Second Life Mesh Update Week 32

This week the Mesh Upload User Group met in AGNI. Prior to now the group met in ADITI. The meeting filled up one region and we overflowed into a second. The location links for the meeting are wrong, but should get fixed this week. The questions being asked are getting more complex. Still, there is some interesting news.

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Meeting Location

My understanding is that from this meeting on future meetings will be held in AGNI. I expect the new location to be the NW Corner of Mesh Sandbox 9. Right now one has to be a member of the Mesh Volunteers group. More information on that here: Mesh/LiveVolunteers. The Lindens will soon be removing that restriction. Then a resident may easily attend the meetings.

Hopefully by next Monday all the meeting links will be updated. Twitter notices still have the wrong location link. Twitter seems to be the last to update.

Meeting Location

Simball and Mesh

I guess Simball is catching on in Second Life. I’ve checked it out but never gotten into it. One of the Simball players (owners?) posed a question asking of the mesh roll out would affect Simball. The new mesh enabled servers use Havok 2010 and Lab modifications. Charlar and Nyx Linden see no problem. That doesn’t mean there won’t be a problem, but things should be OK.

Bone Scale and Mesh Deformers

Neither of these will make it into the first release of Mesh. However, the pelvis and other bone positions can be moved. There are some known problems with the pelvis Z position. Most of the positioning stuff was unclear to me. Check the forum for more information.

Rigged Mesh

An interesting question was asked about what happens when one wears multiple rigged meshes. Consider. A blouse and pair of paints made by different people could be meshes with different mesh rigging. Which would control? Or would the blouse control the arms and the pants the legs? Or would it be the last rigged mesh put on that controls?

Prep Linden tells us that currently only one rigged mesh with JOINT-OFFSETS can be worn. As long as there are no joint offsets it does not matter. But, the last worn mesh with a joint offset wins.

Prep says it is in the development cue to add more joint logic in the future. It will allow more than one rigged mesh item with joint offsets to be worn and work.

Maya Scale Problem

A scaling bug seems to be present in rigged mesh coming from Maya. Imported items are narrow and thicker and taller in SL than expected. The Lindens are looking into what the problem may be.

Mesh Cost

Same song, different day. But, some good news. It looks like mesh will be cheaper. The last word is that mesh upload cost would start at L$10 during the mesh roll out. At 100% roll out the base upload cost would go up to L$150. That has changed. It will go up but it will be something less than L$150.

Also, several people have noticed the the minimum Prim Equivalence cost is down to 1 prim. Or 0.5 prim that rounds to the next higher integer. By uploading multiple meshes in one upload one can reduce the PE. The same is true with link sets. The total count of the set’s PE can be reduced.

The scaling cost as it is now looks to be the cost at 100% roll out. That will not be increasing.

nVidia GTX 460 Problem

While not a mesh question this subject did make it into the agenda and the Lindens acknowledged it. Runitai Linden is working on the problem now. See: nVidia Driver GTX 460 Problems. There is a work-a-round. Also if you want to help get the problem fixed, run with Debug GL on and generate crash reports. Get the JIRA for reporting the results from the linked article.

Are We There, Yet?

Vivienne Daguerre’s perpetual question… 🙂 Charlar says mesh is rolled out to about 30% of the grid. It will probably hold there for this week. They anticipate having 100% roll out before the end of August… yes, this year.

Mesh Viewer

The mesh project viewer has been rolled into the current SL Development Viewer, Second Life 3.0.1 (237980) Development. All future version should have mesh support. Notice this is labeled VIEWER 3.0. So, don’t get overly excited when you hear Viewer 3 is here.

A new production viewer is out and announced in the SL Blog: August Update. The main SL Viewer is 2.8.1 (237758) and the Beta Viewer is 2.8.3 (237828) Beta. The announcement implies the mesh viewer will come out later this month.

The FPS in this viewer is about 1/3 to 2/3’s the speed of Dolphin Viewer 2. But, Dolphin does not do mesh.

Code Differences on AGNI and ADITI

The code in AGNI is as stable as possible. The code in ADITI is constantly changing as bug fixes are tried out. One may also find different server versions running in different regions of ADITI.

Testing Grid

Some time ago I asked the Lindens if the mesh regions of the ADITI would remain was answered that they would. Asked again whether the best place to test mesh would remain ADITI was again confirmed by the Lindens.

Avatar Render Cost

Now that mesh is rolling out the ARC is horribly inaccurate. Once mesh is out the Lindens plan to repair ARC and make the numbers more realistic and in line with the new resource consumption measures.

Weight and Upload Fee

Gaia Clary of Machinimatrix.org noticed that adding mesh weighting to rigged meshes changes the upload cost and PE. The Lindens say adding weight information for a rigged mesh increases the amount of information upload, stored , and then streamed to users. So, a rigged mesh’s weight changes the resource consumption and therefore the cost they charge.

Another interesting question was about how that affects models of rigged meshes merchant may use for sales demos and in-world models. With mesh clothes there will be a huge change in stores. One will not have to look at PICTURES of blouses and other clothes. One could place the mesh blouse on a hanger in-world. Neato. But, the additional cost of weighted mesh drives up their prim cost. Removing the weighting means making a copy of the model and undoing the weighting work.

Runitai suggested another possible solution. Upload the model without normals to reduce the cost. One must make it Full Bright because without normals it won’t light correctly.

Gaia tells me that in Blender one can remove normals by making the model SMOOTH. Check the SL Forum for more information and to ask questions. I have yet to play with rigged mesh and I am mostly clueless on this point.

Mesh Cost Equation

The Lindens tell us the equation is pretty much set. That does not mean it won’t change, but it is unlikely to change. If statistics show a lesser resource consumption then the equation may be revised to reduce mesh cost. See: Mesh Technical Overview.

Mesh Upload Interface

Is the interface going to change in the near future? You may not know it, but the interface has changed a number of times. That makes it hard on those making tutorials as they have to keep revising them. There are more changes coming to the interface. But, the foreseeable changes should not break tutorials… well… we’ll have to see. But, people should probably be able to figure out the changes and relate the tutorial and interface.

Adult Mesh Sandbox

There is now an Adult Sandbox. So, adult mesh objects can be tested. Gee… wonder what kind of things those might be? (That is a rhetorical question) In the world map search for Mesh Sandbox b.

Summary

Mesh is moving forward. The roll out seems to be staying with the Linden Timeline.

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