wednesday, May 20, 2009 and will be closed as of Midnight on Saturday, May 30, 2009.  Voting will also begin on May 30, 2009 and will continue until Midnight on Saturday, June 6, 2009.  Winners will be announced at an Award Ceremony and Gala on Sunday, June 7, 2009 at 1:00 pm SLT.  See Below for Prizes, Rules, Dates and Instructions:

Prizes

Contest Period

I will always remember you Rheta. What I thought was just another gushing fangirl revealed herself to be one of the most heartwarming, integer, loving and caring person I ever had the chance to know. It pains me like you have no idea to know that I won’t be able to share a giggle with you and debate about deeply philosophical subjects as we often did.

I will always remember the fake humility behind which you hid your brilliance, your wit, and your incredibly generous heart. A person with such your culture should have never hidden so clumsily but that humility also made you a better person, more empathic and more sensitive than anyone I have ever known in any life.

Rheta, I can barely stop sobbing between each keystroke, but you would be the first to tell me I have to be strong, for you and for everyone that ever loved you, and for everyone you ever loved. But oh Rheta, how cruel is this world if it deprives us of you.

This is not the last time I will talk to you Rheta, not by a longshot. Everytime I will have a difficult choice to make, I will think of what you would tell me. Maybe you didn’t know it my love, but you made the world a better place for us all to live in.

Goodnight, my sweet Rheta… I love you

I just wanted to give a bit more information about the piece I will put on sale. It is a portrait from my own Boudoir Rouge collection, of course. It will be sold under the same terms I usually sell portraits from the Boudoir Rouge series. This is a unique item inworld, one single copy has been produced and will be sold inworld under the form of a resizable and copiable frame. The new owner will be the only person in SecondLife to have a copy of it, as I pass the original to the new owner. Also, I will send a 6000×4000 JPEG copy to the new owner, so he or she can make RL prints for personal display.

Here is a snap of the said portrait, already on display at Rouge for the upcoming auction:

Please join us for a fundraising event this Sunday the 26th, 2009. Bidding Starts at 10:00 AM SLT, and will continue until all items have been placed on the bidding block.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Rouge/200/65/22

All proceeds will be donated to the Relay for Life fundraiser 2009. Team Eshi Otowara and Dirk Talmasca have joined forces to bring you some amazing artisans for this event.

There will be Second life photography, Second life digital Art, Second life Sculpture, Real LIfe Art, and a few eccentric pieces that are artistic in their endeavors. There is even a full 17th Century Period English cottage With furnishings included.  DJ Seren Dawes will graciously provide some tunes for our bidding pleasure.

Here is a latest list of contributing artist.

• Ahmad Hosho
• Akira Seymour
• Anathaniel Gausman
• Arteer Olivia
• Barrowness Beaumont
• Case tomorrow
• Cicciuzzo Gausman
• Cienega Soon
• CodeBastard Redgrave
• Dan Yapungku
• Dingo Utorid
• Douglas Story
• Eliza Wierwight
• Gary Kohime
• Gracie Kendell
• Gwen Carillon
• Java Moonwall
• Joshua Morane
• Juicily Loon
• Keiko Morigi
• Kiya McMahon
• Life Charron
• Looker Lumet
• Mars Lake
• Panteleimon Aeon
• Riona Rimbaud
• Silverdrake Sparrow
• Shoshana Epsilon
• Shoshisn Shilova
• Stephen Venkman
• Sura Abismo
• Theresa Carfagno

For a while now, I almost lost faith in SL photography. I slowed down considerably creating artwork based on SL photography, mostly for all the reasons below that makes this activity irritating and unpleasant. The bottomline is, to make decent quality artwork in SL without heavy use of Photoshop is nearly impossible, and this should not be.

Let’s begin, shall we?

