Category: Content Creation User Group

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, July 18th, 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

• Release viewer: version 7.1.8.9375512768, formerly the Graphics Featurettes RC viewer dated June 5 and promoted June 10th.
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • WebRTC Voice RC, version 7.1.9.9688089989, July 1.
  • Atlasaurus RC (object take options; improved MOAP URL handling), version 7.1.9.9620320242, June 27.
  • Maintenance B RC (usability updates / imposter changes) 7.1.9.9555137545, June 21.
  • Maintenance C RC (reset skeleton in all viewers), version 7.1.9.9469671545, June 14.
• Project viewers:
  • None.

WebRTC Voice Update

Not strictly a Content Creation tool / subject, but of import to SL as a whole.

Summary

• A project intended to move Second Life away from reliance on the Vivox voice service and plug-in, and to using the WebRTC communications protocol (RTC=”real-time communication”). Roxie Linden is leading this work.
• Key benefits:
  • WebRTC supports a wide range of real-time communications tools in common use (e.g. Google Meet), supporting audio, video and data communications, and is thus something of a “standard” approach.
  • Offers a good range of features: automatic echo cancellation, better noise cancellation and automatic gain control, much improved audio sampling rates for improved audio quality.
  • Opens the door to features and capabilities to voice services which could not be implemented whilst using Vivox.
• In addition:
  • LL are are of some of the security concerns around WebRTC voice (e.g. risk of eavesdropping, exposure of users’ IP addresses, etc), and is actively working to block these through the use of an internal proxy service.
  • LL will be looking to Linux devs to help give feedback on how well WebRTC is working on their Linux viewers
• Feature requests for WebRTC should be made via the WebRTC board on the SL Feedback Portal.

Status

• There is a Release Candidate viewer available on the Alternate Viewers page. Thus is expected to be the next viewer to be promoted to de facto release status.
  • This promotion is liable to occur ahead of the planned simulator deployments (see below), allowing time for TPVs to adopt the code.
• Currently, LL is looking at August for a potential deployment across all of SL on the server-side.
  • This will follow the usual approach of roll-out to the simulator RC channels first, then to the SLS Main channel.
  • As a result, there will be some short-term issues around peer-to-peer, Group and ad-hoc voice connections between those on regions running the two different voice services (Vivox and WebRTC).
  • Depending on how the deployment goes (e.g. first to a single RC, then multiple RCs, then the SLS Main channel), it is hoped that any such issues will only be for around 2 weeks.
• Viewers adopting the WebRTC code prior to or during this deployment period will be able to process both WebRTC and Vivox voice, so outside of the possible short-term issues during the back-end deployment mentioned above, voice services should not be interrupted for users.

Graphics / glTF

Transmission / IOR

• Geenz Linden continues to work on Transmission and Index of Reflection (IOR). This will provide:
  • Both refraction and “blurry” refraction suitable for things like frosted glass surfaces.
  • Dispersion, allowing chromatic aberration, allowing the RGB channels to “separate out” based on a certain factor.
  • Volume, allowing an object surface to be tinted at different surface thicknesses.
• There are still some bugs to be resolved with this work, after which it will be folded into the main viewer development branch, but is currently tied to the work on mesh import, but may be separated out.

PBR Terrain Painting

• This is the next planned project for Cosmic Linden, and is in the very early stages of planning, so things are subject to potential change.
• Currently, the thinking is:
  • The four PBR materials currently used for PBR terrain would remain available for use / painting.
  • The painting element would allow a user to define how these materials are mixed (via a paint map), rather than having to rely purely on the the existing height map.
  • The paint map is likely to initially be on the basis of one blended texture at region level (not parcel), although the resolution of the texture is still TBA at the time of writing.
  • The permissions for terrain painting will be based on ability to edit the height map (if you can alter the latter through the Region settings, then you’ll be able to use the terrain painting capability).
• This effectively means:
  • Users who have terrain editing permissions will be able to use the existing terrain texture system, using the height map (terrain elevation) to define which textures are visible, and the “blending” between them. or – if provided at the region level – access the PBR terrain paint map and use that to define the terrain (e.g. where grass, dirt, rock, etc., appears),  without having to use terrain elevation changes.
  • Use of the paint map will still be based of the X,Y positioning of terrain (as with the current height map), but all allow for actual blending of materials, rather than just creating transitional noise between textures set for different elevations, as with the height map.
• Terrain painting will be a significant departure in how terrain texturing has been managed, requiring a new entity to be introduced. This is also still being thought through, but it is unlikely it will be a new asset type stored on the asset servers.
• LL prefer to limit terrain painting to the four available slots at region revel, rather than allowing fully customisable swatches / slots at parcel level, as the latter presents “non-trivial issues” for terrain texture handling /loading.
• Two further ideas being discussed in relation to terrain but not on the implementation road map are:
  • Implementing a means by which a prim can act as if it is part of the terrain, and inheriting the materials of the terrain on which it is placed, whilst allowing the geometry of the prim to be still be manipulated.
  • Instead of using terrain, provide a means by which “something else” (something created external to SL and then imported) as terrain. However, it idea is described as “more pie in the sky” thinking.

