Entering the Asset Store

We have been active in Second Life since 2006. Browsing through the seven years in business, there's a long row of successful products and satisfied customers behind us. We have also provided thousands of designers the resources they needed to incorporate into their projects. Counting Bytegang's complete production today, we're past the 700 pieces mark - from simple prefabs to complex autonomous systems, some even with server side programming.

With our numerous brands we've touched virtually every area of creativity. We've done avatar design under Dirty Lynx and our apparel, skins, hairstyles, accessories or complete avatars are widely spread and loved. Hanzo Blades although not very active lately is still perceived as a benchmark in weapons production and probably every cyber samurai owns at least one of our blades. We run a lively airport with automated traffic control, where air pirates fly the airplanes powered by our sophisticated flight simulation system that has yet to find a par in terms of realism. The Corse GP racing track is a legend of it's own among the racers. Not only do we produce some of the best looking vehicles and invested huge efforts into their operating systems, we also run a racing track that is tightly bound with them in an organic synergy. And certainly - Prefabrica - our most successful brand. It has literally become a synonym for stock creative in Second Life. Our 3D models, textures or sound effects have become the foundation of a huge and wonderful collection of products. Prefabrica was always a guarantee of quality and assurance in the wild waters of free creativity of Second Life. We've been here for the creators for a long time and we mean to stay so. However:

It's an important day for Prefabrica today. We're taking first steps into an uncharted territory. It's the realm of Unity Asset Store. The store provides seamless in-Editor access to resources for the thousands of Unity game developers. And we see it as a great opportunity to cooperate with other teams and designers. We were able to bring some of our meshes from Second Life as well as put together a few new sets. We're entering the market in modest way with six initial packages but the wave is coming. There will be our complete line of textures available soon, and, for the first time really Prefabrica CODE is coming with some snipplets you'll love to use.

Flufee goes Android - and Bytegang too!

I've decided to post a little bit after quite some time. There's a good reason for it and the reason is Flufee. Namely it's Flufee's new adventure - and this time outside of Second Life.

Flufee was the pioneer of mesh in Second Life. We've made the character along with Yobee during the mesh beta era, and it was available at the Dirty Lynx store just as the mesh imports hit the main grid. Being one of the first mesh avatars out there at the time it was greatly successful. During the following year many thousands of Second Life users have purchased the avatar, either in regular or the later introduced tiny size, in one of the many colours. Some do even wear the Flufee apparel which we added to the product line in 2012. Although Flufee and Yobee were the first ones, soon there came friends to join the gang - and it totals almost two dozen characters today. Flufee even got his own website at www.flufee.com.

It's time for the next step. Flufee for Second Life, although wonderful and charming, suffered from a few limitations and although we love the metaverse, we decided it's time to bring Flufee and the gang to another platform as well. Actually not just one platform. We're heading towards all the iPhones, iPads, Nexus tablets, Galaxy family smartphones, and Chinese overnight miracles... soon even the TV in your living room. What allows us to do that is Unity.

Because Unity Rules!

We've been playing with Unity game engine for some time now and it's a wonderful dev environment. It's not even that far from our Second Life expertise and that's really handy. The most important thing for us is that it exports one project to multiple platforms (I mentioned some of them above). This opens up the wide world of various devices we can port to - and we see that as a great opportunity to show our stuff to more folks. Much more folks actually.

Another great feature Unity has is the Mecanim animation engine which allows seamless blending of animations and their targeting.  Moreover it is really easy and fun to use (important factor!). And this is where Unity meets our mesh avatars. We've been playing with Flufee in Unity and the outcome is our first Android application! It's certainly very modest, but hey ... "It's Something!" :) Flufee gets real time animations, reacts to your voice and if you manage to find the right triggers it even dances. The app itself is certainly free and you can support us with a payment that unlocks some extras. It's being first released onto Android devices on Google Play, but we're busy fine tuning the iOS version too at the moment. Check out the video we've just published:

There's more to Unity and Bytegang than just Flufee apps. We will be releasing first Prefabrica products for creators on the Unity Asset Store pretty soon. And, really, that's just the beginning. I will have some truly wonderful news for the Second Life creators concerning Unity. But for now - Let's go, pirates!

A few words on mesh imports

Earlier this week the mesh import feature was enabled on all the Second Life server channels, the new official viewer also started to be able to render the new poly mesh models and the Marketplace gave green light to selling mesh content. Three of the four major conditions for mesh import creativity launch have been fulfilled. The last one, mesh support in 3rd party viewers, will enable the experience for everyone at last and we're all looking forward to it.

Last year Prefabrica brand was split in four divisions - IMAGE for textures, SOUND for sound effects, CODE for programming solutions, and most important one - MESH for 3D model resources. Why "MESH" in March 2010? Well, technically every 3D object is a mesh, including sculpted prims of course. So, where's the big difference one might ask. It's actually not as big as it might seem, but from our point of view mesh import brings:

- the end of models created exclusively for SL - we now can use the work we've been doing for our other games and projects in SL (and vice versa). This was not possible with models made of sculpted prims - and you will see the fruits of this possibility very soon in our stores.

- improvement of workflow, as polygon mesh models are easier to texture due to custom UV maps and multiple faces. Also the 3D creative process itself is a bit easier now.

- rather smaller improvement of the quality of the 3D content. Actually there's few things polygon mesh allows that couldn't have been done with sculpties as well. The best old fashioned sculpted content looks as good as the mesh content to the end user in most cases.

- avatar appearance - here of course the biggest changes are awaited. Mesh objects can be rigged to move along with the skeleton and many see the posibilities here. However, the limitations are still present. Are you thinking about a mesh skirt? Well, probably forget about your own shape then. The thing is that the skirt (or other clothes) will adjust to a wider pelvis as the joint distance is in play, but not to a larger butt, as it doesn't affect the joints. So prepare for your belly to go through the mesh shirt, your breasts to stick through your mesh jacket and so on. Have a try yourself - we've prepared a free rigged mesh t-shirt model in the PREFABRICA mainstore. So knowing the limits and counting with them, mesh will be very helpful in some applications where sculpties couldn't compete - like sleeves and alike. However, if you're thinking complete avatars, mesh is a blessing. We've prepared first two full mesh avies: the Flufee and Yobee creatures in Dirty Lynx - and I really love the way they look and behave. (See the videos - Flufee and Yobee on YouTube) This opens up the door really and I'm looking forward to see what comes out of this.

- generally - I think there's not going to be any influx of free 3D content from the internet to SL. The amount of work and skills needed for a good performing mesh model is still about the same as before. It's only opening the doors to the new means of creation - which is a positive by all means :)
 

What we're up to in the nearest future "meshwise":

- we'll be releasing at least five new mesh cars in Prefabrica very soon. The Corse GP racing track will be full of them I'm sure.

- we have scheduled first mesh fullperm prefabs for release in the coming week. Sci-fi vehicles anyone? Motorbikes? The packaging is in progress now.

- taking advantage of our proved download system, we are going to provide full source downloads for all our mesh prefabs. You can get the .obj, .dae and .psd for the mesh t-shirt now in the Prefabrica mainstore.

- Dirty Lynx will continue the new avatars line and we also have some more apparel coming. Mesh in game too here.