Category: SL User Group Meetings

The following notes are primarily taken from the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting, held on  Thursday, March 29th, 2018 at 13:00 SLT. For the purposes of Animesh testing, the meetings have relocated to the Animesh4 region on Aditi, the beta grid – look for the seating area towards the middle of the region. The meeting is chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, etc, are usually available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

There is no video to accompany this update, notes are taken from my own audio recording of the meeting.

Animesh Project

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.

Current Progress

Vir now has a proposed revised land impact / tri count formula and test plan for Animesh. This will be going to QA, and if all goes well, the new formulas will be deployed on the Aditi Animesh test regions ready for public testing. No end-date for public testing on Aditi has been defined – the Lab want to ensure as many as are interested have to opportunity to test the new formula. Animesh attachment will remain limited to one per avatar, at least for the time being.

It is likely that server-side support for Animesh will reach the Main grid ahead of the project viewer reaching release candidate status – although this still won’t be for a while.

LODs and Streaming Costs

How Animesh Level of Detail (LOD) is handled is still being tweaked. Currently, Animesh objects sit between in-world objects and avatars in terms of the way their LODs are handled / swapped. The Lab is looking to adjust this, so that Animesh LODs are more consistently handled as they would be for in-world objects.

The broad plan is – for Animesh only – that the lower LODs will not affect streaming costs so long as they are not disproportionately large. Providing they get smaller by at least a factor of approximately 2 as they go down to the courser LODS, they will not impact streaming costs.

Note this work is not part of Project Arctan, which may lead to further changes in costs associated with objects at some point in the future – see below for more.

Project ARCTan

This is the code-name for the project to re-evaluate object and avatar rendering costs (e.g. Land Impact and avatar ARC), led by Graham Linden as a part of the overall rendering system work. The aim of is to have the costs assigned to objects and avatar more accurately reflect the impact they have on people’s viewer performance.

The hope is that overall, by making a careful set of adjustments, not only can client-side performance be improved, but creators can be given positive incentives to build more performant content (a problem currently being that providing good LOD models – high, medium, low and very low – for mesh content can actually penalise a creator in terms of upload costs / Land Impact, encouraging them to skip doing so).

This project is still in the early stages, and the Lab is fully aware of the risks and concerns involved in potentially making changes to things like Land Impact (e.g. undesired object returns), and so are approaching the work cautiously. Right now, data is being gathered and internal comparative testing is being tried. There are no plans to make any kind of changes in the immediate future. When changes do start to be made, they will be done so carefully to avoid disruption, and users will be appraised of what is happening and when.

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 baking service.

It is important to note that this project is still in its preliminary stages. Any release of a project viewer doesn’t mark the end of the project, but rather the start of initial testing and an opportunity for creators to have input into the project.

Current Progress

The project viewer is still with QA with a couple of outstanding JIRAs awaiting resolution. The hope is that it will be making a public appearance soon.

When issued, this viewer should work anywhere, as it doesn’t require simulator changes. However, only those using the project viewer will see things as intended. Anyone on a viewer without the Bakes on Mesh updates will see placeholder textures, rather than the intended baked textures, on avatars trying the Bakes on Mesh capability.

Bakes on Mesh will essentially use the three avatar elements used by the baking service – head, upper body, lower body, eyes, hair, skirt), and applies clothing bakes for those elements to specific mesh faces, effectively “hiding” the corresponding base mesh region. This means for example, a head bake can be applied to a mesh head, an upper body to the mesh upper body faces, etc.  It does not at this point allow for more finely tuned applications – such as an individual jacket layer, or just to the hands.

Environment Enhancement Project (EEP)

Project Summary

A set of environmental enhancements involving simulator and viewer changes, and includes some infrastructure updates.

Current Progress

Rider is still engaged on infrastructure work, which he hopes to complete Soon ^TM. Once that is done, he’ll complete the work on assets in inventory.

Custom Pivot Points

Work is being carried out to provide custom pivot points for mesh objects (see BUG-37617). This will most likely appear in a Maintenance RC viewer, once ready. The exactly implementation details weren’t clear at the meeting; it’s believed the data for the pivot point is coming from the corresponding data for the highest LOD in the uploaded .DAE file. However, the pivot point must be inside the bounding box of the object, and remains the centre of the object. Steps will also be taken to prevent pivot points placed outside of the bounding box simply causing the bounding box to increase in size (as did happen in a mesh uploader error), as this tends to both increase the objects LI by a factor of at least 2, and break the associated LODs.

Other Items

Texture Caching

Work continues on trying to improve texture caching in the viewer – which has already been an educational process for the Lab. There is nothing on the horizon yet in terms of updates for the viewer, as the work is not seen as a high priority when compared to other projects. However, there is a belief that there is room for “dramatic improvement” in the way textures are managed.

Permissions System

The question was asked if there are any plans to re-work the Second Life permissions system to be more supply chain driven, as is planned for Sansar. Short answer: there are no current plans to overhaul the permissions system simply because it is so complex. Currently the only thing being considered with permissions is extending them to allow scripted permission changes (formerly known as mod keys), which are seen as important for enhancing Animesh capabilities. However, here are current no time frame in when / if these will be implemented.

Firestorm RenderVolumeLODFactor Setting / Object LOD Confusion

Some appear confused by the recent RenderVolumeLODFactor behaviour change (see here) and what it is doing, believing it is part of a change to object LODs in Second Life.

Essentially, the Firestorm update is purely a viewer-side change only, intended to encourage users not to use over-the-top settings in their viewer which can affect performance, because changes to this value are globally applied, affecting all objects within the viewer’s field of view, not just a specific wearable or object.

