Blender

More Fitted Mesh News

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Obviously I am messing with Fitted Mesh. Since it has been released lots more people are attempting to work with it. The result is things are changing quickly because a larger number of people are attempting to work with it. That increase in interest tends to reveal more problems as more users do more things and find the problems not discovered during development, which is what is happening.

Current Blender Problem (up to 2.69.10-6466454-win64)
Current Blender Problem (up to 2.69.10-6466454-win64)

Today I found out Gaia has published: Fitted Mesh Kit. The key piece of information is that Blender and Fitted Mesh are only compatible starting with Blender 2.70, which has yet to be released. You will probably be able to get a current build of the planned Blender 2.7 from GraphicsAll.org. But, as of today I don’t see one.

However, the nightly builds are available. Download at Blender.org. Gaia provided the link in the Kit article. But, I don’t see a 2.7 build. The RC builds may not appear until March.

The current plan from Blender.org is to release 2.7 in early March. The RC is to be frozen March 2nd, according to December plans. We may not have a usable plain Blender, meaning without Avastar, until we see that RC release. 

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Avastar Updates & News

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Another test version of Avastar is out: avastar-1-1-978_blender-2-65. There was a problem with the hands not animating. That has been fixed in this version and probably other things.

[2014/02/18 12:25]  Gaia Clary: hands work again in: avastar-1-1-978_blender-2-65.

Gaia Clary was talking in Blender Avastar group about not having enough time to answer questions and get development work done too. So, expect to see less of Gaia in the group. Personally I would prefer to have Gaia working on software and video tutorials than answering questions. Plus there are some knowledgeable people that hang out in the Avastar group that do a good job of answering questions.

SL Wiki Avatars

The sample files found in the SL Wiki were last updated in December 2013. There are; Blender files, FBX files, Collada files, and Maya files. I am now certain the Blender versions are broken. The weighting really sucks. Legs and arms of the avatar do not work as well as they did for the previous SL avatars.

Examining the files I find the weighting is not the same in the current Fitted Mesh avatar files as in the previous avatars I’ve written about in: Second Life Mesh Clothes Blender 2.6 Setup 2012 Tutorial.

I am experimenting to see if I can create a file that has the best of both sets of files.

May be I don’t know what I am doing, but as I see it now things are a mess.

Blender Baking in Cycles

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You may not have noticed that Blender has more than one render engine. It includes:

  • Blender Render
  • Blender Game
  • Cycles

By default Blender uses the Blender Render, which is often referred to as Blender Internal. Cycles is the newer render engine. It uses NODES for many of its rendering features. While nodes are quite different from what many of us are used to, nodes mode texturing does get the process out where one can see what is happening with the render process. A person can also insert modifications into the processing stream at any point.

[youtube Ow2cDaivDVo]

I like using nodes for texturing. I haven’t used them much because there was no way, at least that I knew, to bake Cycles rendered textures for use in Second Life™. Now we can. 

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Blender Information

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Blender users are often looking for information and tutorials about Blender. Second Life™ users are often looking for SL specific Blender information. They now have a new source, or at least a remodeled source, of Blender information. Dark Scarab is a Blender feeds aggregator.

Dark Scarab has a list of Resources, image Gallery, the Blog, and a forum.

This is a handy site to follow for those wanting to stay up on Blender updates.

Real & Second Life Tidbits 2014-2a

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Baking

There is a quick little tutorial on how to bake a specular highlight into a texture on YouTube. I like it because it uses the Blender Nodes.

[youtube VGKbLFqYY58]

SL Fashion Blog

This is a blog with great images taken from Second Life. It is, as the name suggests, about fashion. But, the images are gorgeous. See: SL Fashion.

Check Lada L-roy’s review policy. Nice philosophy. 

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Avastar 1.1 Beta Released

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Today I see Avastar® has a new test version out. Gaia appears to have had it out since Dec. 8th. For whatever reason I am just seeing it show up in Feedly today. Since the announcement of Fitted Mesh Gaia Clary has been updating Avastar and figuring out how to work with the new Fitted Mesh options. Since the Fitted Mesh announcement in November there have been a dozen or so updates to Avastar as they add Fitted Mesh support.

[youtube GRFkK6vcOEs]

Until now the releases were simply called test versions, which since they were released to users might be considered Beta versions too. The current version is: avastar-1-1-931_blender-2-64.zip. Update: 12/22 – now avastar-1-1-934_blender-2-64.zip. This release is called a beta version in the announcement: Avastar-1-1 (beta). Gaia says they plan for this to be the version that goes to final release. So, in the newer SL terminology we might consider this more of a release candidate than a beta version. 

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