Tag: Mesh Deformer

SL Project news week 44/3: mesh deformer

Posted on by Inara Pey

Testing is continuing with the latest release of the Mesh Deformer project viewer, which can be used to deform mesh items to either default or custom human shapes. While the pool of test items remains small, people appear to be testing using their own creations, with at least some feedback being given to the JIRA (STORM-1716), which remains open to comment. If you are testing the deformer using the latest project viewer, please be sure to provide feedback on your results – be they with default shapes or custom shapes – to the JIRA.

Some problems with breast fittings might be down to an incompatibility between Avastar and the viewer, which is currently being corrected

Most of the results obtained to date appear to be satisfactory, although some issues still remain with custom shapes. Darien Caldwell, working with Gaia Clary, has identified one issue which exists specifically with the Avastar add-in for Blender co-produced by Gaia.

Avastar is a Blender add-on for Second Life mesh creators and animators which provides a wide range of capabilities, including (for mesh creation): SL shape import into Blender, SL shape sliders support, support for attachment bones, and so on.

The issue has been that Avastar’s sliders have been based on a scale of 1-100, whereas the viewer’s sliders operate on a scale of 0-100 , leading to some scale miscalculations within Avastar which in turn have led to issues with mesh fitting over body parts such as breasts. According to Darien Caldwell, she and Gaia now have this “pretty well nailed” and an update to correct Avastar will apparently be out shortly (Update: please see Magus Freston’s comments at the end of this article).

This still leaves the broader deformation issue, as reported recently, which is still being looked into, and awaiting some feedback from Qarl.

Other issues outside of these which have arisen with the deformer have been largely the result of unrealistic expectations – that it will, for example, mimic facial morphs or hand movements closely or some changes to feet. However, in these situations, it is important to remember that the deformer was never developed to deal with these, as it works off the avatar’s bone structure, and facial features and hands don not have any bone structure within the avatar associated with them.

Time Frame for the Deformer

While progress with the deformer continues to look good, there remains no ETA as to when the code will appear in the release version of the official SL viewer.

The major reason for this is the ongoing problems with the Beta release channel for the viewer (of which more in the next update for this week!). As it stands, the deformer is positioned roughly at the back of the queue of releases which are being held as LL work to resolve the current crash issues with the Beta viewer. This means that, at least until the Beta issues are resolved, there is no official ETA for the deformer code reaching the release viewer. However, the latest revisions are starting to be incorporated into some TPVs.

In the meantime, and if you have been testing the project viewer, please remember to give feedback via the JIRA.

Performance Concern

While it is not actually an issue with the deformer per se, commenting at the Content Creation User Group on Monday 29th October, Siana Gearz highlighted a potential problem with mesh clothing utilising the deformer and avatar physics.

The concern is that the deformer uses the same morph-based schema as is used by the avatar physics system. This means that the GPU has to do a lot of additional calculations for the polygons in an item of mesh clothing to simulate movement (such as “bouncing boobs”) when avatar physics are in use. This obviously leads to a performance hit. So long as the polygon count in clothing is kept low, the impact is minimal, but the concern is that clothing build using high polygon counts to provide detail could have a larger impact on the viewer.

One possible way for this to be avoided, should it become an issue, is for clothing makers to optimise their mesh clothing with lower poly counts – and the forthcoming materials processing capabilities should go a long way towards helping with this.

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SL project news week 43/3: viewer status updates

Posted on by Inara Pey

SL Beta Viewer

A new Beta version of the beta viewer was release on the 24/25th, (3.4.1.266251), which has more-or-less the same visible changes as the previous release, except that tcmalloc has been re-enabled as LL seek to determine whether stability issues have been improved or not. However, given the high crash rates experienced with the previous release, Oz Linden is requesting people take time out to give the beta a run. Speaking at the OpenDev meeting on Thursday 25th October, he said, “Run the beta viewer a lot. We think this one will be good, but it takes a lot of usage to find that out and things won’t get unstuck until we do.”

Tcmalloc has been re-enabled with the latest beta release, and this probably means that those using cloud storage such as Microsoft Skydrive and others (such as Cloud Drive – see FIRE-7520 – are liable to encounter issues using it.

The intent at LL still appears to be the complete disabling of Tcmalloc from the viewer code, however, the attempts to do so to date have only met with partial success – the “fix” for MS Skydrive, for example, apparently only worked for some instances, not all.

