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You are here: Home / Archives for Arrehn

Arrehn

August 17, 2021 By Arrehn

Message from Arrehn- A Sincere Thank You to Pioneers

Once upon a time I created the MetaHarper Show Tools for myself, to help manage a complex show that had outgrown my ability to frantically click buttons. Later, the tools helped a circle of friends with their own artistic performance pursuits. When we fast-forward to today, many users are people I have never met before, drawn together only by a common interest to see live multimedia performances flourish in Second Life.

As our list of creative users expands, the features and capabilities of MST and ChoreoHUD and even Immersive Theater have outgrown my ability to use every feature myself. As a result, I now depend on fearless people to tell me what is working well, what could use some additional layers of loving polish, and what might need to be a future feature.

I know that the people who send this feedback do this tread a more difficult path.  We all have a choice in what tools we use. When faced with the unknown, it is often far easier to quietly use another tool, or find private workarounds, rather than go back to me and invest the time to dive deep into the technical details and pursue improvements. This is not in any way surprising, it is expected. Most people want to focus on sharing their art and choreography and not focusing too hard on where their technical tools came from, and there’s nothing wrong with this.

Having said that, there are some of you that do take the time and effort to choose MST and push me with feedback when you need improvements. Maybe you like our non-commercial roots, or you like our interoperability, or perhaps you  had a positive experience with myself or someone else who helped develop MetaHarper tools. Regardless of the reason, I cannot overstate how important this is for our success. I and all the MST users owe a debt to the people who have gone out of their way to help troubleshoot complex issues, contribute documentation, share ideas for improvements, and commit to trying new features during high  stakes, live performance on regions overloaded with eager audiences who might not be seen again for another week or even month.

If you are one of these fearless pioneers, know that you make working on show technology rewarding. We’re part of a community of people pushing the boundaries of what is safe, prudent, and possible. This is a fine place to be.

I want to recognize some of the people who have especially helped our Show Tools evolve over the last year. In no particular order:

  • Blaze DeVivre
  • Meegan Danitz
  • P0rsche3000
  • Sho Kyong
  • Jenna Dirval
  • Subversive Vavoom
  • Gloriana Maertens
  • Honey Heart
  • Cherryblonde Scribe
  • Kareen Magic
  • Fifi Oh
  • Diawa Bellic
  • Chewie Quixote

If I’ve left anyone out please do let me know! I can only hope the list will be as long next year. Thank You!

Filed Under: MetaHarper News, MetaHarpers, Product News

August 17, 2021 By Arrehn

Summer 2021 – New MST and ChoreoHUD beta releases!

Hello  MetaHarper Show Tools users! If you have been following our releases you may have noticed much polishing and maintenance over the last year. The performing arts in Second Life are growing and there has never been so many live choreographed performances as there are today. I am happy to see that this art form continues to flourish, and I hope to contribute to this trend by developing even bigger and more ambitious show creation equipment.

I’m happy to announce the next round of new features for MetaHarper Show Tools and ChoreoHUD Director for 2021! The following features are in a working/testable state and I’m actively looking for design partners to try them out in full live shows:

  • Very Long Path (VLP) movers. These movers can hold hundreds of waypoints in memory, so choreographers can keep them active in a performance for an hour or even longer without having to stop or takes breaks.
  • Movers can now be shared to multiple performance engines. This allows different choreographers to hand off control of the same mover to each other, or the same choreographer to create animation sequences of an hour or longer.
  • When designing movement paths, the movers have new features to help smooth out travel speeds between waypoints.
  • Movers, Performance Engines, and Camera HUDs are now ‘Experience Aware’! They can be configured so that users will not be bothered my pop-up permission requests when sitting on movers or clicking for dance invites. Additionally, the scripted camera design tool will no longer bother the user with popup camera permissions requests.

If you are interested in using one or more of the above features in your up coming live performances and have the time to allow for learning some new tricks and providing feedback, I’d love to hear from you!

I have some other projects current in active development but they are not ready for testing. These include:

  • Adding ‘macro’ or ‘hot button’ capabilities to ChoreoHUD
  • Adding the capability for ChoreoHUD to show organized subsets of animations
  • Adding the ability to pull a full sim of audience members into choreography, using mover/animations

Is there something that you don’t see on this list? Please let me know. I hope to see you all on stage!

-Arrehn

Filed Under: Product News, Show Tools, Slider Posts

June 4, 2020 By Arrehn

MST Choreo HUD Credits

Design and Programming:

  • Arrehn Oberlander

Artwork:

  • Joseph Wain
  • Sho Kyong
  • Sammie Benoir
  • Fifi MetaHarper Oh

Design Partners:

  • Deb Heron
  • Jenna Dirval
  • Meegan Danitz
  • Sho Kyong
  • Diawa Bellic

Filed Under: Show Tools

September 2, 2019 By Arrehn

Coming to a Theater Near You… MST Templates

If you look backstage at your favourite performance theater you might see a mesh logo like the one in the picture to the left, the MetaHarper harp-mermaid.

If you click this object, you will be given a notecard containing useful information for show creators. Some of this information will be of interest to MetaHarper Show Tools (MST) users, and some of this notecard will be of interest to anyone who creates acts for this theater regardless of the tools they use. You will find:

  • The Theater’s official MST Centerpoint name.
  • The Theater’s official centerpoint owner.

