New World Notes

Now With 300K Members, Second Life's Facebook Page is By Far SL's Largest Social Media Presence - And Disproves an Old SL Myth

Daniel Voyager called it first: The official and highly active Second Life page on Facebook is by far Second Life's most popular social media presence, now with 300,000 members. (And it's been growing steadily over the last few years.) I have it on good authority that Second Life's actual active userbase is about 600,000, so that Facebook number constitutes up to half the userbase (give or take). Compare this to the Second Life presence on other social media sites (figures from Mr. Voyager) too:

Free Poser Tutorial on 3D Avatar Animation This Thursday

Poser is putting on a free webinar this Thursday April 11am (Pacific), a Poser press person just put it to me, and since a lot Second Life content creators use the 3D modeling program for their custom avatars, I'm pretty much pleased by this Poser proposition. Tutorial includes "Using 3D people in Poser – We'll explore how to pose and dress both Miki and Tyler and use body controls and morph dials to edit and customize these figures. The same basics will apply to any 3D figure in Poser." Read more about it and register here.

Video Tutorial for Making SL Mesh Clothes Via Zbrush/Maya

Courtesy a 3D modeler named Varek, this is an extended tutorial for creating and weighting mesh clothing with Zbrush and Maya. Not being a modeler myself, I'm not sure if this is the best tutorial for both platforms, but this guy's models look pretty good to me.

Cool Web App Shows You What a Face Looks Like Were It Painted by Artists - Works With Avatars!

Face of the Future is an old but cool Java-based web app someone just sent my way -- upload a face photo (i.e. yours), designate the location of the eyes and mouth, and the program depicts the face as it would look like, were it painted by one of many artists. The neat thing is Second Life avatar faces are realistic enough so you can use a screencapture of those too. So that's my Hamlet avatar above transformed to look as if I was painted (from left to right) by Botticelli, El Greco, and Modigliani. You can also transform the face to look like another gender, or different race/age range.

If You Advertise Items on Flickr, You Can't Use It to Link to SL or Even Your Blog -- Here's Some Alternative Services Where You Can

 

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Recently beloved SL builder Cory Edo had her Flickr account severely restricted due to violations of their TOS. She must have done something wrong, right? According to Flickr she did, but it's something that almost every other designer, blogger, and photographer in SL is doing wrong too because the rules that she broke aren't exactly shared openly by Flickr to begin with.

So what happened here, and what can you do to keep it from happening to you? If you post ads for your virtual products or services (or any products or services) on Flickr keep reading, for the sake of your pics and your business!

SL Redditors Share Their Favorite Second Life Hangouts

I'm enjoying this "Where do you guys enjoy hanging out?" thread on Reddit's SL forum (launched by "BossMafia"), because it has a lot of interesting recommendations and insights into SL activity, and because most (if not all) don't fit the geeky, gamer, pervy-skewing stereotype Reddit's often saddled with. Examples: "The Buddhist sims like Kannonji and Hikari and the Buddha Center. Do scheduled meditations with folks."(From "semiretardado"). And from "bmml003", who runs a breedable market: "I spend 99% of my time in-world working on my 4 sims... I've dealt with a lot of people over my time in SL, and I have worked almost everywhere. So I don't really have time for fun anymore." Many more (some of them NSFW, a few NSFL) here.

Want to Take Great SL Images? Get Mr. Weaver's Phototools!

This lushly textured and evocative image, "human beauty", was shot in Second Life by William "paperwork Resident" Weaver (click here to embiggenize), and made entirely in-camera, with no post-production effects. How? Using a tool made to work with the Firestorm third party viewer, created by Weaver for virtual photographers like him: I'm talking about Phototools with Windlight Plus for Firestorm 4, which you can get here.

Weaver is a rising star in virtual photography, creator of utterly artful images like this, and, he tells me, "While I appreciate people who are good with Photoshop and after effects, I enjoy working with the limits of the viewer. And in order to do that, I modded it specifically for creating images." It took a lot of work to make it, he tells me, but "it was completely worth it." Here's why:

Submit Content to Reddit's SL Subreddit, Get It on NWN!

Reddit's Second Life subreddit continues to be a great resource for finding SL-themed content, but it needs more diverse content -- more links to YouTube machinima links, more to SL images on Flickr, more SL blog posts, more SLurls from the in-world map... basically, more everything.

If you're an SL content creator or just a fan of SL content, please join the subreddit, and share your best links with us 730+ members! As an added incentive: This week, I will blog at least one link of a new SL Redditor whose submission gets at least five Upvotes.

Annotated 9 Year Timeline of Social Controversies in SL

SL blogger Botgirl Questi recently created this annotated, interactive timeline of controversies in Second Life, going back to 2003, and it's pretty damn cool:

SL Redditors Advise SL Newbie on Reddit

There's a good discussion thread on Reddit in the site's Second Life subreddit group, started by a new SL user asking for advice on how to start. Favorite advice/observations so far:

• "I would definitely search through Second Life for ANY of your interests in RL (or even fantasy!) - if you enjoy roleplaying or medieval themes, there is tons out there for that... I find SL search often times sucks so sometimes if you search Google for those terms+Second Life you might get better results." (Emphasis mine. Redditor: Pipiru)
• "[I]f you are mistreated or feel unwelcome anywhere you visit; just move on. There are loads of places to visit, you will not run out." (Redditor: fosdagger)
• "You can search for events to find clubs or different events that might be interesting to you. I started in a vampire clan to make friends (but way too much drama). These days I hang out doing 7seas fishing." (Redditor: curiousGirlie)

Go here to offer/get more advice and insights. And if you haven't already, consider joining Reddit's SL subreddit. Lots of fun and useful content... but a lot less useless drama.