Mesh – Page 12 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Bento Feature Request – No Lock

2015/12/18 by Nalates Urriah

Adeon Writer has filed a Feature Request in the Second Life JIRA: BUG-10990 – [Bento] A formal method of bone-translating animations is vital for the creation of proper facial expressions.

Included in the JIRA is this quote:

[04:28:52 PM] EpicGordon Broome: I don’t like getting involved in development, JIRA’s or forums or whatever. But disallowing bone translation in animations is ignoring some very basic fundamentals of animation theory, dating back decades. I’ve scrapped multiple projects because of the lack of squash/stretch in walk cycles (Toony characters). This update is also going to break features in an upcoming avatar of mine, regarding facial animation. Which is funny, because they give us so many new facial bones – that we just can’t use properly. Raise eyebrows, pull up mouthcorners for a smile, extend a tongue, using only rotations? I cannot for the life of me see a GOOD REASON for this limitation.

I have this feature – http://imgs.moyloon.com/i/05d71e3d26.png – almost done for a new avatar of mine, a pose-able tongue. The new rig has two bones for this explicit purpose. But they are useless, as I cannot pull the tongue out of the mouth in any good fashion. I cannot pull the mouth corners around without arbitrarily locking them to rotating around a bone.

Not to mention non-humanoid avatars. We’re getting so many new bones – and yet we’ll be limiting the design freedom so much, since anything non-humanoid will be unable to avoid issues caused by inheriting rotations, since locations cannot be transformed.

Allowing animations to do this is a trivial change, as I’m fairly certain that limitations were put in place to prohibit this (Hence why .anim’s were able to do things .bvh cannot), rather than requiring lots of labor on the engine.

It doesn’t affect me personally, too much. If this is the way it ends up being, I’ll just hog more resources by alpha swapping meshes, and using more animations for each of these different states. However, it’s unnecessarily clunky, and will ruin a lot of content creator’s livelihoods in its current implementation.

Visit the JIRA and click WATCH. You’ll get update emails as this ticket proceeds. DO NOT voice opinions in the JIRA! Opinions and ‘me too’ is for the forum: Project Bento Feedback Thread. The discussion there is growing quickly.

ALERT: Second Life Avatar Changes!

2015/12/16 by Nalates Urriah

Today we have a post from the Lab about changes to the SL Avatar. See: Introducing Project Bento – New Bones Added to Second Life Avatar Skeleton.

What are the changes?

Ever wish you could incorporate a tail, wings, or second set of arms into your avatar? How about having animations for facial expressions and finger movements? Yes, we know that there are some incredibly creative workarounds that give you some of these, but they can’t leverage skeletal animation, so they have been very complex, often fragile, and very expensive in performance and resources both in your Viewer and the Simulator.

Are Second Life’s Jelly Babies Breaking SL?

2015/10/25 by Nalates Urriah

As I have pointed out more people are talking about Jelly Babies and the coming RC Second Life Quick Graphics Viewer version 3.8.6.305942 movement toward being the main viewer. Of course some know what they are talking about and others don’t.

erratic / ava sweater & meg leggings
High or low ACI?

I think – Jelly babies will take over SL soon (AKA how linden lab is planning to break second life) – falls in the ‘doesn’t’ category. utilizator404, the author, believes the Lab is breaking SL by introducing the Avatar Complexity Information (ACI) feature. I disagree, but I can see how some may consider the appearance of Jelly Babies as a problem. The opinion that Jelly Babies breaks SL is as valid an opinion as any. I just don’t agree with it. So, I’ll rebut it.

In the article an assumption is expressed that the Lab is not fixing the root causes of lag; failure to optimize the viewer, not changing how the viewer uses video memory, failure to use all the features of new video cards, and no use of Direct3D (a Windows only graphics render engine).

Most of 2014 and 2015 has been spent optimizing features of the viewer and SL servers. If you follow Inara’s or my blog you already know that. If you have only read the release notes of the Linden and third party viewers as they are released, you know that numerous fixes for how the viewer use memory have been made. From the Third Party Dev’s meeting we know more are in progress.

Second Life’s Render Complexity – Discussion Starting

2015/10/22 by Nalates Urriah

We have been here before. A feature like the old Avatar Render Cost (ARC) was used by what became known as ARC Nazis to abuse people. You see a type of person that has basic authority issues, control issues, or a bullying nature adopt a fascist mentality and start telling people what they can do. Some in those groups start trying to enforce their will on others. Abuse, shame, hate, anger… and more is called into service in attempts to enforce their will on others.

Geisha Shadows – Think this gorgeous outfit has a high ACI?
If it does, is that good or bad?

We could call this politics… In SL it is more often called drama. But, whichever we call it, it has the same source: human nature. Humans are different, unique. But, we all have the same basic traits, just in different degrees and we learn to cope with issues in different ways. We call the result character.

Second Life’s Limits

2015/10/01 by Nalates Urriah

In the SL Wiki there is a page titled LIMITS. This page lists most of the limits we encounter in SL. The page updated today to indicate the change from the main viewer with a new mesh uploader.

::Since viewer release 3.8.4, processing of meshes in the Collada file that have faces assigned to more than 8 materials has changed. Instead of simply dropping the extra material faces, the uploader now creates a new object to accommodate them. The result is that the single mesh is divided into multiple objects (prims) in a linkset (or coalesced object). Thus the limitation to 8 materials is removed as far as input is concerned, but still applies to each of the resulting linked objects actually uploaded. As a consequence it is now possible to upload a mesh with more than 174,752 triangles, although it will be divided into multiple objects. (Reference)

This sounds like a good change. But Drongle McMahon made this comment in my blog about the change (I’ve done a little editing on it – reference):

Second Life’s Mesh Mess

2015/09/30 by Nalates Urriah

Kat Feldragonne is a mesh fan. But recently had a problem with mesh render time at an event. It apparently was frustrating enough Kat wrote about the experience: Mesh Mess – A Lesson in Frustration. If you read it, I suspect you will know exactly what Kat is writing about. I’ve experienced the problem. I suspect most of us have.

There are places and times when it seems to take forever for things to render. Avatars are missing parts or clothes are gray and stuck on sideways or at some odd direction. Nude avatars render in all their glory and only later do the clothes render. Of course the nude person has no idea their clothes have yet to render for those around them. The clothes always render quickly for the one wearing them.