Day: May 3, 2024

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, May 2nd, 2024.

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

• On Thursday, May 2nd, the Materials Featurette RC viewer updated to version 7.1.7.8883017948.

The rest of the official viewers remain as:

• Release viewer: 7.1.6.8745209917, formerly the Maintenance Y/Z RC (My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history), dated April 19 and promoted April 23.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • Maintenance B RC (usability updates / imposter changes), version 7.1.7.8820696922, April 29.
  • Maintenance X RC (usability improvements), version 7.1.6.8758996787, April 23.
• Project viewers:
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.12.579958, May 11.

Graphics / glTF

• Mirrors: Geenz Linden continues work on bug fixing (notably the fact that mirrors under Linden Water seem to break) and additional updates to improve usability.
• PBR Terrain:
  • Cosmic has fixed an issue wherein 2K textures were not rendering on the mini-map.
  • In addition, she is looking into the ability to customise repeats in PBR terrain.
• It is known that screen space reflections (SSR) do not work well on Linden Water, producing moiré effects. There has been talk within the Graphics team of “ripping out” SSR and replacing it with “something” – but no determination has been made as to what should be used, and it is pending work elsewhere within the graphics / rendering system.

glTF Scene Import

• Runitai Linden is continuing to work on glTF scene import. This has reached a point where (on test viewers) it is now possible to preview a scene (tied to an in-world object) in-world.
• Work is now being done to set-up a couple of test region on Aditi (the Beta grid) where this can be more widely tested.
• The overall status of the glTF scene import work is described as “prototyping with much brokenness”, and the project is liable to continue through summer in order to get it into something of a more productive state.
• The initial aim is to get to a point where scenes can be imported and seen, and nodes within them updated with both tools in the viewer and / or using LSL, and ensuring they stay in synch with the rest of the scene.
• Once the above has been reached, then the plan is to start looking at performance, working out a Land Impact accounting schema, etc.
  • In as much as Land Impact is concerned, it is likely that nodes within a scene will have their own Land Impact, with those also involved in skeletal animation having an additional Land Impact.
• Scenes are liable to use the MSFT glTF extension for Level of Detail (LOD), as this allows LODs to be set per node within a scene, providing more intuitive / consistent LOD switching management (based on screen coverage).
  • For automatic LOD generation, the first pass of work might only use the automatic LODs generated by Blender; if a home-ground automatic LOD generation system is used, it will “almost certainly” be Mesh Optimiser.
  • Overall, glTF scene support should leverage Blender’s LOD generation, as Blender is “way better” at this than LL are “any day of the week”.
  • Managing LODs (e.g. setting a default LOD Factor in the viewer is liable to become more firmly set and managed as glTF scene import becomes available (e.g. all viewers working to a fixed LOD of 3.00 or something).
• The will be constraints placed on scene imports (e.g. will not be able to have a scene which exceeds the capacity of a region; scenes will not be able to span more than one region (so as to avoid issues with physics, etc.); and so on).
• It was noted that glTF scene support will require a lot of work in areas such as physics management, update message handling (the object-based messaging currently used will not work with glTF scenes). Not of these aspects are seen as potential blockers – but solving all of them will take time.
• glTF scenes will present more of a two-way street for creators, moving more seamlessly between a design tool such as Blender and SL when building and testing a scene and, following the upload of a scene, the ability to save it back locally again (subject to the SL permissions system where content has been subsequently added to a scene after its initial upload).

In Brief

• Animations: it was noted that under glTF there is support for at least eight morph channels (with one vertex attribute being considered a channel, so it could be that 2 morphs change 3 attributes), making animation far more flexible in terms of use.
• Some using the SL Mobile app have apparently been reporting that PBR terrain textures are not showing in that app, as it currently does not have PBR rendering support – this has been passed to the Mobile team.
• It was noted that one of the reasons for LL adopting the glTF specification is that it is mobile friendly, so the Mobile team is going to be adding PBR, etc., support.
• A lot of the meeting was taken up with a general discussion on matters relating to glTF scene import – LOD management, collaborative building, licensing matters (e.g. if an asset is available on a third-party asset store with a specifically licensed use, and importing it to SL potential break that license – should LL proactively block the asset from being imported?), etc., which have yet to be fully determined internally at LL, and so fall outside of this summary.

Next Meeting

• 13:00 SLT, Thursday, May 16th, 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.