1. Quirky camera focus: Try photographing an element laid on the floor and to cam over it without pulling your hair. As soon as you dunk the camera 1 degree too much, it flips over and to hell it goes. And how about caming in a restrained area? It’s enough to be a burden on the photographer.
2. Broken high resolution snapshots: I am not refering to the dreadful and definitely borked “Hi-Res Snapshots” option in the Advanced menu. I am speaking of taking a snapshot in a Custom resolution higher than your current screen resolution. For some it will work, for some, they will see cutting lines, black edges, or will find one of the other problems like the RenderGlow glitch or disappearing attachment like stated below.
3. Crashes on snapshot: I tested several clients and had numerous reports of crashes on snapshot. It’s time to realize it is one of the main usage for the SL viewer. Having a fantastic environment you can’t photography is pointless. Snapshot functions must be througly tested and stable. Some also get pitch black snapshots that apparently can only be fixed with a cache cleanup.
4. RenderGlow support broken: If you don’t disable RenderGlow, most people will see “glow ghosts” if any item with a bit of glow appears in the scene. If you shoot over your current screen resolution, those lasty glow bugs will appear exponentially accross your snapshots.
5. Disappearing attachments while taking a snapshot: This is probably one of those I hate the most. Often, when snapshotting at very high resolution, hair will disappear, or random attachments. Sometimes changing the angle does the trick, or changing the distance, but not always. Restarts are useless. I screwed whole photo sessions because of that glitch and wasted dozens of hours.
6. Inconsistent lighting system: Lights in SL have always been a problem, like light sources cancelling each other, with a max of 6 lights. Under low ambient lighting conditions, this makes it hard to create complex lighting scenes. Lights also competes in a weird way, and hard to say if they are directional or omnidirectional sometimes. Add Windlights to that mix, and it makes it even more complex. Shadows are still very crude if you don’t use high Windlight ambient lighting, and I sure hope it gets fixed when the new ShadowDraft builds come into play.
7. Invisiprims: One of the most long lasting bug in the SL rendering system. We all know about it; think about everytime you noticed how ugly your 800L shoes looks over a club dancefloor. I heard it’s complex to fix. But I sure wish it was, as it makes snaps look akward and amateurish, if one doesn’t spend insane amounts of time fixing this with Photoshop, often with mitigated results.
8. Deficient avatar mesh: Again, we can dream. But some like RealXtent apparently did it. So it’s not impossible. It is surely the reason why I spend so much time fixing snapshots using Photoshop. Be it stretched inner thighs, horrible feet, clunky fingers, square boobs and butts, you name it.
9. Limited zoom: You can only cam that close to an avatar and then you need to use the CTRL 8-9-0 zoom keys. Why limit that, or can we at least have the option to disable this behaviour? The extra zoom controls are fine, but makes it harder to cam and focus too.
10. The eyes!: Do really I need to elaborate? Especially when you are shooting yourself, since you need to focus on a prim to have your eye fixed on it, caming to zoom on your face becomes an extreme sport. It’s feasible, but there’s no miracle solution, and it often turns into luck shots. Same thing for taking snapshots with closed eyelids. Take 50 snaps and pray you get the right timing.

This list is surely not complete or exhaustive, one could probably name other quirks and bugs that are extremely irritating. My point was not to list them all, but to send a message to the Lindens. Please fix our photography, because visuals are what makes SecondLife what it is, and it is currently broken. Maybe one should submit a JIRA as a meta issue and put it as showstopper, because the show is indeed stopping…

And who else but Ina to ask me to do something absolutely unique and to my own knowledge never done before in SL, being a maiden Nyotaimori. Yes, I will serve as a live sushi plate, and you can come and pickup a piece, until I am completely nude. All proceeds for every piece picked up will go to the SLSC.

Please read the following press release, and hope to see you there.

