2023 week #16: SL CCUG meeting summary (abbreviated)

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, April 20th, 2023 at 13:00 SLT. 

These meetings are for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current work, upcoming work, and requests or comments from the community, together with viewer development work. They are usually chaired by Vir Linden, and dates and times can be obtained from the SL Public Calendar.

Notes:

• These meetings are conducted in mixed voice and text chat. Participants can use either to make comments / ask or respond to comments, but note that you will need Voice to be enabled to hear responses and comments from the Linden reps and other using it. If you have issues with hearing or following the voice discussions, please inform the Lindens at the meeting.
• The following is a summary of the key topics discussed in the meeting, and is not intended to be a full transcript of all points raised.

Additional note: unfortunately, my audio recording died whilst saving to disk, leaving me with just the first 10 minutes of audio from the meeting available for playback / summary. Given responses to questions in text are supplied in Voice, it is impossible to provide any reasonable summary beyond the point at which the recording save failed, so this is therefore a very foreshortened report, and not representative of the entire meeting.

Official Viewer Status

The Performance Floater / Auto FPS RC viewer updated to version  6.6.11.579629 on April 20th.

The rest of the official viewers remain as:

• Release viewer: Maintenance R viewer, version 6.6.10.579060, dated March 28, promoted March 30th.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Maintenance T(ranslation) RC viewer, version 6.6.11.579154, April 6th.
  • Maintenance S, version 6.6.11.579153, March 31st.
• Project viewers:
  • The PBR Materials / reflection probes project viewer, version 7.0.0.579401, April 10th.
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.8.576972, December 8, 2022.

The Performance Floater / Auto FPS viewer looks set to become the next viewer to be promoted to de facto release status in the coming week.

glTF Materials and Reflection Probes

Project Summary

• To provide support for PBR materials using the core glTF 2.0 specification Section 3.9 and using mikkTSpace tangents, including the ability to have PBR Materials assets which can be applied to surfaces and also traded / sold.
• To provide support for reflection probes and cubemap reflections.
• The overall goal is to provide as much support for the glTF 2.0 specification as possible.
• In the near-term, glTF materials assets are materials scenes that don’t have any nodes / geometry, they only have the materials array, and there is only one material in that array.
  • It is currently to early to state how this might change when glTF support is expanded to include entire objects.
• The project viewer is available via the Alternate Viewers page, but will only work on the following regions on Aditi (the Beta grid):  Materials1; Materials Adult and Rumpus Room 1 through 4.
• Please also see previous CCUG meeting summaries for further background on this project.

Status

• Viewer:
  • The viewer is now very close to being promoted to Release Candidate status. Issues within the viewer build farm prevented it from getting fully cleared by QA, who are currently taking one more look at it.
  • It is believed that all the significant showstoppers thus far found have been dealt with (although more may show up as a result of it becoming available to a wider audience in RC).
  • The above should include the issue of objects in the camera’s view failing to render unless occlusion culling is disabled and the issues of some mesh items “exploding in the the viewer’s viewer both being fixed.
  • Ton mapping has been updated so there is no longer the ability to change / turn off tone mapping. This has been done in the name of “trying to keep things consistent” with older contents that has tone mapping built-in. This does lead to a few edge cases (such as not being able to get totally pitch black environments), but also fixes some issues around general exposure (e.g. preventing full bright objects changing brightness depending on camera distance).
  • It is likely that the work on exposures will eventually be fed into the snapshot tool, so photographers can adjust the exposure settings for them pictures.
  • There is still a collection of minor issues / bugs still to be resolved – such as getting parity some some of the current sky settings – which will be dealt with in RC as the viewer progresses.
  • Those who do find significant issues in using the viewer in RC are asked to report them via a BUG report ASAP.
• When the view does go to RC, it is likely the server-side support will be deployed to one (Preflight) or possibly two (Preflight and Snack) small simulator RC channels to allow for testing on Agni (the Main grid). Details of the available regions will be published in my project summaries as and when available.

Future glTF Work

• There is an internal (to LL) design document in development which is intended to set-out the next steps in the glTF work; however, this is not currently ready for public release.
• Past indicators have been that it is possible the near-term work for glTF could include planar mirrors (with some controls around their use) and also glTF mesh uploads.

Next Meeting

• Thursday, May 4th, 2023.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.