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Second Life: AvaStar Custom Normals

2015/04/19 by Nalates Urriah

AvaStar now has the ability to work with vertex normals. Why would you want to work with vertex normals? Watch the video.

Next Generation Platform-SL2: The Avatars

2015/12/302015/04/18 by Nalates Urriah

Everyone is curious about what the avatars in the Next Generation Platform (NGP), or SL2, will be like and what we can do with them. Now we have some clues. High Fidelity is working on their avatars and has just release a set of improvements. See: Creating and rigging an avatar with Blendshapes in Makehuman. The information is somewhat compatible with the current Second Life™ and I suspect a hint of what is coming for SL2 or the Next Generation Platform.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZHyypkXDd4

This is a great video for designers. You’ll find references to a number software tools I have not heard mentioned in relation to Second Life. Some of those look to be handy for SL.

Second Life’s New User Avatars

2014/08/14 by Nalates Urriah

Designing Worlds has a show up in which they interview people running Japanese new user help regions. I watched the show on SLArtists, the Treat.tv site seemed to be down this morning, at least I could not access it. The video is here: Designing Worlds DW 245 – Japan’s New Residents. The Designing Worlds page that should have the video is here: Designing Worlds visits the Japanese regions to learn how they support new users – now on the web!

Taciturnly – April 2014

About 3:30 minutes in, they talk about the problem the new user avatars are causing. They feel this is a MAJOR obstacle to improving player retention.

The new mesh avatars for new users was thought by some to be a definite problem for new users. The thinking was they would create more problems than they solve and harm player retention more than help. The people doing support in beginner areas are confirming the problems are manifesting. The question they are hearing often is, the promos say we can customize our avatars, so why can’t I change my avatar?

New ‘Starter Avatars’…

2014/05/18 by Nalates Urriah

New Avatar – Interesting Mesh Density

OK everyone is posting about these. If you haven’t already heard, you have to be hiding. They are far better than the Ruth and Roth avatars from earlier times.

They are interesting and noobies will look much better. However, noobies will still act like noobies . They won’t be all that hard to recognize.

However, Saturday when I was trying to play with the new avatars the SL system was acting up. The Choose an Avatar panel did not want to load. I kept getting an empty panel. I left the panel open and relogged, that got it working, or it may be just the relog did it. Or my region may have been having difficulties.

Once the panel was loaded then some avatars would not load. I would get what looked like an LOD4 version 0f the avatar only, very bizarre looking up close but ok from a distance. Switch to another one and later retry the one with loading problems, seemed to work.

When you wear one of these avatars a folder is created in the Clothing folder of your inventory. The ‘Lucy’ avatar is of course in the Lucy folder.

These avatars completely replace, well are worn over, your system avatar and a full body alpha mask hides the system avatar. They are complete mesh bodies and clothes. I am not sure why they made them No-Mod.

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Second Life Avatar 2.0

2013/12/12 by Nalates Urriah

Today I found some additional information about what Linden Lab is doing with the avatar.

In the JIRA there is an item: STORM-1800 – The vertex weights of the default character mesh could be better. Recently Alexi Reggiane added a comment (09/Dec/13 8:41 PM):

LL is currently working on making on the avatar in their fitted mesh project. Are these [meaning STORM-1800] improvements being submitted along with changes in the collision bones in this project? Now would seem to be the optimum time to implement these changes. They have said once the fitted mesh project is complete it will be years before they would be willing to make changes to the avatar again.

Darien’s Thinking on Avatar 2.0

2013/09/30 by Nalates Urriah

There is an interesting post on SLUinverse about Avatar 2.0 by Darien Caldwell. See: A Modest Proposal: Moving toward Avatar 2.0.

Darien’s idea of making a new avatar compatible with the current avatar’s UVMaps is a deal breaker for me. That just drags those problems along. Fixing the UVMaps and attempting to use older clothing made for the previous UVMap is going to be a problem causing even more distortion.

Darien does key in on the layering problem. We can layer system clothes. We cannot layer textures on objects, like mesh avatar bodies. Adding that capability would likely be a complex change to the system. Whether it is or not, it would allow the use of even more textures. With the texture load increase coming from Materials use, that could be a serious lag producer.