Tag: SL News

Mesh deformer and standard sizes: Qarl speaks

Posted on by Inara Pey

There has been much in the way of heated debate on the subject of the mesh parametric deformer and standard sizes for avatars of late. So much so that in this week’s Metareality podcast, Kimberly Winnington (Gianna Borgnine in SL), deformer coder Karl Stiefvater (Qarl Fizz in SL) and in-world content creator Cathy Foil discussed the debate at some length and touched on other aspects of the deformer project.

The following is a summary of the core aspects of the discussion, presented in the panelist’s own words. My thanks to Kimberly for allowing me to produce this piece.

[2:10] Kimberly Winnington (KW): As it stands now, mesh items have to be built to the default avatars like the Ruth Avatar and then be deformed.

[2:32] Karl Stiefvater (KS): There’s a slight difference between Ruth, the actual Ruth – a lot of people call different shapes “Ruth”,  so that’s a bad term to use – and the important shape, the one that you get when you say, “Hey, I want to do a shape!” and you don’t touch any of the other dials … and I call that the “default shape”.

[2:58]  KW: So as it is now, clothing has to be built to that default shape before it can be deformed.

[3:04] KS: Right.

[3:05] KW: And it’s been suggested it should … that group of things like the default avatar should include some sort of standard size as well, even though that’s not officially a feature at this time.

[3:22] KS: That is correct. The rationale there is the deformer isn’t perfect and if you start with a shape that’s closer to your end shape before you actually tweak it, you can get superior results … Even if the deformer worked perfectly, when you design a shirt with a floral print … and you put it on someone with their body weight turned all the way up … the floral print is going to be distorted … So with the new system, the artist could say, “I’m going to repaint that floral print so it doesn’t get stretched out.”

[4:19] KW: There’s this fight going on. Emma Gilmore, also known as Elie Spot – she is of course on the standard sizing side, she was one of the people who worked with a bunch of other designers and came up with the standard sizes. And then I guess on the other side of the argument is Maxwell Graf … he’s on the side that the standard sizing is a marketing ploy and is awful and we shouldn’t even tolerate its existence. And I guess I’m somewhere in the middle of those two arguments on the basis I kind of agree with the standard sizing – not as the official solution because I don’t want to change my avatar …  so I’m all for the deformer and do not want to have standard sizing as the only solution.  However, I would have a much better chance of fitting into something without a lot of stretching if I stretched from a size that was closer to my avatar than the default avatar …  But I still think that it’s at least a solution that should be discussed; where the starting-off point for the deformer should maybe be closer to a standard size.

[6:56] KS: It sounds like you and I are in agreement …

[7:15] KW: The other thing that came up was … Emma was talking to you about possibly having a way they could convert current meshes without having to re-upload, and you had suggested to her that she post on the JIRA and get some feedback from some other people. So the problem became she posted on the JIRA and she posted a Plurk about both these issues. like let’s discuss where we should start from and lets talk about whether we should be re-uploading or converting and how should we do that … So it started this huge fiasco where everybody kind-of attacked her both on the JIRA and totally all over Plurk, and were like, “you’re wrong, you shouldn’t be posting here…” … I actually agree with her and think she has a good point; but whether you agree with her or not, the topics she brought up are important for us to discuss as a community, especially designers and people who want to wear mesh. Because once the thing is final – you know how things go in Second Life; it will come out and everyone will be unhappy with it but it will be too late to do anything about it. So you have to do it now …

[9:59] KS: The deformer isn’t perfect. There are problems and what she’s proposing … is an extension … so it doesn’t take anything away from what you had before; it’s just adding new features. So how can you hate something that has everything you want but has this extra thing that somebody else wants? How does that engender white-hot hatred? I don’t understand.

[10:36] KW: I think there’s two things. I think the first on is not understanding that it works in collaboration with the deformer. So I think there’s a lot of people…they hear “standard sizing” and they are automatically like, “No”, without understanding that it’s not going to work like standard sizing is now … that you have to fit to that standard size.  This is just in collaboration with the deformer, and I almost want to name it something else….

[11:03] KS: How about “alternate bases”? … Alternate bases, everyone.

[11:14] KW: The other thing that comes up is that a lot of people feel like that if we make a solution that fits … then Linden Lab will stop trying to think about trying to create a new overall avatar mesh.

