Tag: Content Creation 2020

The following notes are taken from my audio recording of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, January 20th 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

Environment Enhancement Project

Project Summary

A set of environmental enhancements (e.g. the sky, sun, moon, clouds, and water settings) to be set region or parcel level, with support for up to 7 days per cycle and sky environments set by altitude. It uses a new set of inventory assets (Sky, Water, Day), and includes the ability to use custom Sun, Moon and cloud textures. The assets can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others, and can additionally be used in experiences.

Resources

• Project definition document.
• Project summary (this blog).
• Full EEP Documentation.

Current Status

• EEP is now viewed as a priority for release by the Lab, with work progressing on the final bug fixes on the graphics side.
• The biggest change recently made is to remove the option to disable Basic Shaders in the viewer, on account of this option causing problems when trying to address other issues.
  • It is not believed this will impact users, unless they are running really old graphics cards that do not support (the now 15-year-old) OpenGL 2.0.
  • Note this is not removing the ability to toggle ALM off / on.
• Release is still being couched in terms of being in “about a month” – so possibly early March.
• Those who use windlights for photography or within their regions are strongly urged to test the EEP RC viewer (last updated on January 9th, 2020, at the time of writing this summary).

Rendering System Improvements

Outside of EEP and in the future, the rendering team plan to spend time simplifying SL’s multiple rendering paths and options to make them easier to maintain going forward.

ARCTan

Project Summary

An attempt to re-evaluate object and avatar rendering costs to make them more reflective of the actual impact of rendering both. The overall aim is to try to correct some inherent negative incentives for creating optimised content (e.g. with regards to generating LOD models with mesh), and to update the calculations to reflect current resource constraints, rather than basing them on outdated constraints (e.g. graphics systems, network capabilities, etc).

As of January 2020 ARCTan has effectively been split:

• Immediate viewer-side changes, primarily focused on revising the Avatar Rendering Cost (ARC) calculations and providing additional viewer UI so that people can better visibility and control to seeing complexity.
• Work on providing in-world object rendering costs (LOD models, etc.) which might affect Land Impact will be handled as a later tranche of project work.
• The belief is that “good” avatar ARC values can likely be used as a computational base for these rendering calculations.

Current Status

• Testing has suggested that when an avatar attachment has a very high number of prims, there is a chance the avatar appearance does not get baked correctly – the number of prims effectively “chokes” the Bake Service.
  • The number of prims is reported as “north of 32”.
  • It appears to be the number of prims – not submeshes – in an attachment that cause the issue, but this is by no means certain.
  • It is not something that appears to have been reported via Jira, so LL is curious whether or not it is an artefact people may have witnessed.
  • A version of the internal Jira will be filed publicly by Vir for creators to look at.

Next Meeting

The next CCUG meeting will be on Thursday, February 13th, 2020.

Brief Notes from the January 29th open-Source Developer Meeting

These notes are recorded here as they may have longer-term relevance to content creation / viewer use.

• Linden Lab has identified improving the viewer UI / UX to be a high priority.
  • Initially, the focus will be on improving usability for users who are not yet familiar with the viewer (and/or SL in general).
  • A further aspect of the work will be making the number of choices available in many places smaller and making the terminology more uniform.
• The UI team is said to have “quite a list” of possible changes / improvements, some of which have come directly from TPV developers and through feature requests.
  • Additional feature requests are well – including illustrative mock-ups of idea, providing these are properly documented.
  • Please see my tutorial notes on filing SL feature requests, if required.

The following notes are taken from my audio recording of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, January 23rd 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

Environment Enhancement Project

Project Summary

A set of environmental enhancements (e.g. the sky, sun, moon, clouds, and water settings) to be set region or parcel level, with support for up to 7 days per cycle and sky environments set by altitude. It uses a new set of inventory assets (Sky, Water, Day), and includes the ability to use custom Sun, Moon and cloud textures. The assets can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others, and can additionally be used in experiences.

Resources

• Project definition document.
• Project summary (this blog).
• Full EEP Documentation.

Current Status

• EEP is now viewed as a priority for release by the Lab.
• Work is continuing on the final bug fixes on the graphics side.
• Release is anticipated by LL to be within the next month or so.
• Those who use windlights for photography or within their regions are strongly urged to test the EEP RC viewer (last updated on January 9th, 2020, at the time of writing this summary).

Project Muscadine

Project Summary

Currently: offering the means to change an Animesh size parameters via LSL.

Current Status

• Now officially on hold pending other projects / work (notably major projects such as:
  • The cloud migration project.
  • Transitioning the viewer build tools to Visual Studio 2017 and to a recent version of Xcode (OS X)
  • Completing the migration of viewer repositories from Mercurial to Github.
• The status of the project will be reviewed as other work progresses, but it is unlikely there will be any further work on Muscadine in Q1 2020 (through until the end of March).

ARCTan

Project Summary

An attempt to re-evaluate object and avatar rendering costs to make them more reflective of the actual impact of rendering both. The overall aim is to try to correct some inherent negative incentives for creating optimised content (e.g. with regards to generating LOD models with mesh), and to update the calculations to reflect current resource constraints, rather than basing them on outdated constraints (e.g. graphics systems, network capabilities, etc).

