Deformer

#SL Mesh Deformer Project Update Wk16

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Inara Pey has an article out titled: Parametric Deformer: Qarl updates (2). Qarl Fizz, the former Linden writing the Mesh Deformer code, participates in the Metareality Podcasts. In the Apirl 20 broadcast. Smoke and Mirrors, Qarl talks about progress on the Mesh Deformer, known to some as AKA Parametric Deformer.

SL Mesh Feet
Mesh Feet with Deformer 0.1

The audio recording is over an hour long – 1:23:00.

The audio starts out talking about the coming SL9B celebration. Geez, Drax and I see the reaction to the SL9B announcement similarly. This and the coming Myrylyn Shinn interview I’ll be publishing have me reconsidering my mental state. But… Yay, Tateru Nino. Whatever, if you are considering doing something for SL9B, listening to the section is worthwhile. It runs from about 01:00 to 26:00 minute marks.

Botgirl’s SL9B parody song is at 25:20.

27:20 Discussion on Max Grafs standard sizing for mesh clothes starts.

The part where Qarl talks about the Deformer is at 28:00 and runs to 28:54. It’s just a few words. Basically Qarl has been busy and hasn’t worked on it for a time. He put some time in on it 4/16 and is moving on it. He reiterates that Linden Lab is committed to getting it working. He would be seriously surprised if the Deformer was rejected. In his opinion that just is not going to happen. To get the sense of things you have to hear this section it’s less than a minute.

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#SL Avatar Changes ‘in progress’

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If you are working with mesh you probably understand some of the problems the Second Life® avatar has. If you make clothes for Second Life Avatars you are also likely aware of the short comings of the Second Life Avatar. For all the time Second Life has existed users have wanted better avatars. When SL Avatar 2.0 is released that will change… we’ll want better avatars. Oh,  wait! That’s not a change.

Another gotcha at the max breast size setting

We always want something better and as technology improves we get it. It takes better computers to run SL than it did when SL was created. In 9 years (going by SL birthdays) technology performance has doubled about 6 times, or 2^6th = 64 times… don’t see it in your frame rates? Neither do I.

For some time when I see a Linden asked about when we might see an Avatar 2.0, I hear them give evasive answers. Not maliciously, they either don’t know or are NDA’d. The best non-committal answer we get is that it is not a near term project. I think the Lindens would love to give us a new avatar. The problem is the literal RL millions of dollars of content such a change would break.

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Nirans Viewer 1.32 Review

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NiranV releases lots of iterations of this viewer. There are no massive changes from my perspective as a  user. The changes tend to be in the nature of the user interface and new ways for established controls to work. For instance one of the previous versions change the default camera position. Expect lots of experimentation and innovation with this viewer.

[youtube aBNUpFUITGs]

The video is made by NiranV using the Nirans Viewer.

Start with a Problem

NiranV is using a new compiler (or library – not sure) to build this version of the viewer. I think the hope is the viewer will be faster. Whatever, the package fails to include a component: vcomp100.dll. You can get the component from: Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x86) 32-bit or Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x64) 64-bit version.

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#SL Content/Mesh UG News Week 9

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No meeting last week because of Presidents Day in the USA. This week’s meeting was short but had a good turnout.

Land Impact Costs

Vincent Nacon is trying to produce a info status for 3D Max users so they can see a mesh model’s weight while it is in 3D Max. There currently seems to be a disparity between the equation on the wiki and the one used by the viewer’s uploader. The Lindens are looking into it.

If anyone else has models that do not match with what you think they should be, get a copy to Charlar or Nyx. That of course assumes you know what you are doing and understand what the uploader is supposed to be doing well enough to recognize a problem…

Convex Hull Link Sets

I didn’t know what they were talking about… It is about changing a prim link set to use a convex hull for the set’s physics shape. In many cases the change will reduce Land Impact costs. When attempting to do this with a prim torus or sculpties it can drive the land impact up.

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Dolphin Viewer Update 3.2.8.23163

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There is a new version of the Dolphin 3 Viewer out. Dolphin Viewer Download.

This version of the viewer removes Qarl’s Mesh Deformer.  You probably know that Mesh Deformer 0.2 is out and is included in some viewers. Nirans ran into some problems getting it to work. It seem Lance did too. With some question about the new viewer policies it seems Lance decided to leave it out of this version. He plans to put it back in when the Deformer is further refined.

There is a WebKit upgrade in the Linux version… I doubt Linux users follow this blog, so I seldom have much about Linux here. But, this is one of the noted changes in the release annuncement.

One nice feature added to the Dolphin Viewer is the ability to use all of the keys on your keyboard for gestures. If you have made gestures, you know that in the SL Viewer and several others you are restricted in which keys you can assign to a gesture.

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Cool VL Viewer 1.26.2 (17) Released

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There are not many changes in the last two versions. But, the experimental version 1.26.3 has an important change for me, which is the addition of Qarl’s Mesh Defomer 0.2. Henri has done something a bit different in his implementation. In his words from the forum:

Second version of Qarl’s mesh deformer implemented (with a new “Force Mesh Deformer” advanced settings in Advanced -> rendering, to force the same behavior as in the first version, i.e. to apply deformers even to meshes which were not designed for them): the new default/normal behavior of the code is to apply deformers only to meshes which were flagged as deformer-compatible at upload time (with a new “Deform to avatar shape” option added to the “Upload Options” tab of the “Upload Model” preview floater).

This should give us the ability to see how the 0.1 and 0.2 versions of the Deformer differ.

Download

I found the download horribly slow. It basically ran at 150kbps taking 30 minutes to download. My connection will handle 31mbps according to SpeedTest.net. Other downloads were running well, so who knows…

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