Exodus Viewer Beta 6 (12-01-02) Released Review

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A new release of Exodus is out. This one has lots of new features. Many are for photography and machinima. The viewer may be losing it emphasis on being a gamer’s viewer and being a photographer’s viewer. But, one may as well expose controls to the video pipeline while working to optimize it. So, it may be too soon to say.

Looking Good in Exodus Viewer Beta 6 (12-01-02)

The Exodus Devs have noticed the coverage in the blogs. So, they added some features just for the photographers and machinima peeps. Nice. I hope they keep their gamer focus and avoid trying for a viewer that is all things to all people.

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Nirans Viewer Releases Deformer Version

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Niran has added Qarl’s Mesh Deformer code to the Niran viewer 1.03. I tried it out and played with mesh. There are some things I learned.

Fit

The size of the mesh does matter. The Deformer does not move all mesh to the outside of the avatar. In some cases I found small mesh clothes were inside the avatar. Also, large clothes left a space between the avatar and the mesh.

[youtube gRT0fWacyEY]

An explanation of the video is below in the Video section.

So, I guess the base avatar that one designs mesh from is going to be important. I’ll have to do some experiments to see how using a personal shape avatar works compared to using the base avatar.

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Bug

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Sunday I realized I have a bug in my blog layout. The opening page is not rendering correctly.

Now I’ve spent the day trying to get Dreamweaver CS5.5 to work with WordPress. It is supposed to handle dynamically linked files. It sort of does. But, once I decided it wasn’t just me doing it wrong, I found it is a known problem with DW CS5.5. So, its not just Linden Lab’s programmers that mess up.

I had to revert back to the more manual process of editing the site with CS3.

The mistake I made in the layout is annoyingly difficult to correct. Too many things have to change. However, the home and single article pages have been rebuilt and should work. There are a few more pages to do. I’ll get to those in the next day or two.

#SL Mesh Deformer Goes Alpha

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On the 31st Qarl Fizz released a video update on the mesh deformer. I have the YouTube link below. This is good news and we get more information on how the Deformer will work. Gianna Borgnine of MetaReality was tweeting about the coming announcement in their podcast. I’ve been involved in the holidays and not paying too much attention to events in SL. So, this is a nice New Year’s surprise for me.

[youtube yoOywmSKG2k]

The video is 16:03 minutes long.

00:00 – Qarl tells us that in this alpha release the heavy ‘heavy lifting’ part is done. The math and integration to the viewer’s render pipeline is done. This does not mean the Deformer Project is complete. It means the foundation has been build and is ready for testing. Qarl is ready for feedback on the Deformer.

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Dolphin Viewer 3.2.2 (22185) Released

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This release has a couple of notable changes. The ability to set a default material for prims you rez has been added. The feature is from the Firestorm Viewer code. And the new V3 avatar button now works in Dolphin.

The Dolphin Viewer Forum is here.

The release announcement page and link to the download is in the Dolphin Viewer Blog.

Dolphin 3 Install

Download and Install

The download is typical. The stalled copy panels still appear. But, they now close when you start the viewer. Their failure to close was a problem in my Vista 32. So, the install is nicer.

Experience

The viewer performs in the 10 to 15 FPS range, for me. If you have not seen the thread in the SL forum about viewer performance check out: How Fast is Your Viewer? – Second Life. If you haven’t already, add your information.

As best I can tell there are not earthshaking changes or additions to this version. The viewer is advancing at a steady pace.

Blender 2.61 Released

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A new version of Blender was released a couple of weeks ago. It has 180 fixes that will be helpful. There are some new features but those are not for anything we do in Second Life. Also, Gaia Clary has a Collada fix rigged mesh over on Machinimatrix.org.

New Blender 2.61

Simple Blender Install

To have multiple versions of Blender installed download and use the Blender Zip Archive. The zip file contains a working copy of Blender in a folder. The folder can be placed anywhere in your file system and work. One unzips the file to a folder, opens the folder, navigates to the blender.exe file, right click and drag it to the desktop or Launch Bar, release, and select Create Shortcut. That’s it. You have an independent install of Blender.

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