Second Life – Content Creation UG Meeting 2017 w26

I missed the first 10 minutes of the meeting as RL was intruding. There are Two interesting parts. Toward the end of the meeting a discussion of copybot issues starts. That section and an hour long post-meeting is in another video. When I get it uploaded, I’ll link to it from this article.

I’ve used bold text to highlight subjects in the outline summary of the meeting. You may remember, I use these videos to learn about video editing for RL work. Premiere, in general, or maybe just on my computer, is broken. So, I cannot currently use titles or text from within Premiere. So, this video is mostly about audio for me. In that area, because I used Firestorm (FS) I had to learn more about audio cleanup. Maybe if I knew more about FS, it would be less of a problem.

Medhue caught the entire hour-long meeting on video (HERE). My video picks up about 10 minutes in (1:10 PM SLT). Medhue skipped streaming the post-meeting. He was there for most of it. Inara has not posted her summary of the meeting. So, I don’t know if she’ll touch on it or dive in. I’ll dive in.

In the 10-minutes prior to my video starting, Vir Linden was following up on a question about whether animating attachment points is (will be) allowed and whether meshes can weight/rig to attachment points. The Linden viewer currently blocks animations and meshes that do. The servers, however, will allow it. So, for now things are a bit inconsistent.

Read more

Second Life – How to Lower ACI – A Script

One of the complications in 3D rendering is working out how to blend the objects with transparent parts. Think of windows and SL hair. Designers can reduce the complication by how they use alpha layers and blending. I’m not going to try to explain how to set stuff up because I have yet to get it figured out. But, I came across a handy workaround for things we already have.

I buy hair, dresses, and other things that use blending modes. Most are no-mod. But, the script below can be used to modify them.

In the beginning of the video, I am wearing Magika’s Dreamy as purchased. This is hair that in the Linden viewer has an ACI of 4,699. Using the script reduces the ACI by 702. That is a saving of 15±%. This is my first try, so I have no idea if this is typical, minimal, or a max. You may find that high ACI items benefit more.

There is some degradation in the appearance. When zoomed out, it is barely noticeable. Only when zoomed in can you see the difference. Personally, the 702 ACI saving is not worth the loss of appearance.

Read more

Second Life – Content Creation UG 2017 w/23

Getting this video out was a problem. Adobe Premiere started crashing and refusing to show video in the Project Editor panel. Plus, the Hippotropolis region was crashing during the meeting. That made for an interesting meeting and made more work putting the video together.

There were lots of audio challenges in this video. I tried to clean up several places. Cathy Foil’s microphone is over driving the system. Vir Linden apparently talks into a fixed position mic. He tends to move toward and away from it when talking. Anyway, I did what I could with it.

Meeting Summary

Vir Linden starts the meeting talking about viewers. The AssetsHTTP viewer is still in QA, but expected to update the RC in week 24.

Work is continuing on animated objects. Vir has the server and a pre-project viewer working so one can see animated objects. Other viewers crash. So, that has to be handled.

Read more