On Thursdays the Content Creation UG meets at 1PM SLT in Hippotropolis Campfire, AGNI. (URL) Medhue Simoni and I are both recording it. You’ll find his video here: Second Life Content Creation Meeting 4-20-17. (760p) He is playing with streaming. So, you can watch the meeting live streamed in his channel.
This video is my recording. (1080) It is missing the first 15 minutes. But, the silent portions of the video are time-compressed to lessen run time. Plus a bit of post meeting discussion is included.
I do the video to experiment and practice with Adobe Premiere. The big difference between the two videos is I use a SpaceNavigator and Medhue is using a mouse.
There were up to 17 people watching the live stream. There were 27± people attending in SL. A couple have started attending from seeing the live stream, yay.
The meeting starts out with Vir Linden talking about the status of RC Viewers. He says while the HTTPAssets is working it is having a higher than desired crash rate.
Meeting Summary
There are internal discussions happening inside the Lab about adding some default animations. It may be more accurate to say ‘animation slots’.
We have walk animations. With the ability to use scripting to specify which animation to use for the default the “walk animation” becomes more of a slot or pointer to an animation than an actual animation. The same idea is what I think they have in mind for additional animations.
Nothing has been said about what they may do with a default ‘tail’ animation when a specific animation is not supplied. I would assume they would just not play an animation. Trying to build a duck-waddle-tail-animation would likely be a disastrous joke. There just isn’t a way to create an animation that would look right for most tails.
A question came up about whether it was possible to use a script to reset the skeleton. Vir says currently the two ways are; manually right-click the avatar and Reset Skeleton or have a script run an animation that resets the skeleton.
Vir was curious why one would want to do that? Seems there is a problem with deformed skeletons (think human to elephant). When you wear the elephant, a script runs that moves all the bones to the correct places. You are set. Go to another region and your viewer remembers how your avatar should look. BUT…
The servers do not track such animations. So, in a new region it and no one there will know the deformer script ran and their viewers assume all the elephant bones are arranged as a human skeleton. Oops. So, you have to manually click Reset Skeleton.
An often-used work-around is for the creator to loop the deformer animation so it continuously positions the bones. You wouldn’t notice it as the bones don’t move. But, that solution has problems. What if you need to move a bone and the deformer keeps moving it back?
There is also an issue some are experiencing when taking off an “elephant” body. Their skeleton is supposed to reset to human when they detach the elephant. For some it doesn’t. The hope is with scripting an exit process would force a restore.
See BUG-11310 – [BENTO] Repro for avatar shape being deformed after removing rigged mesh – requested by Vir.
One of the problems with triggering Reset Skeleton is that it is viewer side. So, it works for you, but not others.
TM: 3:30 (my video) Explanation of server side baking (SSB) and discussion of possible mesh body baking.
TM: 6:34 – Turn on Show ACI
TM: 6:50 – Baking service has no knowledge of materials. Adding it would greatly increase the scope of the service.
TM: 10:45 – How close to being a project? Vir lists off several things they are thinking about doing.
11:50 – Substance Painter question, will SL look at supporting?
13:00 – Vir speaks about SL Project Development Map. Sorry. No goodies. It’s mostly secret.
15:30 – Mention of CC UG agenda page.
16:15 – If someone is passionate about a project, how do they encourage the Lindens to work on it? Vir says, basically be at meetings like CC UG.
19:00 – Asked about polling. So, he spoke about some of the polls run in the past. The Lindens don’t see them working all that well.
20:00 – Windlight comes up. One pending idea is to make an object that is a collection of WIndlight settings that could be traded and sent like shapes. Also, a number of attendees wanted ‘scriptable Windlight’. The idea is to set a region Windlight then change an individual’s WL depending on where they are (think outside or in a cave).
26:00 – Maya BVH Issue – This is a Bento and general SL animation related problem. This is a problem related to SL only allowing 4 channels of weighting while Blender/Maya allows more channels. BVH files have to be manually edited to remove any channel beyond 4.
As an AvaStar user I know there is a feature that finds vertices with more than 4 channels in use. We then have to decide which channels to remove.
Cathy Foil has made a video for working around the problem. See YouTube or below.
In the video at time mark 27:00 you see the effect of an animation for a different ‘head’ being applied to a standard-Bento human head. (You’ll likely think of the movie Beetlejuice.) Cathy was apparently wearing a gesture for a Medhue elephant.
39:00 – Official part of meeting over.
39:30 – Problem with tails sinking into body when avatar height changed. Disccusion of how to design around.
41:00 – End voice. Text chat.
44:00 – End video