9-11 Memorial Removed as Offensive

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Hamlet ran the article: 9/11 Memorial Deemed “Offensive”, Rejected from SL9B.

The world is getting far too Politically Correct. People will be offended by many things. In a free world we are free to offend people. It may not be the smart thing to do, but we are free to do it.

There is no guaranteed right to live one’s life without ever being offended.

The selection of art one wants to allow in their gallery or in this case SL9B is up to those organizing it. We can’t take their freedom away either.

Reacting to small numbers of complaints disrespects the majority.

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Blender Testing Needed

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Gaia Clary has been and is working with the Blender Development team. In Blender 2.64, the likely next release, we will see a revised Collada Export. Gaia is looking for people to help test the revisions while the code is in beta.

Coming Blender 2.64 Release w/New Collada Export

Blender Installs

Using Archive installs will allow you to have multiple independent installs of Blender. See Blender Archive Install for more information on doing a Blender Archive Install.

Downloading Beta Versions

You will find the various beta versions of Blender on a site named GraphicAll.org. Look for a release build designated r47979 or newer.

Discussion

Gaia posted the information in the SL Forum in: Blender Collada news. If you want to provide feedback or ask questions this thread would be a good place. If you find a bug, report it in the Blender.org patch tracker.

Gaia posted a longer and more informative post on Mahinimatrix.org. It gives some of the background on Blender Collada and plans for the future.

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Firestorm Announcement Today

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We have some news from the Firestorm Viewer Development Team today. Seems they have been suffering from burnout for a time. So, they have taken some time off and are now back.

It seems they have some new developers. Holy Gavenkrantz has apparently been a code contributor to Phoenix and Firestorm for some time. Now he is officially on the development team.

Navmesh (white) w/Static Objects (red) Showing

Armin Weatherwax was a lead developer for KoKua viewer. For whatever reason he has moved over to the Firestorm team and will be handling development of Firestorm for other grids, like OSGrid.

You may remember there is a thing floating round not so officially called the Havok Licensing thing. That is about Pathfinding, which if you don’t know is about creating Artificial Intelligence Characters or NPC’s (Non-Character Player) and your hopelessly uninformed, which I don’t understand if your are reading this.

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More #SL Mesh Clothes Needed

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There is a small collection of mesh clothes in Hippo Hollow for testing the Mesh Deformer, aka Parametric Deformer. You can get a copy of the Mesh Deformer Project Viewer. With that you can see how the clothes from the test set work.

Mesh Deformer Control in LL Project Viewer

Oz Linden says for now the lack of test clothes is not holding things up. But, very soon it will.

The current version of the deformer (0.3 by my count) has some problems that cause flicker and flashing. Once those are fixed, the lack of clothes WILL BE DELAYING the Deformer project. We need to get more sample mesh clothes into the test set. See this post for Oz’s initial request: Examples Request.  It includes instructions for submitting examples.

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Good Article On Mesh

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I came across this in my reading: Mesh clothing and avatars in Second Life. This is a good article covering petites and other aspects of mesh. I think it is worth the read for anyone still confused about mesh, petites, and other aspects of mesh.

Hamet has just run an article on Mesh Avatar Faces: Leverocci’s Upcoming Mesh Heads in Second Life. Iris Ophelia wrote the article. While it would probably seem redundant to many at this point, she does not point out the limitation that mesh faces cannot be animated.

 in her article gets into the limits of mesh clothes, avatars, and such. Plus she adds a section on recovering from problems encountered when wearing mesh avatars. Eventually she gets to the Mesh Deformer too.

Snickers’ article is written for the fashionesta crowd and is easy to understand.