High Fidelity Goes Open Alpha – How to Get In

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Philip Rosedale has posted on the HF blog: High Fidelity Open Alpha. He is announcing the opening of the Alpha testing phase to the general public.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mNqaJOZoCM

While this may sound exciting, and it is, it isn’t what you may be expecting. But, you can download the server and client now and get a region running. You are going to need to be a little geeky to get an install running. But, installing and running the Interface is as easy as installing and running a Second Life Viewer. 

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How To Easily Update to Blender 2.74

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Blender 2.74
Blender 2.74

Blender released a new version 3/31. The short list of improvements is:

  • Cycles got several precision, noise, speed, memory improvements, new Pointiness attribute.
  • Viewport has new cool compositing features, outliner now manages orphan data-blocks better.
  • Modeling now allows custom normals, and transferring data layers between meshes!
  • Massive improvements to hair dynamics and editing tools: a big step forward with more to come…
  • A new tool “Cavity Mask” was added to sculpting/painting, along with other improvements.
  • Great memory consumption optimization in Freestyle NPR stroke rendering.
  • Grease pencil and Game engine improvements, and more…

Download: Blender 2.74 – Blender 2.74 Features List 

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Second Life: How To Do Windlight

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Chic Aeon has done three little video tutorials on Second Life™ Windlight. Chic uses the Firestorm Viewer for this tutorial. The ideas apply to all viewers, you just find the controls in different place.

See:

@ SLartist – Hat tip to iHeartSL Fashion and Machinima Open Studio Project

Out Of The Shadow
Out Of The Shadow by Miuccia Klaar, on Flickr

Second Life: How to Fix CDN Problems

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Well, this may or may not fix your problem. But, it is a chance to improve things.

System Failure - Survival Horror Game
System Failure – Survival Horror Game by Loverdag, on Flickr

The problem some are seeing is texture and mesh fetching errors, which means regions and/or avatars are failing to render. When that happens things may be odd shaped or never appear and they stay gray. If you look in your Second Life™ log files you’ll find errors like these: 

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