Gaia Clary is asking what they concentrate their efforts on in regard to the AvaStar program. See: Decide about the Future of Avastar and vote for your choice.
AvaStar Next Steps
Blender
Blender 2.72a Released
Blender 2,72a is out and it has a bug. So, we’ll likely see 2.72b release on Tuesday. The bug is a crash caused by trying to paint on a surface that does not yet have a UVMap. You can read the Developer Notes to see what is going on.
Download Blender 2.72a. Find out what is new in 2.72a here.
Blender Hi-Poly Sculpting to Low-Poly Models
For those of us in SL creating high detail and low poly counts is a challenge. While this tutorial and the tools used are not completely for Second Life, the techniques used are applicable.
Just Fun Blender
It is amazing, to me at least, that this was made in 3 weeks during spare time… 4.5 days to render…
Blender Tricks & Developer Notes
5 Little Known Tricks in Blender’s Outliner
This is an interesting tutorial on using the Blender outliner. See 5 Tricks for the original post.
Blender Developer Notes
Blender developers meet to discuss which directions to take Blender and which features to prioritize and schedule for release with the next version. For us we get a glimpse of what may be coming to make our modeling lives easier.
See the latest notes here: Developer Meeting Notes: October 12, 2014.
We do learn there may be a Blender 2.72a release this week to fix a couple of bugs that made it through all the testing.
In a couple of weeks we will learn what they have decided to include for release 2.73. One possibility is Stereo 3D… I wonder if that means Oculus type 3D… wouldn’t that be a rush?
There are side projects that apparently are not part of the main development thread. That lets them stay outside the scheduling, I suppose. They are added when they are done. One of those is refactoring Materials Nodes for better multi-threaded operation. That should speed up our bake times for complex items.
Bits of Second Life 2014-41
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.
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.