Commenting on the situation at the OpenDev meeting, Oz said that efforts to completely disable tcmalloc are “taking too long”. As a result, and to prevent work with tcmalloc from adversely affecting attempts to stabilise the viewer, the decision has been taken to move the work on tcmalloc to a separate branch of the viewer code for the time being, with efforts on the beta branch focusing on stability.

In the meantime, code releases remain blocked, pending confirmation the beta release has improved on previous crash rates (which were around 14%).

Mesh Deformer Viewer

As reported in part 2 of this week’s project news, a new version of the Mesh Deformer project viewer appeared over the weekend – 3.4.1.266081, dated October 20th. In addition, Darien Caldwell has made updates to the SL wiki page on the avatar shape XML format which are related to the project.

The updated shape selection options for mesh clothing and human shapes in the mesh upload floater, as seen in the latest version of the Mesh Deformer project viewer

The current thinking is at present that the latest version of the viewer requires wider testing, so if you are involved in mesh clothing / shape creation (humanoid shapes, remember), then you might want to download the viewer and try it yourself. Commenting on the JIRA (STORM-1716), Darien notes:

If people could provide feedback on the use of the custom base shape part specifically, that would be great.

Keep in mind the potential bone length problems outlined above: do these affect your creations negatively when used with custom base shapes?

And is the potential workaround of setting bone lengths to the defaults a problem for your workflow?

Those and any other issues, please post. Thanks 

Initial feedback from those who have tried the viewer have been largely positive, although the issue with custom shapes and certain sliders, as previously reported in these pages (and on the JIRA) remain. Darien has been looking a little deeper into the latter issue, which affects a total of eleven shape sliders, and seems to have found the potential cause:

“The bone length deformation seems to be performed in the function LLRiggedVolume::update(). The deformer is doing its processing before this is reached, and when creating the custom base shape, it’s never run on that custom base shape. So the bone length deformations aren’t included.”

Instead, the current  deformer code assumes that all joints in a shape have the same scale, and that the scale is uniform in all axes. This is fine for a standard shape, but doesn’t work so well with custom shape forms, and wouldn’t work were scaled bones within avatar shapes ever to come about. The solution for this issue is unclear; the current plan is for Darien to write-up her findings for LL, so that someone there can look into the code as well.

The problem: bone length deformation is performed outside of the deformer code, which in turn appears to assume that all shapes use the same, uniform scale for joints. When working with a default shape, neither of these issues present themselves in obvious ways. When working with custom shapes, however, the problems become very evident. In this image a tall, then shape is use to generate an upper body mesh (flesh toned). When uploaded and applied to the shape itself (shown in black), the discrepancies become clear. Had the mesh been correctly deformed according to the shape data, it should more closely match the original shape

Group Services Project Viewer

Baker Linden’s server-side Group Services code for handling very large in-world groups was rolled out to four regions on the main grid on the 25th October, as reported here. However, due to the issues with the beta viewer code as reported above, testing of the new code requires the Group Service project viewer. If you do manage any group(s) with more than 10K members, you may wish to download the project viewer and give things a test on the nominated regions (see link above).

The viewer is available in Windows, Linux and Mac flavours.

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SL project news week 43/2: SL viewer, mesh, and materials processing

Posted on by Inara Pey

SL Viewer News

Things are not looking good on the official viewer front. As previously reported, the crash rate for the 3.4.1.265898 beta release was unacceptably high when compared with the current release version.

A new beta candidate  – 3.4.1.266073 – was released late on Monday 20th October. As per usual, it will remain on the beta channel for a couple of days once released in order for LL to get a read on performance and crash rates. Some regression testing has started, with the beta code merged back to the viewer-development pipe, but work is really pending on confirming the beta code is relatively stable.

In the meantime, feature changes to the official viewer remain frozen, and even should the new beta release prove stable enough, it is going to take some time for LL to prioritize all of the pending updates (both their own project work such as the Steam updates, HTTP project, Group Services, etc., and contributed updates), start merging them into the code, testing them, and then releasing updates once more.

With regards to overall viewer stability, A series of crash fixes from Firestorm (officially viewed by Linden Lab as the most stable viewer connecting to SL) have been contributed to LL and are awaiting regression testing in order to confirm their effectiveness with the LL code.

Mesh Deformer

A new version of the Mesh Deformer project viewer appeared over the weekend – 3.4.1.266081, dated October 20th. This has the revisions Darien Caldwell has made to the uploader and custom shapes, although she is still waiting on feedback from Qarl on the matter of the sliders / bone armatures which are deformed by both the viewer and the deformer, as mentioned in part 2 of my week 42 update.

