Dean’s Pants

I bought an iPhone. You’re surprised? Seriously? You don’t know me at all.

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This may sound like part of a scene that got cut from “Pulp Fiction”, but let me assure you, this is about good software.

GIMP is a free software/open source alternative to a program like Adobe Photoshop, and serving as a you-pay-for-what-you-get replacement, it’s done fine for me. I’ve used it a lot, though I’d never touch one of my photos with it (I use Photoshop Lightroom for that), I’ve made many a Second Life texture with it, but here’s the number one reason I’m going to buy Photoshop: kerning. GIMP doesn’t have it. GIMP can do diddly-shit with text. And no, I’m not going to spend an afternoon building some legacy version from source on my Mac and hope to get the Freetype plugin working. Do you want to know how much I want this (and other things) to work out of the box? I’m going to spend $700 (or whatever it costs when it comes out) for Photoshop CS3. It doesn’t help, either, that while trying to make a minute markers on a clock face texture for SL, GIMP crashes 90% of the time while rotating a layer. Fuck that.

“Taper” is a pretty cool shape-altering feature in SL. If you’re like me and prefer to do all your calculations, sizing, and placement by hand (or if the tool you’re using doesn’t do everything it could), here’s how to deal with all the new dimensions that spring up with using taper.

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Here are a few useful formulas I’ve derived in the time I’ve squirreled away building in SL. I thought they might be useful to someone out there, and I’d love to have them here for my own reference instead of in the middle of what looks like an high school freshman’s geometry notebook hidden amongst diagrams of parallelograms and triangles. Also of note, I deal only with my ruler in world coordinates, not local or reference.

(Big thanks to SL friend Sanford Foulon who put me on the right track on calculating the visually deceiving values of Y taper.)

To calculate the angle created by applying Y shear to a box primitive:

arc tan ((y * shear) / z) = theta

• y is “Y” size.
• shear is the value in the “Y” box under “Top Shear”.
• theta is the angle created between the XZ plane and the sides of the box originally parallel to the XZ plane (before shearing).

To calculate the angle created by applying Y taper to a box primitive:

arc tan ((y * taper) / (2z)) = theta

• y is the “Y” size.
• taper is the value in the “Y” box under “Taper”.
• theta is the angle created between the XZ plane and the sides of the box originally parallel to the XZ plane (before tapering).

The values of Y sheer and Y taper that will give you a perfectly upright (i.e., parallel to the XZ plane) side:

taper = 2 sheer

If anyone would care to see me derive these or show visual examples, please just comment.

Okay, so I play (or whatever the appropriate verb is; someone tell me what it is, dammit!) Second Life quite a bit—probably too much—but I really dig this satire site [thanks, emjaybee!].

Among the best parts in the FAQ are:

• What’s this body thing, and what do I do with the dangly bits?
• Why can’t I build a dirigible with my mind?

And then, an image that says, “Fornicate using your actual genitals”. Awesome. Truthfully, though, I’m still perplexed why anyone has “sex” in SL.