Mesh

Take-Away – It is possible to animate the face of a mesh avatar using the Deformer. The details follow:

Yesterday after the Server Beta meeting White Rabbit showed me a full body avatar. It’s eyes blinked. I mean blinked like the SL Avatar blinks. The eyelids moved. Now that is novel.

Now that may not seem like much, but if you have made avatars with mesh heads, you know that the face cannot be animated to show expressions as the SL Avatar can. What White Rabbit is discovering is that the Mesh Deformer in the current Project Viewer is handling the facial morphs used for expression.

I didn’t get to see all that White Rabbit has discovered as the region we were in on ADITI kept crashing and restarting. But, I did find what I saw impressive.

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There is an issue for some with the Mesh Deformer and the time it needs to calculate the mesh for offsetting. Kitsune Shan has been working with the Deformer and voicing concern about the time needed for the Deformer to kick in.

Kitsune is proposing that we do something like what is done with avatar baking. The viewer does the bake and sends a composite image to the servers for everyone else to use. Of course that is being changed to a server side process now, where a new service in servers at the Lab will do the bake and send out the composite image. Kitsune would like to see something similar to that for the Mesh Deformer.

White Rabbit points outthe difficulties with attempting to cache the deformation calculations. White Rabbit has done some testing and finds the CPU time for the Deformer calculation is consistently small. She speculates that the long calc times come from the thread being a low priority process.

The chances that Deformer calc’s will be cached server side is, in my opinion, slim to none. We do not have any statistics on the type of hardware being used with Second Life™. We know there is new stuff, way old hardware, and everything in between. But, AFAIK, we have no information on how much of each.

We have been told that number of users staying with SL Viewer 1.23.x is only 2 or 3%. Third Party Viewers that do not use SSE2 CPU commands is small. Read the SSE2 thing as meaning viewers that support really old computers. Their user bases are so small they fit within the 2-3% too. So, I’ll speculate that the Lab is not going to put much effort into something as complex as caching deformation data.

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In my #SL News on the 15^th I reported I think the Mesh Deformer Project is setting off to the side. I mention that from Oz Linden’s perspective interest in the Deformer has died out. That drew some reaction in several places. Since a couple of days after the article things have picked up. I doubt I did all that. But, people are getting the word out.

I’ve also gotten several questions that surprised me. Some are pointing out they are new to this issue… which while that surprises me it shouldn’t. This project started a year ago and we have had a lot of people come in and leave during that period. So, I’m going to try to update things get people together.

If you find people confused on what testing is in progress and what needs to be done, please refer them here.

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