Jacek Lives

I had the honor of presenting my UI design concept at the User Experience office hours this past Thursday, and I must admit to being pleased with how it turned out. The presentation went off without a hitch (quite a feat in SL), it seemed well received by the audience, and I got some great feedback and ideas.

If you missed the presentation, you can check out a great write-up by Kippie Friedkin, or plow your way through the transcript on the SL Wiki. If you’re following along with the transcript, you’ll want to have the mock-ups that I showed at hand for reference:

1. Main UI Overlay
2. Inventory Quick Filter
3. Inventory Right-Click Menu

Here are a some of the really interesting ideas (some new, others old favorites) that came out of the discussion:

• Making the “Chat/IM” and “Voice” buttons separately resizable in the UI overlay.
• Optional UI animation for the “Chat/IM” button (e.g. a little bounce) when you get a new message.
• Functionality to find items by date range.
• Functionality to find duplicate items, so you could remove them to reduce clutter.
• Gmail-like labels for items, allowing items to belong to multiple “sets”. Related: symlinks for items, allowing you to put “clones”/”shortcuts” of items (especially no-copy items) into multiple folders/outfits.
• Functionality to create custom tabs that show the contents of a folder: Right click folder, “Show as Tab”.
• A “Custom” option on the Quick Filter menu, to pop up the window for more advanced filter management.

By the way, if you like discussing and thinking about ways to make SL’s interface easier, more useful, or just generally better, you should subscribe and post to the Second Life User Experience (SL-UX) mailing list!

It’s a little bit slow right now because it’s new and not many people are aware of it, but there have already been some very cool discussions about improving notifications, reorganizing the menus, annoyances in the building UI, and more. New topics and discussions welcome!

I’ve posted a photo journal of my sister-alt’s visit to Loco Poco’s Island. It was crazy fun!

A new revision (2008-05-28) of the Blender to BVH exporter is available. Here are the noteworthy changes:

• Added GPL2 as licensing option.
• Added hand and foot control bones (scale 1.5 to enable).
• Bone adjustments to make Auto-IK work better.
• Auto-IK enabled by default.
• Minor skeleton tweaks in the knees.

A note about Auto-IK: for this revision, Auto-IK is enabled already, to make it easier for beginners to pose the armature. Just grab and pull on the arms or legs (but not the hands or feet; those won’t work), and the limb will move around. If you don’t want Auto-IK, click off the “Auto IK” button in the panel on the right (about 1/3 of the way down the screen).

A note about the hand and foot control bones: by default, they have no effect. But if you scale them up to scale 1.5 (select the bone, press S, type 1.5, press enter), the corresponding limb will try to reach for the control bone, using IK. You can use this to keep the feet planted on the ground, for example. If you don’t want the control bones cluttering things up, you can hide them by selecting them and pressing H; get them back with Alt-H.

By the way, a tip about using IK targets (like the control bones): it works best if the limb is already (without IK) in a pose similar to how you want it. So, IK just gives it that extra “snap” to keep it in place. If you only use IK without posing first, the limb might bend the wrong way and you’ll have to see a doctor.

Enjoy.

• Blender to BVH Animation Exporter (revision 2008-05-28)

P.S. This doesn’t mean I’m maintaining it… :P

Just in case you didn’t have enough giant megaprim sculpty octopods in your life, you can follow the pictoral story of the creation of my Giant Octopus sculpture from start to finish.

Hey, today was my second rezday! It has now been two years since I descended from the immaculate skybox in the heavens and took my first waddling steps on Orientation Island. (I’ll spare you the nostalgic stories of how things were “when I was a noob.”)

Last year at this time, I was waxing existential about my days in Second Life. For some reason I can’t remember, my continued presence in SL seemed uncertain back then.

So here’s hoping that one year from now, I won’t remember the reasons why it seems uncertain now, either.

Checked out the new Circuit City sims. I looked high and low, but found no iPod Nano. What I did find was this awesome, atmospheric subway scene.

Apparently when it comes to the new SL login system, hecurity comes first!

(Screenshot is Alex LaPointe’s)

A vote for SVC-956 is a vote for Squidmobiles everywhere! Please, think of the tentacles!

If squiddy doesn’t get the hollow sculpties he needs, he’ll be morbidly obese and too heavy when I make him from sculpties!

Just another day in the life of Jacek Antonelli, Bug Detective.

Here I’m snooping out some bounding box issues related to VWR-1852.

P.S. This is my first ever Flickr. Crazy.