Omega appliers: using your Tango appliers with your mesh body

(Update: killing the YouTube video embedding, as it seems to trigger an excessively annoying message at each page loading. Last time I'm uploading a video on this crappy site).

So you've seen the latest hype seems to be mesh bodies, and you're wondering if you should get one or not. The big issue being, you've already some mesh parts such as Tangos or one of the Azzes, and you're not exactly motivated to redo all your wardrobe if you get one.

Well, here are good news: you might not have to! The solution: the Omega appliers. This is the first attempt that I know of to make universal appliers for a very broad range of mesh parts. I got these myself for my WowMeh mesh body, and I have to say it has been working great so far! The other good news are, they're using the same applier system as the Lola Tangos, so your Tango appliers might work out of the box for any mesh body supporting the Omega appliers. Here is for example yours truly, wearing a mesh dress from !Soul that has an additional Tango applier:

Click to view the video.

Nice boobie wiggling, uh? Gosh, I miss that with mesh clothes… *grins*

So, how to get it, and how does it work? Well, to get it is quite simple: they're on the Marketplace, and they have an in-world store, called Love-N-Lust Designs. All you have to get is the Omega Kit for your own mesh body. Just do a search on its brand in the MP store and you should find it easily. The in-world store has huge posters with your mesh body on it, it should be pretty easy to spot. All kits cost L$99 (and are worth every penny *winks*). There are however 2 popular mesh bodies that you won't see there: the SLink Physique, and the body from The Mesh Project. Not sure why these don't have a kit, maybe simply because the body designers just didn't want to…

Now how to use it. Well, the best advice I can give you here is: read the instructions! Yeah, that very often helps, promised. *chuckles* Here is what I had to do with the WowMeh, I guess it is more or less the same for all other bodies:

• I made a copy of my WowMeh body, hands and feet in my inventory. I chose to put these in a specific folder marked as the copy supporting the Omega appliers, but you can do as you please here. Just make sure to work on a copy, and to be able to find it back when you're done without confusing it with the original one.
• The fun part: I took the copies of the body, hands and feet and dropped them on the ground. SL-style out-of-body experience, I guess, feels a bit weird. *chuckles* Dropping these on the ground will actually make a copy of the copy, so you might want to delete the ones that are still in your inv after that.
• In the contents of the Omega kit, there's a script named 'Omega Applier Listener for WowMeh' - the name will change for other bodies, of course. I just dragged it from my inventory and dropped it on all the parts: body itself, hands, and feet.

• Then I took back the 3 parts.

And now the magic:

• I wore the mesh body with all the other required parts (alpha layer, and so on, you're used to that now if you have one).
• I wore the Tango applier for the dress above.
• I clicked on the button in the applier and…

Tadaaaaaa! The magic of technology! I just used a Tango applier on a WowMeh mesh body, woooot!

A warning though: not all Tango appliers will work with the Omega kit. If I understood well, some appliers use a full texture for the upper body, and others a reduced texture that only covers the breasts. The first ones will work, but not the second ones. So if an applier makes you look like that:

it probably uses a reduced texture, and it won't work with the Omega system.

There's also a trick to make Phat Azz appliers work with the Omega Kit, but I didn't test that one.

There's a lot more to the Omega system than just that though. There are quite a few clothes designers starting to include 'native' Omega appliers with their products. These will of course work with your 'Omega-powered' mesh body right out of the box. Let's hope more and more designers will support it, so that the applier hell will be over once and for all.

How to stream your videos stored in your DropBox to your blog

With the not-so-sudden disappearance of SL Porn Tube, I decided to take a look at something I have been wanting to do for quite long: store my little videos in my DropBox and embed these on my blog. Since I've only been doing little clips lately, I didn't really feel like uploading them to XTube, and even on Naughty Machinima, they look a bit out of place. So DropBox seemed to be a nice solution… if it works.
So good news: it does work! It's not exactly easy and has its drawbacks, but I managed to do it. Here is how.
First, I uploaded my videos to DropBox. That's pretty easy, you probably know how to do that  if you have a DropBox account. If you don't, you have all the required documentation when you sign up for DropBox.
Second, I created a sharing link for the videos I wanted to embed. This is quite easy too: you just have to go on the DropBox website, log in with your account information, browse your files to your video and open it. You'll get a window like this:

Now you just have to click on the link sign indicated by the red arrow on my screenshot to create a sharing link for the video. This will create the link immediately and open a new page with a little dialog:

