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.

#SL Pyramid Warning Symbols

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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.