glTF Scene Import

• No update, as Runitai Linden is out of the office.

(Non-Ambient) Lighting

• Punctual lights is a glTF extension that has recently been folded into the main specification, defining the use of lighting sources (house light, table lamps, street lights, etc.).
• Geenz Linden is working to implement punctual lights, but they will be tied to the node hierarchy for glTF scene imports.
• Longer term, they hope to use the extension to enable punctual lights to render shadows (so, if your table lamp is a punctual light, it will cast shadows).
  • However, the extension is currently ambiguous as to what parameters should be used to define/ constrain such shadows, so this aspect of the work is liable to take longer to achieve, and may be dependent upon how other companies implement punctual lighting shadows.
  • In the meantime, Geenz does have some ideas on handling shadows from point and spotlights, which might leverage the work done on reflection probes.
• In discussing the adoption of glTF punctual lighting, Geenz further noted:
  • There are some notable differences between glTF lighting and SL’s physically-based lighting model and also with the capabilities of lighting projectors as they are currently in SL.
  • As such, trying to unify punctual lighting with SL’s existing lighting / projectors could lead to content breakage.
  • Because of this, it is likely that as punctual lighting ins introduced, the existing lighting system will cease to be significantly enhanced, and pretty much left as-is, with the focus shifting to enhancing the punctual lighting system.

General Notes

• Cosmic has also been completing work on support for PBR terrain texture transforms. This is s subset of the texture manipulation options (scale, offset, rotation, etc.), available with texturing prims, and is per material.
• A request has been received to get planar face alignment to be functional for PBR, and this is defined as something the Lab wants to resolve “soon”.
• Order-independent transparency is not something on the current road map, as it is seen as “too performance costly” to implement.
• There is some potential for performance improvements / optimisations for mirrors.
  • Currently, whilst the mirror surface is planar, the reflection probe generates reflections for a full 180º in front of the mirror, not all of which might be required.
  • It might therefore be possible to adjust this to angles more appropriate for such viewers, making them slightly more performant – but the improvement will not be huge.
  • It should be remembered that mirrors can also be turned off (or have the update rate reduced) through Preferences by those feeling a mirror they are closes to and is active is too big a performance hit.
• There have been multiple calls for Linden Water to be restored to its pre-PBR looks. Geenz noted that while making improvements to the appearance of Linden Water are not out of the question, the fact that Linden Water is not glTF compliant makes what can be done more difficult.

Next Meeting

• 13:00 SLT, Thursday, August 1st, 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.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, June 20th, 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

• Release viewer: version 7.1.8.9375512768, formerly the Graphics Featurettes RC viewer dated June 5 and promoted June 10th.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Maintenance C RC (reset skeleton in all viewers), version 7.1.9.9469671545, June 14.
  • Maintenance B RC (usability updates / imposter changes) 7.1.8.9130881608, June 10.
• Project viewers:
  • WebRTC Voice project viewer, version 7.1.4.8947030231, May 8.

WebRTC Voice Update

Not strictly a Content Creation tool / subject, but of import to SL as a whole.