Here, you can send the link by email, or share it on Facebook or Twittr, but this is not what we're after: what we need is the 'Get link' button. This will copy the address for the link in your clipboard.
Third, I edited my blog post to embed the video in it. This is the tricky part: you have to display the raw code for your post and give up on the nice word-processor like interface. On Blogspot, this is done by clicking the 'HTML' button at the top left corner of the page when you're editing your post.
Once you have the raw code displayed, spot the place where you want to put your video (I often use a silly marker like XXX in the normal interface to find the right spot), and then you insert this:

<video width="WWW" height="HHH" controls="controls">
<source src="XXX" type="video/mp4" />
</video>

where WWW is the width for the video you want in your blog post, HHH is its height (try to keep the aspect ratio from your videohere), and XXX is the text for the link you got in DropBox, but modified a bit. The DropBox link will look like:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/o9kqxokew3cana6/Beach%20showing%20off.mp4 
You have to replace the 'https://www.dropbox.com' part by 'https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com'. So the address above would be transformed in:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/o9kqxokew3cana6/Beach%20showing%20off.mp4
Just for information, it is not a hack: it is actually advised by DropBox itself (see here).
So since I wanted my video to be 640 points wide in my blog post, and that it had a 16:9 aspect ratio, its height should be 640 x 9 / 16 = 360 (math, waaaaaaa! *grins*), so the code to insert in my blog post is:

<video width="640" height="360" controls="controls">
<source src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/o9kqxokew3cana6/Beach%20showing%20off.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
</video>

And voilà, it works, the video is embedded in my blog post, woohoo!
Except it doesn't work… Uh? Well, OK, it does, but not everywhere… On my usual browser - namely Firefox -, I had the surprise to see a big grey rectangle in my blog post with a message saying 'No video with supported format and MIME type found." Darn… WTF? After searching a bit, I found out that all video formats do not work on all browsers using this method. The video was correctly displayed in Safari, but didn't work in Firefox… It seems that most commercial browsers (IE, Safari) support correctly the MP4 format, but it isn't supported in open-source browsers like Firefox or Chrome, that prefer OGV or WebM…
So what to do here? Well, there a simple solution: reencode your video in another format, for example WebM, upload the new video to DropBox, do the same as above to create a sharing link for it and put a new line in the <video>…</video> piece of code in your blog post. Here is how it actually looks for my video:

<video controls="controls" height="360" width="640">
<source src="http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/o9kqxokew3cana6/Beach%20showing%20off.mp4" type="video/mp4"></source>
<source src="http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/mer42krv3glsq1m/Beach%20showing%20off.webmhd.webm" type="video/webm"></source>
</video>

Two lines for the source: the first one for browsers supporting MP4, the second one for the others that only support WebM.
And this time, it does seem to work everywhere, woohoo! You can see the results here or here. Pretty neat, uh? *smiles*

So of course, streaming your videos from DropBox has its drawbacks:

• The size of videos is not limited, but the total available space is: 2 GB by default, you can raise it to 5 GB by inviting people I think, but for more, you'll have to pay…
• As explained above, you have to put two copies of your videos in your DropBox to make sure most people can see it. So it'll eat up more space than necessary from the already limited available one.
• Even when putting both formats, it might not work for some people with older browsers. You might want to put a link to your DropBox page for the video here (the one for the shared link, which is the only one which is public).
• I've read somewhere that if you get too much traffic on a shared link, DropBox might decide to remove it. I'm not sure it's true, I didn't find anything about this in the DropBox terms of use, but it would be understandable, since it increases the load on their servers I guess…

All in all, for my little things, I think I'll stick to this solution. If I ever do a 'full featured' film again, I'll probably go for the XTube and/or Naughty Machinima solution, but for now it'll be enough.

And here are my sources for all this:

• A post on Mr Wideen's classroom blog explaining the embedding process.
• An introduction to the <video> HTML tag on the alsacréations website (in french).
• And finally a link to a pretty neat reencoding application called Miro Video Converter. I used it to convert my videos from MP4 to WebM, and it worked really nicely!

WowMeh Mesh Body test

Hey look, it's me!

Or is it?
Well, actually, no, it's not the usual me. It's me wearing the mesh body from WowMeh. I decided to give it a try after seeing Kirsten's photos of herself wearing it (here, here and here). They have a demo, I tried it, and even with a few flaws I think it has, I decided to buy the full thing.
Here is how it looks first. I tried to do photos for what Kirsten hasn't already shown, so basically clothes and extreme position. *grins* All these are totally unedited photos, of course, apart from some reframing.

