Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Nalates Urriah The Viewer Release Candidate pipeline is operational. Get ready for some surprises. Remember. I’m writing as a Windows user. Things may be different on a Mac.
Oz Linden explained some of the thinking about and intended operation of the new pipeline. Part of the explanation was getting my terminology straightened out. Words convey meaning and people have to have the same meanings for the words being used to communicate.
Gaia Clary, operator of Machinimatrix.org and purveyor of Avastar, has a new video tutorial out showing the changes in Blender 2.68 weight painting. This video is just about the changes, not a basic weighting tutorial. It is however a must see for anyone doing weight painting. 6:29 minutes.
[youtube LMeAnl-wEpo]
The addition of weight tools to the Blender Edit Mode is great. The improved vertex weight editing in the right-hand Properties panel of the 3D window, is a major help in figuring out what’s wrong with a weight painted object that is misbehaving.
You can discuss and ask questions in the SL Forum in: Blender 2.68: Weight Tools Overview. If nothing else stop by and thank Gaia and click the KUDO’s button.
I’ve been hoping the SSA feature would roll to the entire grid. The Lindens just aren’t listening to me. The main channel is going to get the Experience Tools package, which is an infrastructure upgrade that is basically invisible to us.
Blue Steel get the package that ran on Le Tigre last week. This is bug fixes and a change to Materials handling to improve performance. It gets the Experience Tools upgrade and may be a fix or two.
Magnum and Le Tigre are going to get the SSA package. It updates to include the Experience Tools update and a couple of fixes. The combined region count for Le Tigre and Magnum is near 4,000 regions.
The way this is going we might see all three RC channels running SSA in week 31.
As reported before, a new viewer pipeline with various release candidates is coming online. It is mostly in place now. I don’t see where any recent announcements have been made by the Lab. Inara over on Living in the Modem World, has written about it. But, I think we are all a bit unsure how things are going to work. I know I am. I’m experimenting with things now.
I’ve updated my machine to use Win 7-64 in a dual boot scenario. This gives me a clean starting place for experimenting with the new viewer pipeline. Until today the only viewer I had installed was the main SL Viewer. I have all the other viewers on the other side of the dual boot in Vista 32. So, I can get to them. But, not from Win7.
I have clean AppData folders as a new Win7 user. Plus caches and log areas are new and fresh.
You probably know there is a griefers tool known as a graphics crasher. What you may not know is there is a defense. The blog The Green Lanterns has an article on how to defend against these crashers. See: Debug settings to make graphics crashers obsolete.
I have yet to try these settings. I have not been running into crash problems. So, you are on your own.
The The Green Lanterns site is mostly interested in griefers/anti-grifers and what they and the Lab is doing related to griefing. I have yet to decide if this is another vigilantly group or a responsible activist group. I tend to avoid griefer and anti-griefer discussions considering both sides mentally unhealthy. But, The Green Lanters blog seems oriented towards helping people, at least that’s my first take.
Thursday July 18th Blender.org released a new version of Blender. This is an important update for Second Life™ users that are doing weight painting.
You’ll find the Blender 2.68 Release Notes here.