Sculpty Media Video URL Previewer
Nothing quite beats previewing a sculpt texture in Second Life except the L$10 upload fee. Then again on the Beta grid we don’t need to worry about that but I’d like to share with you all another preview. This preview is still within Second Life, so you should see exactly what you’ll get if you decide to upload and apply your sculpt texture.
Intro over, lets get to the good stuff. We’ll be using Second Life’s parcel video media URL and an SMIL file pointing at a JPG on the net. Lost you yet? Bear with me, the parcel video media URL can be found in About Land under the media tab, you’ll find the “Replace this texture: [ IMG ] with contents from this URL: [ URL ] “. [You'll need to enable "Play Streaming Video When Available (uses more bandwidth)" in the Audio & Video tab of your Preferences (CTRL-P).] So what we’ll be doing it taking a texture and dropping it in the Media texture box then point the URL at our SMIL file.
I won’t go into what an SMIL file is, just to say that Quicktime can drag an image from a specified url and play it as if it were a movie. I’ll add links to the pages where I read about using SMIL with Second Life. Now the piece of code you’ll be needing is:
<smil>
<head>
<layout>
<root-layout id="root" width="256" height="256" background-color="#333333" />
<region id="main" width="256" height="256" left="0" top="0" fit="meet" />
</layout>
</head>
<body>
<img xsrc=”http://www.nandnerd.info/outputimage.jpg” mce_src=”http://www.nandnerd.info/outputimage.jpg” region=”main” />
</body>
</smil>
Nothing too complicated huh? replacing the url in src’s with your own texture will do the trick. Once you have your .smil (I named my one “example.smil”) on a web host together with the sculpt texture in the src’s above we can go into Second Life and open the About Land for your Parcel. Under the Media tab you should be able to drop a texture from your inventory into the “Replace this texture” box. Now you enter the URL in the box below, for me that is http://www.nandnerd.info/example.smil (feel free to give this a go with your own land properties). Finally, you’ll want “Auto scale content” unchecked.
Lets now test the stream. Rez a cube and texture it using the same texture you used for the parcel media. Now press play on the Movies control at the very bottom of your screen. After a blink of black then an Quicktime Loading screen it should display a sculpt texture (pretty pixellated rainbow-like texture), it works! If it doesn’t then check you have Quicktime installed, that you are pointing to the right URL, that you have the .smil file in order (i.e. pointing at a valid src url for the image) and failing that begin to cry.
With that working next we take a common off-the shelf prim (right-click, create, click on the ground) then we turn it into a sculpted prim (More>> button followed by Object Tab and change Building Block Type to Sculpted). Now, if we drag and drop the texture we used on the land media tab of about land [b]without the stream playing[/b] we would end up with some horrible vector vomit (unless you chose a sculpt texture), so before you do that play the parcel movie stream. We can now drag the texture from your inventory onto the Sculpt Texture box in the edit window. And hey presto we have a sculpty preview.
We could stop there but instead lets go one step further. In order for us to refresh the image we need to stop the movie and start it again. Doing so won’t change your sculpt shape though (the client only does this if you apply a new texture manually, by script or on-rez). And so in order for us to view the new sculpt shape we will also need to switch the sculpt texture. In order to do this repetitive task I wrote a simple script. The script itself is a little hacky and some further experimentation could lead to some improvements.
Before I leave I wish to say that the above works fine for me. I demonstrated this to one other person and it didn’t work for them so your mileage may vary. If you would like to see this in operation then drop by nand Nerd’s Flexi Fun, Lasiocampa 133,209,57 and click on the vector vomit (with movie streaming enabled). I just hope that this information is useful to someone and I welcome any comments (especially on how to improve this tutorial).
Posted in Rambling, Second Life