Second Life and Virtual Worlds
There is a list of the continents that make up Second Life™. The list lives in the SL Wiki. I noticed the list was being updated. Check it out here: List Of Microcontinents And Sim Clusters.
It appears most of the changes are being made by Ana Imfinity (AnaImfinity.Resident).
You’ll find other parts of the wiki that deal with SL’s geometry have been getting attention too. Scroll to the bottom of the wiki page I linked to above to find; Oceans and Second Life Geography.
It took me a while to find this file. I just stumbled across it. Like previous versions of Avastar had a free ‘workbench’ file for non-Avastar users there is a similar file now for Fitted Mesh. See: Machinimatrix Fitted Mesh Survival Kit.
This file looks complex if you haven’t seen an Avastar file before. Gaia Clary has a text object in the ‘blend’ file that explains the file’s layout. When you open the blend file load the UI (box in ‘file open’ usually checked by default) to see a layout like I show in the image above. This will expose the more important parts of the file.
The Tool Shelf section I labeled ‘A’ is an Avastar feature. The Properties Panel on the right that I have labeled ‘B’ is a standard Blender panel that does the same things. ‘A’ is a shortcut for ‘B’ that makes things more intuitive for Avastar users.
Any Blender user without Avastar can do anything an Avastar user can. But, it is going to take way less learning and far fewer clicks with Avastar. So, the text section gives non-Avastar users the information supplied by section ‘A’.
Avastar does have a modified Collada export that does a number of translations for you to create a SL compatible Collada file. You have to walk that mine field if you do a plain Blender Collada export.
If you grabbed the Fitted Mesh avatar files in the Second Life™ Wiki and tried to use them, you may have had the result I got. No joy. I got no skeleton just a mesh.
There is somewhat a fix. Go over to AutoDesk and get the standalone FBX® 2011.3.1 Converter. Use it to convert the FBX files to Collada DAE files. Those can be imported into Blender. You will get the skeleton and all the extra collision bones, including the new ones. You will need to scale up by a factor of 100.
The skeleton imported is not that great. But, you can see all the parts. I am not sure the resulting file will actually produce a usable model. But, it gets one further along.
Numerous people are working on Virtual Reality projects. Here is an example of where one team is.
[youtube B_JpcmSEGzw]
They might have gotten further ahead if they had used Second Life. The world would definitely have looked better.
Gaia Clary posted yesterday that there is a new test version of Avastar for Fitted Mesh. This is the second release of a test version of Avastar for Fitted Mesh. (Don’t be surprised, the appearance of the Machinimatrix.com site has changed.)
I’ve been playing with avastar-1-1-905_blender-2-64. The new release is: avastar-1-1-907_blender-2-64.
This release handles reported problems in the Second Life™ JIRA. I understand these JIRA items are readable by everyone.
FITMESH-2 – Discrepancy/Typo between Existing Avatar_Skeleton.XML and new Avatar_Skeleton.XML
This JIRA item has corrected files that can be used with the Fitted Mesh Viewer 3.6.11.283899. You will find the avatar_skeleton.xml file in folder: C:\Program Files (x86)\SecondLifeProjectFittedMesh\character
The file avatar_lad.xml is in the same folder. Both of these files can be replaced to update the viewer. These changes will likely appear in the next Fitted Mesh Viewer release.
Alphaville Herald has an article up about a class action settlement. People that were banned are getting US$. See: Refunds For Banned Second Life Players!! SHOCK!!!