Month: October 2014

Bits of Second Life 2014-41

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NVIDIA and VR

I have seen a little about nVidia’s new graphics cards, the 970 and 980 cards. The Road to VR has a good article on the new video cards. For those thinking about Oculus Rift this is an informative article. See: Big News for VR: Nvidia’s New Graphics Cards.

NVIDIA 980 - 10/2014
NVIDIA 980 – 10/2014

For 3D to work, whatever type, the system needs to render the world from two camera positions. This literally doubles the work the card must do. Fortunately, the texture handling, loading and unloading, doesn’t double too.

The article points out how the new cards are optimized for duel image processing.

Top 10 Hunts

Fabulously Free has their list of the top ten hunts out. See: FabFree Hunts. Most have a Halloween theme. 

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Blender 2.72 Released

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On Oct 4 a new Blender version was released. Get it here. It is an 86mb download, assuming you get the Zip file for the stand-alone install. I highly advise using the Zip file over the install program. It is much easier to have and run muiltiple versions of Blender using this install method.

Ebbe Altberg Interview

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Designing Worlds in Second Life had an opportunity to interview with Ebbe Altberg, the Linden Lab CEO. It has been promoted for a day or two now.  Today the video of the interview was released. You can see the video on SLArtist.com.

Designing Worlds Planned Mesh Deformer Project Meeting
Designing Worlds

This is an interesting video interview. Ebbe’s excitement with SL1 and 2 comes through. He gives us information about SL1 and SL2 and where they are going. I’ll warn you that what he says can be interrupted several ways. His implications are not always clear. So, what you are reading here is what I heard and how I took his meaning. That doesn’t mean it is correct. I think it is, but… 

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Second Life Bits 2014-41

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AvaStar

AvaStar 1.2 is out and now Gaia has published an article on what they will be doing now. See: Remarks from the Creators. The interesting take away is that the tutorial videos will be getting updated now that the product has stabilized.

Remembering - Lost Eden - 2014
Remembering – Lost Eden – 2014

Images from Second Life

This week has seen some articles on creating great images using Second Life. New World notes has: Top Four Tips for Flawless, Photoshop-Free SL Snapshots, Family Portraits: This Second Life Photographer Has a Knack for Taking Snapshots of Domestic Bliss, and How to Turn SL-Based Images Into Visual Art. There are others that have commented on the aspects of what makes great images and art.

The Internet has a ton of image composition tutorials. Google Image Composition. 

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Second Life for Oculus

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As builders plan for a world to be seen by Oculus Rift users we hear a bit more about building things to real life scale. It is a good idea and has many benefits.

Babe @ Lost Eden - 2014
Babe @ Lost Eden – 2014

What we aren’t hearing much about is how to avoid making visitors sick, simulator motion sickness. I suppose many think that the Oculus Rift people will take care of such problems. The Oculus people are certainly putting thought and engineering into building a system that will avoid giving people simulator sickness. But, they advise those building for Oculus headsets to make sure they can keep their frame rates above 60 FPS…

I suspect the majority of Second Life users seldom see 60 fps. I know with my Quad Core and GTX560 I seem to get 25 to 50 FPS most of the time. If I am in a crowd, it is more like 8 to 12. 

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OSGrid Needs Help

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You may have heard that OSGrid had a hard disk crash. They use a RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) system to improve reliability and speed. But, the system crashed and could not be recovered as they thought would be possible.

They have been exploring recovery via professional data recovery services. It appears they will be able to recover all data. It is unclear to me exactly what the cost is, but US$2,600 is close. That uses up a little more than half the funds available to OSGrid.

If you use OSGrid, it is definitely time to kick in with a little extra support. Make donations here: OSGrid Donations. A thousand people need to contribute $26 to cover the drive failure.

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