Second Life Mesh Status Week 8

Development work on mesh is proceeding. I haven’t written much about it lately because most of the information is rather geeky… boring. I don’t really care about the details of the equation used to calculate upload cost of mesh nor all the changes made to the equation to make it equitable. I do care about what will make them cheap to upload. Whether I write about it or not there is lots going on in the Mesh Development Project. There is also LOTS of interest in SL Mesh. The Mesh Office Hours meetings are held at the corner of the region because the region is filling up. That allows people to flow into 4 regions for the meeting.

Second Life Mesh

Second Life Mesh in February 2011

First of all, Charlar Linden tells us that some of the mesh objects imported with older versions of the mesh viewer will become invalid. These are typically mesh objects that have a box outline around them in the physics shape display. Use Develop->Render Metadata->Physics Shapes to see the shape.

Nyx Linden says uploading the mesh objects with a new version of the Mesh Viewer will correct the problem.

Trying to upload with an older viewer (Currently: Second Life  2.4.0-215383) will soon consistently fail. So, upgrade the viewer. Use the Development Viewer. Be warned the Development Viewer is an untested viewer. Use it at your own risk. Download (Currently: Second Life 2.7.0-221656 – it changes quickly)

Avatar OBJ File License

A question was asked about the license for using the avatar’s OBJ file. Nyx says, “Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0”. The Lab is changing files so the license will be included in the download.

You can download the avatar obj files here: Clothing Tutorials – Second Life Avatar OBJ Files

Mesh API Upload Documentation

Linden Lab still has not published a mesh specification for the upload process. That is mostly because it has been changing and there is no point to publishing a moving target. There is no projected delivery date for the spec. It is planned and will release once it is stable.

Mesh Road Map

There is one. It is highly subject to change so the Lab is not publishing one. However, we know several items that are on the map, just not where in relation to each other. Mesh Skeleton – this lets us change the bone structure and how we animate an avatar. With this change we could create a skeleton for an octopus, something we cannot do now.

Avatar 2 is sort of on the map. While many of us would like to see a new avatar that render better, think of wearing short-shorts. There are challenges and a big public relations issue. Imagine all your clothes not working on a new avatar.

Textures

When including materials in an import the Mesh Viewer has a bug. It considers things in a specific order and applies textures. That is not always the right thing to do. The work around for now is to edit the Collada file and change the order to one the SL Viewer can handle, tedious. Eventually that will be fixed.

If you’re interested in learning more about this see the Office Hours Minutes at 11:40 or so.

Terminology

When working with 3D models there is a set of terms commonly used. When you are a programmer, those terms don’t necessary make lots of sense to what you are doing. So, the same words get used to mean different things… handy, huh? So…

A FACE is a submesh in SL speak.

What a modeler calls a face is a SET of Triangles with a Material Attached in SL speak.

OpenSim

There is a firewall between OpenSim viewer and server development and again that is blocking various people and efforts related to mesh, which continues to be annoying.

Exporting Your Shape to Blender

If you want to play with making clothes it is handy to have a copy of your avatar and its in-world shape. The Phoenix viewer will allow you to export a copy of your avatar with its in-world shape applied. The 908 viewer has an awesome export capability for avatar exporting. Advanced (Crtl-Alt-D)->Character->Mesh & Morphs->[body parts]

Summary

Mesh Development is moving forward. We do not have a delivery date. There are some complex problems to be resolved yet. I suspect mesh is 6 months are more away.

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