Chandra’s Page

I started playing around with OGLE (OpenGL Extractor) the other day, and it’s so far proven to be a marvelous tool. The basic idea behind OGLE is that it grabs geometry from inside Second Life (or most other OpenGL-based 3D applications, for that matter) and spits it out as a Wavefront .OBJ file, a format understood by many 3D modeling programs.

Setup was fairly simple. OGLE relies on another tool, GLIntercept, an OpenGL extraction and debugging tool, to do most of the heavy lifting, so that needs to be installed first, but the whole installation process was all of five minute’s work. OGLE comes with a default configuration file that works quite well for capture in SL, so after coping a couple of files to the Second Life directory, it was all ready to go.

The TGA sail template for the Flying Tako allows for some wonderful customization of this lovely little sailing vessel. Alan Kiesler has made it even easier for users of Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro; he’s created files for both graphics apps that include all the alpha channel information and a layer for your own graphics, greatly simplifying the process of making your own custom sail.

I’ve replaced the template download in my original article with Alan’s template package; follow this link to download his generous efforts.

UPDATE: Alan Kiesler created fabu Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro versions of the template, which supercede the original TGA-only version I posted on this site. See below for the download link. Thanks, Alan!

First, the bad news. Due to recent snafus on the Second Life forums (SL account required), the sail template Kanker Greenacre provided for customization of his lovely Flying Tako sailboat disappeared. The topic in which the file was posted on the forums seems to have fallen into a digital black hole, and not even the mighty Torley Linden was able to retrieve it.

The good news: I talked to Kanker, and he mailed me a copy of the template, which I am now hosting.

Aimee Weber never fails to amaze me with the detail in her texturing, so it’s no accident that on most trips I take to Midnight City I make it a rule to invade whatever skybox project she’s got going.

The shadows baked into the textures of this laboratory build are, hands down, the best I’ve seen in Second Life. Aimee is truly a master of the medium. There are more pictures of this stunning room in the portfolio section of Aimee’s website, without the map of the upcoming Relay For Life grounds, posing stands, or assorted clutter in my picture.

It figures that my first post in here in a couple months would be about something that’s actually been around for even longer, but it’s brand new to me. FlipperPA Peregrine whipped up a lovely little tool for converting an animated GIF89a image into a Targa suitable for animated texture use in SL. It even spits out the LSL code required to run the animation.

Now I need to get off my duff and build those animated textures I’ve been dreaming of for the Space Fountain accelerators.