Nalates Urriah

Have you tried reversing your normals? Inside Blender most things are double sided, meaning you can see a face from either side. In SL the viewer only renders the front side of the face. You can see this in SL if you make a big cube, set it to phantom, then move your camera inside the cube.

Nightgirl Destiny asked a question in this post about exporting mesh models modified by shape keys. For instance: in the base avatar file a male model is made by activating shape keys. But, how you would you export that shape-key-modified-model for say a mannequin in SL?

Look in the Third Party Viewer Directory. There are a number of text only viewers and even an app or two for phones.

The custom animation armatures (skeletons) are way nice.

Unless you know you have a cache corruption problem, avoid clearing the cache. Doing so will slow the computer as it has to re-download everything. Clearing the cache is an old 'fix all' that is out of date. In 2011 a new caching system was added and downloading changed over to HTTP which is an error correcting protocol. So, large caches without a slow down are possible as they are indexed. Corruption is rare because of the change in protocol. There are several possible causes for a slow down. The most likely are connection issues and SL server issues. Your first step is to figure out if it is you or SL. I explain how to do that in: Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection. It will show you how to check the SL server performance and your connection specifically to SL. Viewer performance is very much affected by other programs running on your computer. So, make sure you have not picked up some malware. Several different 'search replacement' Trojans interfere with your connections. When you ask a tech question include information about your computer and viewer. If the viewer will at least show the login screen, get the info from the viewer's Help-About... and paste that into your post with your question. To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post.

There are free Dance Huds. There are free dances too. So, look around. You'll find about 2,000 dance HUD's in the Market Place. Most a pay-for-HUD's, but there are free ones there too. Some of the best people to ask about dance HUD's are the dancers in clubs, the ones on the poles. They will also be able to give you information about dance animations. Dance animation makers often have free HUD's available for those buying their animations. Animation come in 2 basic types; motion capture and handcrafted. The motion capture animations are supposed to be better... I remain unconvinced on that point. If one motion captures a lame dancer, you have a lame animation. Open Search in the viewer and search on 'free dance hud'. You'll find some dance huds mixed into the results... if you are lucky. SL search has problems. But, you'll find dance related things.

Wow... you must not own the region... This forum is for users of SL. The Linden Lab Support people are NOT here answering questions. Only users answer questions here. None of us can fix a region. Your best bet is to contact the region owner or if you are on the mainliand, then Linden Lab Support and submit a trouble ticket. This is Tueday so a majority of the regions will be restarting as new software is rolled out. An hour is a bit long for a restart.

Nyll has you figuring out your graphics info the hard way. When you ask a tech question include information about your computer and viewer. Get the info from the viewer's Help-About... and paste that into your post with your question. To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post. Its a much easier copy/paste. nVidia Control Panel Guide - The latest nVidia driver is 301.42 WHQL or the Beta 304.48 (June 18)

As several have pointed out, Cloud Party is not the first threat. According to several people it is not that much of a threat in any sense of the word. But, we can hope that it motives the Lab to make some changes before CP fails. A good analysis of Virtual Worlds and the possiblities for CP is covered in Gwyneth Llewelyn's article: Not yet a party but soon?

Take a look at: Second Life Advanced Modeling Blender 2.6 Tutorial 2012. It covers several tools used to make surfaces fit to other surface.

The current test clothes are here: Hippo Hollow. You may be able get the dae files from Oz.

There are people using SLI NVidia settings. I don't know how to set the nVidia control panel to push SL to use all the GPU's. But, I have personally talked with people that are running SLI. It does give a speed kick, but not as much as one would expect. The second card is basically just used to decompress textures. There are newer OpenGL features being used by the Linden Lab viewer. A new video memory compression algorithm was implemented a few weeks ago. I have no idea if it can use the second video card to help or extend video memory. Ask around in some of the viewer support groups. When I wrote an article on SL video settings that is how I found the people using SLI. You may need to ask a few times. Try different times of day. Expect lots of people to tell you it can't be done. You can learn more about how the viewer works and how various hardware affects frame rates by reading: How To get a Faster Second Life and Graphics Tweaking for Second Life. These are getting a bit old. But, there are no new massive changes since they were written.

