The mesh viewer just came up on the download page.

Second Life Mesh Project Viewer Download

9:22 AM – Got the viewer and made it into ADITI. Not many people there. Only 3 or 4 in each mesh area. But, others and I cannot tp into the regions. Long wait and then tp fails.

9:30 AM – Cannot tp into Mesh City locations or Mesh Sandboxes (1 to 35). Some of the sandboxes are empty, no people. Others have some people in them.

10:58 AM – …then I find out my Blender is broken. Remove all Blender installs, all Python installs. Install Python 2.7 and Blender Beta 2.54 (nice shinny interface) and that is working again.

Since there seems to be a tp problem, I typed in the destination at login, Mesh Sandbox 33. You can use any sandbox destination from 1 to 33. I made it to a sandbox. \o/

11:00 AM – Jack Linden posts Open Beta blog article: Mesh Import Open Beta Starts Today. There are a number of links to various mesh related wiki articles. (Second Life Wiki Main Mesh Page) There are links to videos. Lots of good stuff.

Code availability for TPV Developers is planed for the end of the week. They will link to it from the Project Snowstorm wiki pages. This means TPV’s can support it once meshes come to the main grid. It also lets OpenSim get started on compatible mesh support. OpenSim with a module add-on has had meshes for over a year.

11:28 AM – \o/ It works pretty well. It is certainly usable. There are some gotchas and small problems in the user interface. But, those will get fixed.

If you plan to try applying standard texturing, make sure to do an inventory load. If all your textures are not loaded, the texture selection list keeps bouncing to the top as more items are loaded into inventory. Very frustrating.

10:45 PM – 🙁 Blender 2.54 is having problems exporting meshes skinned to AV rigging. It seems Blender 2.49b handles it correctly. So, if you are making things that have to skin to the AV, use the earlier version of Blender.

Tutorial

Machinimatrix is making video tutorials using Blender 2.49 to make the meshes and shows importing them to SL. The first two of a series are up. See: The Meshes Trail (Part I and II)