Second Life – Content Creation UG Meeting 2017 w41

Thursday was a long day for me. Not where I could access SL. So, the Medhue video of the meeting is what I watched to see what is currently happening with Animesh. And it is Medhue’s video I’ll write an index for.

Keep your hand or mouse close to your volume control if you watch the video. Medhue streams this video live and YouTube archives it. So, there is no editing and the audio isn’t cleaned up. Both tasks are work and time consuming. Be happy that we have any video. And expect to do a lot of volume changes.

CC UG Index

01:00 – Vir Linden is talking about the project viewer for Animesh. It is almost ready. It has passed QA. The holdup is getting some test regions ready and providing documentation. There will some test content available for us to play with.

02:16 – Alexa Linden is working on getting all the support stuff finished up.

03:00 – 4 mod regions (in a square), 1 adult region (separate), all in ADITI.

04:20 – How skeleton is to be aligned when uploaded. You have probably run into the mesh orientation problem, especially if you are NOT using AvaStar or MayaStar. You use Blender with a Y orientation to design and then upload into the X-oriented SL world and the mesh is rotated 90 degrees. AvaStar and MayaStar handle this correction for you.

Vir looked at trying to fix this oddity. But, changing the SL orientation from X to Y for animesh creates some problems. I would expect the change to make all animesh and avatar animations incompatible, which might not be a bad idea. Debatable. But, animesh will be much more useful sooner if existing avatar animations are compatible with animesh.

Are you wondering if you could import a copy of your avatar mesh as animesh and dress it in your Copy-OK, No-Transfer clothes and use that Copy-OK walk animation to have a twin? And here I thought SL was already way kinky…

Whatever, the standard SL avatar has X-axis screen forward with Y-axis as left-right. Blender has Y-axis forward and X-axis as left-right. This gives the 90-degree rotation. That apparently will not change.

06:56 – Medhue builds some y-aligned critters.

07:20 – Question asked if existing animations will be compatible with animesh? Vir answered, definitely.

07:45 – Does orientation mater if the animesh is attached to a cube? Vir is thinking that linksets of animesh would be all animesh objects. That seems odd to me. Adding in non-animesh items to the links produces an unpredictable result. WTH!?!

As it is now all items in the linkset would need to be rigged mesh.

As Medhue says, ‘We’ll see when we get the viewer.”

Vir says they will do some work on the problem between now and project viewer release.

09:30 – RivaYachts point out that his need for animesh is for making realistic sails for his sailboats. This would require animesh and basic prim and not-rigged mesh be linked.

Vir says the Lab wants that to be possible and work well. But, the knowledge for it should work mostly resides in the resident community.

So, this will be an area in which the Lindens put something out and then let the users tell them why it doesn’t work and how it could be better.

13:40 – Double-sided mesh comes up. As it is now we have single sided mesh in SL. Look at it from the backside and it is invisible. But, a material that triggers double-sided rendering would be a big help and reduce poly count.

16:00 – Some discussion of Land Impact values. But, Vir says it is only ‘under consideration and TBD.

I did learn that the fixed cost of animesh is only counted once if you add other animesh items to the linkset. Provided you use a single skeleton? … it got a bit fuzzy or I got confused. We’ll figure it out when we see the project viewer.

16:45 – Will animesh be like an AO for these objects? No… Animesh has to be scripted to run animations. Vir expands on the subject.

17:20 – You cannot link multiple skeletons. The idea is linking a body and skeleton with a rigged animesh shirt. They share the same skeleton.

18:10 – However the additional rigged mesh (shirt) will add to the poly count.

This begs the question, will say a body, shirt, and pants all have to fit in the 20k-30k polygon limit for animesh? I think so.

If so, this would be a huge incentive for way better design than we are seeing now. Admittedly, there are designers that are doing a great job now. I am seeing tops that I used to expect to have an ACI of 25 to 50k ACI with 2 to 5k ACI now. I do think a restrictive limit would push more to that level of optimization.

19:15 – The poly count restrictions were discussed at the last meeting. Vir says they haven’t worked on that idea in the past week, so he was avoiding going there.

20:20 – ACI now has some poly county information. We’ll likely see that new display only in the Animesh project viewer.

21:00 – Discussion of limits of overly complex mesh, uploader decimation verses blocked uploads.

22:50 – Lucy (Lucia Nightfire) gave Vir a written proposal, via JIRA, on LI and ACI. Vir acknowledged receiving and considering. See BUG-139203. It is an interesting read and it is well reasoned.

26:00 – There remains some confusion as to how animesh works. Medhue provides an explanation of how animesh might handle something like an AO. Vir adds to the explanation.

If one uses Pathfinding the animesh script can react to the events Pathfinding pops. Otherwise, one would have to script movement and animation. Older AO scripts react to ‘status’ posted by the avatar (server) for changes, example: from walking to flying. But, they have to constantly talk to the server to know what the avatar is doing. Newer AO scripts replace default animations and leave animations changes up to the server.

There are no default animations for animesh. Animating animesh has to start from scratch and provide it all.

30:00 – There seems to be some confusion about how far an animation can move an object. For animesh, I can see room for confusion. So, consider a dance animation. It can move an avatar no more than 5m. That same limit will apply to animesh as it is an animation limit. It is NOT an animesh verses avatar limit.

Objects, which an animesh item is, can be scripted to move across the entire grid. Moving things is animation, but, we have a nuanced meaning for the difference between the general term of animation, which is about moving any object via script and Pathfinding, versus a BVH or ANIM animation that moves the various parts of the skeleton and is limited to moving the whole skeleton 5m.

30:40 – Do animesh animations have physics? No. Waving arms will not collide with things. So, it will be like avatars. BVH and ANIM animation is only visible animation. No physics change. Which is why most SL combat games limit, by the apparent distance moved, what animations can be used when playing.

35:45 – Land Impact – Animesh will be tied to Land Impact. Lots of text chat comments. No new information, lots of opinions.

40:37 – Rider Linden pops in. Has just finished converting water settings to the new EEP format… or maybe that is putting water settings in the EEP asset framework.

Even with my volume maxed out I couldn’t make out all of what Rider was saying.

44:10 – More on poly count limits. Vir explains their current goal. It is to test what works and doesn’t with the currently planned test limits. The primary question, basically does this animesh thing work?

47:45 – The coming Land Impact changes are for animesh. Other existing ‘things’ should not see a Land Impact change.

48:45 – Function at high altitude… will animesh work at higher altitude? High altitude is something above 3,000m. In which case it is expected to behave as Bento does. The Lab hasn’t gotten complaints, but problems with animations and mesh shape above 3,000 are expected to have some problems.

52:15 – Test baking update? The update to 1024 is done. Now they need to load test and figure out if it works or has to change. The roadmap from there forward has some bumps as some other things have come up that have to be solved before they can move ahead.

52:50 – Will animesh eyes behave as avatar eyes do? People do not what to have to animate eyes. Vir is thinking that will be in the second phase of animesh development. Worth listening to what they think they may add in phase two when the focus more on NOC enhancements.

So, at some point, we may have default animations available for animesh. Or maybe just more control over eye movement, say animating based on Look-At type events.

1:00:00 – There will be a secret handshake, and your encoder ring will blink red, and a picture of a bat will appear in the SL sky to tip people off the Animesh Project Viewer has been released…

Or you can watch the SL Blog for an official announcement and the Release Candidate Viewers page of the wiki.

End

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