I came across a tidbit of news this morning. If you are setting your SL Viewer to any language other than English, the Collada import for mesh may not work.

You’ll see the problem in the import preview window. You’ll see polygons with normals reversed and vertices here and there out of place. If you try more than one import, you’ll see the reversed normal polygons and the out of place vertices change and which are messed up are unpredictable.

Problem w/Mesh Import by Lemon AcidJuice @ Flickr

For now the problem is corrected by switching the viewer to use English.

If you are seeing the problem and can reproduce it on demand file a JIRA bug report with all the steps.

The discussion of the problem is in the SL Forum: Unpredictable mesh import.

I recently decided to buy Avastar-1 (RC2-782) and see if it could solve some problems I’ve run into with posing the avatar for weight painting. I’ve also had some problems getting custom mesh to fit my avatar. Tight skirts require everything be precise. Things weren’t as precise as I hoped. I was getting frustrated.

Comparing In-world with Avastar and OBJ Export

Avastar is an add-on for Blender sold by Machinimatrix.org for US$22. I resisted purchasing it because I want to provide tutorials that provide a free path to accomplishing the same things. I’m in the process of updating my tutorial: Second Life Mesh Clothes Blender 2.6 Setup 2012 Tutorial. It’s almost a year old and a few things have changed. 

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If you didn’t read through my index of or listen to the Metareality podcast What is the Problem?!?, you missed Karl Stiefvater’s comments on the mesh deformer. Karl was addressing a point that has come up in JIRA 1716.

Its in the math… by: AJC1 @ Flickr

In some version of the Mesh Deformer Project Viewer there was a significant delay between the time a mesh garment was worn (rezzed) and the Deformer started deforming it. In some cases on some computers that was 2 to 4 minutes.

There are several people that make tutorials for Second Lifeâ„¢. Others explain aspects of Second Life. We can find their stuff in blogs, web sites, on YouTube and Vimeo, and amazingly enough in the SL Forum. Of all those the stuff in the forum seems to be the hardest to find. So, here are a couple of the forum jewels.

In modeling mesh that moves, avatars and clothes, the arrangement of the vertices and how they form loops of quadrilateral polygons is an important concept to understand. Arranging them well determines how well the model can flex. The arrangement of vertices and faces is referred to as the model’s topology.

Mesh Modeling Topology – By: Codewarrior.

Codewarrior Congrejo has a couple of good tutorials in the SL Forum. I think both are too good to just be buried in the forum. They will get little love from Bing & Google. Quickly they will scroll out of sight on the forum. So, I’m putting links here on my blog.

There is a new video on YouTube showing the Mesh Deformer in action. 6 minutes. Notice that Enhanced Avatar Physics are enabled. That apparently surprised some of the people commenting in an SL forum thread.

Check out the Forum thread: MESH DEFORMER PROJECT NEEDS YOUR VOICE. WhiteRabbit0 posted.

While I understand the frustration, there is so much wrong with that post I’m not sure where to start.

I checked with Oz Linden about the Mesh Deformer Test Garments in Hippo Hollow. I wanted him to remove the old garments that do not work with the current deformer. He prefers not to, being concerned it might signal some action on the Deformer. I disagree and think non-working garments are creating more confusion, just read the 1716 JIRA thread. But, it is his choice.

I think this signals a full stop in the Deformer. Oz is taking every opportunity to request more staff and get the project moving. But, it seems the project the Lab saw as low priority remains low priority.

If you want to test the Deformer, there is a dynamic link to the latest version of the Project Viewer, which was updated this week. Code from the other viewer development branches were merged into the Deformer branch. So, the Deformer Project Viewer is very much up to date.  As far as I know there were no changes to the actual Deformer part of the viewer.

You will need to upload your own rigged mesh clothes and enable the Deformer aspect of them.

I see this morning that Loki Eliot has a post up titled: The Secrets of Mesh Landimpact. If you are not into the techy details and math, this would be a good article to read to get an idea of how the new Land Impact Costs work with mesh objects.

It isn’t that Loki doesn’t get into the techy stuff. It is just he explains it in ways that are not all geeked out. Plus he provides illustrations to show what he is talking about.

Check it out.

 

Don’t get excited. There is no ETA on the Deformer nor is the project moving. However there is a new Project Viewer out (273384). You can find the link to it on the left column. (SL Mesh Deformer) Oz merged in the CHUI code.

About the only thing that has changed is the drama in the JIRA thread STORM-1716. We get more and more uninformed people commenting. Anyone reading the last couple of screens will be completely confused now. I tried to correct some of that mess.

Some think the Deformer doesn’t or mesh clothes won’t work with Avatar Physics. That is just plain old uninformed. It works just fine. Yay, Karl!

Some think they have ‘tried’ it and seen it NOT work. I’ll have to ask if the old deformer clothes have been removed from Hippotropolis… or wherever it is they are. Because those old clothes do NOT work with the current Mesh Deformer. Only the clothes uploaded with the latest version of the Deformer work. Then only when the clothes are uploaded with the Deformer flag set to enabled, which is not the case for most mesh clothes.  That shows even more how little some of the comment contributors know.