Blender – Page 23 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Blender 2.72 Test Build Out

2014/09/21 by Nalates Urriah

We are getting close to a new version of Blender being released. As is typical, in the lead up to the release a test build or a ‘release candidate’ is out. This gives users a chance to find bugs and the developers a chance to catch bugs before making the release.

See the Details here: Blender 2.72 Release Notes.

There are improvements to the Cycles Rendering System. None of these changes have much benefit for designers targeting Second Life™. However, for those baking with Cycles, the progress bar is now supposed to work.

The User Interface (UI) has some improvements. There are pie menus now. Toole tips are improved, which is mostly just an appearance thing. Occlusion Selection has been added. This gives you an alternate style of selecting objects in a busy model. See User Preferences -> System tab -> Selection.

Second Life AvaStar L$5000 Bug Chase

2014/09/21 by Nalates Urriah

Avastar 950 Model – Image #3

Gaia Clary, of Machinimatrix and AvaStar, is offing L$5,000 to those finding bugs. The first one to report a bug in the current AvaStar version gets the prize for that bug. But, it has to be a reproducible bug and you have to properly file a bug report with Machinimatrix. The process is described in an in-world announcement (which I’ve changed a bit to make it more readable):

Second Life Tools

2014/09/182014/09/17 by Nalates Urriah

Blender 2.7 Materials Baking

Blender is moving more and more toward use of Cycles Rendering. With Cycles comes the need to use the Node Editor to build materials. For those materials to be of use in Second Life™ we often need to bake them to an image.

As I was baking materials I kept getting strange and seemingly random results. Sometimes everything would work as I expected. Other times I seemed to lose all control over which image Blender was going to bake to. I finally found how to control which output image is used to receive the bake output. See this answer/tutorial on the problem: How do I bake a texture using Cycles bake.

Output is controlled by which Image Texture node is selected in the Node Editor, not the 3D window or UV Editor window, which is why I was having trouble understanding what Blender was doing.

AvaStar Pricing to Change

2014/09/10 by Nalates Urriah

The rumor is… AvaStar pricing is going up. Gaia is having a problem supporting development and customer support. Something has to give. Development slows considerably or the price goes up. Various ideas have been voiced for how to price the tool with accompanying screams from the user base. But, that is to be expected whenever a merchant has to raise prices.

Norder Ney HeavenScent - 2014 — Norder Ney HeavenScent – 2014

Gaia Clary says she is now working on Avatar and SL products full time. She has to make her living selling these products.

Gaia does not seem to be a fan of subscription pricing. So, I expect the initial purchase price on AvaStar 2.0 to jump up, but that has not been decided. The current US$27± price is not providing Gaia a living. So, will we see $100? May be. The final price is yet to be decided.

AvaStar RC4 Released

2014/09/06 by Nalates Urriah

Yesterday Gaia Clary released a new Release Candidate of AvaStar. This release is mostly cosmetic. Tool labels have changed to better reflect industry jargon. Some may have moved to smooth out some bumps in workflow.

Also, the Help Documentation has been updated to reflect the AvaStar 1.1 user interface. You can access the AvaStar Help pages here. Once on the first page there is a tree-like menu giving access to other help pages.

Gaia is revising the workflow documents to AvaStar 1.1 interface. There is no mention of an ETA for when those will be available.

AvaStar has context sensitive help. When in Blender, with AvaStar installed of course, right click a control and select Online Manual. Easy.

Blender-AvaStar Animation IK/FK Tip

2014/10/082014/09/03 by Nalates Urriah

I am getting deeper into making animations I’ll use in Second Life™. I am a novice animator/modeler, so I probably don’t know the best way to accomplish any given task nor do I understand Blender cooncepts all that well. But, I wasn’t seeing any tutorials and I haven’t been in any classes that helped me with using both IK (Inverse Kinematics) and FK (Forward Kinematics) in a single animation. (See What is IK/FK for more information on IK/FK.)

Since I’ve had to figure out how to do this, I thought I’d make a short tutorial.

I used Blender 2.71 and AvaStar 1.1 RC3 while experimenting and writing this.

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