Lots of news happening this morning. Some viewer related news came out in the Mesh Meeting. For those that have been trying to upload mesh with the new viewer and OpenGL fixed viewers news hits on what the problem is.
Mesh Meeting in Second Life ADITI
SH-2595
SH-2595 – Upload menu won’t calculate fees. This problem blocks your ability to upload. Models that would previously upload will not work. Prep Linden has posted in the JIRA thread. It seems there was a fix and it got lost not making it into a merge. However the fix is in the Development viewer.
Monday was a busy day. Lots of mesh related things going on. The Content Creation/Mesh Import User Group is where most of the news breaks. This week we were supposed to find out where the Lab was in their research for how to handle mesh clothes and body shape issues. There is lots of information on the subject.
Mesh Import Group 2011/10/17
New Tree
Charlar Linden has changed from his deciduous look to an evergreen look, which is probably seasonal thing for well dressed trees…
Unconnected Vertices
An unconnected vertex is a vertex without an edge connection to any other polygons. They are somewhat like crumbs. They usually serve no purpose as there is no way to render them. So, the question was asked what the SL Collada Uploader does with them.
Prep Linden says they are not rendered. If one has unconnected vertices the uploader should alert the user to the problem. In general you don’t want extra vertices driving up your Land Impact costs. Prep asked we file a JIRA feature request. I am not sure who is filing it.
To day at 2 PM PT/SLT in-world will be a meeting about the Mesh Deformer Project. The meeting will be at Garden of Dreams. This is designing Worlds Treet.tv studio. A featured speaker is a Maxwell Graf, well-known designer and owner of Rustica. Also Graham Dartmouth of Builders Brewery and and Jusden Jonstone, an Opensource Developer, who has worked both for Linden Lab and for Third Party Viewers will be speaking.
The Mesh Deformer is about getting mesh clothes to work with the appearance sliders. It is more complex than that, but basically that is the part that will affect most SL residents.
I suspect we will get new information on the project. There is likely to be some fund raising going on too.
This meeting is an hour after the Content Creators User Group (Mesh Group) meeting. This is the week the Lindens said they could give us more information on their research into what may be the best way to provide mesh deformation in SL. I’ll have more on that later in the day.
You can learn more about the project at Indiegogo.com.
The big topic in mesh is the Deformers issue… an obvious spinoff from the Transformers movies… not. Maxwell Graf is leading an effort to get mesh deformers for SL clothes. As you probably know mesh clothes will not fit to our avatar shape, which is overly simplified but conveys the idea. Deformers will make the clothes fit our shapes.
Mesh Meeting Oct 10, 2011
The Lindens were caught by surprise in this issue. The entire mesh project was geared toward using mesh for things other than clothes. During the closed beta period those helping were apparently oriented toward building mesh things, not clothes. So, clothes were a secondary concern for Lindens. In hindsight a good case can be made for seeing clothes as a secondary priority being a blunder. But, that is in hindsight and we know how that works, unfairly.
The previous part of this tutorial is OpenSim Terrain Tutorial via Blender – Part 1. The previous part is about getting terrain from Second Life and OpenSim into Blender. This part is about exporting the terrain from Blender 2.59 as a height map image.
Height Maps via Blender Nodes
Terrain
By the time you start this tutorial you should have a completed terrain or at least have a test terrain to try.
Also, you should have a backup of your region. Loading the tutorial can mess up your region. So, a backup is a good idea. In OpenSim I make OAR file backups. (save oar [filename.oar] – save to OpenSim’s working folder. You can specify a path.)
Now is a good time to back up your Blender file too. It is a great idea to work in a copy of the file.
Updates: Includes minor updates for use with Blender 2.63.
Blender 2.5 has a new import feature that can be used for making terrain in Blender. Most terrain tutorials are about getting terrain into Blender and little if anything about getting it out. Those that are about exporting terrain are mostly for Blender 2.49. There are enough changes between 2.49 and 2.59 that it is hard to figure how to accomplish 2.49 tasks in 2.59. This article is about importing terrain to Blender and exporting for use in Second Life and OpenSim. Part 1 is about getting terrain into Blender and Part 2 about getting terrain out.
Terrain Imported from OpenSim
I’ll be working with Blender 2.59 and OpenSim 0.7.2 Dev. The height maps can be used in either SL or OpenSim.
Terrain Vertices Count
First I need to know what I’ll need to export for use in OpenSim. Plus I have a terrain in OpenSim (OSGrid) which I’ve worked on for some time that I want to get into Blender and start from there. So, I need to import and export terrain to and from Blender.
