Dedric  Mauriac: This podcast is made available on the Rezzed.TV Network, podcast for the metaverse.

Dedric  Mauriac: Blue Hair, number 18!

Geoff Smith: Blue Hair, Blue Hair!

Dedric  Mauriac: Hey, this is Lewie, also known as Dedric Mauriac in Second Life. I haven’t been up for a while with podcasts lately because my computer had decided to just die on me. Usually I can research this information and find a fix or a patch or something, but it just went so far downhill that it got worse as I found possible solutions to my problem.

The last state that it was in was that it would not play any audio. I could not install or uninstall programs. Even my Visual Studio couldn’t even compile programs. It kept complaining about some compiler could not be found to reinstall Visual Studio, and what do you know, Visual Studio could not reinstall. So I got another hard drive and everything is back online. Actually, it’s working a lot better than before.

For one, iTunes doesn’t ask me to install it every time I double-click the icon and run it. Pretty much it’s, you know, clean, squeaky clean. Very nice to look at.

Not clogged. I even got a few of my older programs working like Songsmith for one. I got my Morph Vox audio working, which changes my voice. So that’ll help with my little Mishinima, little stories. Speaking of which, I created Mishinima recently for Kratmariner’s One Heart Word Stories Weekly Challenge. I decided to just write a little story about the topic, Peds and a Pod, just 100 words, record my voice, and I used Songsmith in the background, which I didn’t sing with it, I just spoke. And for background music, it’s not so corny. Just check it out on YouTube and just search for the phrase Songsmith on one word and you’ll see how corny this thing can be.

But, yeah, it turned out pretty good and I even took it a step further and started adding sound effects, which really gave it some life. And I was like, you know what, let’s just make a little Mishinima as well. It was only 45 seconds. These aren’t really long stories, but the term goes, or the saying goes, for every 10 seconds of Machinima. It equates to about an hour.

They weren’t kidding. So yeah, it took quite a bit of time, but yeah, I got something. Looks pretty cute, fun. So check it out on YouTube and hopefully be on Mishinima.com as well if they ever approve it.

And yeah, it’s on my blog as well and you can comment on it, say what you’d like about it or even, you know, for who knows what you might even want to rate it. And Machinima is all open sim stuff with the Hippo viewer. So yeah, making really good use of land in open sim. Speaking of which, land in Second Life. I’m no longer owning the Woodbridge Sim in Second Life.

I turned that over to my wife and gave her full rights over it. And she has just made it amazing. It’s like a full forest.

And she’s based it off of where she grew up and up in the Catskill Mountains. And I’ve taken another friend of mine there and, you know, he said, you start and talk about old whore stories saying, you know, it’s just like, you know, you’d be walking and all you could see is the little shiny dots on the guy’s hat in front of you. And if you lose him, you’re all gone. You don’t know where you’re going.

And all of a sudden the ground would go straight up in front of you out of nowhere. And I’m like, okay. But he thought it was exciting. I think it’s exciting.

It looks pretty good. So check out the Woodbridge Sim sometime. It’s just amazing, especially if you love nature and woods. It’s still got the old wood bridges on it as well. And oh yeah, Crap Mariner redirected the boat to go along the path because there’s a little waterway going through the Woodbridge Sim now and the boat goes on that waterway. And there’s a dock with fishing. So the fishing is back.

You can sit there and go fishing for a while. All right. So other news was Second Life was CSC, the company that I work for now appears on the Second Life blog or it did earlier this week or I should say last week now. It was Tuesday that I got posted and they asked my manager three questions about how CSC came into Second Life and what are they doing there. And he and I had worked a lot to get these questions out. Actually, we had all this information before they asked us the questions.

We had to rework it to just answering just those three questions. And there might be more later on, but it’s pretty amazing stuff, especially for businesses looking at CSE. So if you’re interested in what businesses are looking at with their perspective, go ahead and check out the Second Life blog and the Working in World community.

We’ll have that up there. The next thing I noticed, I was just looking around and I found TrueSpace on the Internet. And I found out that it was free. I was scratching my head over this because actually like maybe a year or two ago, I was looking in a true space and they had like a really old version, like 3.x something. And that was free, but the latest and greatest of TrueSpace was actually a pretty penny. Actually, it’s not really that expensive in the past. Even when I got the free version, they said, okay, if you like this, you know, you can buy the professional version for a significant amount less than the actual price. I’m trying to think maybe it was $100 or $200 usually. Now, that might seem a little high, but you’ve got to consider the professional tools like 3D Studio Mix, Maya. I think even that what the heck was it?

ZBrush, I think it was. They’re pretty high up there. They’re in the thousands. I’m not sure about ZBrush itself, but the really good ones are in the thousands of dollars. Back when I went to the Art Institute over 10 years ago, man, that’s like a decade, I was taught how to use 3D Studio and it was a really old version. I was still working in the days of DOS where 3D Studio could not even run with Windows because it would consume all memory available to it. If you had Windows running at the same time, it wouldn’t work. Windows was basically a DOS-based, it launched from DOS in the past, but now it’s the opposite way. DOS launches from Windows.

We’re now DOS’s called command prompt, but I’m digressing. I got very familiar with 3D modeling with 3D Studio and I really liked it. I did have a student edition, but when I came home from my parents or was it true space I had, either one. My mother threw my computer.

She didn’t throw it, but when I moved back home, she put it in the back truck. There was a three hour drive from Pittsburgh to West Virginia. Yes, I did live in West Virginia for a while, but the computer was face up absorbing all the rain coming down at it. My life was pretty much ruined enough that I had to tuck my tail between my legs and come home to my parents’ house, but then on top of that, my computer was pretty much destroyed. Everything on the hard drive was so corrupted. It’s just beyond words. I had just lost so much.

Everything had become my life at that time. I didn’t have anything on backup, nobody backed up things those days. The only option I had available was floppies and zip discs. I’m a student, I didn’t have much money. I had three zip discs, I believe, and you couldn’t fit that much on a zip disc at that time.

I still have them, but there’s not really much of any value today. But TrueSpace is free, and this is just so amazing. I was just shocked and I was scratching my head, I was like, where the heck was I? TrueSpace had been acquired, Calgary is the company that created and published TrueSpace, but they have been acquired by Microsoft. Microsoft decided, let’s make it free. Why is TrueSpace interesting to you or people who are in Second Life? Second Life already does 3D modeling in a sense.

I’m like, sure, yeah, but the powerful thing with it is that you can actually model much better scenes, animations and whatnot. There are also sculpt texture plugins. One lets you view sculpting maps as objects with entry space. The other plugin lets you work with an object that will allow you to save it to a sculpt image to upload for Second Life.

So if you like to play with vertices and adjust them in a 3D environment, or vertices, edges, faces, blah, blah, blah, you have all that with TrueSpace. So, you know, if you’re interested, go ahead and grab it. It’s there. All right, you know what? I think I’ll just close with that. I don’t really have that much Second Life stuff today, do I? But I think that should be enough. And we’re coming up 12 minutes, I guess. All right, so this is Lewie, Dedric Mauriac, whatever, Instant Blue, overall in OS Grid. So, see you later.

Dedric  Mauriac: Bye.