Second Life

Things about SL

Second Life News 2014-7 #2

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The third party viewer developers’ meeting was Friday. News from there:

Third Party Viewer Meeting 2013-49
Third Party Viewer Meeting 2013-49

Viewers

A viewer hot fix was promoted to the main viewer’s channel. This was on top of the Fitted Mesh promotion earlier in the week. This ‘hot fix’ was to fix the Facebook posting problems. Since it was Valentine’s Day weekend Linden management decided this was the RC (Release Candidate) that should be promoted.

The HTTP RC Viewer is doing well. Jessica Lyon says that Firestorm’s merges of the Fitted Mesh and HTTP code are working well for them. That doesn’t mean it will work well for everyone trying to use the viewer. It just means that within the group currently testing it, things are going well.

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Second Life Hardware Stats

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One of the stats that Second Life™ designers want is to know how many people now have Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) enabled on their viewers. Essentially that tells us how many people can see Materials. From past articles you may remember last year the Lab got a new reporting system. The team using it to … Read more

Blender Baking in Cycles

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You may not have noticed that Blender has more than one render engine. It includes:

  • Blender Render
  • Blender Game
  • Cycles

By default Blender uses the Blender Render, which is often referred to as Blender Internal. Cycles is the newer render engine. It uses NODES for many of its rendering features. While nodes are quite different from what many of us are used to, nodes mode texturing does get the process out where one can see what is happening with the render process. A person can also insert modifications into the processing stream at any point.

[youtube Ow2cDaivDVo]

I like using nodes for texturing. I haven’t used them much because there was no way, at least that I knew, to bake Cycles rendered textures for use in Second Life™. Now we can. 

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Second Life News 2014-7

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Servers

Not much to report here. Last week we knew that the Release Candidate (RC) channels would not be getting an update. Next week (8) the Lindens are anticipating rolling out a release to the RC channels. Again it will be one release rolling to all three channels.

Capella at night. Materials & Projectors
Capella at night. Materials & Projectors

The package will be a fix for a rare problem estate managers see when restarting a region. It seems when they are the last avatar out, the get logged off. Seems the server is shutting down before they are completely out. This fix will adjust the time between last avatar out and shut down.

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Fitted Mesh Blender Problem 2014-7

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Listening in the Avastar User Group tonight I found out there is a problem with both Blender and the SL Viewer when working with Collision Bone exports.

[youtube I91MqgrbQyw]

The viewer does not preview the weighted mesh you are uploading correctly. That means you will have to upload the mesh item and try it on to see whether it is working or not. This seems to be a problem in the SL Viewer code and apparently is reported as happening in Singularity too. I expect we’ll hear of the problem in other third party viewers too. 

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