Delicious

I’ve been playing an equine avatar for a while now in Second Life. Without coming off as arrogant I’ve undoubtedly been quite popular among the equine enthusiasts for my good looks. Specifically my cock, which tends to be the proverbial elephant in the room. Not all seems to prefer horses but it appears everyone likes a nice big cock!

Second Life is all about creating stuff and I made the cock myself, sort of. It’s been a project of mine ever since I started and I’ve been improving it whilst learning more and more about the Second Life creation tools.

It started out as a brown plastic-looking lump that a friend gave to me during my first week of SL. It had all the marks of a freebie item but it had a nice shape and more importantly it was modifiable. The first modification I made was to make it slightly bigger *chuckle* and give it a more realistic look. I gathered up a bunch of pictures of horse cocks (Thank you, Google!) and made a fairly realistic looking texture. The new texture made all the difference as people would approach me constantly to get a closer look at it.

Next I started to dig into scripts. I learned a lot by studying the scripts that were already in the cock and used that knowledge to add some things it was missing and changing things I didn’t like. I added a new inserted “state” and more recently a caged state. The first one made the cock smaller for use during sex and the other was a golden cock cage with a little padlock that I used to intimidate other users.

This brings me to the now, or yesterday, when I decided to update the shape of the cock. This meant 3D-modeling and Second Life has no built-in modeler. I decided to try Blender because it seemed to have the most tutorials related to Second Life and I knew it had the most features for a free 3D modeling tool.

I also knew it was a piece of shit of a program and that became painfully obvious in a matter of minutes.

I don’t want to digress too much on this, but I have to say that Blender has the single worst UI of any modern application. It’s fucking terrible! It reminds me of the DOS version of 3D Studio. I say this as someone who actually has a lot of experience in software engineering and interface design. It reeks of Linux and poor judgment. Nothing is self-explanatory or follows any conventions we’re used to in other apps. For instance, in most modern apps left-click selects and right-click pops up a context menu. In blender right-click selects and left-click does god only knows. In terms of user friendliness it’s despicable if not entirely backwards.

But as you can see in the screenshot above I did eventually manage to build my model (no thanks to Blender) and generate the necessary texture. Second Life reads its geometry data from 64×64 textures where red, green and blue represents X, Y and Z coordinates. It’s quite a clever system if you have the tool to generate them.

With the sculpt texture in hand it was an easy thing to upload it in Second Life and recreate the model. Because of the model-texture conversion the finished geometry didn’t have the same fidelity as in Blender, but the texture did a good job at covering up any discrepancies.

Overall I was happy with the result and I’m anxious to see what the response is from the afore mentioned equine enthusiasts.

[Update]

The new model was indeed very appreciated and I met a girl who nearly came in her pants just by talking to me (I was preoccupied at the time with two other girls but kept roping her in for future play).

I returned to Blender a couple of times to refine the model even further and at one point the model-texture conversion spontaneously broke down and I had to restore it, which was virtually impossible with the horrible UI. I was following a guide but despite that it just wouldn’t work.

I ended up googling a solution and I got it from the Blender wiki documentation, where it almost explicitly says “If the previous steps doesn’t work, try pressing the buttons in this specific order”. What is this? A user interface or some sort of combination lock? If I didn’t know the secret button order I would had been screwed. Blender sucks so much balls it’s ridiculous.