The Problem: Fitted Mesh an Alpha Tutorial

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I suspect anyone that has worn mesh clothes is very aware of skin-poke-through and ‘holes’ from the Alpha Layers making parts of the avatar invisible. I am particularly annoyed by both. But, is there anything we can do? That is the question asked at Fabulously Free in SL. Here I’ll provide the techy answer and information. I’ll also link to good tutorials.

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Fab’s three advisors answer the question. Their answers are straight forward and provide the advice most of us know. But, there is a more complete techy answer. First I’ll summarize their answers then get into the tech.

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OpenSim: Kitely’s Market Place Second Look

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My recent article OpenSim News: Hypergrid Market 2014-12 drew more comments than most of my posts. Maria Korolov, WhiteStar Magic, and Ilan Tochner commented making good points I feel worth further consideration in regard to Kitely’s new market place.

Kitely Market in Android S4
Kitely Market in Android S4

Maria believes the Kitely market will help with the DMCA problems. Her thinking, if I understood, is that having a single market for many OpenSim grids it reduces the work one needs to do to file a DMCA take down notice. Rather than keeping track of all the grids and filing with each, a merchant/creative can file with just Kitely. This is a good point and addresses the concern I raised about the added complexity of the Hypergrid spreading products across a number of virtual worlds.

If each grid has its own market, we have to deal with all those markets and defend content in all those markets. I see that as a big problem. Maria is likely right that a concentrated market would simplify the problem and not present the massive work load I foresaw.

Filing only with Kitely does not get things removed from all the grids. But, that may be a temporary thing. They hope to be able to implement that feature with cooperation from grid owners. For now once an item is in a grid’s asset database it is there until the grid manager removes it. A DCMA take-down will stop sales from Kitely and that may be all one really needs to worry about. More about this farther on.

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AvaStar Update 2014-13

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Gaia Clary has some news up on the Machinimatrix.org site. It is announced that AvaStar and PrimStar­‑2 will no longer install in Blender versions before 2.70. Uuuummmm… I could have said that better. With Blender 2.70 you will need newer versions of AvaStar and PrimStar-2 to be able to install them.

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Gaia also explains a problem that some of have run into when installing AvaStar updates. When one removes AvaStar then installs a newer version, the install fails. I figured out that I needed to uninstall the plugin, save the User Preferences, exit Blender, restart Blender, then install the updated AvaStar.

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Second Life Bits 2014-13

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Viewers

After my Tuesday morning post I found the main release viewer updated to 3.7.4.288138. This was the Hotfix RC viewer compiled Mar 15 2014 and released some time Monday.

Image by: Reema Xue, Flickr
Image by: Reema Xue, Flickr

I am finding this viewer runs pretty fast (30+ FPS) when few people are around. Add a dozen people and it slows down horribly. I’ll need to spend more time with it and try it around other groups, but in the little time I have had it, that seems to be a pretty consistent experience.

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Oculus… Facebook?

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Jo Yardley has an article up about Facebook buying out Oculus Rift. It would be nice to know the details of that deal. But, an upfront US$2 billion… that is a deal. See: Facebook buys Oculus Rift for $2 billion.

Is this a good thing for Second Life™ users? At this point there is no way to know. Everyone on both the Facebook and Oculus sides are talking about how great a deal this is. Companies always do that.

Putting $2 billion in Oculus’ pocket is a good thing for them. Having access to Facebook’s resources is a good thing for them. But, they had to give up some measure of control. Only time will tell if that works out. Remember the movie? Still that is a lot of money for a tech company that has yet to prove the tech will be as popular as hyped.

For Facebook they get the Oculus tech. They obviously think they can to something with it. Strongly enough they shelled out $2 billion. But, what they say they will do with it is pretty vague.

We do know Facebook is NOT privacy oriented. Nor are they a game company. So, where will they take Oculus development? Minecraft developer Markus Persson is backing off plans for teaming with Oculus because Facebook creeps him out.

I just want a ‘retail’ Rift to play with.