Karl Stiefvater (Qarl Fizz)

[11:47] KS: I don’t thing that we’ve forced them to do anything ever … They’ve never given in, ever! So I don’t see that as a smart strategy … One thing I want to add to this, tho, is this other aspect  that I don’t think anybody knows about. And that is, Linden Lab, internally, is … struggling with a question that is probably going to delay the deformer even more. And that is, they don’t know if they like the default avatar as the base. They think there might be a better base. … Then the question is, so how do you pick a better base? Some of them are suggesting … that adding curves is easier than removing curves, so if the base was something that had no boobs, that had no curves or shapes whatsoever, that might perform better … But they have no system in mind for making this call. So this is like one of those objections that can never be necessarily resolved, which is very dangerous for the project. So one of the things I like about this alternate bases idea is it neutralises this potential problem, because if they think there is a better base avatar, we can just add it later. As soon as they decide what that perfect base is, we’ll just add it to the list. So it’s beneficial for reasons completely unrelated to the whole fight right now, so that’s something to keep in mind. That’s mainly why I’m sort-of leaning this way … because it kills two birds, and one of these birds is otherwise potentially project destroying.

[14:23] Cathy Foil (CF): Is it possible to have the content creators load-up their own custom bases for their mesh? Would that be possible? Or would they have to create their own blend shapes so they work with the sliders?

[14:40] KS: No … they would have to use the existing shapes, the existing parameters. But they could specify their own set of parameters; that’s doable, but I’m a little bit afraid that that’s over-designed … so I think that maybe down the road that’s a good option, but I think for right now just a set … just six or seven different bases….

[15:16] CF: I did have a wackadoodle idea I wanted to put forward. I know it’s probably way too late in the development … right now you have the avatar mesh is driving the deformer of the mesh clothing, and I thought of the idea of having “deformer underwear” so to speak,  an invisible mesh that you wear so that the avatar’s mesh deforms the underwear but then the underwear deforms the clothing mesh … so that the designers could create custom underwear that would only fit over certain parts of the avatar if they wanted or they could have more vertices in the underwear that would spread out the deformer so that they would deform the clothing mesh maybe a little bit more evenly.

[16:08] KS: That’s a clever idea … but no it’s too late for that! [laughs] But that’s interesting and that could definitely be in version 2 … Then clothing could work on avatars that are completely alien, you know, something you couldn’t dial around … like an elephant .. you could create an elephant avatar and then your hoodie or your dress would fit…

From here, the discussion moved out to talk about design techniques before moving on to the remaining topics of the podcast. For those interested in the mesh deformer and the ongoing debate, I thoroughly recommend listing to the podcast in its entirety, which also includes issues such as DMCA, copyrights and a discussion about the use and impact of the SL Marketplace.

Related Links

End of the road for the SL Solution Provider Programme

Posted on by Inara Pey

Tateru brings word that Linden Lab have e-mailed those involved with the Second Life Solution Provider Programme to inform them it will be shut down at the end of May 2012.

With the closure, the current Solution Provider directory will be moved to a new wiki page, where information will be presented in a “shortened version” of the directory and which Solution Providers will be able to maintain themselves.

The e-mail from Linden Lab itself reads:

Dear Solution Providers,

Thank you for your participation in the Solution Provider program. As of May 31, 2012 Linden Lab will be officially ending the Solution Provider program.

As part of the program’s closure, we will do the following: 

  • Replace the current Solution Provider Directory with a shortened version on the Second Life wiki (more information on the modified Directory below).
  • Close the SLDev group and in-world region.
  • Remove all Solution Provider program related wiki pages on secondlife.wiki.com [sic*].

As of May 31, a modified version of the Directory will be located on the Second Life wiki. The direct link will be sent out closer to the 31st. It will include the name of your company (with a link to your company’s website), services provided, country/countries where you work, languages, and company description. All the above information is taken directly from your current listing. Once live, you will be able to modify your listing by logging onto the Second Life wiki.

It has been a pleasure working with and getting to know so many of you over the past 4 years. I wish you all the best in your endeavours within and outside of Second Life.

Regards, 
Madhavi Linden

The news is unsurprising in some respects: the directory as it stands appears to be largely stagnant, and the last remnant of the secondlifegid.net Technology Programmes pages (which otherwise resolve back to people’s SL dashboards), and many of the case studies listed within the pages no longer exist in-world. This reflects the fact that the directory does not lend itself to easy update in its present form, and has grown increasingly stale since the lab shifted its focus away from real world business use of Second Life in 2010 to concentrate on the product as a consumer platform.

