Tag Archives: Mesh Tutorial

Avatar Render Cost 2015-07

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Penny Patton writes about reducing her avatar’s render cost. (See: Draw Weight.) Kay Jiersen picked up on the article and wrote an article too. (See: Render weight best practices for Second Life.) Some time ago I wrote: Second Life Performance: Render Muting, which is about the same subject.

Penny Paton's Example of Dense High ARC Mesh

Penny Patton’s Example of Dense High ARC Mesh

Penny is pointing out there is a bit we can do to change our render cost with only a minimal change in appearance. Kay suspects few people are even aware of the Avatar Render Cost (ARC) feature in the viewer and have no clue they need to do anything. I agree with Kay. But, she goes on to recommend changes to Second Life, which is where I disagree.

Kay made field trips to various places in Second Life where she recorded the ARC values of avatars in the regions. Kay points out that only 81 of 190 (42.6%) avatars would render using a setting of 80,000 for Render Muting. That means 109 or 57.3% of the avatars would not render .

The horrible frame rates (FPS) I am getting have me looking at a new computer and a better video card. But, I actually have little hope that will help FPS in regions populated with 30+ avatars.

On an empirical basis Kay found that jewelry is a major culprit in high ARC.  Continue reading →

Blender-AvaStar Animation IK/FK Tip

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I am getting deeper into making animations I’ll use in Second Life™. I am a novice animator/modeler, so I probably don’t know the best way to accomplish any given task nor do I understand Blender cooncepts all that well. But, I wasn’t seeing any tutorials and I haven’t been in any classes that helped me with using both IK (Inverse Kinematics) and FK (Forward Kinematics) in a single animation. (See What is IK/FK for more information on IK/FK.)

Animating w/AvaStar

Animating w/AvaStar

Since I’ve had to figure out how to do this, I thought I’d make a short tutorial.

I used Blender 2.71 and AvaStar 1.1 RC3 while experimenting and writing this.  Continue reading →

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Second Life News 2014-23 – Group Ban

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We have some actual news today!

Group Ban

This new feature is now running in the main grid in RC channel: Le Tigre. Many people have been looking forward to this feature coming out. If all goes well we could see it move to the entire grid next week.

Any group owner or manager with proper permissions can use the feature.  You need to visit a region in the Le Tigre channel to use the feature. Also you need to be using the Group Ban Project Viewer. Unfortunately the viewer is not showing on the RC/Project Viewers page. But, you can get the viewer here: Download: Windows, Mac, Linux.

You can find details on using the project feature here: Group Ban FAQ.

Be warned, the bans made in Le Tigre may not stick, meaning a banned person may be able to re-join from regions outside the Le Tigre channel. So, while the ban is server side older regions don’t know to check for a ban before allowing a join. But, the person will be in the ban list.

Once the project goes grid wide you may have to re-ban or eject the banned people one last time.

The server side code is at RC level, meaning it is working as planned and is expected to be the finished product. The viewer is just reaching ‘project viewer’ status, which we might consider the old beta version status.

Expect some changes to the viewer before it rolls out as the main viewer. When the server side code goes grid wide one can then use the Group Ban Viewer and ban people. Since the ban is enforced server-side and all the servers will then be running it, it won’t matter which viewer a banned person uses, they won’t be able to get in the group.

This should make life in group chat much better.

Servers

There was no roll to the main channel this morning. There was maintenance to the servers and logins were down for a time this morning.  Continue reading →

Second Life Normal Maps & UV

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There is an interesting discussion in the SL Forum about a problem some people have had making Normal Maps for Second Life™. Jake Koronikov opened the thread. Jake had a problem with the normal maps creating a visible seam in the model.

FlickrNormal

Normal Maps from Flickr Search

For instance, the seam between the front and back sides of the avatar leg. Of you were making a manikin and using a normal map on it that seem would become visible as a step on the surface rather than the smooth surface it is supposed to be.  You can see his images of the problem in the thread: Tangent spaced Normal Map seam visible in UV border area. (2017 – The images are gone.) Continue reading →

Maya Survival Kit for Second Life

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AvaStar users have Gaia Clary’s survival kit for Fitted Mesh. Now       Astrid Kaufmat has put a survival kit for Maya users up in the SL Forum. See: Maya Survival Kit (for fitted mesh).

Maya Logo

Maya Logo

Neither Gaia not Astrid are claiming these kits are the end-all-be-all solution for working with Fitted Mesh. But, they will help you survive the current state of affairs.

Astrid recommends getting the plugin ngskintools, which you can download from here. She links to guides and tutorials for using the plugin in her post, link at top.

Astrid’s basic work flow is to weight to the mBones as Maya users have prior to Fitted Mesh. Then copy the weights to the collision bones we have now. She uses a script named abweightlift, which can be downloaded from the creativecrash site. Her post explains how to use it.  Continue reading →