Summary

• A project intended to replace the Vivox Voice system with the WebRTC communications protocol (RTC=”real-time communication”).
• Will see the removal of the SLplugin.EXE from the viewer, to be replaced with a library wrapper within the viewer.
• Offers much better and more flexible voice support across platforms, with improved capabilities (e.g. automatic echo cancellation, automatic gain control, better noise cancellation) with better audio sampling / quality.
• Also opens the door to adding new features and capabilities to SL Voice, some of which have been long-requested.
• Care is being taking to address potential security issues (e.g. preventing eavesdropping, exposing users’ IP address (by using an internal proxy server), etc.).
• During the transitional period as WebRTC is deployed on the back-end and gradually made available by viewers, support will be provided for both Vivox and WebRTC (i.e. if you are using a viewer using the Vivox plug-in, you will connect to voice via Vivox, and if using a viewer with WebRTC, then that protocol will be used.
• Both Vivox and WebRTC work together, but their may be some initial limitations / issues until the project is fully deployed and the switch made.
• Feature requests for WebRTC made via the WebRTC board on the SL Feedback Portal are being evaluated and some are being actioned, together with issues being investigated.

Status

• There is a Project viewer available on the Alternate Viewers page. Thus is expected to to to Release Candidate status very soon.
• The server support is currently available on the region WebRTC on the main grid.
• The focus is currently on getting the viewer code up to release status so it can be adopted by TPVs, with a gradual deployment of the server code, however, it is unlikely the latter will be widely deployed until after the viewer code has been more fully adopted.
• That said, this is something of a priority project, likely to be fast-tracked as much as possible.

Graphics / glTF

Terrain

• Cosmic Linden is working on PBR terrain custom repat controls allowing for improved Texel densities to help reduce the “stretching” of textures of elevation changes)  and better support 2K textures.
• Most of the viewer work for this is now almost complete, but is awaiting simulator-side support on Aditi in order to be offered in a test viewer.
• There is a more general bug where PBR terrain does not render in planar mirrors, and Cosmic is also working on trying to resolve this issue.
• PBR Terrain painting: depending on how the above progress, Cosmic hopes to be able to start looking into the potential for PBR terrain painting in the near future. Currently the tentative plan is:
  • To allow land owners to control the mix of the four PBR materials on terrain, rather than the current situation where it’s determined by some elevation weights plus some noise added on top.
  • This capability will potentially be allowed for whoever can edit the terrain heights in a given parcel.

glTF Scene Import

• Runitai Linden is continuing to work on glTF scene import. The focus remains on the viewer-side code.
  • As previously noted, this allows glTF scenes to be uploaded, tied to an in-world object and previewed in the viewer.
  • The support for this is available on the Rumpus Room regions on Aditi (the Beta Grid).
• Actual simulator / back-end support for glTF scene will not start to be implemented until after the viewer side of the code is in better shape.
• The overall goal is to get scene import working with Blender (and in accordance with the glTF specification), and mee the requirements /  guidelines outline in the Blender glTF Imort / Export documentation. The plan is to:
  • Support all of the animation data defined in the document.
  • Support “most” of the materials data in additional to the already supported  metallic roughness & emissive unlit.
• As this work is still in the prototype phase no decisions have been made regarding the potential Land Impact for scenes or how LI will be calculated. This will come later in the project, once LL have more of a handle on things (upload, streaming, download, runtime cost, etc.).
• There are also a lot of additional decisions yet to be made regarding this work – the LSL API, avatar limits (which can be attached to an avatar within a scene), all of which mean it will sill be a while before glTF scene imports are ready for any form of testing on the main grid (Agni).

General Notes

• Runitai Linden is looking at the render pipe and possible optimisations and the potential to improve things like rendering objects, etc. Some of this work is likely to find its way back into production viewers in time.
  • This work also includes refinements to mirrors (e.g. so they get occluded, improvements to the update rate, etc).
• Geenz Linden continues to work on Transmission and Index of Reflection (IOR), however, as they were out of the office for this meeting, no update was available.
• Proper support for HDRI skies is being increasingly requested as a result of the Graphics Featurette viewer, and this work may  be accelerated. However, they will require a new asset type.

Next Meeting

• 13:00 SLT, Thursday, July 18th, 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.

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 16th, 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

• Release viewer: Maintenance X RC (usability improvements), version 7.1.7.8974243247, dated May 8and  promoted May 13 – NEW
• Release channel cohorts (please see my notes on manually installing RC viewer versions if you wish to install any release candidate(s) yourself).
  • Maintenance C RC (reset skeleton in all viewers), version 7.1.7.8820704257, May 6.
  • Materials Featurettes RC viewer, version 7.1.7.8883017948, May 2.
  • Maintenance B RC (usability updates / imposter changes), version 7.1.7.8820696922, April 29.
• Project viewers:
  • WebRTC Voice project viewer, version 7.1.4.8947030231, May 8.

