Category: SL User Group Meetings

The following notes are taken from the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting, held on  Thursday, July 26th, 2018 at 13:00 SLT.  These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are usually available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

Note that the audio presented here may not be in the exact order of discussion during the meeting; as subjects were at times returned to following their initial discussion, I have attempted to bring together key points of discussion by topic / subject matter. Also, please note that audio drop-out when Vir is speaking appears to be an ongoing Voice issue.

Animesh

Project Summary

The goal of this project is to provide a means of animating rigged mesh objects using the avatar skeleton, in whole or in part, to provide things like independently moveable pets / creatures, and animated scenery features via scripted animation. It involves both viewer and server-side changes.

Resources

• Animesh User Guide
• Animesh test content
• Animesh LSL methods:
  • llStartObjectAnimation
  • llStopObjectAnimation
  • llGetObjectAnimationNames
• Animesh – Updated Limits and Cost Formulas
• Animesh feedback thread
• JIRA filter for Animesh

Viewer Status

The Animesh viewer updated to version 6.0.0.518080, which appeared in the pipeline on Wednesday, July 25th.  It comes with the following notes:

It has a fix for a bug that caused rigged meshes to fail to display intermittently [BUG-225063]. There is a significant change to orientation handling for Animesh objects in this build. If you make an Animesh object from a linkset that contains a rigged mesh as the root object, then the rotation for the object will be corrected to try to make the rigged display line up with the physics representation (correction is based on the bind shape matrix). This will change the behavior of some existing content – for example, the gift raptors on Agni are now rotated 90 degrees. Content that uses a non-rigged object as the root should be unaffected by this change. LOD calculations for Animesh objects now use the dynamically updated bounding box, so they should be more accurate and consistent.

The rotation fix does have an impact on some content, which can end up moving “sideways” compared to the expected direction.

Additional Work for Animesh to reach RC Status

• Server-side: Vir is currently trying to track done the cause of some server issues which are probably the result of the simulator having to “remember” a lot more information with Animesh, and failing to do so properly, which can impact things like streaming costs.
• Viewer-side: still some outstanding work to be done with getting LODs to behave / display consistently.

Both of these are seen as requiring resolution before the Animesh viewer moves to release candidate status.

Future Animesh Work

• There has been some discussion about possible follow-on projects for Animesh, but no final details on what will be in the mix has been made.
• Animesh customisation, including assignment of a body shape is considered to be “high” on the list of follow-ups. However, no decisions have been made on whether:
  • It will include LSL support for customisation.
  • It will add body shape support (and the use of the body sliders for customisation.
  • It might include an extension to Bakes on Mesh for Animesh.

Animesh and Scale Animation

Scale animation is something that has been requested since Bento. However, the problem here is the SL animation format doesn’t have any notion of scale animations, so in order for support to be added, the entire animation system would require an overhaul.

Another issue, as found with Bento, is that things can become tricky (if not confusing for some) when animations and sliders are both controlling the same thing – as would be the case with scale animations (although this was eventually done with bone translations).

In Brief

• BUG-225153 “Animesh issue: Multiple faces don’t work – Reverts back to one texture when animation played”: this does not appear to have been reproduced by others, and it is unclear whether it is an issue, or something specific to the user.
• BUG-225158 “[ANIMESH ] Inconsistent default graphics settings with relation to current mainstream viewer as well as ‘recommended settings’ button”: this appears to be a change in how graphics settings are detected in the viewer in general, rather than specific to Animesh. further testing / investigation is required.

Bakes On Mesh

Project Summary

Extending the current avatar baking service to allow wearable textures (skins, tattoos, clothing) to be applied directly to mesh bodies as well as system avatars. This involves server-side changes, including updating the baking service to support 1024×1024 textures, and may in time lead to a reduction in the complexity of mesh avatar bodies and heads.

This work does not include normal or specular map support, as these are not part of the existing Bake  Service.

Resources

• Bakes on Mesh forum thread.
• Bakes on Mesh JIRA filter (courtesy of Whirly Fizzle).

Current Status

Still with the Lab’s QA team, and the viewer is internally flagged for product reviews, so a project viewer update could be appearing soon^TM. This should include a number of bug fixes that have been worked on recently.

In addition, Anchor Linden has been adding new LSL constants for the various Bake Channel textures, so that if someone wants to use LSL to change a particular face on a mesh object to use Bakes on Mesh, they will be able to do that using a constant.

