Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Because of the large interest in JIRA SH-2374 (Rigged Mesh Deformer) I expected an interesting meeting and it was. We did learn that the Lindens are still working on how to handle the problem. The relegation to ‘Someday/Maybe’ status still upsets some. The lack of explanation upsets even more people. But, at last we got some explanation.
Charlar Linden said he would be adding more notes to the JIRA item. On the 4th Charlar added this comment to the JIRA.
Tateru Nino of Dwell On It linked to Satiated Desires’ post, A consumer’s guide to Second Life mesh. This is a must read for Second Life resident considering buying mesh clothes. No tech or geek, just the stuff you want to know. If you think I’m geeky when explaining mesh, check out Satiated Desires. Satiated explains … Read more
The latest mesh development viewer has support for Collada 1.4.1. Download Page. Most problems are fixed. There are still some reporting problems with Blender rigged mesh.
Auto-return got turned off in the ADITI mesh sandboxes. That is going to be corrected. So, the area will start clearing again, probably by the time you read this.
As OpenGL, I want applications to not use the fixed function, because it is deprecated. – SL is using OpenGL Version: 3.3.0. There are problems with the viewer and OpenGL. Fixing the issues is a high Linden priority. It is still in process.
For those getting out of memory errors, try turning off private memory pool management, which I don’t know if it is a compile setting or a Debug Setting (MemoryPrivatePoolEnabled). See: VWR-26864
With the addition of mesh objects we have some nice possibilities for creating new things in Second Life. Ashasekayi made a great 6 part clothing/rigged mesh tutorial. Gaia also makes wonderful tutorials for working with sculpties, going from sculpties to mesh, and mesh. They have the basics pretty well covered. I want to get beyond the basics and find more Blender features. I have found several features that can help with modeling and in particular with making clothes. This article is about one of the Blender features.
Looking through loads of tutorials I’ve found some I think are pretty good examples of how to use the feature for making clothes look like they are made from real cloth. This is not a complete how to make a top. This is about a feature you can use in making a blouse.
Cloth Simulation – This is a feature in Blender that I have seldom seen discussed in Second Life circles. I wanted to explore what it can do and try it out. I used Blender 2.59.
Tateru Nino writes the Dwell On It blog, a favorite of mine because she does numbers. Today she has an article titled, The effects of the Mesh content-type on Second Life. The article is an accurate assessment of the current state of ‘mesh’ in Second Life. The comments show the user reaction to mesh and are interesting to read. I have a very different opinion than I see in the comments there.
In psychology there are the concepts of transference and projection. If you have a new age belief system, you know those concepts as mirroring. The concepts are a mix of ideas that basically results in the idea that what we see in others is ourselves. So, if we see someone being dumb, we are probably seeing our own stupidity. If we are smart our first thought would be to ask of our self if we are being dumb and missing something. At the least it can save us considerable embarrassment.
So, with mirroring as the top cliché read through the comments on Tateru’s post.
I read lots of stuff. Somewhere in my reading I came across an idea Einstein expressed in a conversation about language. It contained the idea that people cannot communicate or understand each other if the language does not have words that precisely describe concepts. If we use ambiguous terms we will have ambiguous discussions. Ambiguity is a disaster in technical conversations and any conversation where one hopes to achieve some consensus of opinion.
A few interesting things came up in this week’s Mesh Import group meeting.
This mesh cost things is an ongoing problem in SL. People have yet to figure out Land Impact (LI), formerly Prim Equivalence (PE). They keep asking questions in the meeting that have answers in the SL Wiki. The forum is full of complaints that mesh costs too much. Well, it sure does if you do not understand the Land Impact equations in the Wiki.
If one understands the explanations in the Wiki and Forum or the repeated explanations answering questions in the forum, mesh can be cheap It is tedious building efficient mesh, but it is easy to build efficient mesh that is cheaper than comparable prim builds for many things.
Understanding mesh cost also gives you an idea of what is a good candidate for prims, mesh or sculpty. Trying to build everything out of mesh or giving a mesh object a gilillion sharp edges are bad ideas.