Second Life

Things about SL

Dolphin Viewer 3 – 3.3.13.24707

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Dolphin Viewer Logo
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Dolphin Viewer 3 has had a number of quick releases recently. Most of these are for fixing bugs. Recently there was a problem with shadows. That has been fixed in this release.

The announcement for this release is: Bugfix Release – Dolphin Viewer 3 3.3.13.24707.

You can find the downloads here: Dolphin Viewer Download.

The download is about 28mb and takes a couple of minutes.

The install is typical, nothing special.

The install saves all your settings. With Lighting & Shadows and Ambient Occlusion turned on with HIGH settings I get 20 to 25 FPS. Turning on Sun/Moon Shadows pulls me down to 16 to 18 FPS.

The shadows look pretty good.

One of the things I’m finding I enjoy is the feature in Preferences -> Dolphin 3 -> User Interface -> Allow Separate Search Terms on each Inventory Tab. Try it. You’ll like it.

 

Working with #SL Male Shape

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Some of the avatar files have a male shape included. Others appear to NOT have the separate male shape. You can also import a male shape to Blender by exporting one from SL. See Second Life Mesh Clothes Blender 2.6 Setup 2012 Tutorial for information on how to export from Second Life® and details on which shapes are what.

Revealing the Male Shape

This tutorial is about working with Blender 2.63a shape keys to get the male shape. It will also give you some idea of how the Alternate or Redpoly Deformer can work.

If you make petites or giants, getting a copy of the male model that is well weighted is important. If you have tried exporting the male model as a mesh for use in SL, you likely ran into problems. This tutorial will help with exporting the male model.

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MetaReality Week 27

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This week the podcast is interesting. Lots of opinions are voiced and lots of SL news is touched on. There is not a lot of what I think of as hard news. But, you’ll gain an idea of where some things are headed and probably some insights.

Metareality Podcasts

I’ve provided time marks and my take on the discussion. I have not tried to relate the opinions, I would likely get that wrong and I see that as unfair to the MetaReality cast. So, listen to the audio to get the opinions and apply your own personalized interpolations.

MetaReality Podcast: Healthy Competition

00:00 to 02:15 – Introductions

02:30 – Review Mesh Deformer developments.

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Second Life News Update Week 27

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You may have had problems logging in Thursday. Around 1 PM SLT things were getting sorted out. Thursday was to be the main roll out to the main channel. That had to stop because of network outages. I was trying to make it in about that time. No login errors. Viewer would just sit there doing nothing.

Beta Server Meeting

As to exactly what the network problems were no one is saying. That means either they don’t know, some information travels slowly within the Lab, or it was security related.

The roll of the Pre-rendered Library Avatars package was stopped. The Linden regions got the roll. The network outages forced a stop before the roll out could be completed. So, the grid is in a rather unique state this week and will be until next Tuesday. Then the Pre-Render package will go grid wide.

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Content Creation Improvement UG

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The new group had its first meeting. I’m bummed to have missed it, but RL fun was calling. They posted their meeting minutes so I can have an idea of what was happening. Some of the interesting things from the meeting follow.

Geenz Spad is chairing the meeting as the facilitator. He states the purpose of the meeting as: the idea is for people to discuss their ideas in a collaborative environment, and if everyone can agree on an idea, that idea will hopefully be made into a proposal at some point for Linden Lab, and prototypes demonstrating that functionality will also eventually be submitted as well.

So, this meeting is an opportunity for fashion and content designers to contribute ideas to enable better content creation and get problems in the design and creation work flow smoothed out.

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#SL News Week 26 & 27

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Lots of things going on RL & SL. So, I keep getting behind on the general news. This should catch us up on some of the interesting things happening.

Content & Mesh Meeting

Cloudy Blurry Avatars

In today’s (7/2) Content & Mesh User Group Nyx Linden brought up the Shining Changes announced last Friday. I covered Shining in Second Life Changes Coming. Nyx’s announcement… or maybe it is better to call it an explanation… follows:

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