Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Juicy Bomb has a fun and interesting article on how to make animations run in slow motion. The trick when used with a good emoter (she recommends one) is GREAT for fashion and other photography.
See the short article here: Emotes & Slow Motion Animation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Snickers Snook 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.
Recently a number of us have been seeing a flock of organdy-yellow pyramids appear around us when trying on mesh. They look very much like the script warnings we see when a script fails. However, they are a little different in that they do not have the little piece of paper denoting a script within the icon.
These non-script inspired pyramids are caused by mesh failing to rez. It is unclear whether this is solely a viewer issue or a viewer and server issue. Whatever the case, the quick fix is a relog or teleport to another region.
One can also change the viewer settings to reduce the likelihood of being a roosting perch for a flock of pyramids. The setting can only be founds in the Debug Settings.
This is hard to test so I’m doing some speculation on whether or not the change is worth the effort.
MeshMaxConcurrentRequests – Number of threads to use for loading meshes. Default value 32. It is probably better to reduce this setting if you have a slower connection. Try increasing it if you hang out in places like TRUTH Hair. I know at least one person setting this at 256 and claiming it cured the problem. I’m not convinced.
I suggest leaving it at 32 unless you have a significant and persistent problem. If you do decide to change it, try 16 or 64.
I can’t find any other settings that limit mesh render. I seem to remember there were more. But, they have disappeared from recent viewers. So, there is little we can do to avoid the problem.
This is the second tutorial in a series. The previous tutorial is: Second Life Mesh Clothes Blender 2.6 Setup 2012 Tutorial. The next tutorial is still a work in progress.
The direction I’m going with tutorial is toward making clothes and weight painting. But, this tutorial will provide information for those building both objects and clothes. I am limiting this tutorial to just the modeling and the tools we need for making the model and the lower poly models we need for Second Life.
This is not your standard tutorial. There are loads of modeling tutorials. Making avatar clothes is a special type of 3D modeling. There are a number of tricks to be learned, especially for making Second Life® clothes. I’m going to focus on the things I had a hard time figuring out how to do.
I’ll lay this tutorial out with indexing so you can quickly find the various tricks. I need that because I tend forget a step here and there and need to look it up.
Page 1 – First Decision – Which shape to use.
Page 1 – Deformer – What it does.
Page 2 – Modeling – Start the modeling tools.
Page 2 – C-Select – A better select tool.
Page 2 – Redoing Topology Trick – Snap with a good video.
Page 2 – Snap – Details on using snap.
Page 3 – Scaling – How to use Alt-S scaling.
Page 3 – Shrinkwrap – How to use shrinkwrap.
Page 4 – Triangles vs Ngons – Getting into Ngons and Bsurface.
Page 4 – Bsurface – How to use Bsurface.
Page 4 – Grease Pencil – Needed for Bsurface.
Page 5 – Reducing Poly Count – Needed for LoD’s.
Page 5 – Dissolve – Tools for reducing poly count.
Page 5 – Using Images – How to use pictures and images to guide your modeling.
Page 5 – How to Model – Some of the Second Life requirements.
Page 6 – How to Model – The outline.
Page 6 – Summary
I hate slow paced, rambling video tutorials. I’ve found some that are pretty good. I’ll include those where appropriate. After them I’ll add explanations. Sometimes they leave out the most basic but necessary steps. Even after a couple years of using Blender I’m going: how did they do that?