There is a section in the Second Life™ forum about technology: Tools and Technology. Thursday afternoon (1/16) Linden lab posted article there titled: Raising the Roof: The HTTP Project. The post is about the changes coming to how the SL Viewer and SL servers communicate.
The abbreviated point in the post is: communication between our viewers and the servers is and is going to be better and does and will use less bandwidth. This means fewer problems logging into Second Life. Also, more reliable connections and fewer disconnects. The changes will mean fewer capabilities from routers and gateways will be used, allowing the less expensive routers to handle Second Life better. And in general things will download faster.
The podcast was out early this morning. I wasn’t. This morning I have been playing with my new blog theme, which breaks my Dreamweaver. So, the podcast is a nice break from sorting out database changes and the WordPress foibles of setting up a local copy of a live site.
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As always, what I write about the podcast is my take on things. So, listen to the podcast before flaming. You can listen to it or download it (nice addition to Drax’s blog) here: Drax Show #2 Osprey Therian. Drax links to a CNN article on Osprey. I think it would be nice if Osprey’s friends posted some comments on the December 2013 article.
I am not making any pretense of transcribing the audio. My comments are just that comments on what is said in the show. I’ll be clear when I make a quote.
This viewer is not yet the main viewer for Second Life™, but it did get an update Tuesday 1/14. This is the Interesting RC Viewer. It is known for faster scene rendering. You can download it here: Second Life RC & Project Viewers. If you are doing photography, this version could save your sanity. Even shopping things are rendering fast. I haven’t got to use it much. But, it seems great, better than previous version.
Well maybe… I’m looking for a new theme for this blog. I am trying this one out, SUNSPOT. I kinda like it. I’ll give it a few days. The feed in the old theme is broken. Somewhere in the code I built I added a space into the output where I shouldn’t have. Ever since … Read more
Blender users are often looking for information and tutorials about Blender. Second Life™ users are often looking for SL specific Blender information. They now have a new source, or at least a remodeled source, of Blender information. Dark Scarab is a Blender feeds aggregator. Dark Scarab has a list of Resources, image Gallery, the Blog, … Read more
A couple of years ago we were sorting out just which files we could get that had a model of the Second Life™ avatar with a default shape. We were going to need that for use with the Mesh Deformer. A good ‘default shape’ file will still be needed on the OpenSim grids. I wrote a long article on which files were which and did a lot of testing of the files to find the differences and decide which file to base my work on. I am sort of in the same place now with Fitted mesh.
I’ll say that OFFICIALLY there are no files for Fitted Mesh… yet. The reason for that is Fitted Mesh is still in development. So, there is no FINAL version of the avatar. But, we do have two files that can be used by experimenters. I’ll explain what we have have now.
Linden Fitted Mesh Avatar
The Wiki has a ZIP file that has a number of files in various formats. The files appear to have been last updated 12/16/20134/2014. They are provided in a ZIP file and include the file I show below. The Mac folder has the same files with slightly different file names.
You can see there are Blender, Collada (dae), FBX, and Maya (ma). The last two are AutoDesk file formats. For compatibility consider:
Autodesk FBX technology helps to enable the interchange of 3D data between the following Autodesk products: Autodesk® 3ds Max®, Autodesk® Maya®, Autodesk® Softimage®, Autodesk® MotionBuilder®, Autodesk® Mudbox®, Autodesk® Smoke® and Autodesk® Flame® software. Consult the compatibility charts below to learn about the level of support for these applications.