Similarly, the SLDev group has been largely ignored over the last three years, with much of what used to occur within it having been shifted to mailing lists such as the open-source developer’s mailing list. These mailing lists will not be impacted by the close of the SLDev group.

*As we know, the SL wiki URL is in fact wiki.secondlife.com.

With thanks to Tateru Nino

Kev Sweetwater passes away

Posted on by Inara Pey

Daniel Voyager brings sad news that Second Life resident Kev Sweetwater has passed away in real life. He was 35.

Active within Second Life since 2008, Kev was heavily involved in BURN2, the Department of Public Works and SL8B, serving as a core team lead in all three, as well as being an advisor to the LEA.

A special commemoration and celebration of Kev’s SL life will be held on Saturday May 19th at the Burning Man Deep Hole region, from 18:00 through 21:00 SLT. All those who knew him, or who wish to remember his contributions to Second Life are invited to attend, memorials may be made to standup2cancer.org.

In addition, a photo memorial  to Kev is being arranged: those wishing to contribute Second Life snapshots are asked to contact Marianne McCann in-world.

Condolences are offered to Kev’s family, and all who knew him in Second Life.

Given Daniel and Kev were close friends, I would ask that you leave messages of sympathy on Daniel’s blog as a mark of respect of their friendship and Daniel’s loss. Comments are therefore closed here. Thank you. 

Links

Linden Lab roll-out Region Idling

Posted on by Inara Pey

Simon Linden has posted to the Server topic area of the technology forum about a new SL server feature, “region idling” which commences today, Wednesday 16th May.

This will see those regions that do not have any avatars either in them or camming into them to lower their frame rates and script processing, thus reducing their load on their host CPU. This should in turn improve the performance of the other regions running on the same hardware.

The idling itself should be entirely transparent to users, with the region immediately returning to “full speed” should anyone enter the region or cam into it. However, Simon does warn of a possible caveat to the transparency:

We expect this feature to be totally transparent to users. Residents will not see or be on regions that are idling. Scripts, however, may observe the effect if they are using the llGetRegionTimeDilation() function, and may require fixing.

There are some additional points to note with this capability, which are addressed in an FAQ also posted to the forum.  These include:

  • Regions are not turned off or shut down. They merely run at a slower frame rate when nobody is there. They will appear exactly the same way as before in search, the world map and other Second Life features
  • Region idling cannot be manually disabled for a region
  • Any scripts that use LSL network functions will suspend region idling for a short period of time to allow them to function normally.  This will allow scripts that connect to outside services via email, http and xmlrpc to run as expected.

The roll-out of the function will commence with the Blue Steel release channel, and will then be progressively rolled-out to the rest of the grid in the coming weeks. Anyone suspecting region idling is having an adverse effect on their region is requested to file a JIRA (no specific project given), providing clear information on the problem and the exact times it happened.

Related Links

Local Textures: coming to a Viewer near you

Posted on by Inara Pey

Update 14th May: My thanks to Oz Linden for pointing out that if you apply a Local Texture in-world, and then modify the original image file in a suitable editing tool and save it again, the viewer picks up the change and automatically applies it in-world (see Comments). I’ve also clarified that Local Textures can be used for clothing and skins within the text of this article.

Local Textures is a means by which textures stored on your computer can be applied to in-world objects on a temporary basis, allowing you to judge their suitability for use prior to uploading.

In this, it combines functionality currently found in many third-party Viewers (TPVs) in the form of the Local Bitmap Browser, with the added capability of being able to apply a selected texture directly to an object in-world within your own world-View.

The option, contributed by Vaalith Jinn, the originator of the Local Textures Bitmap, has been available within a number of recent Development builds of the official Viewer, and is now available in the latest Beta release (255742), so expect to see it in a mainstream release very shortly. (It should also be noted that the option is already available in both Dolphin and Niran’s Viewer.)

Using Local Textures

Local Textures is accessed from the Texture tab of the Build floater:

Texture picker: note the Local radio button (circled)

Note that there are now two new radio buttons on the Texture Picker itself – Inventory and Local. The former will, naturally, allow you to browse the textures within your SL inventory as we’re all familiar to doing.

Clicking on the Local option, however will change the Picker to display the following:

Local texture panel

This contains three new buttons, described below.

