and here we are in 2016 with a brand new lab chat, co-moderated by our own jo yardley:
enjoy and comment aplenty.
we will be back in full force and non-stopping attitude with fresh programming on february 5th [yes i will bring back many many interviews from sundance 2016 but we won’t ignore second life news either!]
don’t forget – if you do project bento stuff = come to the LAST public filming february 1st! ping us in-world for details!
here is a little teaser [ignore the audio = it announced an already obsolete filming date]:
the drax files radio hour [with jo yardley] is a weekly production of basicdrax entertainment.
the show is supported by maven homes, gizza creations, botanical, strawberry singh, abranimations, aeros avatars, kahruvel design, giant snail races every saturday, the cube republic, the avazines publication family, {what next}, dutchie furniture, landscapes unlimited, dwarfins, fallen gods incorporated, feroshSL and Death Row Designs.
music by bd.
contact the show via skype draxfiles, avatar draxfiles or email radio@draxfiles.com
the drax files radio hour 
Reblogged this on ZZ Bottom misadventures in Virtual Worlds!.
Thanks for the mention! It was quite a bit of work getting those that far.
As for the Lab Chat, Ebbe did impress me with what he did understand about Bento. Overall, as a CEO, I think he’s been the best since Phillip. I agree with much of what he has to say, especially around business. That said, I do have some serious concerns.
I would think that Bento would highlight the most important issue concerning Sansar, and urge LL to take the new rig seriously, not that SL’s was not, it’s just old. The SL avatar, for it’s time, from a novice creator’s perspective, was pretty innovative, and it became the key element that sparked the whole economy. It was the standardization of the SL avatar that created the whole market. Thousands of people were creating for 1 avatar, and consumers instantly had millions of options. If Ebbe thinks he can open Sansar, even to just us creators, with no notion of any set standard for the avatar, I won’t even bother checking it out. Sansar will be dead from the start, with a few stray creators trying desperately. People put up with this craziness in SL now, only because they have so much already invested in SL. Nobody with a brain is going to go into Sansar and spend money aimlessly wondering if this or that will fit. I personally think it is crazy that they don’t have, at least, a notion of the system they want, or some working theories. I could give them an ear full on the topic of avatars and clothing that fits.
Just to throw something out there for clothing. In the last year or 2, there has been some advancement in propogating Blend Shape morphs to other meshes in Blender. Imagine I have this avatar, and this avatar has 100 default Blend shapes to customize the shape of the avatar’s body and face. Well, in Blender, I can easily make a pair of pants that fits the default shape, then copy all the blend shapes from the body, to the pants. I’ve used this extensively over the past year making content for my clients. If Sansar incorporated this same type of system, a creator would only need to make clothing for the default, and Sansar would created all the blend shapes to match the body shape. Bingo, everyone is happy! With a system like this, Sansar could even allow us to create our own blend shape for the default, which can also morph our clothing. And….. we could sell those blend shapes to other users. Imagine me selling a blend shape that morphs someone’s whole avatar into a werewolf, and the clothing just morphs with that same blend shape because Sansar propagates the blend shapes of the body onto the clothing. This would seriously wow people!
We haven’t even gotten to the topic of animation, and how it needs to work in a virtual world or game environment. This is not a simple task. It’s arguably much more complicated that even the clothing issue, and much more important. As we can see in SL, if you have good motion capture animation, that can trump almost anything. The fact that we, meaning animators, were all creating for the same avatar skeleton made the animation market robust, and anyone could make their own with some free tools. With priorities and other aspects, animation can be quite complicated.
IMHO, these things make or break virtual worlds. The crazy part is that Ebbe could not tell us anything about these things.
The teaser video for Bento has been removed I just realized. Wonder who did that…oh I guess it was me! Anyhow = here is the full done episode = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEzfh1S5Y6Q