A reminder for those trying to test Bakes on Mesh: the capability requires server-side support, which has not been deployed to Agni (the Main grid), but is only available on Aditi (the Beta grid) on the Bakes on Mesh test regions.

To prevent confusion, it’s been suggested the Bakes on Mesh viewer is blocked from accessing Agni until such time as the server-side support has been deployed.

Environment Enhancement Project (EEP)

Project Summary

A set of environmental enhancements, including:

• The ability to define the environment (sky, sun, moon, clouds, water settings) at the parcel level.
• New environment asset types (Sky, Water, Days that can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others.
  • Day assets can include four Sky “tracks” defined by height: ground level (which includes altitudes up to 1,000m) and (optionally) 1,000m and above; 2,000m and above and 3,000m and above, plus a Water “track”.
• Experience-based environment functions
• An extended day cycle (e.g a 24/7 cycle) and extended environmental parameters.
• There are no EEP parameters for manipulating the SL wind.
• EPP will also include some rendering enhancements  and new shaders as well (being developed by Graham Linden), which will allow for effects such as crepuscular rays (“God rays”)
  • These will be an atmospheric effect, not any kind of object or asset or XML handler.
• The new LSL functions for finding the time of day according to the position of the windlight Sun or Moon have been completed,and are more accurate than the current options.
• EEP will not include things like rain or snow.

Resources

• Project definition document.
• Project summary (this blog).

Current Status

• Rider Linden has been working on the viewer UI (presumably as a result of QA feedback). It is thought that a first cut project viewer is not that far away from appearance publicly.
• However, as EEP requires additional back-en changes which have yet to be deployed to Agni, it is likely that when the project viewer does appear, initially, it will only work on Aditi (the beta grid).
• Rider has also been teasing people with EEP-related images on the forums!

Other Items

• BUG-225157 “[RC BlueSteel 18.07.17.517953] Adjusting specular horizontal offset also adjusts specular vertical offset on BlueSteel regions only”: this has been imported into the Lab’s internal JIRA and may be receiving attention.
• Increase to maximum prim size: the current prim size limit in SL is 64m on a side. There have been calls to increase this to allow bigger meshes to be imported (e.g. large land forms for landscaping a region).
  • There are no plans to increase this limit in the immediate future, and it’s been pointed out that increasing the size could be somewhat self-defeating in that it results in a loss of vertex position resolution (vertex space being limited to 64K), which could result in odd artefacts occurring in uploaded models, and, as Elizabeth Jarvinen (polysail) succinctly put it, “your vertex positions will wobble like nuts at high altitudes”.
• Next Meeting: due to the Lab’s start-of-month internal meeting and vacations, the next CCUG meeting will most likely be on Thursday, August 16th – check the wiki page to confirm nearer the time.

 

The following notes are taken from the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting, held on  Thursday, July 19th, 2018 at 13:00 SLT.  These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are usually available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

Note that the audio presented here may not be in the exact order of discussion during the meeting; as subjects were at times returned to following their initial discussion, I have attempted to bring together key points of discussion by topic / subject matter. Also, please note that audio drop-out when Vir is speaking appears to be an ongoing problem at his end.

Animesh

Project Summary

The goal of this project is to provide a means of animating rigged mesh objects using the avatar skeleton, in whole or in part, to provide things like independently moveable pets / creatures, and animated scenery features via scripted animation. It involves both viewer and server-side changes.

Resources

• Animesh User Guide
• Animesh test content
• Animesh LSL methods:
  • llStartObjectAnimation
  • llStopObjectAnimation
  • llGetObjectAnimationNames
• Animesh – Updated Limits and Cost Formulas
• Animesh feedback thread
• JIRA filter for Animesh

Rotation Issues

These cover a couple of issues:

• In one (BUG-139251), when some static mesh objects are converted to Animesh, the visual mesh is rotated through 90 degrees when seen in the Animesh viewer, but the physics mesh isn’t, leaving it perpendicular to the model. This is possibly an orientation issue, with the viewer expecting the mesh to be aligned to +x=forward – which not all mesh modelling tools follow.
• The second problem is that when linking a series of objects into a single Animesh, then are visually located where the avatar skeleton supporting them is located, but the physics shapes remain in the original location of the objects prior to linking / converting.

Both of these problems pre-date Animesh, but have been effectively “hidden” because until now, rigged meshes could only be attached to an avatar, effectively masking the issues.

