You already know that I am a huge fan of the FilterCam HUD by MechanizedLife. I love anything that makes my life easier, and the FilterCam does just that by eliminating the need for post-processing my photos.  Considering my very limited Photoshop skills, this tool is invaluable to me.  This is a photo I took earlier this week and uploaded directly from in-world. I didn’t even have to crop it. All of the effects were provided by FilterCam and Windlight. What could be easier?

Now, we want to see how YOU use the FilterCam HUD, and we’re giving you some incentive. MechanizedLife is holding a FilterCam Photo Competition with support from the makers of the Avimote PoseMaker HUD. The prize packages total more than L$15,000 and everything you need to know to enter is listed below. Just be sure to get your entries in before the end of the month. And please, don’t hesitate to leave a comment here or drop me an IM in-world if you have any questions! Good Luck!

What: FilterCam Photo Contest

When: 6 February through 28 February 2010, Winners announced 1 March 2010

Prizes

1st Prize - L$5000 + Avimote PoseMaker Personal Edition (L$2450 value)

2nd Prize - L$2500 + Avimote PoseMaker Personal Edition (L$2450 value)

3rd Prize - L$1000 + Avimote PoseMaker Personal Edition (L$2450 value)

Prizes will also include: MechanizedLife gear and Tillie’s Posestands

Rules

• All entries must originate in Second Life and must be created using the FilterCam HUD by MechanizedLife
• Entries must be submitted to the FilterCam Flickr Group
• Entries must include the tag “FILTERCAM CONTEST”
• Post-processing is permitted, but should be used sparingly as the idea behind the FilterCam HUD is to create beautiful in-world snapshots that do not require extensive post work.
• A descripton of the filter/mask used and any post-processing applied should be included in the photo description.
• You may use any of the filters/masks included with the FilterCam HUD or you may create and use filters/masks of your own design.
• You may submit up to 3 entries.
• Entries can be submitted through 12:00am SLT on Sunday, 28 February 2010, at which time judging will begin.  Late entries will not be considered.
• Winners will be announced on Monday, 1 March 2010 at 5pm SLT and prizes will be distributed at that time.

Judges

The following individuals have agreed to participate as judges for this competition.

• CodeBastard Redgrave - Owner, MechanizedLife and Creator of the FilterCam HUD
• Gabby Panacek - PR Manager, MechanizedLife
• Ryker Beck - Second Life artist and designer, creator of many of the filters/masks included with the FilterCam HUD
• Stephen Venkman - Second Life Artist and Photographer
• Tillie Ariantho - Second Life Photographer and Creator of Tillie’s Posing Stand with HUD
• Jori Watler - Second Life Photographer and Jewelry Designer

About FilterCam HUD

FilterCam is a fantastic visual effects HUD system which makes it effortless to add a variety of high quality special effects to your pictures or when filming machinima. Over 80 high quality masks and filters are provided, including a picture frame and keyhole, as well as blood, cinema, circle, clear, grunge, iphone, nightvision, oval, postcard, scanlines, square, tryptic, and wanted.

FilterCam Tutorial:  Creating Masks & Adding Custom Filters to the HUD

Ryker’s Tutorial for making your own filters

About Avimote PoseMaker

The Avimote PoseMaker HUD allows Second Life residents to pose their avatars in any position they like, right where they are, without the need for external tools. It can be used to override part of an existing pose, such as when a hand is stuck in a skirt, or to create complete new poses.

Try repeating that title five times! Nonetheless, we here at MechanizedLIFE Multiversal HQ have received some requests about how to go about inserting your own pinups or other illustrations into the pinup calendar that is one of the ten kiosk choices you get with the CalendarCog Kiosk Boxed set from our store. BTW, our new store at Starlustian has all our Cog stuffs in a terrific Retro Computer motif!

Here is my Pinup CalendarCog Kiosk, providing marvelous memories as well as up-to-date information on the events of my life.

