Tips – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Blender: How to mouse wheel values…

2016/10/21 by Nalates Urriah

I came across this tip revealing a feature in Blender I suspect most of us don’t know. Now if I can remember this it will be handy.

Second Life: Clothing Parameters?

2015/03/13 by Nalates Urriah

An idea for having clothes have parameters that are persistent was put forward. The person suggesting the idea was having problems with setting up feet and shoes for an outfit then changing the feet and shoes for another outfit and messing up the first. I doubt that feature request is going anywhere because of the system … Read more

Second Life News 2014-44

2014/10/28 by Nalates Urriah

Servers

The Deploys of Week post is up. The big news is CDN.

Oops! Don't Panic 2014 — Oops! Don’t Panic 2014

CDN

The Content Delivery Network upgrade will roll to the main channel, the entire grid, this week. That will be happening Tuesday morning.

RC Channels

All three RC channels will get the same maintenance package. The detailed release notes are not out yet. All the Deploys post says is there are ‘some improvements’. We’ll probably see more information coming out tomorrow (Tuesday).

Snack Channel

The Snack channel is a small pre-test RC channel. It is used when the Lindens want to start out with a very small sample for testing. It was used for the initial testing of CDN. It is no longer needed and the regions in the Snack channel will be rolled back into the channels they were previously in and the Snack channel will disappear until it is next needed.

Second Life Normal Maps

2014/04/15 by Nalates Urriah

Drongle asked in the Content UG meeting about what I’ll call the breakeven point when using normal maps. When does a normal map cost more or less than the number of triangles it replaces?

This question comes from considering the cost added by downloading and rendering another texture, the normal map. As GPU’s render triangles faster every day, there is a moving point at which it may be cheaper to add some number of triangles and skip the normal map. But, where is that point?

The answer is: it is different on each computer. The only way to know is to test. But, that only tells you for the specific hardware you are using.

It would be good to have a rules of thumb that works for the majority of people. Nyx Linden says, “It depends on how overloaded the GPU is in terms of computing and at which stage of the pipeline, the overall memory usage, which depends on the scene and the available hardware, etc. turning on normal maps for a surface is going to increase the load on the GPU computationally, regardless of what texture detail the normal map is. Adding a more detailed normal map will increase memory needs and the stress of managing all the extra texture data. That being said, if you can get away with significantly simpler geometry for a little bit of texture data, that would speed things up greatly for any users that are geometry bound.

Read more

Second Life’s Bug Island

2014/03/03 by Nalates Urriah

Have you ever wondered if your viewer and computer were rendering Second Life™ correctly? Do you see what other users see? And if you compiled a viewer, is it rendering things correctly? The answers to those questions can be found at Bug Island.

Of course showing up there and looking to see what you viewer shows you is only half the answer. You also need to know what things are supposed to look like. The SL Wiki shows you the pictures and behaviors, in movies, of what you should see. SL Wiki page: Bug Island Test.