Blender 2.68 RC1 Released

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There is a great article by Gaia Clary in the SL Forum: Blender 2.68: Weight Tools reworked. She is explaining how weight painting in Blender has improved. Tools work as one intuitively thinks they should. I see that as a big improvement. I’ve fought with Blender weight painting for some time.

Also the documentation has been updated. See the Vertex Groups section of the 2.6 manual.

Blender 2.67b is currently the stable release. But, a Blender 2.68 Release Candidate is out. See the Blender download page for the 2.67b version. There is a candidates download page here.

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Oculus Rift – VR Update

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There is an update on KickStarter.com about the status of the Oculus Rift, which is adopting the name Oculus VR. See the update here: Shipping Update, E3 2013 Recap and Oculus 0.2.3 SDK Release – Update #38 – July 4th, 2013.

This update is about the release of the 1080p developer’s headset.

Scroll down the page to the comments about EVE-VR. This is a tech demo of the EVE Online space adventure game. It blew people away and won awards. The reviewers are raving about the immersive quality of the experience.

And Yet Another Interview with Rod Humble 2013-27

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These just keep popping up. Ciaran Level in Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble on Second Life’s Tween Years links to the article on AllThingsD: Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble on Second Life’s Tween Years (Q&A).

Rod Humble Interview
Rod Humble Interview

Also Jo Yardley has an article, up about the same interview: Oculus Rift in Second Life goes public late summer!

Again Rod comments on Second Life’s performance and how it has been a prime concern. Rod says that this year he believes he will be able to say, “Hey, performance is good.” I definitely will go with ‘better.’ But, I’m going to have see more before I’ll say ‘good.’ I also suspect it is going to be ‘good’ for SL.

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Update on SSA

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Surely by now you know SSA is Server Side Appearance, which is about baking your avatar appearance. The Lindens have posted a second notice that SSA will be here next week. See: It’s Time to Update Your Viewer!

And they reuse their previous video:

[youtube jwglL3VXI80]

Please make sure all your friends know about the coming update and the need for them to be using a recent version of whatever viewer they use. 

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Firestorm Viewer 4.4.2-34167 Released

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I see late yesterday the FS Team released viewer 4.4.2. There is an announcement on the FS Blog: Mandatory Firestorm 4.4.2 Update. This version fixes the problem of overloading the Linden stats servers. Users would not notice a problem. So, many might not update and stats indicate that would be the case. The result is this is a mandatory update.

Firestorm Viewer Download is here. Look in the right hand column, white area.

Firestorm Splash Screen
Firestorm Splash Screen

You may have found that your 4.4.1 viewer will no longer login. You get an update message on the splash screen. If you close it and attempt to login, you get another notice and the viewer does not login. If you close that one and attempt to login again, you find you are in a loop. The viewer is not going to login because the FS Team has told it not to. It is blocked by the FS Team. 

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