So if you really insist on replacing the wonderful Rouge Pinups, which include ML staffer Gabby Panacek as well as ML founder Alidar Moxie, here’s how you do it:

• Make a copy of the original calendar and archive it.
• Then rez a copy of it and use Edit>General to rename it to whatever you desire.
• While you’re in Edit mode, click on Edit linked parts, then click the picture prim of the calendar kiosk.
• Go to the Content tab and you should see a script called RotatePic. (If you don’t, you didn’t do this right–try again!)
• You can delete the script that’s there and use the RotatePic script that I can supply you if you IM or Notecard me. (I will give you a notecard with these instructions and the script embedded in it.)

Once you’ve followed those steps, open the script and follow the instructions: “replace the uuid1, uuid2, with your list of texture UUIDs. Don’t forget the last entry must have no comma at the end.” To find UUIDs, right click on a texture or photo and you will see an option for copying the UUID. Paste it into the script.

Click Save, then click Reset. The kiosk will soon show the new pics in rotation.

Contact Paypabak Writer for the notecard with the new script! Who knows? I might even include a pinup of myself!

Happy New Year!

We just wanted to take a few moments and share with you a couple of great reviews/tutorials that were blogged recently by Alicia Chenaux and SarahTheRed Aurbierre.

Follow the links to read these two fantastic posts:

From Ch’Know Style: FilterCam 2.0 is Ready!!

And from What? Another Fashion Blog?: Feature/Tutorial: MechanizedLife FilterCam

Thanks so much to Ali and Sarah for their support of FilterCam!

UPDATE:  And here’s another good one from Shyayn Lusch’s The Digital Doll: CodeBastard Redgrave is Such a  B!tch Thanks, Shy!

As some may know, FilterCam has native support of glow layers since the beginning. However, since viewer 1.20, Linden Lab “broke” support for glow on the HUD as a tradeoff for an issue, namely inworld glow objects affecting HUDs. To fix this, Linden Lab completely removed glow support on the HUD, which broke existing content, namely FilterCam’s glow support.

If you would like to see glow come back on the HUD, at least with a debug option to enable/disable it in your viewer, please vote/comment on this JIRA here: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3167

Raven Haalan uses our Calendar Cogs and therefore is the focus of this Spotlight. However, Raven is worth the spotlight for a number of other great reasons: he’s a great scripter in his own right, with the RavenScript product line (the store mentioned in this blog is closed, sad to say). He’s involved with the communications team for Burning Life in SL, which is the mega event of Second Life, entering its seventh year of infamy. He also participates in Step Up!, a special event day for creating awareness about content theft in SL. Raven is also a delightful resident of SL in any of his three forms: Jaime Kenin and Binary Rascon being his other avatars. Time spent with any of these people is well spent as my sister Pay can attest, and for whom I am indebted for all her notes and pix taken in service to this article. Of course, I wonder sometimes where he gets time for operating three avis and all the things he does when he also is a regular contributor to Prim Perfect!

SLers Ottawa Group clubhouse in the sky.

Raven has probably done the best job of ’splaining how Calendar Cogs work outside of this blog, of course (although the new upgrade now does away with the server components he describes). He is using the Superboard to handle events for his latest SL project, the “SLers of Ottawa, Canada” group, where he has created a clubhouse for fellow Canadians to meet and plot virtual domination of SL. (Doesn’t everyone belong to a group like that?) Sister Pay was there while Raven built the skybox for this group and came away impressed with the speed at which he worked.

Raven added a red bow for the holidays to the SuperBoard announcing SLers of Ottawa, Canada, events.

Thanks, Raven, for your continued support of MechanizedLIFE products!

You heard well! FilterCam is now better than ever with it’s brand new menu system and support for multiple preset notecards! This opens the door to new extension packs that will become available shortly.

Current FilterCam owners can get a free upgrade simply by wearing their old FilterCam HUD. If the updater fails, please contact us inworld.

The new version is available from SLX or inworld at one of the MechanizedLife stores.

