Blender Bad Habits

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Hibit Spad posted a link in the SL Forum to an interesting Blender article, Blender Bad Habits. There are 10 bad habits that the author, Light, encourages people to unlearn. I have a few of those habits.

I think it is well worth the look.

I think the author is mostly on about those making video tutorials for Blender. I think the bad habits were taken from tutorials. I have to say there are WAY more horrible tutorials on YouTube than there are good ones. I came to the conclusion that on YouTube you REALLY need to know the author of a video tutorial. I can go nuts as someone rambles through a tutorial.

A not so bad a habit is the attribution given by Blender.org to Domino and Gaia. See: Blender 2.62: Collada I know who Domino and Gaia are. I haven’t heard of Juha, but congrats and thanks to all three.

A Second Life compatibility option was added for exporting armatures, along with a number of other fixes related to transformations and armatures.

State of the development

There has been much discussion about the state of the Collada integration, it’s not currently working very reliable yet, and this needs to be solved somehow. A new team now started working to improve Collada support to get it more useful for integration with external tools and game engines, improving the existing OpenCollada based I/O module. Members of the team are:

  • Domino Marama (development)
  • Juha Mäki-Kanto (development)
  • Gaia Clary (Organization, Documentation and all the rest)

Other developers interested in joining development are welcome. There’s a wiki page where we collect plans, application support info, test files, and a list of issues to solve.

Valentine Fail Update

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Yesterday the Market Place failed creating an annoying disruption. Today we got a follow up post on what happened.

The Commerce Team:

Hello,

Yesterday, we posted a summary of the downtime we experienced on Valentine’s Day. We indicated in that post that there were still some orders that needed to be pushed through to completion. We want to assure merchants who have orders in the “Being Delivered” state that we are currently pushing those orders to completion and reconciling the payout to the merchants. We anticipate that orders in this state should be processed by end of day Thursday. Once these are complete, we will post another update here, along with details on how to address any orders that are still stuck.

Best regards,

The Commerce Team

Reference

#SL Server/Scripting News Week 7

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The Lab has had some challenges with recent update packages for the servers. However, the main grid did get an update this week. We also got two new packages on the  release channels.

Main Channel

The information on the recent roll to the main grid is summarized here: Deploys for the week of 2012-02-13. The is the package with the improved list handling. The upgrade has better code for starting and stopping regions. Better memory usage code has been added. The Course Location for mini-maps has been fixed. There is a fix for  llGetParcelMaxPrims(llGetPos(), TRUE) so it now should be reporting the correct numbers. There is a fix for SVC-7443 Telehubs.

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#SL Pathfinding API Documentation

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Path by richardefreeman Flickr

Rand Linden has been adding information about the Pathfinding API to the SL Wiki. Also, a beta testing page is up in the wiki too. The testing page is incomplete. But, it is looking like we will soon see the new feature arriving in the Preview Grid ADITI.

What It Does

Non-Player Characters (NPC) or Non-Played Character, depending on who one talks to, is what we often call bots. A computer runs them. The SL Wiki has a page on the software that runs bots. See: Second Life Bot Software Comparison.

In addition to the more familiar bots we can have other NPC’s. The Linden Scripting Language (LSL) has a function named llCreateCharacter() that can turn any collection of prims, sculpties, and/or mesh into a NPC. The function is described as: Converts the current linkset to an AI [artificial intelligence] character. By default, the character’s shape will be an upright capsule approximately the size of the linkset, adjustable via the options list. The linkset must use mesh accounting.

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Niran’s Viewer Update 1.23.5

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The speed of updates to various viewers is overwhelming. If I reviewed every release, I would never have time to do much else. Fortunately several of the viewers do a good job of blogging what’s changed in their viewer. The problem with those updates is they tend to only tell one the good stuff, which makes sense if you think about it. If they find a problem, they tell the development team so it can be fixed. So, the problems they know about have been fixed.

Give a viewer to a regular user and we’ll do something odd with it that the developers haven’t tried. That is why users always find bugs. As good as the developers and testers are, they can’t think of or do everything that can be done by a user.

So, reviewers always have things they can find. The problem is finding it all.

Version 1.23.5 of Nirans is out and has a load of fixes and additions. As usual the interface has changes. Some you’ll like and some not so much. But we learn from experimenting.

Downloads

Niran’s now has both 32 and 64 bit versions of the viewer for Windows. The 1.23.5 was released in the 64 bit version about 10 AM today. Nirans Viewer download page.

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#SL Animation Changes

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Avastar in Blender - Image by Machinimatrix

In January of this year Laurent Bechir filed a user story in the SL JIRA, STORM-1803. The JIRA item points to Machinimatrix’s post on Second Life’s animation format. The animation format controls what we can upload into SL. In a way this user story is a feature request.

Oddly it is the Biovision Hierarchy (BVH) file format used for uploading that restricts much of what we can do with animations in Second Life. Internally SL uses an .anim type file format that allows more animation controls than BVH.

Some of the things an ANIM file allows are:

  • Different animation priorities per-joint
  • Keyframed animation control of eyes!
  • Variable length joint offsets per frame (allowing cartoon-like “stretchy” bones)
  • Keyframed rotation and repositioning of attachments (which meshes can weight to; to use as new child bones  )
  • Client Side scaling of attachments and default mesh
  • ANIM files are text files

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