Second Life and Virtual Worlds
This Tuesday the package running on the RC channels moved to the main channel. That package was said to be Simulator fixes… whatever they were.
As of late Tuesday (5+PM PT) there was no information about what would or if any would roll to the RC channels Wednesday.
Presumably the Lindens are still working on the Experience Tools database…
KatsBits.com has a written tutorial on baking normal maps from mesh geometry in Blender 2.74. See: Bake Normal Maps From Meshes. It is a long tutorial and explains how to avoid some of the common mistakes.
Have you seen any good tutorials lately?
Are you looking for a good tutorial on something?
Inara made it to last Monday’s open source user group meeting where Oz Linden apparently talked about the Second Life Render Muting feature and where it is in the development pipeline. You may remember that a bug was causing the Jelly Babies to be invisible. That is fixed.
Now the feature is waiting on UI changes. Once those are complete we will get an RC viewer version with the feature. Inara is guessing sometime in week 32, which I think is a good guess. I am looking forward to this feature. I think it will have a significant impact on performance in the long run.
Inara quotes Oz talking about the notices that will appear when our Draw Weight changes and when those around us are not rendering our avatar. We will be able to control how long those messages stay on screen. We already have a Debug Setting to tell the viewer when to render high draw weight avatars as Jelly Babies. Presumably we will have that control out where we can adjust it easily too.
Gaia Clary is starting the AVA Mesh Project. The goal is stated as: We want to provide a Standard Mesh alternative for the SL Avatar that can be used as starter kit for any mesh project that creators can think of. We plan to make Avastar capable to handle this Standard Mesh as seamless as possible.
Read more about the project here: The AVA Mesh Project.
I’m not sure what this project would do for me. I get the idea of standardization is appealing. But, making fitted mesh for the classic avatar body is always going to be a pain because of the disparity from the classic avatar using morphs and our mesh having to use bone weights.
Then we change to the new Mesh Bodies; Slink, Maitreya, and etc. I see no way to get these brand makers to change to a standard body. But, to make clothes fit these bodies we need their mesh and its weighting. If we try to standardize for all those bodies we come up with a compromise. So, there will always be the possibility to have a better product if we use a model specifically for a specific body…
So, I’m going to wait and see what comes from the project.
Jo Yardley is pointing us to an article about Project Sansar that appeared in Variety. Variety magazine, according to Wikipedia, was a weekly magazine published from the East Coast covering entertainment. In 1933 they started also publishing a daily from the West Coast. Of course they have an online version.
Jo thinks this is great coverage for Sansar and Second Life. See: Variety writes about Project Sansar. She works with entertainment people from time to time helping them get their period pieces historically correct. So, she may know something or maybe it’s just she likes the people in the industry.
Ciaran has the article Project Sansar To Offer Instancing And Perhaps A Different Approach To Branding Experiences posted. Ciaran has put together a set of clues and come to a conclusion. His reasoning seems plausible. So, what is instancing?
Ciaran gives a quick answer. I’ll go a bit deeper. First let’s look at how Second Life™ works. We have a region running in a server. Technically we may have more than one region running in a server, but for our purposes here I’ll ignore that aspect.