Graphics / glTF

Featurettes Viewer – Recap

• Support for:
  • Viewer-side setting of PBR materials for terrain.
  • 2K texture upload support.
  • Mirrors: using reflection probes to generate local static or dynamic (incl. avatar) reflections in real-time.
• Both Geenz Linden (mirrors) and Cosmic Linden (PBR terrain) are engaged in follow-up work for both of these projects, which will hopefully appear in a future graphics featurette viewer – not the current version (e.g. allowing PBR materials on terrain to have custom repeats, offsets, rotation).
• It terms of PBR terrain, it was noted:
  • Emissive is supported on terrain.
  • There is a issue with Mac systems (either emissive or normal may “fall off”).
  • As running all four PBR materials on terrain can put a load on the viewer, there are some automatic fallbacks for systems unable to handle the full load which mean some of the materials may not be applied
  • Those opting to use PBR for terrain, as the viewer capability gains adoption (and region owners enable it), there is not requirement to also provide textures for terrain (to allow for those on non-PBR viewers).

General Notes on glTF / PBR

• As an extension to the last point above, it was further noted that as PBR gains adoption, there is no enforced requirement for creators to continue to provide fallbacks to handle “non-PBR” viewers.
  • This lead to a further statement (first made at the May 10th TPV Developer meeting) that creators building for SL21B are not required to provide Blinn-Phong materials fallbacks on their builds when using PBR.
  • The above can be taken as an informal view that viewers need to support PBR either fully or with a “beta” release by the time of SL21B (commencing Friday, June 21st, 2024).
• One of the reasons Linden Water reflections are not as good under PBR is due to attempts to optimise the rendering load so that any potential frame rate hit is minimised for more users.
  • Geenz Linden is looking at improving them once more as a result of the work done for mirrors. This work, if successful won’t bring water reflections up to the standard of pre-PBR water reflections (updated every frame), but will offer an improvement over what is currently seen with PBR.
  • Water as a material has been requested and is something LL “is interested in”, but this is not part of the current glTF / PBR work.
• LL believe that most users should not see a dramatic fall-off in viewer FPS as a result of PBR, such that their experience is heavily impacted.
• There remains no current plan to support displacement maps.
• As well as working on mirrors, Geenz Linden is now working on Index of Refraction (IOR) and transmission, both in line with the glTF 2.0 specification (e.g. allowing transparent surfaces that distort what is behind them, as can sometimes be seen in the physical world).

glTF Scene Import

• Recap:
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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).
  • There 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).
• In terms of scene import / export, while it is still earlier days, Runitai noted again that:
  • The idea is to make the import / export a two-way street for creators so they can modify their scenes with relative ease by taking it back to Blender to fix issues that cannot be fixed in-world.
  • This will be subject to the permissions system to prevent the wholesale export of content added to a scene.
  • Scenes uploaded will have attributions appended by the asset service (we owns the asset, when it was uploaded, etc).

In Brief

• PBR and Bakes on Mesh:
  • LL “keenly aware” this needs to be done, and is noting support for it coming via the Feedback Portal.
  • However – it is not currently a live project.
  • The discussion also again carried the caveat that updating the Bake Service to support 2K textures is only part of the issue: all SL wearable definitions all also need to be revised to be able to support 2K textures, as these are also currently limited in their resolution.
• There was an extended discussion on content ripping from Second Life and copybotting (with the latter covering a number of flavours). In short:
  • The is the hoary old (but nevertheless true) acknowledgement that Second Life relies on local computer rendering; ergo, regardless of whether it is via a”copybot viewer” or not, content can be ripped from SL and used elsewhere by those determined to do so.
  • Insofar as content being ripped and re-sold in Second Life (or elsewhere) there is the DMCA process – and in terms of other platforms, it does not matter if they have a DMCA Portal or not – a formal identification of content being misused (with proof of ownership) can still be sent to them in order to initiate a take-down process.
  • There was discussion on why “obvious” copyright-infringing content in SL was not taken down (with the example of Chanel products being used). As I understand it (and IANAL), this is bound up with the Safe Harbor provisions of the DMCA, design to provide immunity to ISPs and website operators for copyright infringement committed by their users by providing them with a framework for taking action. Pro-actively removing content potentially circumvents this process, leaving the company open to possible legal action if mistakes are made (and / or for simply not pre-actively addressing all infringements, large and small).
• There was also a discussion on animations under glTF. However, as this will be a future element of the glTF scene support project, so I’ll leave specifics until such time as the work starts and LL talk more directly as to what they are doing and when.
• The latter part of the meeting included (an occasionally heated) discussion on the new Modesty Layers being proposed by Linden Lab (see: 2024 SL Governance meeting week #19: Child Avatar Policy). However, as this was somewhat entangled with matters of policy, and those directly involved in making the changes to said policy / overseeing changes were not available  / present at the meeting, ad what was suggested as to possible technical solutions was somewhat speculative, I would prefer to leave further reference out of this summary, and leave matters until those at Linden Lab responsible for the policy have more fully engaged directly with content creators.

