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.
Tag Archives: Tips
Second Life: Clothing Parameters?
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 changes that would be needed. But, it would be kind of nice.
There is an easy work-around, which is why I don’t see this feature being implemented. I think the problem solution I have is best illustrated with an example:
My Shoe Inventory Arrangement
In inventory I have my shoes and within this pair of N-core shoes folder I have Scripted and Wear folders. In the Wear folder I have my skins. YS&YS is my newer skin. I’ve adjusted the foot to match my skin in each of the shoe color folders to that skin and set the shoe color. I have one Stocking folder in Mocha Skin. I had to adjust the skin color to match the stocking I liked, which was not in the shoe’s included stockings. Kind of a pain.
By doing this the outfit that wears a shoe/foot combination always has the same skin/shoe color. When I need new colors or I change skins, I make a new foot-shoe combination from the shoes/feet in the Scripted folder. Then I don’t mess up my outfits.
I haven’t started buying mesh shoes for the Slink feet I have. But, I will. It looks to be much simpler and require fewer foot-show combinations because I can reuse the feet. And stockings… with mesh feet it looks to be so much easier to wear stockings, especially with patterns.
Second Life News 2014-44
Servers
The Deploys of Week post is up. The big news is CDN.
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
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?
Normal Map
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. Continue reading
Second Life’s Bug Island
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. Continue reading