Current Status

As of January 2020 ARCTan has effectively been split:

• Immediate viewer-side changes, primarily focused on revising the Avatar Rendering Cost (ARC) calculations.
  • This work will also involve providing additional viewer UI so that people can better visibility and control to seeing complexity. For example:
    • Which attachments are taking the most rendering resources / rendering time.
    • Available options for improving local performance.
  • The aim is to provide users with information they can understand and make use of to assist in their local performance (e.g. “these red figures on your avatar attachment mean it is impacting YOUR system’s performance and slowing YOU down”, rather than jut pointing the finger elsewhere).
  • It is hoped that providing this information may also encourage creators produce better, more efficient avatar-related content.
• Work on providing a UI for in-world object rendering costs (LOD models, etc.) which might affect Land Impact has been deferred to a later tranche of project work.
• The belief is that “good” avatar ARC values can likely be used as a computational base for these rendering calculations.

In Brief

LOD product: LL is considering taking future look at how level of detail is managed by Second Life.

• GLOD is now 15+ years old and there are potentially better ways to handle things.
• Automation of some LOD options might be seen as possible.
• It is recognised that avatar LODs are not the most efficient (e.g. 2X bounding box LODs), but how they might be better managed is seen as a complex issue (e.g. avoiding situations where the viewer uses one LOD for an avatar’s body and another for the avatar’s head, so the head looks deformed compared to the body, or vice-versa).

Content Tools: interest was also expressed in hearing about the preferred tools used by creators and what creators might like to see by way of better support for said tools / file formats related to said tools and in general. The question was not asked with any specific project in mind, but simply to gain a broader understanding of what content creators use, etc.

The tools mentioned by creators at the meeting include:

• Clothing: Marvelous Designer, Blender, Maya, Substance Painter, 3D Coat.
• Other tools mentioned: Topogun, Zbrush.

PBR was also mentioned, although this would require a large-scale overall of SL’s rendering engine.

Requests were also made for:

• Better handling of sub-meshes during the upload process (e.g. consistent linking between different uploads of the same multi-part mesh).
• Ability for mesh instance recognition (e.g. if a specific sub-mesh is repeatedly used in a build, then it should be uploaded only one and instanced across the build) – or at least the viewer to be able t instance sub-mesh elements when rendering.

 

The following notes are taken from my audio recording of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, January 9th 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

Environment Enhancement Project

Project Summary

A set of environmental enhancements (e.g. the sky, sun, moon, clouds, and water settings) to be set region or parcel level, with support for up to 7 days per cycle and sky environments set by altitude. It uses a new set of inventory assets (Sky, Water, Day), and includes the ability to use custom Sun, Moon and cloud textures. The assets can be stored in inventory and traded through the Marketplace / exchanged with others, and can additionally be used in experiences.

Due to performance issues, the initial implementation of EEP will now likely not include certain atmospherics such as crepuscular rays (“God rays”).

Resources

• Project definition document.
• Project summary (this blog).
• Full EEP Documentation.

Current Status

• The EEP RC viewer updated to version 6.4.0.534193 on Thursday, January 9th.
• Bug fixing continues, notably around alpha rendering issues.
• It is believed there are about a dozen remaining issues to be dealt with before EEP may be ready for formal release.

Pathfinding

First introduced in 2012 (and developed over the following year), Pathfinding was intended to provide a means for more interactive non-player characters (NPCs) in Second Life. Unfortunately, the implementation of the system proved to be so cumbersome (and leaving aside some of the incorrect perceptions about Pathfinding on the part of land holders), the it has never really seen that much use in Second Life.

With the arrival of Animesh, there has been renewed interest in using Pathfinding in conjunction with Animesh characters, but again, the current implementation is proving a bottleneck (e.g. highlighting / indicating “walkable” areas in the viewer; whether the navmesh is actually visible; the effort required to Pathfinding, etc.).

• A forum thread highlights the issue, and it has been suggested that if a Jira can be raised highlighting the specific problems, it might be something the Lab could take a look at to try to improve some of the visualisation issues within the viewer (Navmesh visibility, etc.).
• However, a broader pass at improving / overhauling Pathfinding is not on the Lab’s current road map for SL.

Pathfinding Resources

• SL wiki Pathfinding Introduction.
• SL wiki Pathfinding Tool in the Viewer.
• SL wiki Pathfinding LSL functions.
• SL wiki Pathfinding Quck Start Guide.
• This blog: Pathfinding overview (2012).
• This blog: Pathfinding – Playing Inside Buildings (2012).

In Brief

IP rights, UV Maps and “working copies”: there has been recent discussion on the forums, through various user groups (notably Governance, which I’ve been unable to attend for the last couple of months due to RL) concerning IP rights and things like mesh VW maps, compatibility, weight painting etc. The questions have arisen of late due to a mesh appearing on the Marketplace that achieves compatibility with all the other meshes of the same nature by providing amazingly close replicas of them.

Currently, the primary course of response to concerns over potential infringement – imperfect is it may appear to be where this issue may be more esoteric in nature, given that the meshes in question all tend to use things like UV maps derived from originals supplied by Linden Lab – is for a creator with concerns over infringement to file an DMCA complaint with LL.

BOM take-up: Bakes On Mesh take-up is seen as being a little slow. Some mesh body / head makers have yet to fully adopt BOM flagging on their products for example (so while Maitreya support BOM on their current body via a HUD, the body still has some 800 individual mesh elements that the viewer needs to handle, compared to the (roughly) less-than-fifty used by the Slink Redux (BOM) body). Also, there are continued concerns about BOM’s ease-of-use when compared with the use of HUD-based applier systems. While the latter can be more resource-intensive, the form is seen as requiring better scripted tools and / or better inventory visualisation mechanisms (even better base alpha support) in order to be more attractive to users.

Next CCUG meeting: Thursday, January 23rd.