——————

Inachi Presents Avatar Nyotaimori on Second Life

一拿吃的女化身壽司在第二世界上菜！

Shakespeare, Second Life and Skin City, Second Life-In the midst of a virtual reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan England, an avant-garde virtual sushi restaurant named Inachi unveils its first gourmet dish. Dubbed “Nyotaimori,” the platter features an artistic arrangement of finely-priced sushi adorning the nude avatar body of virtual celebrity Codebastard Redgrave. The sum of sushi prices on this Nyotaimori reaches at about L$1,000,000; its purpose is to be dismantled by its audience as every “edible piece” of this virtual culinary sculpture is sold off in a single fundraiser to benefit the SL Shakespeare Company. The presentation opens to the public at 1 PM PDT on Saturday, March 21st at the Blackfriars Theatre.

Not surprisingly, the prolific Ina Centaur is both the founder and artist of Inachi and its Nyotaimori. As with many of Centaur’s projects, Inachi began as a hobby, “Inachi started out as a somewhat offbeat-obsessive project to document and semi-immortalize in virtual-world-3D, some of the sushi I’ve tasted. And then one day a friend showed me a picture of nyotaimori, or female body sushi. It all became clear to me that day-both the name ‘Inachi’ made sense, as well as how I might turn these sushi-Lego things I’ve created into… a feast for your eyes!”

Inachi in its most literal translation to Ina Centaur’s native Mandarin Chinese means “Ina, go eat!” But, since Centaur’s discovery of “female body sushi” last May, the translation, while still retaining its homonym, became 一拿吃 or, literally, “One Take Eat.” Centaur explains its significance, “The translation sounds flip, but I think it’s cool that the translation back to English also affords a theatrical pun. My SL Shakespeare Company project has been something I’ve been trying to raise funds for since its inception in 2007, and basically everything I do in virtual worlds goes to fund it. Also, I think the translation fits how we’ll manage to present nyotaimori as a viable artform in a very material and commercial virtual world: people will simply take (pay) and eat each piece of artful virtual sushi goodness.”

To Centaur, this Nyotaimori event is both art that represents Second Life, and a social experiment, “Art is essentially an interpretive representation of an object, in the general sense; in this case, the object is the virtual world of Second Life, and Nyotaimori is kind of like a satirical symbol of it. Inachi’s Nyotaimori recasts a nude female avatar into both culinary and ethnic art via an artistic arrangement of sushi. The individual pieces of sushi are cast in a state that will soon dissipate, as each piece is taken, just as the artful sims of Second Life are dismantled due to the decree of limited resource budgets. The avatar in this avatar body sushi presentation is famous and has media appeal, just like how Second Life has it. But, the art lives in the manifestation of its sushi, just like how Second Life wouldn’t be anything without its user-created content… The social experiment would be to see if people’d bite.” Despite its novelty and representation, Centaur is uncertain but hopeful about Nyotaimori as a means to fund inworld art, “Most of my fundraising attempts in virtual worlds have failed miserably. I hope this one is different enough to meet its goal!”

On a happier note, when asked to comment on her choice of designating Codebastard Redgrave as her maiden Nyotaimori, Centaur comments, “I think Codie is incredibly sexy, and Second Life might find it interesting to undress the sushi off her-literally!”

Venue: http://Blackfriars.SLshakespeare.com
Promo Poster: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ic-beauties/3362521222/
Event Details: http://secondlife.com/events/event.php?id=2484644&date=1237665600

About Inachi (一拿吃)

Inachi is a fictional restaurant set in the virtual world of Second Life. Ina Centaur, its founder and head chef-artist, serves hand-made virtual sushi with exquisite detail and care in performance art settings. Its main store is located in the underground metros of Skin City, Second Life.

For Immediate Release

In mid-January, CodeBastard Redgrave, creator of the MachinimaCam HUD and creator of the acclaimed Boudoir Rouge portrait series, completed the purchase of MechanizedLife from Alidar Moxie.  Moxie chose to scale back her in-world business responsibilities and approached Redgrave with the opportunity to purchase MechanizedLife’s full catalog of scripted products.  MechanizedLife products are scripted tools designed to make your Second Life more enjoyable and include a range of products for both casual users and business owners.

