CCIIUG Informally Closed

Content Creation Improvement Informal User Group (CCIIUG) is informally disbanded… or temporarily just not meeting. Geenz Spad was facilitating the meetings. When asked directly on Wednesday at the Open Source UG Geenz said, “Informally, for the time being. Sadly, not much was actually getting done there and sadly I don’t have as much time as I used to for the group.”

I’ve written about the group several times. Click CCIIUG in tags (to the right) to get a list of the articles.

This is a group that had excellent potential. Geenz is the primary doer in the Materials project. I am not clear on whether Geenz is bound by an NDA or his personal desire to get things finessed before going public. I think it is a combination. Without his being able or willing to talk about progress on the Materials System there is very little fresh meat for this group. Thus interest in it has died.  Continue reading

#SL CCIIUG Week 37

These meetings are getting smaller. There were about 8 to 10 people and this one had 2 griefer idiots at this one. Blocking took care of clowns that eventually wondered off.  I’m pretty sure User Interface design is not a popular subject in SL.

Blender 2.63 Normal Map Controls

Oz Linden was at the meeting asking about control layouts for the Materials System. The problem is how to handle those controls. Oz explained and asked:

For the Normal and Specular maps, our goal has been to allow the texture and each of the two maps to have their own set of positioning controls; offset, rotation, repeat, mapping mode… if you want to line them up, you can, if you don’t, you don’t have to.

Suppose that those controls were tabbed such that you could look at one of the three images with its controls, then flip tabs to see the next one, etc…

The alternative may be to make a huge build floater, but for smaller screens that can get bad fast.

Inara Pey asked, You’re talking sub-tabs within the texture tab, Oz?

Oz answered, something like that, Inara, or possibly a separate floater that has its own tabs… not sure. The essential question is whether or not those parameters need to be seen together, I think.

[…] I’m trying to get a sense of what the relationships are between the controls needed for Materials right now.

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Content Creation Improvement Week 33

The Content Creation Improvement User Group (CCIUG) has been discussing redesign of the Build Panel. Geenz Spad has been bugging me to get people interested in redesign of the panel. I’ve been like, “OMG! This is boring…” Now with the announcement of a materials system project, I understand his motivation. See: Second Life Materials System Announced.

Idea for New Build Panel – Enlarge

To implement the materials system will require design changes to the Build Panel. Whether anyone likes the idea or not the panel is going to change. So, you can either participate in the design process or not. HOWEVER… for all the clueless people that can’t handle change or cope with frustration and fill the forums with rants without participating in the process, remember. We will be pointing to this point in the design process to mock you. :p

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#SL Content Improvement Week 31

Morph Targets and the Mesh Deformer seem to be main topics of interest for this meeting. Neither were on the agenda. We have gone a couple of weeks with no news on the Deformer. Maybe we will hear something from Karl via Metareality’s podcast Thursday.

While Morph Targets and Redpoly’s Collision Bone process are of interest, I don’t see where there is any news about either this week. People have shown up at the Nyx’s Content Creation group and Geenz’s Content Improvement groups asking, but there is no new information. People tend to take that as no progress. It may not mean that, but those doing work on the projects are not being communicative.

Missing Transcripts

If you have been using the wiki, you may have noticed that a problem caused the Lab to restore the wiki from a backup. Several hours of editing were lost. In that loss are some meeting transcripts. The Content Improvement Group has replaced their lost transcripts. So, if you were wondering…

MAINTENANCE – On 2012-7-25 at 17:45 PST we rolled the wiki back 26 hours to the state as of 2012-7-24 15:30 PST. We apologize for any inconvenience.

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Content Creation Improvement User Group Week 29

For short I will refer to the group as CCIIUG or, for me, CIG. This week the meeting touched on Cloth Simulation and discussed more about Morph Targets.

Content Improvement Group

For the first 3 meetings the agenda has been overflowing. The topics also require considerable discussion. So, we have yet to make it completely through an agenda in a single meeting. Attendance has been 20 to 30 people.

Part of the idea is to discuss JIRA items that content creators need fixed. Supposedly the first 15 minutes will be devoted to JIRA items. Asking if anyone has a JIRA to bring up tends to result in a ‘deer in the headlights’ reaction. Eventually we may learn to deal with it.

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Content Improvement Week 28

The second meeting of the new Content Improvement Group (CIG) was this week. The group has not yet been added to the SL User Groups list. You’ll find it in the SL Wiki as: Content Improvement.

Content Improvement Group

Geenz Spad is known in viewer development circles. Geenz facilitates the CIG meeting. With a viewer development background it is probably not surprising that the first topic of discussion was outstanding JIRA items. It isn’t THAT boring…

Using the Linden Lab™ viewers, both main release and development, I kept crashing. I finally switched to the Exodus Development version and managed to stay connected (Exodus is fast). What a pain having to relog 3 times.

The highlights from the meeting follow. There is more on the Deformer debates.

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Content Creation Improvement UG

The new group had its first meeting. I’m bummed to have missed it, but RL fun was calling. They posted their meeting minutes so I can have an idea of what was happening. Some of the interesting things from the meeting follow.

Geenz Spad is chairing the meeting as the facilitator. He states the purpose of the meeting as: the idea is for people to discuss their ideas in a collaborative environment, and if everyone can agree on an idea, that idea will hopefully be made into a proposal at some point for Linden Lab, and prototypes demonstrating that functionality will also eventually be submitted as well.

So, this meeting is an opportunity for fashion and content designers to contribute ideas to enable better content creation and get problems in the design and creation work flow smoothed out.

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New Content Creation Group

Geenz Spad from the Exodus Dev Team is chairing a new user group. Oz Linden will be the liaison between the group and Linden Lab. He may be at some of the meetings. But, since 3PM SLT is 5PM EDT it is late for him and after hours.

You can find the groups home page in the SL Wiki: Content Creation Improvement Informal User Group.

Meetings will be in-world in the Hippotropolis Auditorium, Tuesdays from 3 to 4 PM SLT/PT.

The stated point of the meeting is to find ways to improve rigged mesh and other content. A secondary emphasis is how to improve the viewer to help with content creation.

The first meeting will be a good one to attend.

PS: Squirrely Wrath is accepting donations of nuts… only the food kind. No wackadooles.