Day: October 30, 2020

Beyond Space and Time in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Kondor Art Centre: Beyond Space and Time

October 28th, 2020 saw the opening of a new gallery space at the Kondor Art Centre, the centre for the art of Hermes Kondor, an artist and photographer for whom I’ve developed a strong appreciation. Occupying a space-aged building designed by Beth Delaunay (Isilmeriel) entitled Into The Future, the gallery is intended to be the home of “new creative projects and ideas”.

The first exhibition within it is entitled Beyond Space and Time, a set of stunning images that combine digital creations textured with Hermes’ own photographs from the physical world. And when I say “stunning”, I’m not using hyperbole.

These are pieces that, although produced via digital means, have a deep organic feel and look that gives them a sense of life and vitality that just holds the attention. Such is this sense of life that, despite the metallic look with the primary forms in them, the mind is drawn to wonder if they are exotic lifeforms or living machines travelling through space to observe distant worlds, gathering strength in the yellow radiation of distant suns, or hurtling through the interstellar medium at relativistic speeds.

The Kondor Art Centre: Beyond Space and Time

A closer look at them, particularly the “reflections” on their surfaces created through the use of Hermes’ physical world photographs, adds to this idea – and also turns in on its head. Within these “reflections” can be seen many of Hermes’ photographs of plants.

They suggest that what we’re looking at has been seen via a macro lens, powerful enough to reveal exotic new lifeforms travelling amidst the plants and flora of our own world. Or might it be these “reflections” are actually a part of these creature, these craft; patterns on their metallic-like skins or hulls,  or even part of their complex interiors, their surfaces actually bring semi-transparent?

The choice of what they might be is totally yours to interpret – and therein lies the magic of Beyond Space and Time – within the extraordinary set of themed images is the freedom to allow the imagination unfettered freedom of flight when appreciating them.

The Kondor Art Centre: Beyond Space and Time

Another remarkable exhibition from a genuinely gifted photographer and artist. when visiting, make sure you set your viewer to Midnight, and reduce your draw distance so that the surrounding skyboxes don’t distract from the art when on the rooff of the gallery building.

SLurl Details

2020 CCUG meeting week #44 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Poughkeepsie, September 2020 – blog post

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, October 29th 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

There was a lot of general discussion about animation synchronisation, cloud uplift (the majority of which I’ve already reported in my SUG and TPVD meetings of late), etc., none of which should out as really reportable.

Jellydoll / ARCTan

  • Vir has been working on some bug fixes to the Project Jelly viewer (version 6.4.10.549690 at the time of writing), and this work is now with the Lab’s QA team. When issues, this will see the viewer also based on the current release viewer code base.
  • As a reminder:
    • The current ARCTan work is focused on the viewer-side updates to avatar complexity calculations.
    • Work on providing in-world object rendering costs (LOD models, etc.) which might affect Land Impact will be handled as a later tranche of project work, after the avatar work.

Graphics

  • The Graphics team is still looking at options for replacing OpenGL, particularly as a result of Apple’s plans to deprecate all support for it on their systems.
  • The OpenGL project is large-scale, so the Graphic team is also looking at other shorter-term projects related to performance improvements. These may include:
    • Possible optimisations for people on low-end systems (as noted in my previous CCUG summary, roughly 1/3 of all users are running on systems that do not support Vulkan and many of these systems are more than 5 years old).
    • Linden Water: since the last TPV meeting (see: 2020 TPVD meeting week #42: summary) the Lab believe they have determined that the FPS loss seen when rendering Linden Water appears to be related to a combination of the actual rendering and with water reflections. This is still being investigated. One idea to deal with the latter is to completely disable water reflections in the viewer; however, doing this at present affects the sky and the look of the Sun, so again,further investigation is needed.
  • In addition, the graphics team is looking to see if the viewer UI rendering can be divorced from other aspects of viewer rendering to see if any performance improvements can be obtained by keeping the two separate – currently, a lot of cycles are taken up in the drawing of things like UI panels and buttons.

In  Brief / General

  • Teleport failures are still under investigation. Beq Janus from Firestorm is also investigation, and has encountered a situation where the failure may be related to the manner in which regions are queried bases on draw distance, and the system potentially becomes confused as to the actual destination.
  • Megaprims and relaxing linking constraints (BUG-229551):
    • As  expressed by the feature request, the Lab sees this as being two issues: allowing the use of prims larger than 64m on a size / diameter, and handling region surrounds.
    • In particular, the Lab is looking at the potential of braking out region surrounds (“sim surrounds”) as a supported feature in their own right, simply because of the size of the use case. One suggestion for this is to have what is seen beyond a the edges of an individual region to be definable as texturing, rather than just the default of Linden Water.
    • Increasing prim sizing beyond the current maximum is seen as problematic as the size constraint touches on multiple aspects of the simulator code (e.g. Interest Lists being one) that would have to be overhauled – which is not something the Lab wants to undertake in the near future, although this does do preclude the potential for very large prim sizes at some point.
  • The cloud migration work has left the Lab with a certain amount of “technical deficit” – work  deferred in favour of simply getting systems and services transitioned to running on AWS infrastructure and hardware. This means that once the Uplift Project is completed, there will be a number of areas of simulator and back-end services that will need to be re-visited.
  • Potential projects to follow-on projects outside of the graphics performance updates mentioned above could include:
    • Updating the default terrain texture.
    • Further work on easing the new user experience,
    • Further work on viewer UI improvements.
    • Streaming changing an avatar’s appearance.
  • Bone uploads: the question was asked that why, given Bento provides 120+ bones, single avatar sub-mesh uploads are limited to a maximum of 110 bones. The reason is that 110 bones is the maximum some graphics systems can handle in a single upload before things go wrong.

Date of Next Meeting