The new version should hopefully include a small bug fix when selecting the Default Male shape (which would act as if the Default female shape were selected).

Materials Processing

Materials processing: using a normal and diffuse (texture) map to generate a 3D effect on an in-world wall – coming to SL in the near future

Speaking at the OpenDev meeting on Monday 22nd October, Oz Linden indicated that the specification for the revised build floater in the viewer – needed to handle picking, rotating and offsetting normal and specular maps in the same way as can be done with textures (diffuse maps) at present.

The specification for the floater has been written in-house at LL, but the work is being undertaken for LL by a third-party viewer developer who volunteered to carry out the required work on LL’s behalf. This work will initially focus on getting a shell for the floater built, as there are a number of things that are being worked on within the viewer with regards to making parameters actually visible on surfaces.

Discussing progress at the Content Creation Improvement Informal User Group on Tuesday 23rd October, Geenz Spad outlined some more of the upcoming capabilities, as defined by the initial release specification document.

“We have normal maps with specular exponent stored in their alpha channel, specular maps will have environment masks stored in their alpha channel [so, for example, mesh won’t require seperate faces in order to have different levels of shininess on different parts of it], and for diffuse maps you’ll be able to select to some limited degree what its alpha represents (currently, none, alpha blending, alpha masking, and emissive mask).” He went on, “There’s a few additional knobs people will be able to mess with as well, such as specular exponent (combines with the normal map’s exponent map in its alpha), specular color (combines with the specular map’s color), and environment intensity (combines with the specular map’s alpha).”

However, custom environment maps – such as used with custom reflections – won’t initially be supported, as has been previously indicated. With the initial release specification now locked – but not currently open to public reading, that will occur nearer the time LL are ready to make a further announcement on materials – any additional functionality is being looked upon as being either for a further release or requiring a programmable system to implement.

Whether there will be further updates to the system remains to be seen, but it appears those involved in the project, both inside and outside of LL are reasonably confident there will be. “Materials is something that you can likely expect to receive several updates over time,” Geenz commented. “It’s something that’ll evolve from a fixed system into something a fair bit more sophisticated eventually.”

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SL project news: week 42 / 2: viewer, mesh, shining and more

Posted on by Inara Pey

SL Viewer

After hopes that the latest beta version of the viewer would prove stable enough for things to start flowing again, it turns out that its crash rate is hovering around the 14% mark, with Oz reporting that a substantial portion of the crashes, which still appear to be related to memory problems, occurring as users exit the viewer. While these may go unnoticed by users, LL still want to bring the rate down to something closer to the release viewer (which is currently 10%).

As such, further candidate version of the beta viewer is being built, which should be released on Monday 22nd October with the hope that the changes being made will do just that. However, it is fair to say that the level of optimism within the Lab that this will be the case is currently low. Until the problem is resolved, further releases of code for projects are likely to remain blocked.

This issue is now the primary delay in moving a number of projects forward, including the Baker Linden’s Group Service project, Monty Linden’s HTTP texture project, updates for the Steam link-up and a host of other internal and contributed elements.

Mesh Deformer

A revised version of Darien Caldwell’s proposed addition for arbitrary shapes in the mesh uploader for us with the deformer

Darien Caldwell has been continuing to work on getting the deformer to work with arbitrary human shapes, and has some success. She has also ben working to refine the new options on the mesh uploader to cater for custom shapes, indenting the options to make it clear that they are a part of the Deform to Avatar Shape check box item (see right). Also, and while awaiting feedback from LL, she has moved the option to export an avatar shape as an XML file from a sub-menu on the Develop Menu (DEVELOP -> AVATAR -> APPEARANCE TO XML) to the Advanced Menu on her version of the Mesh Deformer project viewer.

However, as she comments on the JIRA (STORM-1716) for the deformer, there is also a problem.

Essentially, there are certain sliders (eleven in all) associated with armature bone length, which already deform mesh without using the deformer (see her JIRA comment for the full list of sliders). When these are adjusted to create a custom shape for making mesh items, problems arise because they are then deformed by both the viewer and the deformer, leading to odd results under certain situations.

The issue appears most pronounced when working on individual body elements, such as the upper body (as defined by SL) when using a custom shape (such as when creating a jacket). However, in a “full body” mesh, the problem is somewhat less pronounced.