Rendering the avatar is a special case. It is a more complex process than rendering in the rest of Second Life. The idea with avatars is to save CPU cycles on users' computers and the SL servers. The idea requires your viewer to download all the textures that make up your avatar and its clothes; a shape, skin, top, pants, hair, and shoes textures. The viewer ‘bakes’ those into a single composite texture. You see your avatar render nice and sharp when that bake completes. Then your viewer uploads that composite texture for all to see. That saves others downloading all the individual textures and baking them. Your avatar goes blurry as it downloads and decompresses the composite texture you just uploaded and it becomes sharp when that process finishes. You are the only one that sees the double blurry for your avatar. If that process hangs or fails there is a problem. Where it fails affects what you or others see. You can try the old standby quick fixes for avatar rez problems: Change your active group or group tag. Press rebake (Ctrl-Alt-R) once a minute for 3 minutes. Change your bald. Change your shape. Move to another region and try 1 to 4 again. When those fail, check your connection as it is the most likely problem: Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection There is a longer explanation of the problem here: #SL Clouds, Grey, and Blurry Avatars. More in depth fixes are here: Avatar Render Problems: Ghost Cloud Smoke Ball Ruth.

It sounds like you are hitting Bake Fail. Rendering the avatar is a special case. It is a more complex process than rendering in the rest of Second Life. The idea with avatars is to save CPU cycles on users' computers and the SL servers. The idea requires your viewer to download all the textures that make up your avatar and its clothes; a shape, skin, top, pants, hair, and shoes textures. The viewer ‘bakes’ those into a single composite texture. You see your avatar render nice and sharp when that bake completes. Then your viewer uploads that composite texture for all to see. That saves others downloading all the individual textures and baking them. Your avatar goes blurry as it downloads and decompresses the composite texture you just uploaded and it becomes sharp when that process finishes. You are the only one that sees the double blurry for your avatar. If that process hangs or fails there is a problem. Where it fails affects what you or others see. You can try the old standby quick fixes for avatar rez problems: Change your active group or group tag. Press rebake (Ctrl-Alt-R) once a minute for 3 minutes. Change your bald. Change your shape. Move to another region and try 1 to 4 again. When those fail, check your connection as it is the most likely problem: Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection There is a longer explanation of the problem here: #SL Clouds, Grey, and Blurry Avatars. More in depth fixes are here: Avatar Render Problems: Ghost Cloud Smoke Ball Ruth.

The data folders are here: Mac OSX: Users/Username/Library/Application Support/SecondLife/Avatarname/chat.txt Mac OSX: ~/Library/Caches/SecondLife The program folder is Applications. Try this site to see if you can run SL. This is not perfect, but it should give you and idea. Can I Run Second Life?

When you ask a tech question include information about your computer and viewer. If the viewer will at least show the login screen, get the info from the viewer's Help-About... and paste that into your post with your question. To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post. The Catalyst drivers for the ATI cards has problem with indexing the textures. It is an old problem. I'm surprised you are running into it now. See: Pink Prims Bug. I suspect the fix the Pink Prims will fix your problem. Without more info on your computer I can only guess.

Try this site to see if you can run SL. This is not perfect, but it should give you and idea. Can I Run Second Life? Check that your computer meets the System Requirements | Second Life. When you ask a tech question include information about your computer and viewer. If the viewer will at least show the login screen, get the info from the viewer's Help-About... and paste that into your post with your question. To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post. Make sure you are using the latest video driver for your card. If you are on a laptop, plug into wall power. Also check that your card is not set for power saving. You want it set to performance.

Hopefully you got rid of it. These types of crashes can be caused by some some mesh objects. Some complexities in mesh are too much for the video card. The Lindens would love to see examples of such items. So, if you can repeat the problem and list the steps to do so, file a JIRA report.

