Blender

AvaStar Tutorials and Second Life

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Gaia Clary of Machinimatrix, the AvaStar makers, has been providing the Second Life™ community free tutorial videos showing how to use Blender/AvaStar for making animations and mesh clothing. The challenge is in having the time to make them and keep them updated. Blender changes quickly and such videos go out of date a Blender moves forward.

Gaia's Free YouTube Videos
Gaia’s Free YouTube Videos

AvaStar itself has needed to change as Second Life has changed. Plus this past year AvaStar has changed as it developed and improved its tools to provide a better user interface and more efficient work flow. Also, the design community and Linden Lab changing to fitted mesh avatar bodies is changing how we make fitted mesh clothes.

Second Life being 11+ years old now also requires designers learn how to deal with the peculiarities of 3D modeling for a 3D world that, with amazing success, has maintained legacy compatibility. 

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Second Life News 2014-44

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Servers

The Deploys of Week post is up. The big news is CDN.

Oops! Don't Panic 2014
Oops! Don’t Panic 2014

CDN

The Content Delivery Network upgrade will roll to the main channel, the entire grid, this week. That will be happening Tuesday morning.

RC Channels

All three RC channels will get the same maintenance package. The detailed release notes are not out yet. All the Deploys post says is there are ‘some improvements’. We’ll probably see more information coming out tomorrow (Tuesday).

Snack Channel

The Snack channel is a small pre-test RC channel. It is used when the Lindens want to start out with a very small sample for testing. It was used for the initial testing of CDN. It is no longer needed and the regions in the Snack channel will be rolled back into the channels they were previously in and the Snack channel will disappear until it is next needed.

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Blender AvaStar Tutorials for Second Life

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Gaia Clary has released a new PREVIEW tutorial on making non-human avatars: Non Human Character Rigging. I tried to embed the video. I couldn’t.

Don't Panic 2014
Don’t Panic 2014

It appears Gaia is moving toward paid for lessons and limiting where the video tutorials can appear. So, you’ll have to watch the video on Gaia’s site. There is more information on Gaia’s web page than is in the video.

Notice at the top of the of the page is a colored section with a link to purchase the full tutorial set for this course (US$25). I’m deciding if I’ll spring for the class. 

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