The Newly Revized 360-Snapshot RC Viewer is Out

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Alexa Linden talked about the 360 Snapshot Project Viewer at the Content Creators’ UG Meeting (2/22). We last saw this viewer update in week #27-2017 (July). This is the black sheep or Cinderella viewer. It is the one that gets pushed to the back when a fire breaks out and some big bad bug has to be squished. But, YAY! We have a new version. See Official Alternate Viewers.

[vrview img=”http://blog.nalates.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/sl360_Fishergate_4096x2048_22215455.jpg” pimg=”http://blog.nalates.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/sl360_Fishergate_4096x2048_22215455.jpg” width=”512″ height=”512″ ]

This version handles the stitching… if you have built 360-images manually, you know what stitching is. It is taking a number of pictures in different directions and then piecing them together (stitching) to make a globe-shaped picture. Tedious.

But the new viewer is easy. Take a picture using 360-Snapshot and save it to disk, the picture should be ready to upload to Flickr and other sharing sites as a 360-image without further tweaking.

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New SL RC Render Viewer

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For a time, there has been a Project Viewer ‘Render’. That has promoted to an RC level viewer, version 5.1.2.512751. You’ll find it in the Alternate Second Life™ Viewers.

The viewer is based on the Alex Ivy 64-bit viewer technology. It also changes how Jelly Dolls are rendered. One change is a Jelly Doll’s attachments, they now will render on LoD zero. This prevents the higher LoD (think more polygons) levels from loading. This saves memory, which means fewer crashes.

Luanes World - Romantic Sim / Magical Love & Romance
Luanes World – Romantic Sim / Magical Love & Romance

Also, the LoD calculation has changed. No word on how.

Plus, there are about a dozen bug fixes.

Install & Performance

This is one of the largest downloads I’ve seen, 104MB. It downloads quickly.

The install installs over the existing viewer. Settings and stuff are retained.

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Second Life News 2018 w08

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A day behind.

Servers

There was no roll of a new package to the main channel. It continues to run #18.01.17.511913.

The three RC channels all updated to version #18.02.12.512536. The changes in this version are listed in the Release Notes as: Internal fixes and Simulator logging improvements.

#167.. Can you ..
#167.. Can you ..

Since I was traveling to see friends I missed the Server and Scripting User Group meeting. It was at the meeting where we learned there is a change to fix a problem in the server that has been crashing viewers.

Seems the server has been sending malformed update data that kills the viewer. The Lindens believe the problem was a memory corruption problem. A server would work correctly right after being restarted and after some time start sending bad information. Inara published a quote of Simon Linden describing the problem.

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Photoshop Luminosity Masks – The easy way

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We often spend considerable time selecting parts of images we want to change. Quite often we want to enhance the sky and clouds. Tress and other finely detailed objects in the image can make that a real time-consuming pain.

An example:

Complex Selections – Tedious and detailed

In early 2017 I was working on this image. I have since learned several ways to accomplish the selection task. All easier than what I was doing.

Following is a tutorial where Nemanja Sekulic is teaching the ‘standard’ way of creating luminosity masks. He explains what a luminosity mask is too. Nemanja assumes you know the PS basics. He is also showing you the classic method of making luminosity masks shown in most videos on YouTube. The second video her, PiXimperfect’s, shows an alternate method, which I prefer.

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Third-Party Viewer Meeting 2018 w07

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Not much new information in this meeting. But, lots of updates.

As you probably know the Alex Ivy 64-bit viewer is out as the main viewer. Another update quickly followed the initial release, the Voice RC version was added.

Some third-party viewers have install instructions that tell you to find the SL-Voice files in the Linden viewer and copy them into the install. There are reasons for that, but they are too geeky for now. That copy-paste won’t work with the new voice version. Because of security issues the voice modules have changed and are no longer compatible with the viewer that have not added the supporting changes.

Oz Linden tells us there is another SDK for voice coming with a Mac fix. Also, the spatial sound is now working on the Mac.

There is a Maintenance RC viewer that is out.

Also, a Media update RC viewer with updates to CEF bringing the viewer up to latest Chromium version.

Oz is expecting another update for the Rendering Project Viewer. Expect to see more rendering changes. Oz says he has gotten a programmer with render engine experience back from the Sansar project. Some render improvements were put off because Oz felt the team lacked the necessary experience. Now they have it.

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Content Creation UG 2018 w07

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First meeting in a couple of weeks.

Alexa Linden announced that she will add a description to the Aditi regions (Animesh1 to 4) saying they are for animesh only. They Lindens will be returning things that are not animesh and setting an auto-return time cycle for the region.

Medhue made a video, Thank you, Medhue. My Thursday was spent fighting with Microsoft while they ran me in circles.

I’ll provide short summaries of the various topics discussed in the meeting and provide a time mark for the beginning. If you want more info than I provide check the video.

02:40 – Vir Linden tells us the Lab has hired a programmer specializing in rendering. He has worked for the Lab on Second Life™ before, Graham Linden. He is full time. So, things in the rendering pipeline will be changing. There is already a Project Viewer for a branch of viewer changes to the render pipeline. See: Second Life Project Render Viewer version 5.1.1.512446. 

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