Since the purchase, Redgrave, a talented scripter, has completed, updated and released a number of items that she had built alongside Moxie in late 2008, created the new RezURL product and has opened the official MechanizedLife website (http://www.mechanizedlife.com) which contains product information, technical documentation and direct links to each product’s XstreetSL page.  Working with Rouge sim builder Eshi Otawara, Redgrave has expanded the Rouge Boutique on her iconic sim to make room for the new MechanizedLife main store.

On Saturday, February 7, 2009, Redgrave will host the Grand Opening of the new MechanizedLife.  The all-day event will begin at 11:00am SLT with a press conference, followed, at noon, by a marathon, Rouge-style dance party featuring renowned Second Life DJs Nexeus Fatale, Amanda Shinji, DJ Genki, DJ Plusminus and more!

To celebrate the Grand Opening, all MechanizedLife and Boudoir Rouge products, including the BR individual and couples poses will be offered at 50% off regular price.

“The current MechanizedLife clients are incredibly loyal to the brand and I wanted to share this occasion with them and give them an opportunity to try some of our newer products at a substantial discount,” Redgrave said. “We also wanted to welcome new clients to the MechanizedLife family by giving them a chance to try our products without breaking the bank.”

Though the transition is ongoing, the products and MechanizedLife website have already been moved to servers personally hosted and maintained by Redgrave.  This move was completed without any interruption of service.

Moxie will continue to provide support, as deemed necessary by Redgrave, for the next several months and Paypabak Writer will continue to provide first-line customer support just as she always has.

The full selection of scripted MechanizedLife products will be offered alongside Redgrave’s existing line of products including the MachinimaCam and FilterCam HUDs, the Boudoir Rouge brand of individual and couples poses, and the Dramavatar brand of eyes and clothing. All of these products can be found in the Rouge Boutique.

Teleport to MechanizedLife at Rouge Boutique and Press Conference.

Teleport to MechanizedLife at Rouge Boutique and Grand Opening Dance

I had to move from my big empty apartment to a smaller one, much better located. I’m still in boxes and decorating but it’s already feeling much better. Also, I had a major job downsizing, going down from 45h to 20h, with only one objective, take better care of myself. No wonder, having been on call for the last 8 years, 24/24, 7 days a week, have brought me to the brink of a burnout. The last 2 years have been years of abuse and neglect, recovering from a major depression, but now I can breathe a little bit and find new ways to be happy.

One of those way to my happiness is the sweet, caring, marvelous Gabby. She jumped on a plane to visit me in Montreal, and we spent a whole fantastic week, and the new year together. It goes without saying that it was probably one of the most marvelous experiences of my life. I feel blessed and so fucking lucky to have her in my life. She makes me feel so loved, cared for, and for that, I am forever thankful.

A lot of things have moved for me in SL lately. Probably the most notable thing is the acquisition of MechanizedLife from Alidar Moxie. For a long time she inspired me, enlightened me, amazed me with her fantastic creations. We were working on a joint venture called Codali, but before we had the time to get it all started, Ali grew tired of maintaining MechanizedLife and handed me the keys. So myself and Gabby have been much busy re-designing the MechanizedLife.Com website, product presentation, documentations and so on. Eshi Otawara re-vamped my old store at Rouge, added a second floor to it where we house the products. They are all for sale now on Xstreet and we are preparing a big party for the official store opening.

It has been a weird, life shifting month. Several of my favorite people departing and leaving SL. I can name Night, CeN and Alexx Markova. But also, I found out how I was surrounded with amazingly sweet and caring people all around. I need to thank all of you for your support, your unconditional love, your trust and your caring. I cherish and adore you. You all know who you are…

Much love,

Codie <3

SLURL: slurl.com/secondlife/Rouge/153/209/21

Read this for a description of the problems we experienced and how we solved them.

Anatomy of the Problem

As our loyal customers know, this website and all of MechanizedLife’s Main product lines went offline on November 14th 2008. This was due to several factors that seemed to happen in an order that was improbable and should never have happened.

