Blender Update Week 11

The current stable release of Blender remains 2.49b. In Second Life two of the main sculpty tools use Blender: Primstar and JASS2. Both of those still use Blender 2.49b. However, the beta versions of Blender 2.5 are becoming popular with those working with mesh in Second Life. The reason for that is the Collada Export/Import features in Blender 2.56a have more fixes. The Collada features have just been updated again and this week more work will be done on Collada.

If you are finding problems with your Second Life Mesh Imports because of Collada bugs, get over to Letwory Interactive and the Blender 2.5 Tracker and let them know.

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Dolphin Viewer 2.5.3.14965 Released Review

Dolphin Viewer is out in a new version. This one adopts the new code from Linden Lab, version 2.5.1.  Some changes have been made and they are listed on the Dolphin web site: Dolphin Viewer 2.5.3.14965 – good bye web profiles! I’ll mention the ones I find interesting… or troubling, here.

Profiles

The avatar profiles have been changed back to SLV1 and early SLV2 style profile. For now the non-web-profiles still work. We can expect them to continue working until the Lab decided to turn off the series 1 viewer and move on. Still it is only a matter of time until they disappear and it becomes web-profiles or nothing.

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KirstenLee Viewer Team

Kirsten Viewer
EyeFliez - Kirsten Viewer Hangout

The KirstenLee viewer is probably thought of as a viewer built by KirstenLee Cinquetti. A recent blog post reveals that the KirstenLee Viewer is now a growing team. If you’re interested in the people behind the viewer, check out the blog post, Meeting KirstenLee and Dawny.
The post has some interesting information about how the team sees and describes the viewer. No longer do they think of it as just for photographers’ and machinimists’ viewer. They see it as more of a high-end general purpose viewer… Ok, …it’s going to be some time before my thinking changes. But, I do use the viewer more and more for everyday use in SL.

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Phoenix Viewer 1.5.2.977 Beta

Phoenix Viewer
Phoenix Viewer 977

It seems a number of people have been having trouble running the Phoenix Viewer 908. Some users crash after a few minutes and some after a longer time. The Phoenix team has been looking for the problem. This Beta release is a step in confirming they have found the problem. They need more testers on many different type of hardware to test the viewer. So, it you are one of those that has had problems with Phoenix crashing, get the new 977 and give it try. If you crash, file a report on the Phoenix JIRA.

Download & Install

The release announcement advises us that this install will clear the cache. For most of us that just means you may notice your first login rez taking just a bit longer.

Windows users have a choice between an SSE and an SSE2 viewer. To know which your computer will use the Phoenix Wiki SSE page links you to a handy tool that examines your computer and checks what type of SSE support it has. SSE2 is better than SSE. Newly made computers support SSE4. Two year old computers probably support SSE3. So, don’t sell your computer short, just check it.

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Imprudence Viewer Experimental Release 2011.03.11

The Imprudence team has just released a new version of the Imprudence Viewer. This is still 1.4 version of the viewer. The imprudence web site lists the changes and fixes and this version of the viewer. See: Imprudence Experimental Release

Download & Install

The download is about 35mb. The announcement warns that they have had some problems with this installer program. It worked for me. If you have a problem with the install see the fix on the Imprudence site.

This version has the option to associate SLURL’s with the Imprudence viewer, a nice touch. It is common to  find the SLURL’s associated with the last viewer installed. For more information on associating SLURL’s with a viewer see: Emerald Viewer vs SLURL

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