SecondLife Resident Todd Borst got in touch with me to create a real life version of one of his many cool creations: the one, the only Kung Fu Monkey.

Within SecondLife, the monkey sits on your shoulder. In real life, it now sits on his desk.

During the preparation process, we repositioned the monkey so that the left elbow touched the knee and the right hand touched the ear (for stability).

It’s also interesting to note the differences between SecondLife’s graphic representations and how they play out in real life. If you look at the picture of the monkey in SecondLife, the seam between it’s belly and the body is wavy (I believe this is an artifact of how SL changes the level of detail on objects). In reality, it’s a smooth line; as it would be in SL if you zoomed in far enough.

I was very impressed with Todd’s design and would love to have the opportunity to create some of his other SL works.

technorati tags:SecondLife, Fabjectory, Rapid-Manufacture, Mass-Customization, Kung-Fu-Monkey, Fabject

This is the first of a series of articles I’m going to post about the process of creating individual figures with the Fabjectory Service.

Pathfinder Linden (John Lester) contacted me about creating a figure based on one of his avatars and we met at the Fabjectory headquarters in SecondLife.

In reviewing his avatar, we found a couple things that probably wouldn’t fabricate so well. Most problematic was the lower half of his cloak; which was a tapered hollow cylinder. The cloak was thin enough that if fabricated it would just fall apart.

I had him detach the cloak and made a new plywood (the default secondlife object texture) one that would mimic the shape but be much stronger; the substrate has high compressive strength, but low tensile strength (not very elastic). We then just textured the cloak with the correct texture in our post processing.

In post-processing, we also did a few tweaks like moving the back of the hat down to touch the brim and thickening up the brim itself.

We ended up shipping the figure directly to John’s Hotel so that he could show off the figure at the NMC 2006 Regional Conference

From all accounts it was a big hit and helped to show off some of the neat open aspects of SecondLife.

technorati tags:SecondLife, Pathfinder, Fabjectory, Fabject, Rapid, Fabrication, Avatar

It was through my development of the Second411 search engine that I met Jeff Barr. Amazon Web Services evangelist. He’s consistently offered strong feedback and guidance on the service and it’s Amazon search integration. Recently, he was cool enough to mention both Second411 and Fabjectory in his interview for SL Business Magazine.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, Fajectory, Secondlife, Shopping