Adobe Creative Cloud 2013-25

Some news is coming in on Adobe’s change to a monthly release plan. It seems it is being well accepted. Adobe’s published earning is beating the street’s estimates. See Tech Crunch for details: Adobe’s Q2 Earnings Beat Street With $1.011B In Revenue, $0.36 EPS, 700K Paying Creative Cloud Subscribers or 92% of their users.

New features are rolling out in the CC version of the software. Below is a Photoshop change in how it works with 3D painting.

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A longer and more detailed Q&A about the new CC is here: Adobe MAX: What’s New in Photoshop CC. This is mostly and audio with slides. And while it uses Photoshop in the title, this is more about how CC works.

I plan to sign up this month.

Materials Released

Latif Kalifa added a comment to my ‘news’ post this morning that Materials released just after my posting. The version for the main viewer is now: 3.6.0-277516. See the official announcement here: Get the New Materials Viewer Today! Check out Torley’s new video about Materials.

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Torley’s bear is the wrong color… for Torley.

There is a brief tutorial on using normal and specular maps in the video. More tutorials are here:

Oculus Rift Update 2013-25

Jo Yardley has written up her firs hands on experience with the Oculus Rift (Rift). This is an excellent article that puts the state of the art in perspective. The current Rift’s are low resolution, but still impressive. See: Oculus Rift and Second Life.

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The day she saw the Rift the company was releasing a high resolution version, still beta. There is an even higher resolution version coming for retail sales.

Jo portrays the possibilities for this technology very well. The article is worth the read.

Hamlet recently published: Oculus VR Gets $15M in VC Funding – Virtual Reality Much More Likely to Go Mass Market.

Every indication is this tech will create sweeping changes to computer games and virtual worlds. Jo is portraying ways VR headsets could change RL activities. It will certainly change how we experience and build in Second Life.

Second Life News 2013-25 #2

I am distracted by RL work events and running a bit behind. I’ve barely been in-world since last Thursday. We did get a rollout Tuesday to the main channel. The main channel got the Interest List update. This should be noticed as a little bit faster rezzing of regions you are visiting for the first time.

Image from Sorcerer and White Snake
Image from Sorcerer and White Snake

Rollouts started for today, Wednesday, on the release channels. All three are getting the same package. It includes the new LSL functions I’ve been writing about. If you have missed those articles take a look at the release notes. These include additions to Pathfinding and object returns. 

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Second Life News 2013-25

Viewer changes are picking up speed. As the new multi-channel process moves forward we will see more viewer projects moving forward. Some of these things are things I’ve written about weeks and months ago.  Now they are coming to a viewer near you.

TPV Dev's Meeting 2013-24
TPV Dev’s Meeting 2013-24

Inara has written an update on the SSA (Server Side Appearance): SL projects update 24 (5). See it for details. The summary of that news is simple. We are likely to see SSA enabled over the next 2 to 6 weeks. I expect it to SLOWLY creep across the grid. The server side code has already been rolled out to the main channel. Now it is just a matter of enabling it on the regions. But, there are concerns about problems and whether the new servers can carry the load. So, this will be a very careful roll out.

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How to Make Mesh Hair

I came across this tutorial in my YouTube subscriptions. It is done using Maya and Photoshop. But, the technique can be used in any 3D modeling and paint program. It runs 35 minutes. I like the ideas presented.

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If you notice, this is a CG Cookie related video. The CG Cookie version is here: Creating Polygon Hair for Game Characters. CG Cookie is a great site for 3D modeling tutorials.