Nalates' Things & Stuff

Second Life Tools

2014/09/182014/09/17 by Nalates Urriah

Blender 2.7 Materials Baking

Blender is moving more and more toward use of Cycles Rendering. With Cycles comes the need to use the Node Editor to build materials. For those materials to be of use in Second Life™ we often need to bake them to an image.

As I was baking materials I kept getting strange and seemingly random results. Sometimes everything would work as I expected. Other times I seemed to lose all control over which image Blender was going to bake to. I finally found how to control which output image is used to receive the bake output. See this answer/tutorial on the problem: How do I bake a texture using Cycles bake.

Output is controlled by which Image Texture node is selected in the Node Editor, not the 3D window or UV Editor window, which is why I was having trouble understanding what Blender was doing.

Second Life News 2014-38

2014/09/15 by Nalates Urriah

Servers

Tuesday the main channel gets the maintenance package that ran on the RC Channels last week. It fixes some crash conditions and an oddball bug in Skill Gaming areas. Nothing any of us will likely notice.

Norder Ney HeavenScent - 2014 — Norder Ney HeavenScent – 2014

RC Channels

All three RC channels will get an update Wednesday to the same package. This one is an update for the Experience Tools Project. It fixes some bugs and tweaks how some things work.

Viewers

Nothing has changed since I last wrote an update. None of the coming RC Viewers have shown up on the RC Viewers Page.

Linden Lab

I saw mention that Will Wright has left Linden Lab, or at least is no longer mentioned in the list of names for Linden Lab’s management. Back in October 2011 New World Notes carried an article about Mr. Wright joining the board.

So, the question is what happened?

Second Life News 2014-37 #2

2014/09/13 by Nalates Urriah

This last Friday was the Third Party Developers’ meeting facilitated by Oz Linden. We have a burst of news from that meeting. Several projects were updated.

Viewers

I’ve already covered the update of the SL Default/Main Viewer and the RC Viewers. There was no new news regarding these viewers.

However, some props are due NiranV. The new snapshot panel is his creation. It is well done. I personally like using it. NiranV also corrected some other problems in the snapshot process. So, it is more than just a cosmetic change.

Send NiranV a thank you.

Project Viewers

The Oculus Rift Project viewer is in QA as a DK2 project and lots of issues are being found and worked on. Fixes are flowing into that project viewer. So, far the viewer will support DK1 as best it can.

My understanding is the DK2 version of the project is NOT yet published on the RC Viewer page, but soon.

Second Life Transcript Coloring

2014/09/10 by Nalates Urriah

If you deal with transcripts of meetings, in our case in Second Life™ transcripts, they are usually chat logs. They are not that easy to read. So, some people have scripted tools to colorize the transcripts.

Gwyneth Llewelyn has an article up where she writes about her transcript colorizing tool: Revisiting the Colourising Script. She explains some of the problems she has run into over the years.

AvaStar Pricing to Change

2014/09/10 by Nalates Urriah

The rumor is… AvaStar pricing is going up. Gaia is having a problem supporting development and customer support. Something has to give. Development slows considerably or the price goes up. Various ideas have been voiced for how to price the tool with accompanying screams from the user base. But, that is to be expected whenever a merchant has to raise prices.

Gaia Clary says she is now working on Avatar and SL products full time. She has to make her living selling these products.

Gaia does not seem to be a fan of subscription pricing. So, I expect the initial purchase price on AvaStar 2.0 to jump up, but that has not been decided. The current US$27± price is not providing Gaia a living. So, will we see $100? May be. The final price is yet to be decided.