However, this change does not mark any kind of change to the object’s LOD data held on the servers (the content isn’t being “changed” in any way on the back-end); it purely alters the way content is rendered by the viewer in terms of which LOD model of the object it uses.

Date of Next Meeting

There will be a CCUG meeting on Thursday, April 5th, as the normal LL internal meeting has been postponed a week.

The following notes are primarily taken from the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting, held on  Thursday, March 22nd, 2018 at 13:00 SLT. For the purposes of Animesh testing, the meetings have relocated to the Animesh4 region on Aditi, the beta grid – look for the seating area towards the middle of the region. The meeting is chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, etc, are usually available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

There is no video to accompany this update, notes are taken from my own audio recording of the meeting.

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. The project is in two phases:

• The current work to update the baking service to support 1024×1024 textures on avatar meshes.
• An intended follow-on project to actually support baking textures onto avatar mesh surfaces (and potentially other mesh objects as well). This has yet to fully defined in terms of implementation and when it might be slotted into SL development time frames.

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

It is important to note that this project is still in its preliminary stages. Any release of a project viewer (see below) doesn’t mark the end of the project, but rather the start of initial testing and an opportunity for creators to have input into the project.

Project Viewer

• QA testing revealed a number of bugs which need to be addressed before the project viewer reaches public consumption.

EEP and Atmospheric Shaders Work

Environment Enhancement Project (EEP) 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 – the latter comprising multiple Sky and Water) that can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others.
• Experience-based environment functions
• An extended day cycle (e.g a 24/7 cycle) and extended environmental parameters.

This work involves simulator and viewer changes, and includes some infrastructure updates.

Current status: Rider Linden is working on some internal fixes for EEP which should hopefully move it closer to public visibility, and there is some more infrastructure work to be done.

Atmospheric Shaders Work

A project to revamp the viewer’s atmospheric shaders and rendering.

Current status: Graham Linden indicated “good stuff” is in the works, but nothing he can publicly report on as yet.

Animesh Project

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.

In short, an Animesh object:

• Can be any object (generally rigged / skinned mesh) which and contains the necessary animations and controlling scripts in its own inventory  (Contents tab of the Build floater) required for it to animate itself.
• Can be a single mesh object or a linkset of objects (link them first, then set them to Animated Mesh via the Build floater > Features).
• Has been flagged as and Animesh object in the project viewer, and so has an avatar skeleton associated with it.
• Can use many existing animations.
• Will not support its own attachments in the initial release.
• Will not initially include the notion of a body shape (see below).

Resources

• Animesh User Guide
• Animesh test content
• Animesh LSL methods:
  • llStartObjectAnimation
  • llStopObjectAnimation
  • llGetObjectAnimationNames
• Animesh feedback thread
• JIRA filter for Animesh

Current Progress

Vir continues to work on performance profiles, and is “pretty close” to having something for Land Impact, with a formula under evacuation. Among the changes, this formula calculates scaling differently, and Vir notes there are a number of corner cases which need to be dealt with. The tri count cap will also be finalised alongside the updated LI formula.

Rigged Mesh Level of Detail / Bounding Box Issues

Beq Janus has reported on issues with rigged mesh LOD issues related to the avatar bounding box. Essentially, attachments on avatars swap their LOD models as if they were scaled to the overall avatar Bounding Box. Some creators, deliberately or otherwise, force the bounding box to be far larger than is required, which then creates problems

For example, if an avatar bounding box is forced to 15 metres on a side, any rigged object worn by that avatar will swap LODs as if it were 15 metres in size, no matter how small, forcing viewers around it to use its highest LOD model unnecessarily (see BUG-214736 for more).

Vir Linden agreed that this is a problem, and that forcing abnormally large avatar bounding boxes is undesirable. In some places, the Lab tries to use the rigged mesh wireframe as the basis for the bounding box, which is seen as a little more robust as it is looking directly at the triangle data, rather than working off of the avatar itself – and this is the approach being considered with Animesh to avoid similar issues with Animesh rigged mesh failing to correctly LOD in the viewer – however, so believe the use of such static data is “meaningless”.

JIRA “Accepted” Status

The “Accepted” status on the JIRA still causes some confusion. In brief:

• For BUG reports, Accepted tends to mean the Lab have imported the report for evaluation / agree to there being a bug and will look to fix the issue. When it is addressed is dependent on a number of factors (e.g. severity of the issue).
• For feature requests, Accepted means the Lab is sufficiently interested in the idea to want to track it. It does not mean the idea will be implemented, either in whole or in part. Whether it is implemented in whole or in part again depends on a number of factors (how it sits within the current workflow, whether or not it is related to work being carried out and can be added to it; whether it is something which might be implemented alongside of upcoming work; whether it is better to hold off until it and other ideas like it can be implemented together as a project, etc.).

Return of Last Names

The last portion of the meeting focused on the recent blog post from Linden Lab indicating Last Names would be returning to Second Life. Given the level of interest in this project, I’ve written a separate update on this section of the discussion. See:  The return of Second Life Last Names – update with audio.

In Brief

• 

  Transparency shadow casting from rigged items: there is an issue with rigged / static meshes using transparencies (blended or masked), which causes shadows cast by them to render incorrectly (shadow rendering conforms only to the geometry silhouette). Graham Linden indicated that this is something the Lab plans to fix, but the work has yet to be scheduled.

• Switching mesh asset on the same prim root: this used to be supported via script, but was removed due to people using it to create flipbook style animations which could adversely affect performance. It’s been suggested that it could offer an alternative to performance-impacting alpha swapping on meshes; however, the Lab’s view is that while alpha swapping is performance impacting, switching entire mesh assets would still be more of a performance hit, as the latter requires all of the geometry data associated with the mesh to be rebuilt every time.