Metaverse Protips: How to Sell Your 3D Content in Linden Lab's Sansar

Brookston Holiday's has been building in Second Life for 12 years. You can view his work on the SL Marketplace here and his ProMaterials brand.

Second Life builders who create mesh objects now have another market to consider: Sansar. While it's relatively easy for them to sell the same SL object in Sansar, there's some important points to keep in mind. 

I recently spent a week in the fine city of Milwaukee. Having some time to kill, I took a brief stop in at the furniture store Design Within Reach, a home furnishing store dedicated pieces in the modern style. Here are a couple pictures I took while wandering around the showroom:

Some modern design pieces, including a Tom Dixon designed coffee service and Le Corbusier LC4 Chaise Lounge.

It was only natural then that, upon returning home, I’d attempt to design something in the mid century modern style. And hell, while I’m at it, see if I can’t sell a few copies on Sansar. I ended up making a television stand/sideboard. Keep reading after the break if you want to learn some tricks and tips I learned building, texturing, and uploading an object to sell on Sansar:

A mid century modern style television stand for Sansar

90 Degrees: No Such Thing in Virtual Worlds

First, a general tip about building within any game. There is one simple change that many builders can make to improve their builds, and that is to stop making 90 degree angles. Look around the room that you’re sitting in. Chances are you cannot find a single object that has true, sharp 90 degree angles on it. Any woodworker, or metalworker will tell you that sharp corners, on a board or machined steel, is uncomfortable to touch. These corners have to be “broken,” either chamfered or rounded off. Corners that do stick around tend to get worn down with time anyways.

If you play some games, or buy some items on Second Life, they sometimes just look a little off. I’ve been playing a lot of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds lately, and I notice that the buildings in that game often suffer from the same problem. The corners of houses meet at sharp 90 degree corners, so they look fake old fashioned. It saves a tiny bit on polygons, but looks terrible in this writer's humble opinion.

Sharp edged building in PUBG

The solution is simple: add a small bevel to the sharp corners of your build. I tend to do this towards the end of the modeling process, when I’ve already UV mapped the item. The bevel feature within Maya, since the 2014 release or so, with preserve the UV map, and fix the mapping where you add the bevel automatically. It has some problems where two edges meet, but it is pretty good overall. Once you have the bevel added, you can then soften the normals to give the appearance of a softly rounded corner. To my eye, this tends to look more real, like something you can reach out and touch.

Texturing for Sansar: Albedo vs Diffuse

You’ll notice that the color information in Sansar is called albedo, versus Second Life where it is referred to as diffuse. The difference is a subtle one, but important. Diffuse textures not only are supposed to have the color of the items you are texturing, there also is lighting information contained in them. The idea was that you’d include the ambient occlusion, and some lighting and shadows within the texture. This took some of the heavy lifting off of the game engine. You wouldn’t have to waste system resources lighting things within a game scene.

Albedo is in some ways simpler than diffuse. It is the color of the item, when completely illuminated. All of the lighting, shadows, ambient occlusion, and indirect illumination, is expected to be computed in real time by the game engine. Because of this, albedo textures tend to look overly bright to those used to working with diffuse

Sansar Texturing: Roughness vs Specular

In some ways specular and roughness maps can be thought of in the same way. They both control how “shiny” something looks when light is reflecting off of its surface. However, specular highlights will only look realistic in the specific lighting situation they are created for. If you change the lighting, from day to night for instance, you have to adjust the specularity in order to make it look “correct.”

Chart of real world roughness values

Because a roughness map describes an actual physical property of an object, the reflections will continue to look realistic in any lighting situation (provided the lighting is realistic to begin with.) You can refer to the chart below to get an idea of roughness values measured off of real world objects. (Note: the range extends from 0 to 1, which is how most texturing programs label black and white, but if you’re working in photoshop, the range goes from 1 to 256.)