Next Meeting

• 13:00 SLT, Thursday, June 6th, 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.

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.

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 18th, 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 Friday, April 19th, the Maintenance YZ RC ( My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history updated to version 7.1.6.8745209917.
• On Wednesday, April 17th, Maintenance X RC viewer (usability improvements) updated to version 7.1.6.8709279750.

The rest of the official viewers remain as:

• Release viewer: version7.1.5.8443591509, formerly the Maintenance-W RC (bug and crash fixes), version and issued March 29th, promoted April 9th –
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Materials Featurettes RC viewer, version 7.1.5.8472515256, April 3
• 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 + support.
  • The viewer is in RC with on-going bug fixes.
  • The simulator support is now on a Preflight channel on Agni (the Main grid), which includes the regions Rumpus Room 2048; Rumpus Room 2049; Rumpus Room 2050 and Rumpus Room 2051.
• 2K Textures:
  • Are not currently supported for upload onto the Main grid.
  • The fees for 2K textures have been set as follows:
    • Basic / Plus account: L$50 per texture.
    • Premium account: L$40 per texture.
    • Premium Plus: L$10 per texture.
  • 2K textures for Bakes on Mesh requires a substantial update to the Bake service (as is frequently mentioned at CCUG meetings), and currently this does not appear to be in the works.
• Mirrors:
  • Now leverage the Dynamic flag. When set, this tells the mirror to reflect everything in the rendering pipeline including avatars and particles). if the flag is not set, avatars are particles are not rendered, just the environment (e.g. for a reflective floor which reflects the room, but rendering the avatars would cause a massive performance hit).
  • Mirror probes can now be set using LSL.
  • The updated UX for Mirrors is still not done, and it is acknowledged that setting up a mirror is far from intuitive. A good 10+ minutes of the meeting was devoted to “how to make a mirror” – rather proving the point!
• Work has started on prototyping glTF scene handling (as part of the overall glTF scene import work). Initial work is to enable the showing of a scene locally within the viewer using a debug setting. More on this as the option becomes available in a viewer. But in short:
  • Once imported, glTF scenes will be an inventory asset type.
  • Each scene with by associated with an in-world object (e.g. a prim), which becomes its “handle”.

In Brief

• Custom skeletons: this is an ongoing debate within LL. glTF allows for custom skeletons and animations. Second Life has a defined avatar skeleton and recognised animation formats for use against it.
  • As such, there is a disparity between SL and glTF, as in theory, adherence to the glTF specification means recognising the use of custom skeletons with their own animations – which would then be incompatible with the existing SL format(s), and lead to potential confusion  / clashes between established avatar types using the SL skeleton and custom skeletons.
  • Thus, some navigation is required to determine if / how custom skeletons might be handled without confusing the existing consumer market in SL in terms of what accessories work with which type of avatar.
• Emissive strength is seen as “feeble” by some, so a request was made for a numeric box in which a desired emissive strength might be entered. As the glTF specification allows for this, it is something that could be added to a future viewer iteration (but not necessarily would be – Feature Request?).
• Much of the meeting was about what extensions LL might consider, how things like emissive maps and lighting might be handled in the future, IOR, transmission and the potential to add iridescence – some of which are being worked on (IOR and transmission) and will be reported on in summaries as they come along, others are seen as possibly / maybe.

Next Meeting

• 13:00 SLT, Thursday, May 2nd, 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.