Deformation issue: on the left, an “upper body” flesh-tome mesh (analogous to, say, a jacket) built to a custom shape is worn on that custom shape (in black). Note the mis-match. On the right, the same mesh, but combined with lower body elements applied to the same custom avatar shape. A much closer fit

As the sliders are placed closer to their default values, the issues become less and less pronounced. Darien had suspected this might be an issue, but until she started working with shapes other than the default, she had no way of determining if a problem existed. She has also a nagging concern that a small adjustment made to the deformer code itself might be having an unforeseen impact. However, from his own understanding as to how the deformer works and when discussing the matter at a delayed OpenDev meeting on Thursday 18th October, Oz Linden agreed this was unlikely to be the case.

When using custom shapes with the “problem” armatures set closer to their defaults, the problem is still present in “upper body” meshes (l) but is somewhat less pronounced, and again is barely noticeable on a “full body” mesh (r)

Currently, and assuming I’m understanding the matter correctly, the “fix” for this problem seems to be to define a custom avatar shape in SL, then adjust the eleven “problem” sliders to their default values prior to exporting the shape data to an XML file which is used shape to create the required mesh items (body, clothing). Once the finished items has been uploaded to SL, it can be worn with the shape and the desired settings for the eleven affected sliders can then be restored with the result that the mesh should deform as expected.

Darien will be carrying out further tests on the issue prior to offering her version of the deformer for wider use.

HTTP Libraries

As a result of beta viewer issues, it’ll be a while before everyone benefits from faster texture rezzing – but work continues on related services

While the viewer side of the new texture fetch library is blocked from going further than a project viewer at the moment, Monty Linden has resumed work on the server-side of things. Commenting on this at the TPV/Dev meeting on Friday 19th October, Monty had this to say, “I’ve been working on server-side work … and as part of the next part of the HTTP work, there will be a server change, grid change. sim OS change. And I just want to let everyone know that at some point we’re going to have to put up some beta servers on the beta grid and start some testing … It will be an interesting change to the services.”

This work is related to the number of connection an agent can have open to a given service – essentially the development of a “fairness policy” with regards to service connections. The changes and the policy itself are liable to be fairly dynamic as they come into effect and LL monitor use and potential abuse and start to focus down on ensuring a reasonable balance is met. This will require extensive testing from TPVs to ensure their viewers are handling the new services correctly, whether they can operate within the policy in terms of number of retries or back-offs on a failed connection, etc., and whether they need to limit the number of connections users can manually open (where this is the case).

Other Bits

Viewer and FMOD

No major news on this since reporting it in week 41. It is still LL’s intention to do something about it, however no resource has been allocated to it as yet  – with emphasis on the “yet” from Oz Linden. One of the hold-ups here is (again) the ongoing problems with the beta viewer, which require resources and effort to resolve.

Mountain Lion Support

The the TPV/Dev meeting on Friday 19th October, Oz reported that the Lab were making “great strides” on updating their Mac support for OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion, including gatekeeper support, and that the information should be available “quite shortly”.

64-bit Builds of the Official Viewer

The subject of 64-bit one that frequently arises in relation to the official viewer, particularly when mentions is made of memory leaks and the like, and it comes up not only among users. Remarking on it in the TPV/Dev meeting, Oz Linden said, “It is a bullet we have not yet decided to bite, but at some point we’re going to have to.”

He went on to point out that LL are already approaching a point where they’ll have to build OSX versions of the viewer in both 32-, and 64-bit, and that, “At some point the cost/benefit will tip the other way.” As such, he stated that any help LL can get from TPV developers in getting the code “64-bit clean”, etc., would be welcomed. In the meantime LAA support for the viewer has been merged into the development viewer (viewer dev) and is locked behind the current issues with the beta viewer.

SL projects update week 41 / 2

Posted on by Inara Pey

This item is a follow-on from part one, published earlier this week.

More Server News

At the Thursday Beta Grid User Group meeting (Thursday October 11th), and prior to the network optimisation tests, Oskar gave further news in the  serve deploys for week 41. On Tuesday 9th October, the main channel received code previously on BlueSteel, which in keeping with Simon Linden’s comments at the Monday Sim / Server UG meeting, Oskar referred to as being, “A pretty small release, just some server crash mode fixes; stability ++.”

On Wednesday October 10th, BlueSteel and LeTigre received a fix to some database queries that were really slow when accessing really large groups (note these were not Baker Linden’s Group Services code, that is being looked at as a deployment in week 42).

