Day: May 31, 2019

Flourish – blog post

The following notes are taken from the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting, held on Thursday, May 30th 2019 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are usually available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

Environment Enhancement Project

Project Summary

A set of environmental enhancements allowing the environment (sky, sun, moon, clouds, water settings) to be set region or parcel level, with support for up to 7 days per cycle and sky environments set by altitude. It uses a new set of inventory assets (Sky, Water, Day),  and includes the ability to use custom Sun, Moon and cloud textures. The assets can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others, and can additionally be used in experiences.

Due to performance issues, the initial implementation of EEP will not include certain atmospherics such as crepuscular rays (“God rays”).

Resources

• Project definition document.
• Project summary (this blog).
• Full EEP Documentation.

Current Status

• It has been noted that the current EEP RC viewer – version 6.2.3.527250 – is a “little rough”, with issues around midday light, ambient lighting, water transparency, projected lights, etc. Additional effort is being put into checking code merges to try to avoid similar issues in the future, although viewer updates may be a little slower as a result and involve smaller changes.
• An updated EEP RC viewer is with the Lab’s QA team that should fix many of the current issues, and should be available soon.
• Alexa Linden, who a Product Managing EEP, and who spends a good deal of her time in-world both exploring and building, as well as designing environments, is spending more time in checking upcoming EEP builds to help get things back on track.

Non-EEP Viewer Rendering Issues

• Following the simulator deployments of week #22, there have been a series of reports of windlight settings failing to render correctly in either non-EEP viewers or the EEP RC viewer.
• The Lab is unable of any simulator changes that would cause this.
• BUG-226815 outlines one issue, and further bug reports have been requested as the Lab investigate the problem.

Bakes On Mesh

Project Summary

Extending the current avatar baking service to allow wearable textures (skins, tattoos, clothing) to be applied directly to mesh bodies as well as system avatars. This involves viewer and server-side changes, including updating the baking service to support 1024×1024 textures, but does not include normal or specular map support, as these are not part of the existing Bake Service, nor are they recognised as system wearables. Adding materials support may be considered in the future.

Resources

• Bakes on Mesh knowledge base article.
• Bakes on Mesh forum thread.
• Bakes on Mesh JIRA filter (courtesy of Whirly Fizzle).

Current Status

• A BUG related to the AUX channels showing up black for BOM has resurfaced.
• An updated viewer with a fix for his issue has been undergoing testing and should be available “soon”.
• This update also requires an appearance service update as well.
• It is hoped that the bug fix and viewer update will allow BOM to progress.

Animesh Follow-On

• 

  Vir continues to work on adding visual parameter support to allow shape adjustments to be made to Animesh.

• He now has the LSL side of things working “fairly decently” – the command allows users to set individual parameters, and correctly handles vertical height placement, as demonstrated on the right.
  • The LSL capability allows multiple shape parameters to be adjusted.
  • Parameters can be looked up by name or ID, and the command uses ranges for 0 to 1.
  • This allows shape parameters to be adjusted in a similar manner as would be seen when using shape sliders when manually editing an avatar’s shape, albeit with different value ranges (0 to 1 being equitable to 0 to 100 on a slider).
• In the example clip, right, the LSL is being used to apply settings to the Animesh height, arm length, shoulder width, leg length, etc., simultaneously.
• It has been suggested having a Get command to obtain parameter settings would be useful, and this may be added.
• A further question is whether there needs to be a capability to remove parameters (by default an Animesh does not have any visual parameters until they are set – and once set they cannot be removed..
• Overall, the plan remains to get the capability into a usable state and then provide a project viewer for further testing within test regions.
• The meeting also included further discussion on allowing Animesh characters to have clothing / outfits in a similar manner to an avatar’s Outfit folder, and to support attachment points.
  • A problem here is that the Outfit Folder runs through the Appearance Service, which would have to be extended to encompass Animesh objects.
  • Similarly, attachment points operate via the concept of avatars having an associated  agent – which Animesh objects currently don’t have.
  • While neither of these have been entirely ruled out, they are considered significant projects which have their own set of implementation issues that would have to be considered.