Thanks a LOT as usual for all the beta testers and code breakers, you guys are awesome and patient! Hope you will enjoy this version at least as much as we enjoyed brewing this version.

Thanks to Sasara Klaar and Gabby Panacek for the new filter masks, they rock! <3

We just fixed a nasty bug in CalendarCogs that rendered boards or kiosks blank under certain conditions. We also fixed the broken ONEDAY function in the boards. CalendarCog SuperBoard and Board have been released with version 2.1 and Kiosks are now version 1.9. If for any reason you didn’t get the upgrade, please send a notecard listing which products you own to CodeBastard Redgrave.

Dear customers,

Many of our customers probably already read about the roadmap of incoming changes to the XstreetSL marketplace as described on Linden Lab’s blog. Tho we will refrain from commenting this change in policy, we believe our customers can understand our concerns regarding the impact of such policy on the burgeoning and vast ecosystem of content creators. As we believe those policies affects XstreetSL as a free market, we also believe MechanizedLife must opt in for alternative web commerce solutions that will be beneficial to our customers.

This is why MechanizedLife will take the following measures in the incoming days:

• We will downsize our presence on XstreetSL to a strict minimum, only keeping our most successful products on there.
• After selecting what we consider to be the best alternative out there, we will redirect all of our current web product links to this new commerce portal.
• We will register and list our products on a couple of selected alternative commerce portals after we are done evaluating them.
• We will provide an alternative web mechanism for our customers to be able to get special freebies like our CalendarCog Password Resetter. We will also make such key items available inworld.
• We will retire all our other freebies from XstreetSL, including the popular SLURL HUD, which will only be available inworld at the MechanizedLife store. We may re-list it on alternative commerce portals.
• We will encourage our customers to visit us inworld as we appreciate both your business and your traffic, or shop from our alternative web store.

We apologize for any temporary inconveniences during this transitional phase, but we hope our customers will gain an improved shopping experience as a result of it. Thanks and kudos to all of our customers for their continuous feedback and support, and making MechanizedLife what it is today.

Codie <3

Hi, I’m Paypabak Writer and I will be highlighting the people and places using MechanizedLIFE products on what I hope to be a weekly or at least three-times-a-month basis. The first person I thought of (and whom Codie also suggested) was Crap Mariner! Crap wrote about Calendar Cogs back in September 2008 and has been a great advocate of our products for even longer! Up until the most recent release of Cog Kiosks in a set of ten different types of prim displays, Crap had a habit of stripping the script out of the old kiosks and inserting them in shapes she thought best expressed her whimsical place in the SLuniverse. But the new configuration includes an invisible prim version that now suits her best. She’s placed them in bells, bridge signs, and large clocks among other things, displaying the events that occur on various sims in her community.

Here

As she told me during our tour: “Things have quieted down a bit around here since the heyday of the Clocktower, but there’s a few events a week at the Yak, Louis’ weekly improvs [reference to the Louis Volare Peace Center], storytelling on the beach, and so on. So if folks are wandering around or coming in, they can see at a glance that things do happen [and when]. And since everybody in the neighborhood has access to the Google calendar, they … use the same core calendar, and I deploy the kiosks for them if they want them. Cogs allow for people to cross-promote, etc. without being annoying during event and shouting or wasting group slots.”

They suck at math, which explains why they call themselves Five Islands when there are really ten sims involved. Craps describes their community as “half free-range loony-bin, half bunker from the real world.” Crap really appreciates how the Cog Kiosks are such a low-prim investment for alerting visitors to the events of Edloe Island, Nowhereville, and Blakslee World, relieving the community of building signs for events. For evil kicks, Crap readily admits placing sit-ball pillows under the main landing points in her sim: “yes, i intentionally put these pillows here so if people rest here, folks teleporting in land on them. I’m a total shit ;)” So underneath that lovely metal exterior is a rusty metal interior! Thanks, Crap for taking the time to show me around your wonderful sims and for using our products. Some of the best live music performers play Crap’s venue, so keep an eye out of those kiosks!!