  • Add:  Opens a window allowing you to browse your hard drive(s) to find textures.
    • An individual texture can be selected by double left-clicking on it or by left-clicking once on it and then clicking OPEN
    • Multiple textures within a folder can be selected using either SHIFT-left-click or CTRL-left-click (which can also be used to de-select individual items from a multiple selection
    • Selected items are added to the list panel to the right of the buttons
    • You can browse as many folders as you wish and add items to your list, but you cannot select folders themselves
  • Remove: (only available if a texture is selected in the list panel) removes an unwanted texture from the list
  • Upload: (only available if a texture is selected in the list panel) will open the usual texture upload panel, allowing you to upload the selected texture to your inventory with the usual L$10 fee and use it from there. Note that bulk uploads are not supported from the button.

When you have added one or more textures to the list panel, clicking on an individual texture within the list will apply it to the selected object / object face. Note that as these are only local file associations, the applied texture will only be visible to you; no-one else will see the texture (the object/face will remain untextured in their view).

Applying a local texture – only visible in your own world view

Textures added to the list panel will remain available to you until such time as you log-out of Second Life, at which point this list will be emptied.

Note that clothing and skins can be tested in the same way – just use the Edit Appearance floater and the New Clothes / New Skins options.

Local Textures and Temporary Textures

Local Textures might also sound like the Temporary Textures upload capability also found in many TPVs, but there are notable differences:

  • Temporary textures appear in your inventory, usually with the prefix “temp” for the duration of your current session in SL, then they are lost
  • Temporary textures can be see in-world by people other than yourself; this makes it ideal for things like collaborative building, where joint decisions need to be made prior to the selection and upload of textures

There have been rumours that LL are looking to “break” temporary texture uploads with the release of Local Textures. This does not appear to be the case at present; LL have so far given TPV developers no indication that they expect to see Temporary Textures removed from Viewers. Certainly, Dolphin is running with both Temporary Texture uploads and Local Texture; providing LL do not indicate they have a problem with this, it is likely that other TPVs will opt to do the same.

However, it might be worth noting that Temporary Textures do rely on using a feature in a manner in which it is not intended to be used, and which is specifically related to avatar baking. LL are currently looking into ways in which to make avatar baking more robust and less prone to problems such as bake fail (when your avatar fails to rez correctly). One of the options being considered in this regard is moving the bake process server-side.

If this does indeed happen in the future (and it is not a trivial change), then it may result in Temporary Texture uploads being “broken”; but again it is important to emphasise that no actually decision on how to deal with avatar bake issues has yet been taken.

In the meantime, expect to see Local Textures in your preferred Viewer in the near future!

With thanks to Innula Zenovka for raising my awareness that Local Textures had reached the Beta Viewer (forum post), and to Latif Khalifa  and Trinity Dejavu for input to this piece)

ETA contributor’s detail, supplied by Mobius Ryba. 

Further call for deformer assistance: it’s needed, but don’t panic!

Posted on by Inara Pey

Last week Oz put out a call for help with testing the Mesh Parametric Deformer than Qarl Fizz has been developing, and which is now available in a Project Viewer (as well as some TPVs).

The response to that call has been somewhat slow, prompting Oz to pass a further comment on the JIRA related to the deformer (STORM-1716):

Oz Linden added a comment – 08/May/12 8:59 AM

Perhaps this issue really isn’t all that important, or worth the trouble to integrate.

So far, only one designer has responded with one test garment.

Let me be clear – the lack of test material is a major blocker for testing, and therefore accepting, this proposed feature. If you want it, step up and do it soon.

The comment has been reported elsewhere (and remarked upon in the comments following my original piece on the call), and has caused some consternation.

However before people start taking Oz’s comment to heart as a sign that he or LL want to “kill” or “drop” the deformer, I spoke to Oz directly on the matter after reading the comment and he wryly admitted that it was intended as an attention-grabber and that, indeed, several more mesh designers have come forward indicating that they wish to engage in the testing as a result. When I asked him about the shock value of the comment, he replied, “Yeah, it was certainly intentional, and I would not have actually dropped it. But it is true that it would have taken far, far longer (months maybe).”

So does this mean we should ignore the underlying call for help?

No – we just shouldn’t panic about the deformer being dropped. Help is still needed. So, if you are a mesh clothing designer, or know of a mesh clothing designer, then please consider getting involved in the work / asking them to get involved in the work.

Related Links