Blender – Baking Normals
I came across a simple to the point video tutorial on baking normal maps in Blender 2.6, which is enough like 2.7 it doesn’t matter. He manages to crash Blender before the end. But, the important part is complete by then.
SVVR
We are seeing more videos of the SVVR conference. The sound in the current batch is awful. Rumor is some professional grade videos are coming. I am waiting.
Second Life Down Time
The Thursday down time is being postponed. See: Scheduled Maintenance. Presumably the problem from Tuesday that stalled the main channel’s rollout and pushed the RC channel rollouts to Thursday are the cause of the postponement.
ATI/AMD Issues
This appears to be impacting more people. If you have seen Fitted Mesh in a viewer that does not support it, you saw what ATI users are seeing. ATI has OpenGL issues. I don’t know how much of this is fixable by the Lab or has to be fixed by ATI.
One of the commenters here suggests that an ATI driver update fixes the problem. I can’t test that as I am NVIDIA based.
Viewer Crashes
Viewer version 3.7.8.289942 – seems to be having problems, at least for me. Any place where there are 10 or so avatars I get about 2 to 6 FPS. My login time max’s around 90 minutes then I crash, black screens then the viewer poofs.
Materials
We have had requests for more script control of materials. The Lindens are taking a serious look at them. This doesn’t mean it will happen, but there is at least a possibility. Of course one of the big questions is whether this could be a griefer abused function.
There is also the idea of rolling multiple textures into a single texture and shifting (Hor & Vert Offset) the diffuse texture to change textures. Can we put 16 (just to say a number) textures into one large texture and then change the Hor/Vert Offsets to effectively change textures? The materials are supposed to follow the settings for the Diffuse texture, so it should work.
It works for animations. In an animation the normal follows the diffuse map. I didn’t test the specular map.
It doesn’t work for llOffsetTexture(). The function shifts the Diffuse texture, but does not shift the normal map. Bummer. So, we need additional functions to work with materials. We’ll have to see how the Lindens decide to handle the feature request.