Breaking #SecondLife News

2014/02/10 by Nalates Urriah

There is a post up on the Second Life™ BLog: Fitted Mesh Is Here!

What this means is the avatar and viewer have been finalized for the Fitted Mesh Project. The Release Candidate Viewer has rolled out and is now the main SL Viewer.

Within a couple of days the majority of those using the SL Viewer will be running the new viewer and capable of seeing Fitted Mesh clothes correctly.

I suspect Jessica was hinting that the Firestorm viewer with Fitted Mesh is going to main release version. Other third party viewers support Fitted too. So, very quickly the majority of SL will be able to see Fitted Mesh clothes rendering correctly. I am certain 60% of SL users will be able to see Fitted Mesh. I am pretty sure the number is going to be between 80-90%. But, I have only my opinion to base that on.

Advanced Lighting (ALM) is not important to whether you can see Fitted Mesh. Enabled or Disabled the Fitted Mesh will have the same shape. ALM may affect how the material used on the clothes looks. If the designed used the new Materials feature to make the clothes they will look different depending on whether ALM is enabled or disabled.

Fitted Mesh Base Avatar Files

2014/01/14 by Nalates Urriah

A couple of years ago we were sorting out just which files we could get that had a model of the Second Life™ avatar with a default shape. We were going to need that for use with the Mesh Deformer. A good ‘default shape’ file will still be needed on the OpenSim grids. I wrote a long article on which files were which and did a lot of testing of the files to find the differences and decide which file to base my work on. I am sort of in the same place now with Fitted mesh.

Linden SL Avatar – Wiki – Image #1

To see the older files, look in the menu above, The Stuff->Tutorials Index Clothes.

The Files

I’ll say that OFFICIALLY there are no files for Fitted Mesh… yet. The reason for that is Fitted Mesh is still in development. So, there is no FINAL version of the avatar. But, we do have two files that can be used by experimenters. I’ll explain what we have have now.

Linden Fitted Mesh Avatar

The Wiki has a ZIP file that has a number of files in various formats. The files appear to have been last updated ~~12/16/2013~~ 4/2014. They are provided in a ZIP file and include the file I show below. The Mac folder has the same files with slightly different file names.

You can see there are Blender, Collada (dae), FBX, and Maya (ma). The last two are AutoDesk file formats. For compatibility consider:

Autodesk FBX technology helps to enable the interchange of 3D data between the following Autodesk products: Autodesk® 3ds Max®, Autodesk® Maya®, Autodesk® Softimage®, Autodesk® MotionBuilder®, Autodesk® Mudbox®, Autodesk® Smoke® and Autodesk® Flame® software. Consult the compatibility charts below to learn about the level of support for these applications. Continue reading →

Fitted Mesh and Firestorm

2014/01/12 by Nalates Urriah

When is the next Firestorm release? According to Ed Merryman: when it is ready.

The next Firestorm release is waiting on Linden code for the new Inventory API’s. These are changes that improve inventory loading speed and reliability. They are changes that are targeted at fixing the last of the avatar bake fail problems.

Fitted

If you use Firestorm, or any Second Life capable viewer not yet updated for Fitted Mesh (meaning most viewers), and come across someone wearing Fitted Mesh, depending on how it was made, you may see parts of the item stretching off toward the southwest corner of the region.

Fitted Mesh in older viewers – image by Inara Pey

It is thought there is a fix for the problem prior to the roll out of Fitted Mesh. The problem is caused because the avatar used by Fitted Mesh viewers is different than for non-Fitted Mesh viewers. There are additional bones in the skeleton. If your viewer doesn’t know about those bones, it does not know what to do with clothes that use the new bones. The result is vertices in the clothes are moved toward the 0,0,0 coordinate of the region (the southwest corner). Continue reading →

Real & Second Life Tidbits 2014-2a

2014/01/08 by Nalates Urriah

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. Continue reading →

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Avastar Fitted Mesh Tutorial

2013/12/31 by Nalates Urriah

Gaia Clary released a new tutorial for using Avastar to make Fitted Mesh clothes. The video tutorial was published December 24^th on YouTube.

[youtube jzZbDqZ6fg4]

This tutorial gives you a quick education on how Avastar is intended to be used. I think it also clearly shows that weighting is going to be a more complex task. Using the old bones, old as in pre-Fitted Mesh era, and weighting one could kind of get by using just the avatar’s skin weights and a rudimentary understanding of weighting. That meant for a short skirt one was focusing only on the mPelvis, mHipLeft, and mHipRight bones.

Now we will also be considering the Butt, Belly, Right_Handle, Left_Handle, and Lower_Back. That gives us a total of 8 additional bones to consider. Weighting was complicated enough with 3 bones. Continue reading →

Fitted Mesh Concepts

2013/12/23 by Nalates Urriah

For most of the people in Second Life™ the new Fitted Mesh simply means we will soon have mesh clothes that fit our shape. I think that is pretty much correct. There is also a group of us that are curious about how the new collision bones work and what that means for those of us making clothes. But, the changeover to Fitted Mesh Clothes is going to have a much larger impact. It is going to affect everyone.

Avatar Bones – Image 1

Designer Complication

Being able to use the collision bones to make clothes that adapt to each avatar’s shape is a big plus. But, building those clothes is going to be more complex. That means several things. One of course is new designers have more to learn. Another is customers are going to have to deal with finding out who knows how to make well made Fitted Mesh Clothes.

Continue reading →

Avastar 1.1 Beta Released

2013/12/21 by Nalates Urriah

Today I see Avastar® has a new test version out. Gaia appears to have had it out since Dec. 8^th. 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. Continue reading →

Second Life Avatar 2.0

2013/12/12 by Nalates Urriah

Today I found some additional information about what Linden Lab is doing with the avatar.

In the JIRA there is an item: STORM-1800 – The vertex weights of the default character mesh could be better. Recently Alexi Reggiane added a comment (09/Dec/13 8:41 PM):

LL is currently working on making on the avatar in their fitted mesh project. Are these [meaning STORM-1800] improvements being submitted along with changes in the collision bones in this project? Now would seem to be the optimum time to implement these changes. They have said once the fitted mesh project is complete it will be years before they would be willing to make changes to the avatar again.