These pieces of information are useful to configure your MST Performance Engine (aka, the ‘newAct’ object) . You do not have to use the above pieces of information– you are free to rez your own MST centerpoints if you have access to do so, but using the official centerpoint will help keep the theater decluttered.

In addition to centerpoint info above, you will find a full permission, color-coded theater template, for anyone who wishes to make acts for this theater. An example of one is shown in the image below.


White areas show walls that your audience will see. You may wish to cover these with your props or retexture them.

Black areas represent obstructions that are built into the theater, such as columns, walls, stairs, etc. Avoid any movement in your act that would cross into black areas. It is also recommended not to cover these up with props or retexture them- leave them alone. Additionally, there is often a black prim near the lower-front of the stage to provide an indicator of how high above the theater floor the stage begins.

Grey areas represent backstage space where other performers or props can be safely out of sight of the theater audience. It is recommended that you use the grey areas to temporarily hold props or avatars that move in and out of your act scene.

Blue areas represent ‘thrusts’ in front of the main stage curtain that are visible to the audience. The blue areas can be safely retextured or covered to fit your scene, but be aware that it will be visible before the curtain opens.

How do I use these new Theater Templates?

You may use these templates by travelling to your build area of choice, opening the ‘MST Theater Template Instructions‘ notecard you received from the theater’s backstage harp-mermaid object, and clicking the embedded object icon next to the template’s name. You will be presented with a dialog asking if you wish to copy the template to your inventory. Confirm ‘Yes.’

From there, drag the template from your inventory to your build area.

If you are using the MST suite, navigate your camera under the template’s floor and find the bright white ‘centerpoint marker’. Edit this object in your viewer’s build window. Take a note of the marker’s position coordinates and rotation values. You may which to copy these values to your clipboard by clicking the lowercase ‘c’ button next to each section, then pasting the values into a temporary scratch space such as a notecard, chat window, or external editor.

Next rez your MST Venue Centerpoint, and set its position and rotation to the values you have recorded above. You may click the lowercase ‘p’ button to paste in the values from the clipboard directly, saving time. When you are finished, your red centerpoint should be lined up with the white marker under the stage floor. Give your red centerpoint a name that matches the suggested one in the template’s notecard.

Now, when you build acts on in your workspace, you will have confidence they will line up perfectly with your target theater!

Special Note: The white sections of the template are spaced out a little in front of the target theater so they can accept your own textures without “z-fighting” graphical interference you would normally get if you place two objects too close together.

If you wish to retexture the white or blue surfaces, unlink these prims from the template, retexture them as you like, and then pack them into your MST performance engine’s rezzer similar to any other prop. When you unpack them at the actual theater they will be in the correct location and look just as you would expect.

If your favourite theater does not have a backstage MST informational notecard giver like this, and you would like one, I’m happy to work with the theater owner to set one up.

Happy Show Creating!

-Arrehn Oberlander

Filed Under: MetaHarper News, Show Tools

June 7, 2019 By Arrehn

MetaHarpers Immersive Theater Experience: 2019

Located in the Eyefliez region of Second Life, we’ve created a new kind of live theater and act gallery that explores some new types of show formats and stage technology.

We use the SL “Experience” System to give the illusion of a seamless experience where you are transported away to different lands to become part of a scene.

This area is under construction but will soon contain a gallery of interactive scenes as well as hosting occasional live scenic events. Further technical details about the experience are described in the comments below.

Filed Under: Exhibits, MetaHarpers

November 23, 2018 By Arrehn

MST 6.0 Feature Ideas, work in progress

I’d like for the MST 6.0 release to focus on ease of use, and reliability in high-lag environments. I’m open to rewriting pieces, if it makes them easier or simpler to explain. For example getting rid of the concept of boxing/unboxing of the performance engine.

I’ve started to capture the various ideas that may inspire the MST 6.0 release below. I’d love to hear your ideas and your feedback!

Mover Improvements

  • Install the ‘never drop an invite’ system, brought over from the Choreo HUD project.
  • Teach movers to register avatars who sit on them to the MST Choreo HUD, not just performance engine.
  • Allow movers to be more remote-controlled (remotely set save status, and remotely set home status. Both of these may be handy for HUD control)
  • Stop giving out the sync tool by default. I’m thinking this can be an option, which would allow people to choose whether to use synctools.

MST Performance Engine Improvements

  • Adopt a new, improved-efficiency event scheduler from MST Choreo HUD project. Should save script time.
  • Allow a method of disabling internal animation control, for  if you want to use the choreo hud for animations, instead of the engine.
  • Prettier texture and size for the engine
  • deprecate the box/unbox functionality
  • warn when multiple valid centerpoints are present
  • warn when no valid centerpoints are preset (report if centerpoints are present but we’re not allowed)
  • Fix the precache command so that it can be called by chat command.
  • Make the menu auto-reopen after making a choice by default

Centerpoint Improvements

  • Auto stop / start the communication scripts that can be used to project voice on stage, that no everyone uses, to save script time when they aren’t in use.
  • Automatically set the centerpoint name to the venue name, and vice versa

General Suite Improvements

  • Include the new, mesh MST syncTool in the suite package
  • Add a subfolder for venue-owner gear
  • Use a new mesh box for the tools

Documentation Improvements

  • Document all the possible eventlist commands, similar to the MST choreo HUD.
  • See if anyone wants to make quick vid tutorials

Filed Under: MetaHarpers

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