The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, March 21st, 2024.
Again, apologies for the lateness of this appearing; a major RL home project is getting finished-up, but it is still taking a good deal of my time.
Meeting Purpose
- The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with related viewer development work. This meeting is held on alternate Thursdays at Hippotropolis.
- In regards to meetings:
- Dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.
- Commence at 13:00 SLT on their respective dates.
- Are conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
- Are open to all with an interest in content creation.
- The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.
Official Viewers Status
No changes to any of the official viewers through the week, leaving the list as:
- Release viewer: version 7.1.3.7878383867, the Emoji Viewer, issued February 15, promoted March 1st, 2024 – NoChange.
- Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
- glTF PBR Materials Maintenance-2 RC viewer, version 7.1.4.8149792635, March 11, 2024.
- Maintenance X RC (usability improvements), version 7.1.4.8148263040 , March 11, 2024.
- Maintenance-W RC (bug and crash fixes), version 7.1.4.8113624779, March 6, 2024.
- Maintenance Y RC ( My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history + Maint Z RC integration) updated to version 7.1.4.8114240508, March 6, 2024.
- Project viewers:
- Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.12.579958, May 11.
It is possible the glTF Maintenance-2 RC viewer might be promoted to de facto release status early in week ’13 (commencing Monday, March 25th, 2024).
Graphics / glTF
Work continues on the GLTF Featurettes viewer.
- There have been refinements to the applying glTF materials to terrain, notably the UV density was halved in the interest of 2K textures, and further work put into making sure repeats are less noticeable.
- It will now be possible to have alpha under PBR terrain “under limited circumstances” (e.g. single-sided and alpha masked)
- Discussions have started at the Lab on the fees applicable for 2K texture uploads, but no decision on what this is likely to be.
- Mirrors have also bee going through further refinements (e.g. a Hero reflection probe for a mirror can now have similar – but not the same – fall-off as other reflection probes, so it is no longer necessary to have a “really massive” probe to get a reflection; also, a mirror reflection probe now has the ability to go between a box probe or a sphere probe, influencing how it gets masked on a reflective surface).
- It has been noticed that people trying the pre-release versions of the Featurettes viewer have been very confused as to the placement of things like mirror probes. Therefore, the viewer is going through a further UI/UX review in order to try to make things less confusing.
- There are also some optimisation issues (again with mirrors) which may have to be revisited.
- Brad Linden has been working on the server-side support for the Featurettes viewer through QA. If this is successful, it will allow the graphics team to work with the simulator team to get the code into an Agni (Main grid) channel (either as Preflight or as an RC channel).
- Index of Reflection (IOR):
- Initially will be a numerical value which can be adjusted, and which will be “bundled” with transmission
- LL will attempt to get volume and dispersion included at some future iteration.
- In this, it was pointed out that within the glTF specification, IOR requires both transmission and volume: transmission gives the basics for refraction (e.g. glossy refraction); whilst volume allows for things like colours within the refraction.
- It’s not clear if attenuation will be used with respect to IOR.
In Brief
- “Flexi mesh” – a long-standing request to have mesh interact with physics to make it flexible in the same manner as flexiprims (i.e. movement but without collisions being calculated). The response to this was:
- The flexiprim system doesn’t really work for mesh.
- What would be required is dynamic bones (as seen on other platforms). However, providing this has a number of pre-requisites (e.g. custom skeletons on hair for hair movement). As such, it is not something that is liable to be implemented in the near-term (if doable).
- In terms of using Havoc physics interacting with mesh, the short answer is: not possible. It would require Havoc physics libraries which cannot (due to licensing) be made available to the viewer, due to the latter’s open-source nature.
- Bake Service updates:
- LL have acknowledged that it has been some time since the Bake Service has been updates, and that there are multiple requests for improvements and additions to the service (e.g. PBR materials support).
- A potential project to update the Bake Service and implement some of the requested updates is currently being considered. However, a decision on where this will fit in the roadmap and what it will include has yet to be taken.
- There is a fear among some that if the Bake Service is not updated specifically to support 2K textures when that is deployed, it could see Bakes On Mesh deprecated by creators in favour of applier systems which can utilise 2K textures (even if the system downsamples them on the basis of size).
- With regards to 2K textures:
- It appears that LL are trying to make heir use system specific: if a user is on a computer with the capacity to handle 2K textures, then they get 2K; if a user is on an older system (e.g. one limited by VRAM), then the largest textures they get are 1K.
- For PBR terrain using 2K textures, there are some glTF specification-defined fallbacks the Lab hare leveraging to ease the load on lower-end systems.
- It appears the PBR release has broken the Render Resolution Debug setting (most often used by RLV(/a) for screen blurring). A fix for this might be in the glTF Maintenance-2 RC viewer.
Next Meeting
- 13:00 SLT, Thursday, April 4th, 2024, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.
† 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.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 