In The Wash Fabulously Free is doing their Gachamaina. This is a place to landmark. The collection of free and cheap stuff from name designers is nice. The Carnival of Choas, you’ll have to look around for it, has more gachas stuff and is a well done build.
The Carnival of Chaos in The Wash
There seems to be a move toward selling mesh clothes cheaply, but without demo versions. It seems to be sort of a does it look interesting enough to be worth the gamble? I think merchants with demos and low conversion rates may be trying the idea of dropping price and demos to up income.
This last weekend was Easter Weekend, for Christians a big deal. Lots to do, family stuff, dress up, and eating good food. By tomorrow I’ll know how much of what I gained is water retention from salty foods. Ugh. But, it was yummy good and fun.
There is an excellent thread in the Second Life™ Forum about the designer side problems of getting fitted mesh to fit. See: Blender/Avastar [Fitted Mesh]: Need help/advise with a few issues. Posted by Zakiel Windlow the problems are clearly expressed. Zakiel includes a great set of images to show the problems.
ZAkiel’s Images on Fitted Mesh Problems
Zakiel explained where he is coming from and what he has realized, “A few weeks ago I was using a workflow that gave me good, fast and (more or less) SAFE results:
Standard rigging and 5 or 6 sizes (or more). But I wasn’t happy, anyways. I always wanted the “fitted” mesh so all the girls could use my clothes without problems or restrictions. That was what I thought or was expecting.
Now I realize that with the fitted mesh there are restrictions too; and the workflow (for now) is harder, longer and not safe as the standard rigging. I have to check the fitting with big breasts, small breasts, big+high, big+low, small+high, small+low, big+close, big+open, big+high+close… You get the idea… And what works for 1 combination probably won’t for the other…”
RL kept me out of the Server-Scripting UG today. From the forum post we know:
The main server channel did not get a roll out this week.
The server RC channels Blue Steal and Le Tigre will not change this week. They continue to run the Sunshine package with AISv3 enabled. (Agent Inventory Services)
In a number of 3rd party viewers it is possible to make inventory links. The inventory links allow us to use No-Copy items in multiple outfits. But, the AISv3 code is not returning a property formatted link. The result is the inventory list on the viewer side gets out of sync with the server side.
Drongle asked in the Content UG meeting about what I’ll call the breakeven point when using normal maps. When does a normal map cost more or less than the number of triangles it replaces?
Normal Map
This question comes from considering the cost added by downloading and rendering another texture, the normal map. As GPU’s render triangles faster every day, there is a moving point at which it may be cheaper to add some number of triangles and skip the normal map. But, where is that point?
The answer is: it is different on each computer. The only way to know is to test. But, that only tells you for the specific hardware you are using.
It would be good to have a rules of thumb that works for the majority of people. Nyx Linden says, “It depends on how overloaded the GPU is in terms of computing and at which stage of the pipeline, the overall memory usage, which depends on the scene and the available hardware, etc. turning on normal maps for a surface is going to increase the load on the GPU computationally, regardless of what texture detail the normal map is. Adding a more detailed normal map will increase memory needs and the stress of managing all the extra texture data. That being said, if you can get away with significantly simpler geometry for a little bit of texture data, that would speed things up greatly for any users that are geometry bound.
