Rusalka Writer

Just ending three weeks of travel and trying to catch up to what's been going on with mesh. Looks rather dodgy, but I'm starting to understand some things I've been hearing at the mesh meetings for the last year from the Lindens about mesh's role in building, with a curious emphasis on using mesh for "architectural details." It now sounds like we were being told in subtle ways that building- or tree-sized mesh was not going to be part of the future. You could have mesh gargoyles on a prim cathedral, but not a mesh cathedral. I spent a considerable amount of time this spring building my RL house in mesh. Now I'm thinking it will be a template against which I'll have to build the house again in prims. I won't have the prim count on any future piece of land to support the house in mesh. A very strange result, not one I expected a year ago, and rather tragic. And now SL offers a range of non-human avatars that fill the range of mesh avatars many of us hoped to produce and sell? As a mesh creator and would-be mesh business owner, I'm not feeling the love. As a sculpty-maker, all is right in my world.

Ah, SL jewelry. Lag for objects that cannot be seen if you're standing a meter away.

Brigadoon!

On a year-old MacBook Pro with an NVIDIA 330M! I had thought it would be forever impossible. This is terrific. The new viewer is also amazingly faster, an improvement I first noticed with the Search release candidate. I am so pleased. Congratulations and thanks to the viewer team and search team and anybody who had a hand in this. I have noticed only one odd thing— in two of my four shops (in Glashtan and neighboring Lharg) textures that likely only exist in my inventory wouldn't fully load until I selected the object. It only took a few minutes to fix, but there's a small issue. It did not repeat in my shops elsewhere. Mahalo, Rusalka Writer

I believe every LOD step is supposed to drop to at most one third of the level above. At one time it was a half. I don't know why the rule persists when the numbers get so small, and nor do I understand why jamming the Error Threshold to 0.000 on every level seems to work fine, or what that means, or what I'm doing. I hope the Wiki will be very, very clear about all the options. I can make the thing do what I want, but I don't know why.

I think I solved mine. On these certain mesh parts, if I clicked "upload textures" it was an insta-crash. An old favorite bug from several months ago has returned!

Almost posted something rude and angry after crash number 875 of the morning. At least the crash reporter is back. The rest of my experience today is completely up the spout.

I was uploading a multi-part mesh building earlier this morning with Darwin 232901, crashing as I am wont to do, and first noticed that I was not getting the crash report dialogue, whether the viewer crashed out from under me or the one time it froze and I had to force quit. But then it got really exciting. I logged back in after a crash and every bit of mesh was gone. The house and my avatar. I quit and walked away, and now an hour later everything is back. Just thought I should mention what might in future be a rather alarming bug.

Voted and commented!

I'm taking it so simply that I'm just applying color and shine (or trying to) to a mesh that has a single material assigned in Blender. Just a bland, blank, colored body part. Shiny lying on the ground, matte when worn. Darwin viewer.

I'm reading through the notes as I had to leave early. Interested in the bit about vertices only weighting to four joints. I wonder if that could be why I get mad spikes in avatars until I remove all other possible weightings other than those few I want. Perhaps the upload process takes the bones and their vertices in order and drops other, possibly stronger weighting that comes later? I'd hate to finally be figuring out my errors at this late date.

Logged in and tried editing the attached bits, and it says they're shiny but they're not. Odd, since they look nice and shiny when not attached.

No alpha, just solid color. Looks shiny in editing, but when I wear the body part the shiny goes away. Hmmm...

Anybody else having shininess vanish when you wear an avatar?

This has probably been asked and answered fifty times, but so have most of my questions— is streaming cost (or prim cost, whatever) something that is assigned at the time of upload, or does it change as the calculations change? If I upload something now that has a nominal cost of 50, and the cost is later recalculated, will my object's cost stay at 50 or will it adjust to the new cost? Don't want to spend a lot of time uploading if I'll have to do it again and again and again.

Just another thank-you for this viewer. It works so well on my MacBook Pro, it has eliminated so much lag, that I am touring some places I haven't visited in a year. It's my fourth rez-day, and it's wonderful to have so much of the pleasure of exploring SL back! Best-behaved viewer since 1.23. Mahalo, Rusalka Writer

Works for me over in sandbox 35.

Maybe the guy who was predicting the rapture was really talking about mesh...

Looks like they might have gotten around to wiping the mesh sims. In any event, the latest viewer build is still pending, the previous one (Darwin at least) won't upload models, and I dearly hope this won't be the case all weekend.

I remember when the upload window used to show movement and weighting and (occasionally) problems with the weighting. It was nice to be able to see problems early and not have to go through the upload and wear sequence.

Oh, I've been through all that about 857 times. Afraid this is something unique and wonderful and will soon be a jira.

I have tried all the weird poses I could think of, and all the group selection I could, and all over and over. The LOD clue sounds like a path to follow. I do worry that these avatars used to work fine and now no longer do. Maybe it's a feature...

I build my house in Sketchup and imported it into SL (I think it's still standing in Sandbox 35). Unfortunately the upload path led straight through a lot of work in Blender. I had to cut the house into pieces, clean up all the extra vertices Sketchup adds during construction, do all the UV mapping, fix the normals, etc. It took longer to fix the model than I spent building it. The process ended up being part of my installation on the Second Life 8th Birthday sims. So while I don't have much to add that is useful, I would be curious to find out if Sketchup import works better if you pay for the fancy export tools in the professional version.

I have an uncontrollable vertex. I know it's not something one likes to admit... About a year ago I made a simple humanoid avatar to experiment with (under 2500 vertices). I made several other avatars based on this basic humanoid and never had a problem with them. All vertices behaved themselves. Well, I recently reanimated these avatars from inventory and uploaded them. All were fine, with the exception of a single vertex. One vertex in the front of the thigh of each of these avatars seems to be attracted to the opposite leg (or arm, or eye, or whatever— it seems to be the twin vertex in the opposite thigh to me). No amount of reassigning, selecting groups, or re-painting fixes this. The problem is absolutely invisible in Blender (2.49). Yet it always appears when I upload these avatars. The corker? In some avatars it's in the right thigh, in others it's in the left. Maybe I'll just wait for another viewer. Or totally delete the vertices one-by-one until I find the problem. Really looking forward to that.

I wish you came with subtitles, Drongle. ; )