Avatar Development

Here are a few sketches/traces of an idea for my avatar. My avatar will be called The Disco Ninja since this is a tag I've had for many things.

Interactive Showcase - Changes

So after showing my mood board in the seminar on Friday I've decided to use my mood board as my interactive showcase/box. This is because the mood board in more visually pleasing and has more elements that could be developed.

Here is how my showcase is going to look -

I have imported it into Flash and begun work on making it more interactive. To do this I'm using invisible buttons so when the user moves their cursor over certain images they become clearer. The user would then click on the objects to see more/go to another frame.

Here is what I've done so far -

Interactive Showcase by ~TheBigDiscoNinja on deviantART

Does take a long time to load

In other news, in the seminar on Friday I was able to play around with a Wacom Bamboo A6 Graphics Tablet and enjoyed it so much I have decided to purchase one. The reasons for this are because I can product illustrations of a high quality, trace images and photos accurately, develop my 3D avatar and hopefully, using a this graphics tablet in my work will improve my ability to draw.

Below is a trace, using the Wacom Bamboo Tablet, of Superman -

A Diary of an Avatar 04

For my last for diary entry I decided to take a break in Second Life. I found a nice comfortable seat and sat down on it, well, at least I tried to...

And then tried I tried to lie down...

But nevertheless, I also enjoyed a nice warm jacousie...

A Diary of an Avatar 03

Here is my third diary entry for my Second Life Avatar - Steel Silvercloud.

The more and more I play Second Life the more I get board with loading times for graphics and texture. When trying to look at a building you would have to wait a few minutes untill you could see it in its entirety. The viewing distance from my Avatar, at which the server rendors the objects and textures, has a too smaller radius. When flying in paticlular, I approch objects like building walls too quickly for the server to even generate a wall.

A Diary of an Avatar 02

Here's a quick update on my Second Life Avatar after a busy Christmas day... I've managed to pick up a free Santa hat and finally been able to change my hairstyle (After a long struggle in trying to remove the old one) I've also visited a few new places and found some interesting features -

Below is a screenshot of me in the Nike Store. I used their laptop to send myself a email in the real world!

Here is a screenshot of my received email form Second Life -

Here is another screenshot of me flying over the Eiffel Tower in Paris!

If found that using the build-in Screenshot button is very handy since it saves your screenshots straight to you hard drive.

A Diary of an Avatar 01

After having problems with creating an avatar on http://www.doppelganger.com/index.html I have decided to create an avatar on Second Life, which is a 3-D virtual world created by its Residents.

After spending some time trying to think of a good character name, I managed to log in to the Second Life world and start exploring. The first thing I noticed when flying/walking was how slow it takes for the textures and objects to generated. Regardless of this, the fact that your character can fly around is quiet good fun.

Below is a screenshot of the Nottingham University building in Second Life -

When there are quiet a few characters on the screen, Its very hard to find out who is saying what -

A Diary of an Avatar

Create an avatar in an online 3D environments, such as Second Life, there.com or Virtual Doppelganger and spend some time exploring the virtual environments and think about the role of identity in these virtual worlds, try and talk with the virtual residents. Keep diary of at least four weeks of your Avatar’s experiences and post it to your journal, also take screen shoot of your experiences.

• Second Life - http://secondlife.com/
• http://www.doppelganger.com/index.html
• http://www.metaversum.com/content/view/15/47/