Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Body snatchers unit. New mesh bodies are here. Loki Eliot has made new mesh bodies. For now they are free. There are also clothes packs to go with the avatars. These are ‘packs’ not clothes. The point being is they are for designers wanting to make clothes for the Loki avatars. These apparently are not … Read more
I had never heard of it. But this is apparently the 6th fair. It’s an interesting event with a ton of Full Perm stuff for sale. I runs from March 1 to 22. You’ll find it in Old Europe Village. It is small but jam packed.
I am guessing the purpose of the fair is to provide source items for people good at texturing and weak at mesh modeling.
Slink hands and feet got a new update. This update changes how various appliers work with the hands and feet. This is the announcement: -{ZOZ}- IMPORTANT UPDATE Monday,02 Mar 2015 15:38:00 GMT As some may know, Slink released a big update to their hands and feet. This also means that designers have also had an … Read more
Yeah, we know… ‘Fitted’ does not necessarily mean it fits. But, Astrid Kaufmat has an interesting post in the forum about the problem. She is on about figuring out how to work with the SL avatar in 3DMax/Blender/Maya modeling programs without having to have a plugin. Well… good luck with that. I finally gave up, … Read more
Penny Patton writes about reducing her avatar’s render cost. (See: Draw Weight.) Kay Jiersen picked up on the article and wrote an article too. (See: Render weight best practices for Second Life.) Some time ago I wrote: Second Life Performance: Render Muting, which is about the same subject.
Penny is pointing out there is a bit we can do to change our render cost with only a minimal change in appearance. Kay suspects few people are even aware of the Avatar Render Cost (ARC) feature in the viewer and have no clue they need to do anything. I agree with Kay. But, she goes on to recommend changes to Second Life, which is where I disagree.
Kay made field trips to various places in Second Life where she recorded the ARC values of avatars in the regions. Kay points out that only 81 of 190 (42.6%) avatars would render using a setting of 80,000 for Render Muting. That means 109 or 57.3% of the avatars would not render .
The horrible frame rates (FPS) I am getting have me looking at a new computer and a better video card. But, I actually have little hope that will help FPS in regions populated with 30+ avatars.
On an empirical basis Kay found that jewelry is a major culprit in high ARC.
Gaia says: You have to update your AvaStar to AvaStar-1.3-18 when you want to work with Blender 2.73 (RC).
There are some problems with 2.73. The Blender people are holding back its release while they make fixes. But, there is an RC version out.
AvaStar 1.3-18 is the recommended version for Blender 2.73. Any earlier AvaStar version is likely to produce problems with 2.73.
We may find preset shapes in AvaStar someday. It was been discussed with Gaia this week. So, we may eventually see child, tiny, giant, and other shapes.
I don’t expect Gaia to add the ‘Standard Sizes’ as presets into AvaStar. But third parties may make add-in shapes for Blender and/or AvaStar.