Sansar Texturing: Metalness

If you read about the theory behind physically based rendering, you’ll read about dielectrics, insulators, conductors and so on. If you want to make textures what look good, all you have to worry about is metal and not metal. Metal objects are full white on the metalness texture, not metal objects are full black. Simple as that.

Reflections on non-metallic objects appear to be the color of the light they are reflecting. Reflections on metal objects appear to be the color of the object. If you shine a white light on a shiny wood floor, the reflections are white, if you shine the same light on a gold bar, the reflections will look golden.

Metal reflections with and without reflections

Shiny objects also reflect the environment around them, but at this time, Sansar has yet to implement reflection probes of any kind. You can see below the nickel plated handles on the drawer of the TV stand, both within Sansar and within an engine where reflections are implemented. Until there are reflections, metal objects in Sansar will look a bit dull.

Uploading the TV Stand to Sansar

As of now, all your textures have to be applied to your model at the time of upload. So you can’t upload a shirt, and then make a red, blue, and green version simply by changing the textures within Sansar. Also, if you’re like me, and you upload your builds over and over again as you refine them, then it can get a little old, and it’s like 50 mouse clicks for each upload. Fortunately there is a work around. Within Maya, you can apply a phong material, and then apply your different texture maps to the phong, in the following way:

• Color - Albedo
• Bump Mapping - Normal
• Specular Color - Roughness
• Reflected Color - Metalness

You set up the phong material once, and then when you save a change to a texture, you can re-export your fbx file and upload it to Sansar. The textures are now contained within the .fbx, and it greatly speeds up the uploading process.

Once you have the item within Sansar, setting it for sale is pretty straight forward. Select the item in your inventory, and hit the set for sale option in the lower right corner. Then go and edit its title, category, description, item price, and upload some pictures on the Sansar store web page.

Editing a listing on the Sansar Store

Taking the pictures can be a challenge within Sansar; here are some tips:

• Upload your own skybox texture.
• Go into photoshop and create a new image 768 x 128 pixels.
• Set its color to a neutral gray, like rgb:128 128 128.
• Set the image mode to 32 bits per channel and save as an EXR file.

Upload the exr file and set it as the scene’s skybox. Set the sky brightness and exposure bias to 0, and take your product picture against a plain white background. I set up simple 3 point lighting with a spotlight and 2 point lights. You can upload up to 9 pictures, I recommend using all 9. Products with more pictures tend to sell better in my experience.

3 point lighting set up within Sansar

Product shot taken within Sansar

The Sansar store is in a very simple state at this point. There isn’t even a robust search feature, but hopefully that will change in the future. There is also a hefty cut given to Sansar, 15% of every sale. But as long as you’re creating things for Second Life, it’s a pretty simple matter to sell them on Sansar as well. 

Brookston Holiday (@ProMaterials on Twitter) has been building in Second Life for over a decade. In his first life, he is a freelance 3d Artist, musician, and amateur sailor.

Comments

[V]

James must have alot invested in sansar he keeps trying to persuade everyone to leavesSL to go there

[LagOh]

This was a very nice article and the tips are welcomed.

[Carlos Loff]

This is all cool but the market page does not allow even to check if items are comy, modify or whatever, it would be nice for users to know if they can build a whole small wood with a copy tree for example - Sansar came out too soon and anyway I use Mac, again they came out too soon, I give Sansar until next Summer, to reach a definitive - RIP

[Brookston Holiday]

@Carlos There isn't really a copy/mod type permissions system as of yet. As far as I can tell everything sold is basically copy/mod/no trans. Not that there is much to modify.

@LagOh Thank you very much for your kind words!

@V Yup, you caught me, I'm deep in the pockets of Big Sansar. But seriously, at no point in my post do I argue anyone should be leaving SL for Sansar. I don't think they should, it's not really ready for casual users, but for the 3d modelers out there, as long as you're making mesh for SL you might as well take the time to cross sell on Sansar