My previous article on setting up Blender for making mesh clothes (Second Life Mesh Clothing Tutorial) was written in September 2011, eight months ago. I’ve updated it several times, but it is still out of date and awkward in some places. Blender is now at 2.63+ and has BMesh. Photoshop is up to CS6. The Mesh Deformer is close to being completed. We have a self correcting Bone Weight Copy add-on and more. So, lots of stuff has changed as of May 2012. So, it’s time for a new version of the tutorial.

#1 The Default Avatar Shapes (Kinda funny)

I’ll assume you are new to making mesh clothes. I’ll also assume you have some knowledge of Blender and Photoshop. I’ll be using only Blender 2.63a. I also omit the import to Second Life as this Tutorial is already over 7,000 words. Plus, there are lots of tutorials on the Second Life mesh import.

Index

• Page 1 – Blender Install, Base Mesh Selection
• Page 2 – Details on Files and Base Avatar Meshes Available
• Page 3 – Deconfuser, File to Use, Actual Mesh Differences, Easy File Fix
• Page 4 –  Not So Easy Fix for Learning, Exporting Shapes from SL, What’s Needed
• Page 5 – Getting Started, Customize Blender, GPU Kick-in, Load Mesh – Import OBJ, Setup Layers
• Page 6 – Join Parts or Not, Remove Doubles, Parenting, Check Parenting, Start Weighting – Vertex Weight Painting
• Page 7 – Weight Painting, Checking Weight Painting, Checking Weighting Source, Bone Weight Copying
• Page 8 – Checking the Weighting, Exporting Collada for Second Life

Some transcripts got posted and there are some bits of news.

Balancing

You may remember that the Lindens started balancing the regions by running adjacent regions in the same physical server, or at least physically nearby servers. They also made changes to the system so that popular regions would not load into the same server. The change improved performance and up time.

Beta Server

Since there was no new software roll to the main channel this week, they took the opportunity to do more balancing work. More busy regions were moved in to non-busy hosts. Oskar Linden says this makes a huge difference. They were going to get us some neat graphs and do a blog post, but that has never happened.

It has been some time since I wrote about Myst or Uru. These were the first virtual worlds in which I played. Myst Online: Uru Live was my first Massive Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG). When it closed in early 2008 I became one of the D’ni Refugees living in Second Life®.

Myst Inspired Devokan Tao

From time to time one hears of the Myst community in Second Life or OpenSim worlds and their affect on and contributions to these worlds. Hamlet at NWN wrote:  Myst & Uru Roleplay Regions Leave Second Life to Be Beautifully Reborn on OpenSim Grid. That is a bit of an overstatement. It is probably more accurate to say some regions closed and moved to other grids, but the people are still in SL. Now they are also playing in other grids too.

This is pretty neat.

Google is Changing

Metareality Podcasts

I was curious what is going on with SL9B and what the LEA deal was about. I saw that there was something about it in MetaReality’s lates podcast, May 18 – link.

Remember. At best I only paraphrase. While the podcast is intersting, there isn’t much I wanted to expand on or things I was that into… so I didn’t write much. But, the time marks should get you to anything you want to hear.

00:20 Start with SL9B

I’ve been busy with RL clients and not keeping up with SL. So, the cast was interesting. Daniel Voyger has a good article in what will be happening: SL9B resident centralized birthday formal announcement.

We did not get a roll to the main channel this week. The Region Crossing Phase I package failed in Release Channel (RC) testing. Since it failed, no new roll. It was worked on and is now running on Le Tigre and Magnum.

Region Idling

I wrote a short piece on that a couple of days ago. See: #SL Region Idling. That code is now running on Blue Steel.

OS Updates

The Lab has been upgrading server operating systems (OS) to a newer Debian version. Week 19 we saw 3 days of intermittent service in the evenings as backend systems were upgraded. This week Tuesday’s typical restarts were used to upgrade simulator OS’s. I don’t have any information on whether all the simulators were upgraded or not.

Missing Info

RL has been busier this week. So, I’ve missed some meetings and the Lindens are lagging getting the transcripts posted. So, I won’t have any more news until they post or I hear something from this afternoon’s meeting.

The Lindens were not overly happy with my explanation of Pathfinding (PF) to Hamlet (see: SL Pathfinding a Potential “Tsunami” (If We’re Not Prepared)). I didn’t expect it to get quoted when I wrote it. So, I took less time with it than I would have if I knew it would appear on Hamlet’s blog. Hamlet ask if he could quote me after I wrote it, which is OK. I could have rewritten some of it to be more accurate and more geeky. But, I didn’t. So, I got some stuff right and some stuff wrong and it got out there.

Editing Pathfinding Attributes

Whatever… The Linens got busy in Thursday’s PFUG meeting and explained which parts were right and wrong. We got lots of good information. The technical corrections are easy. The most disagreement was on how much drama there will be. I have no doubt there will be some drama. There always is.

Simon Linden announced today that Region Idling will roll out to the Blue Steel Release Channel this Wednesday. If all goes well it will be completely invisble to Second Life users. So, if we can’t see it what good is it? Well, I’ll ‘splain.

When a region has no avatars in it and no one is looking into the region, what good does it do to run full blast? None. So, the plan is to have a region slow from 45 FPS to 10 FPS and release the CPU to spend more time on other regions. Ideally, the other regions running in the simulator will benefit from the extra CPU cycles.

You can read the announcement here: Region Idling coming to Second Life.

Possible Problem

The only likely problem the Lindens are expecting is scripts that use the function  llGetRegionTimeDilation() may have a problem. The function is not going to fail. But, if the script is using it as a region monitor to signal a problem with a region, it is likely going to be fooled and report a false positive. Normally 10 FPS is an indication there is a problem. Now going to 10 FPS to idle is an expected behavior. The scripts will have to rewritten.

 The FAQ’s on Region Idling

There is a FAQ page up: Region Idling FAQ