Monday 16th October may see some restarts on the grid in order to shuffle some regions onto new hardware, with the servers having more and faster CPU cores, which will increase the number of simulators running on the new servers, but they’ll be running on faster CPU cores.

Interest Lists and Object Caching

The short-version update for this comes from Andrew Linden, speaking at the Server Group meeting on Friday 12th October, “I thought I’d have something working this week… it isn’t quite working right. You can see it not working on Ahern on Aditi…” (!)

Interest list changes: easing the pain of random rezzing

He went on more seriously to explain that while the new code is working correctly for the most part, and that rezzing orders should be improved / faster, there are some problems with objects which should be in view of an avatar not showing up and a major issue around teleporting into high ground.

When the latter happens, you effectively arrive “underground” (presumably at the default “ground level” for the simulator  – 21 metres in the case of unterraformed land). The simulator then calculates where you should be and moves your avatar appropriately. With the new code, this has the effect of breaking the server’s notion of the camera – where it is and what it can see – which is used to figure out what objects to send to the viewer. This means that the camera itself cannot be moved or updated.

There have been some performance tests on an older version of the code, which have been mixed, as Andrew also explained, “here were two performance tests run on an earlier version. One test (mostly empty region with about 30 avatars running around) showed a slight decrease in performance… about 5% worse. Another test (crowd of avatars NOT looking at a pile of dynamic objects behind them) showed about 40% improvement (less time spent running the interest list). So I went back to the code to try to fix the first test, and I think I’ve got something that will be as good or better all around.”

The code will also see changes as to how the camera behaves and in the resultant level of detail. Andrew is currently working on limiting the distance the camera cam be moved away from the avatar. Note this is not limiting Draw Distance, but limiting the distance the camera can be freely moved independently of the avatar. He’s considering 128 metres to be the likely range. There are two reasons for this.One is to prevent the camera wandering into regions which are more than one neighbouring region away, the other is because as the camera moves laterally, detail levels degrade, because object detail is tied to the avatar’s position (hence why, when you zoom a great distance, buildings and objects may only appear to partially rez, etc.). Under the new system, object detail will be tied to the camera, so that little degradation is experienced. However, in order for this to work, the camera must be kept within a reasonable distance of the avatar; if it is moved too far, the detail will start to degrade once more (presumably because of the volume of data the viewer is trying to handle).

Mesh Deformer

On Thursday 11th October at the Open/Dev meeting, Darien Caldwell outlined her ideas for using base shape info exported from Second Life when uploading rigged meshes.

If this works, it will essentially mean that rather than being restricted to using a default base female or male shape when uploading rigged meshes, creators will be able to download a human shape as an XML file (permissions allowing), and then specify this shape when uploading rigged meshes.  The basic code for handling the upload with specific avatar shape information has already been added to the deformer by Qarl Fizz, so Darien is focusing on the best way to use it, her work going into a fork of the existing Mesh Defromer project viewer.

Avatar shapes can currently be exported from a viewer via DEVELOP -> AVATAR -> APPEARANCE TO XML (again subject to the permissions system). This saves the avatar shape data as an XML file, which contains the settings from the appearance sliders, and which is automatically saved to your computer (generally to  C:\Users[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife\user_settings for Windows).

To associate an avatar shape .XML file with a mesh, Darien is proposing a further revision to the mesh uploader floater, and has provided an early mock-up as to how it might look.

New option to associate an avatar shape XML file with a mesh on upload (image courtesy of Darien Caldwell)

More work is required the flesh-out this idea, including, as Oz noted at the Open/Dev meeting, making the shape export option more obvious for people to use, which will more than likely see it moved out of the Develop menu, wherein it is currently nested. The .XML file itself is not suitable for use directly in most 3D modelling programmes, so how the exported data might be used with these when creating mesh items remains to be seen. nevertheless, if successful, Darien’s approach may offer a more fine-tuned solution to developing mesh clothing to a range of shapes.

Other items

Viewer and FMOD

The use of FMOD has been the subject of much discussion within the TPV/Dev meetings of late. FMOD is used within the sound system for the Viewer, and until now, Linden Lab has provided a script which pulls library files from an FMOD repository for use in viewer builds. However, following what appears to have been a clean-up of their archives, FMOD have removed the some of the legacy files required for this, as reported in JIRA OPEN-150.