What a bizarre thread… @Ayesha: …the removal, by stages, of the ability of residents to customize their world. What are you talking about? I came in 4 years ago and I’ve only seen additions to SL. What restriction on customizing the world do you think you see? @Up4: You are simply uninformed. When Rod Humble came in there were a number of projects in progress. Most of those have been completed now. Mesh being the most prominent. His decision to fix problems is in full swing now. Ask any of the Lindens in the user groups and they are working on fixes and improvements to the system. The ‘infrastructure’ changes they roll out change how the back side of SL works. So, we often don’t see a change. The recent multi-threaded region crossing code took from February to a week ago to get sorted and roll to the main grid. Phase II of that is in progress. It’s main focus is to remove the lag caused by avatars departing regions. They have been sorting through the avatar bake fail problems. The recent pre-baked inventory avatars are a step in the fix. That problem we describe with a single term is caused by numerous glitches and causes. A real time system with tens of thousands of users gets complex. It took months to chase down the causes. Hopefully they found them all. Now it is taking moths to figure out how to fix them. Chasing down the Time Warp issue and finding the cause buried in the Linux server software took about a year. New software was developed to catch and track the problems in the SL system. Only after exhausting everything else did they turn to developing tools to catch a problem in Linux. Only a few new feature projects are in progress. We know about Pathfinding and Experience Tools. The system is complex and changes in the foundation often affect seemingly unrelated aspects of SL. For instance: changing the max prim size to 64m created an issue with prims encroaching on adjacent property. Returning such prims became surprising complex to handle without creating new exploits for griefers. An entire new system for handling the permissions to allow one to remove an encroaching prim from their property had to be worked out and implemented. Other issues were tracked down to being simply a matter of how physically far apart some servers were from others. I find that amazing for servers in the same building running on a fiber optic network.

Drongle has the best answer. You need to change over to mesh and give up on sculpties. The limits on sculpties are complex. See Domino Marama's site: Primstar Sculpties were intended for organic shapes. We learned how to build hard-edged shapes but it is a tricky and I think tedious process. I can model man-made looking things much easier and faster as mesh. I can also use more if the tools available in Blender. Sculpties have their use. But, I have no use for them.

Avatar 2.0 is a rumor and in some cases a myth. It is very unlikely we will see an Avatar 2.0. It would literally make millions of RL dollars of clothes unsuable. You can get an idea of the current debate reading: The Great #SL Deformer Debate. Click DEFORMER over in the Tags to the right to see the related articles. However, the Lab is looking at some changes related to the avatar. At least they are considering the feasibility of some improvements. We are likely to see the weight painting improved. But, expect such a change to be user drivien and implemented... meaning the Lab will OK the changes and the community will make them. Several people have already offered to make the changes.

Sandboxes are special places where anyone can go to rez things. We often use them for testing things and for building things we don't have room for on our land. The problem with trying to place a shop in a sandbox is that ALL things over a certain number of hours old are returned to the owner. That limit can run from a couple hours to a couple of weeks. This is true whether it is a Premium or Standard sandbox. Shops can be rented cheaply. Rather paying for floor space as we would in RL we pay for prim limits in SL. How many prims do we get for the rental fee. I usually compare shops based on traffic and cost per prim. Traffic is an odd thing. If you are hoping for walk in customers and have ads that will attract them from a distance then lots of traffic is a good thing. If you are going to pull customers from other types of advertsing, then lots of traffic is a bad thing. Your customers will find the region laggy and may not stay to shop. So, you have to think things through before you rent. I now use a Market Place store only. I'm not a well known designer. I've never been able to get a shop to sell enough to pay the rent. So, the Market Place works well for me... well... as well as it can considering its current state. But, it is improving.

There is a bug. Try the upload with 2.59 or 2.63a. Also wipe the .slm files from the .dae source folder. If you are not using Archive Installs for Blender so you can easily have multiple versions in stalled, now might be a good time to start. See Blender Archive Install for information on how to do an Archive install. There is also a 2.64 Beta version for which we are testing the Collada Expoter. See: Blender Testing Needed. I was using that yesterday to test a skirt I'm working on. It seemed to be working well. I wasn't trying to upload textures. So, I can't say for that specifically. I have been uploading textures using 2.63a.

When you ask a tech question include information about your computer and viewer. Get the info from the viewer's Help-About... and paste that into your post with your question. To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post. I use a number of different viewers including Firestorm and Phoenix and I don't have the problem. Look at your attachments. Some sculpty attachments cause funny camera behavior.

Noodly....nice word. :matte-motes-smile: Descriptive... Since you have watched Gaia's tutorial... I would guess the problem is in how you have modeled the mesh more then in the weighting. But, I'm only guessing. Look at the model in this tutorial: . Notice how the mesh forms rings at the joints. This allows an accordion like effect when the joint bends. Another good example is: . Think of making joints out of clothes drier flex venting.