As you can see above, you can have working clothes for it. The clothes I'm wearing are just some I had, I didn't buy anything new. I just had to edit the boots a bit to fit them correctly, because the mesh body doesn't behave exactly like the SL one, but no big deal, it was just a few minutes. For the skirt and the corset, I used a great feature this body has, which is the possibility to hide parts of your body. These parts are unfortunately mostly slices, so it just won't work with every clothes you have. But you will probably be able to find some of your mesh clothes that will be OK with it - so it won't be an excuse to wander around naked, sorry *winks*.
But you're not here to see clothes, right? *grins* So let's go! BOOOOOBIIIIES!

Cute, uh? I like them a lot, they're not too big, nicely shaped, this is one of the main reasons why I went for this body, it looks more or less like a better version of myself, no drastic change.
OK, now, nekkid, of course. *grins*

I had to adjust the color of my bits just a bit to make them look right. Nothing drastic, the selection of skins for this av is quite nice. I'm just using a preset here, and they have a tattoo to hide the seam between the mesh body and the neck (you hadn't seen it, right? *winks*).
OK, now, a test I had to do: how does my best ass…et look like? *giggles*

Yay, cute butt, no? Yeah, it looks good. Again, not so different from the real me, and that's really great!

So now, how does it behave in live situations? Well, I looked for some quite extreme positions and here is how they look:

OK, that last one was just me showing off my bits (because, you know, I love showing off my bits *winks*). So, not bad, uh? The waist look a little bit weird for the doggy pose, the butt still has a few visible angles, but it's much better than the SL av! I also tried the AnyPose HUD to correct the hands position and it worked nicely.

So, I guess the photos were quite convincing, but what are the flaws I was talking about now? Well, first, I kept my boots on for a reason. *grins* The feet are not really good… They don't look nice, and they behave badly when deformed. So better avoid them. It seems the body connects nicely to SLink feet, so it's good news if you have them I guess, and bad news if like me, you don't *grins*.
The second flaw is the hands. It's not obvious on the photo, but they don't look very good either. I tried to do a custom alpha to get back my 'normal' SL hands, but it doesn't work: the mesh body doesn't behave like a normal body, so whatever you do, there are positions where the hands or arms are off from each other… Too bad…
Another minor flaw is a visible seam at the waist. Nothing too bad, but it will be visible on close-ups and will need some photo editing to make it disappear.
For the rest, it worked for me. I'd advise you to get the demo first though, depending on the skin you have, you might have more issues than I had.

So, as a conclusion, is it worth buying? Well, those who know me already know my answer to that question: I've never been convinced by mesh parts or avs, but I bought this one anyway. So my answer is definitely yes! And the main reason for that is that it looks enough like you to allow you to do photos or movies as the 'normal' you while clothed, and then switch to the mesh body when things are getting naughty. And I doubt anyone will see you switched.

Great website for texture design

I found a website today that I wanted to share with everyone. It's called COLOURlovers and it allows to create your own textures by applying a color palette to a pattern. The resulting image can be tiled, which is great for doing SL wallpapers or base textures for clothes for example.
Here are a few examples of what you can create in basically seconds using this site:

You can either create your own colors and palettes, or reuse those others have created. And there are loads of patterns to work with! Great new way to waste some time if you had some left! *giggles*

Free decent cum layers and prims for girls!

I've been asked for this so many times either by newcomers in porn, or simply by girls who'd like to have some without putting half of their money in it, that I decided to create a blog post about it.

So there actually are some free decent looking cum-layers around, even including prims! Here is how the ones I know look on me:

Yay, it's all free!

How to get them? Read it… after the break… *grins*

Handy SL camera control keyboard shortcuts

OK, so maybe I'm the only one who doesn't know that yet, but I just discovered a few very handy keyboard shortcuts for photographers and movie-makers in SL. My problem has always been that when I wanted to frame my photo or movie as I wanted to, the only way I knew was to anchor my view position on a point via alt+click. Unfortunately, that often makes your av's head turn towards the position you've clicked, which might not be what you want… But good news! You don't have to do that if you use keyboard shortcuts! So just anchor your view position so that your av's head is turned the way you want, and then use these:

• Alt+arrow up and alt+arrow down will zoom in and out;
• Ctrl+alt+arrows will orbit around the center of your view;
• Ctrl+shift+alt+arrows will pan in the direction of the arrow.

Try these out, you'll see, opens a world of new possibilities! Just wanted to share that, I guess some people might be interested.

Source:Second Life wiki