Content Creators’ UG Meeting 2018 w50

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Interesting news came out of the CCUG meeting today. There is word on Firestorm’s release.

Here is the video of the meeting. I missed the first couple of minutes.

Word on Firestorm is at the start of the video. Beq Janus gave us an update in chat on where Firestorm is. Their Beta testing has moved to the larger group of Firestorm testers named the Preview Group. Next, it will go to public Beta before Christmas and the final release is expected for early January 2019.

In another article I pointed you toward Beq’s article on the changes to the Mesh Uploader in this next release of Firestorm.

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Second Life and Mesh Body Lag

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Revised 1/3/2019 – Hamlet has an interesting article Well-Optimized Alternatives To Resource-Heavy Mesh Bodies For SL touching on the contentious debate going in Second Life as to how much lag mesh bodies are causing. The high polygon count in mesh bodies is the suggested cause of the lag.

Tachinni - Bonnie Dress - @ACCESS Exclusive
Tachinni – Bonnie Dress – @ACCESS Exclusive

We don’t have an obvious resolution to the argument. Nothing the non-techies can grasp. The techies stay out of the argument having learned one cannot argue with the ignorant as it is all opinion for the uneducated.

Recent technology changes have complicated the information on polygon counts and how they may affect your viewer’s performance. One complication is the shift from video card manufacturers bragging about polygons-per-second rendered to frames-per-second and now giga-rays-per-second… Part of the reason for changing metrics is the marketing hype card makers introduce to sell more cards.

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Second Life News 2018 w50

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This week we have a deploys post. Not much information in them these days. But, we have one. There is no user group meeting this Tuesday. So, no news from there.

Winter storm
Winter Storm

Server

The main channel is to get an update to version #18.12.04.522206. This version has changes to improve region stability, sim-host deployment, and logging.

The RC channels are described as TBD… To Be Determined. As of Monday, something was holding up the decision. I suspect something in the QA review was pending resolution.

The Snack channel is getting an EEP update to 18.12.07.522390.

Flying and playing in Amazon River I’ve been having more trouble
crossing regions. Flying I bang into regions that are offline forcing me to
relog. I hit the boundary and then they turn red on the minimap and show as red after the relog. Annoying. Walking I walk through prim ground/hills and get trapped inside. It has been years since I had to rez a cube to sit on to get out of a prim.

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Blender 2.8 Beta Released

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The new Blender 2.8 is out in Beta version. The user interface is drastically different. Selecting, changing modes… drastic changes. Better? Probably. It would have been nice if Blender worked this way long ago. I think it is more intuitive for the Blender nubie.

Here is a long video showing the new Blender 2.8 Beta.

You’ll find so much changes. I expect Blender 2.8 will initially be unusable until we learn all the changes.

Bookmark the video. You’ll be wanting to come back to it to see how things are done.

Second Life: Content Creation 2018-11/29

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I’ve had problems with Adobe’s Premiere Pro 2019, as have a bunch of other people. As I use that software to edit these videos, I haven’t been posting. That and RL time availability.

The CCUG meetings have been mostly about Animesh. However, they have been covering the status of various projects in Second Life. In this video, we get information on Animesh, Bakes On Mesh, and EEP.

Oz Linden opens with the status of BoM. Using the Project Viewer, you can test BoM everywhere in SL. The feature is provided by a backend service, formerly known as Server-Side Baking (a 2012 thing). The service bakes the appearance of a classic avatar into three composite textures combining skin, tats, underwear, and clothes. This service has now been updated to handle classic and mesh avatars and we call it BoM to distinguish it from SSB.

The Lindens seem a bit nervous about how well the service is working. From their side of things all looks well. However, users have ways of breaking and overloading things in ways the Lindens did not anticipate. So, they are hoping users will use the BoM Project Viewer (alternate Viewers) to test the service.

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