Some viewer developers have already started using FMODex within their builds (e.g Singularity 1.7.0+), which also addresses issues with sound quality as well. Other TPVs are looking at possibly integrating this work into their builds.

It currently appears as though Linden Lab themselves are looking to integrate FMODex, as they see this very much as something which needs to be addressed. Speaking at the TPV/Dev meeting on Friday 5th October, Oz Linden stated: “I got around to forwarding the JIRA on that to our engineering manager for Second Life, and he agreed with me that it is something we should definitely do something about. I’m not sure what the time-table on that will be, it’s going to go into the hopper for the next ‘Things we should do something about, what priority are they compared to all the other things we should do something about’ meeting, which happens weekly.” While openAL has also been suggested as an alternative, it does seem more likely that FMODex will be adopted, something which was hinted at by Oz when talking at the Open/Dev meeting on Thursday 11th October.

Teleport Timeouts

Baker Linden has been looking into the issue of teleport timeouts, and has managed to pin down one cause as a reproducible bug. He’s not sure as to whether it can be fixed, and is currently investigating further as to why it is happening.

 

SL viewer and project mini-update

Posted on by Inara Pey

A couple of items came up at the Open Dev meeting held last night (Thursday 27th September) which are worth pushing out by way of updates to my SL Projects Update from earlier in the week.

Beta Viewer

The beta release ((3.4.1.265134) made available on September 24th is still suffering from high crash rates. Whether these are related to memory leaks or not is currently unclear, as the Lab is apparently having trouble reproducing specific causes of crashes. It is believed that tcmalloc is no longer a part of the code. As a result of the investigations, the planned frequent deploys of 3.4.1 beta releases as specified by Oz last week has been delayed. This is liable to have a knock-on effect with planning for the 3.4.2 beta releases as well, although 3.4.2 continues to roll to the development branch, with 3.4.2.265141, released on the 25th September being the current development build at the time of writing.

Mesh Deformer

Following the release of version 3.4.1.265139 on September 25th, the Mesh Deformer project viewer updated to 3.4.1.265192 on September 26th. This version has the normals calculation disabled, as it conflicted with how Blender creates sharp edges and would cause the deformer to split the edge. In addition, it appears from comments made at the Open Dev meeting that meshes uploaded prior to this version will not deform unless worn with a mesh uploaded using this version, which is intentional.

There have been further contributions to the test clothing at Hippotropolis, and Nalates Uirriah commented that some creators are placing free copies of clothing for testing up on the SL Marketplace for people to use in tests. Oz requested that anyone doing this to please explicitly state the version number of the project viewer they used to upload the mesh clothing.

At the moment, and based on contributions received, Oz is hoping to arrange for a new series of tests to be run to test the overall functionality for the deformer as it stands. Again, if you do wish to contribute clothing (uploaded using the current version of the project viewer), please refer to Oz’s original request on the subject.

Avatar Baking

Bake fail: a familiar problem for many

Avatar baking is progressing, although there is still no time-frame for any project viewer or roll-out of code on the server-side.

Currently, work is being undertaken to move the viewer’s baking code to its own library, which will be used with the new server-side baking service as well. Thus the same code will be used when changing your appearance locally, and to send your updated appearance out via the new baking service, once it has received the updates from your viewer. This aim of this work is to further eliminate some of the errors which can occur as a result of the current baking process being reliant upon viewer-side hardware, drivers, etc., wherein the same inputs can lead to different results when using different hardware.

One of the biggest benefits of this work will be removing the burden of texture caching from the simulators. With the new system, avatar texture caching will essentially be a global service: the Texture Compositing service becomes a single point-of call for avatar texture information, instead of a simulator having to contact the simulator a visiting avatar was originally baked on in order to obtain texture data.

This not only means that texture caching will be removed from the simulators once the new service is up and running smoothly, it could pave the way for other benefits as well, as Oz mentioned in the meeting, “In theory at least, that lets us introduce persistent connections and pipelined requests (don’t know if that will be in the first version or not), which could enormously speed up getting the bakes when you enter a crowded area.”

Plans for the project remain aimed towards providing TPV developers with as much advanced warning as possible prior to the new service being enabled on the main grid (Oz has been aiming at around two months’ notice), to give them time to incorporate the viewer-side code changes and assist with testing the new service. When the server-side code is ready, a project viewer will be released, and a series of regions on Aditi (the beta grid) will be updated to use the new service for testing purposes.

I have a more explicit explanation of the core aims of the new avatar baking service available in an overview of the Shining project.

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