Generating multitexture slides to save time and money in uploading and holding slide conferences

Currently there are many systems for teaching and showing slides in SL and/or OS. Apart from the streaming solutions which are a bit difficult to handle in SL (you need to own expensive land and to set complex deeded objects), slide presenters with image caching are already a good solution. As I told many times I don’t like to spend time and L$ to upload a presentation.

A typical presentation from mine is around 20 slide for 1 hour inworld experience. This would cost 200 L$ which is almost 1 US$. It is not so much, but if I can choose I prefer to spend much less. What about using only 5 uploads i.e. 50 L$, this would be around 20 cents, and it is also much more fast to organize when you upload.

Unluckily the preparation of this smart system can be a bit difficult, but when set up the first time you can use it happily for the other yours presentations

Recipe for the presentation:

0\ The best would be using Zan Printer which offer an embedded JPG printer which automatically produces multi textures without any blank space. You need to rotate the multitextures produced by Zan since they are rotated by 90 degrees.

Video for using zan:

Unluckily Zan Printer is NOT free so here I propose an alternative solution which is free, but needs some extra steps and will have some percentage of wasted space.

1\ I normally use word to prepare my presentations this is because it is much more easy to lay out textual information. If you used Power Point you can use native “export to jpg” mechanism which can be easier. The first step is to export the sequential list of your slides. To export jpg’s from Word you can use the free gnostice printer plugin (http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/downloads/Print2eDoc_58341_p/free.htm) this will add a new printer. Remember to choose as output format jpg and the correct folder where you can find out your images.

Video for installing gnostice and producing JPGs:

2\ Now you need to merge 4 pages in one. I use the contact sheet feature from XnView. Specify all the JPG images in the correct order (order by name) and make contact sheet specifying 2048×208 2×2. And yes you have the final JPG.

Video for producing proper contact sheets:

Next post for the tool inworld opensource making use of this.