Network Area Storage Failure

Part of my backup strategy was a home Network Area Storage (NAS) device that contained two mirrored hard drives and contained daily snapshots of both the MechanizedLife website ecosystem and databases. Sometime in late October, I noticed that this device was not only having trouble serving files back to me, but was having issues storing files, as well. While I thought I was covered, as I could place the drives into a computer and pull the files out, this did not prove to be possible due to a spreading corruption issue with the controllers themselves. This, of course, spread to the worst possible sections of the drives, the MechanizedLife backups, rendering them useless (along with several areas of dear personal data).

Internet Service Provider Wonkiness

My first internet service provider, a friend, supported MechanizedLife as best as he could and only asked that I move on when I overwhelmed his servers. When I moved to my new provider, I took their ‘unlimited’ plan hoping to never have to worry about bandwidth or storage issues as they touted unlimited amounts of each. They gladly accepted my money, 1 year in advance, and set up my account. The first time they told me that I had overwhelmed their server, I apologized and tried to optimize my databases further (keep in mind, please, that I am an Oracle Certified professional, have worked as a DBA full time, and currently have clients who contract specifically for my DBA skills). The second time they told me this I realized that they simply wanted a scapegoat, but asked if they had dedicated or virtual dedicated servers I could upgrade to, which they did not, and I started looking for upgrades. I complained and they did not say anything else to me for a long while.

Recently, it started happening again. My business grew, thanks to loyal customers like you, and they started complaining again. I was actively looking for a new provider when they permanently suspended my account and said ‘we will not give you any backups’, which in light of the above NAS problems was a problem. I offered to pay for them, they refused. I threatened to sue, they refused. They, of course, pointed to some obscure point in the terms of service that said they didn’t have to. Long story short, I wasn’t getting them no matter what I did (I even offered to let them keep the last of my year’s service agreement money in exchange).

The Outage

Since 95% or so of MechanizedLife products have an online component, I took them immediately offline and placed an order for a VPS, essentially a virtual dedicated server of my own that I can run as I see fit. This will allow me to do things like take daily snapshots of databases and run custom software and operations that my old provider would not allow. I am also on my own server, so I cannot effect anyone else’s service. Its more of a ‘you’re on your own’ environment, which suits me fine.

Codebastard Redgrave, Codie, immediately got a notice up on her blog and helped me to pick out the new service and has helped me tremendously in selecting service providers and options. I chose a company where my needs are the minimum they offer so that if I have to grow, which I hope I do, I can do so, and in this environment its as simple as rebooting the server.

Product Status

At the moment, all products (with the exception of the Del.ici.ous tagger which will be back online by the end of the week) are back online. StatsCollectors came online the middle of last week automatically as the domains became available. CalendarCogs are back online, but the database was destroyed meaning customers will need to go back onto the website and redo all of their settings. Unless they happened to be near the device when it reset they do not know their password and the easiest way to reset it will be to either contact Paypabak Writer or to purchase a free Password Resetter.

Going Forward

With the help of Codie, snapshots of the database and website will be downloaded not only to my home computer, but also to her location as well, ensuring this cannot happen again. The backup process for the database is in place already and the process for the websites will be in place later today. This move is actually good for MechanizedLife, as it gives me the confidence to introduce some products that I had been reluctant to release in my old hosting environment. It also coincides with work Codie and I have been collaborating on in regards to our joint venture called Codali that we already had press releases and logos made for when all this mess occurred.

Thank You

Thank you for sticking with me through all of this. I know that it is inconvenient and not at all fun. In order to say thank you, we are going to offer a promotion. Between December 1st and the end of the year, any MechanizedLife product you own that was effected by this outage, we’ll deliver one of the same item any to avatar on the main grid you choose. Simply send us a notecard with your name, the name of the product, and the name of the avatar to whom you wish to have the promotional item delivered. Notecards should be sent to Paypabak Writer and she will see that they are delivered as quickly as demand allows. Thank you again for your loyalty and patience. Stay tuned for more new and exciting tools to be released under the new Codali brand.