As a part of the approaches to fix these issues, Beq Janus and Elizabeth Jarvinen (polysail) have contributed code to correctly apply the bindpose matrix within the viewer. This code is in the latest version of the Animesh project viewer, which should be available soon, and should cover legacy content not corrected by similar fixes incorporated into Avatasr for new uploads (see my week #26 CCUG summary for more on this).

LOD Issues

Vir is currently working on the server-side issues, but once those have been resolved, his plan is to work on the viewer-side LOD issues, including BUG-224971 and the Dynamic bounding box issues (see my week #25 summary). Once he has completed testing the fixes for these, the hope is that the Animesh viewer can move to RC status.

Mesh Physics Shapes Issues

The deployment of Animesh to the RC server channels has revealed a couple of issues which need to be resolved:

• Not all of the mesh information the server is required to “remember” is being properly retained.
• Code within the Animesh update appears to be causing some in-world mesh objects to use the wrong physics shapes.

In Brief

• Concern was raised whether Maya could be used to produce Animesh, given the rotation fixes seem to apply to Blender / Avastar. As Far as Cathy Foil (creator of Mayastar) is aware, meshes created in Maya / Mayastar can be converted for use as Animeshes.
• Animesh does not support custom bones – it works purely with the Bento skeleton, which does allow for bone re-purposing.
• BUG-225063 reports that the latest Animesh project viewer fails to display meshes at times, while older Animesh code can cause meshes to display incorrectly. Vir believes the issue may be linked to one he has been addressing, and believed to be caused by an uninitialised variable. The fix for this should be in an upcoming release of the viewer.

• BUG-216352 “[Animesh] Issue with animations not rendering if they were stopped and started while host object is selected” – this is still being investigated. However, as it only applies to the same animation, rather than all animations, the issue isn’t regarded as a blocker for Animesh.

Bakes On Mesh

Project Summary

Extending the current avatar baking service to allow wearable textures (skins, tattoos, clothing) to be applied directly to mesh bodies as well as system avatars. This involves server-side changes, including updating the baking service to support 1024×1024 textures, and may in time lead to a reduction in the complexity of mesh avatar bodies and heads.

This work does not include normal or specular map support, as these are not part of the existing Bake  Service.

Resources

• Bakes on Mesh forum thread.
• Bakes on Mesh JIRA filter (courtesy of Whirly Fizzle).

Current Status

Some people have been reporting some “excitement” when using the new universal bake channels for Bakes on Mesh in regions that don’t have the server-side support for Bakes on Mesh. These issues will likely require further viewer and server-side changes to fix them.

At a recent LL meeting on Bakes on Mesh it was decided not to implement any additional features at this point in time – so no LSL support prior to the initial deployment. Rather, the Lab would like to get a basic capability out that can be used and tested, then potentially improve on it with further features in time.

As it is, even moving Bakes on Mesh to release candidate status is dependent on a large number of back-end service changes (e.g. the inventory system must be updated to handle the new wearable types; the Appearance and Bake services must be updated, as well and the simulator and viewer updates.

Asa reminder, it will not be possible to use Bakes on Mesh with Animesh creatures / creations, primarily because Bake On Mesh uses the Outfit system, which Animesh currently does not – but may be extended to use in the future.

The question was asked if Bakes on Mesh could be used to texture an Animesh attachment to an avatar, and in theory it would be – but how useful / practical this might be is open to debate.

In Brief

• There will be a CCUG meeting on Thursday, July 26th, however, it comes on top of the SL summit meeting at the Lab (to discuss the SL development roadmap) and  so Vir believes there won’t be too much to report on additional work at the meeting.
• Concern has been raised over the recent DMCA situation involving around 3 makers of mesh heads, and whether Bakes on Mesh will see changes to the SL Terms of Service / guidelines specifically for UV maps (e.g. what is allowed, what isn’t), given that Bakes on Mesh could encourage the use of the basic SL UV maps and result in multiple claims of people “using” someone else’s maps. This concern is being passed back to the Lab’s legal team.
• The latter part of the meeting included a lengthy discussion on animations (adding a function to “instantly” stop an animation / being able to modify animation speeds / priorities in-world; the legitimacy of modifying animations) which also spread to the permissions system (providing  “export” permission to allow people to export “full perm” meshes for direct editing and re-upload and / or implementing a “derivative” permission.
  • Some of the animation discussion touched on the animation discussion may surface as a specific feature request(s).
  • It’s unlikely there will be any large-scale changes to the permissions system in the near future.