Loraan Fierrens

Oh nice! The Web Storage API works now. That should open up some possibilities. I was actually just tinkering with that in the current viewer for a HUD idea and was disappointed to see it wasn't supported in the current viewer. It's good to see you all making this effort, it should help head off some security issues by getting us away from plugins while keeping MOAP capabilities up to date with where web development seems to be headed. Out of curiosity, is there any work being done to provide some sort of proxy layer for viewer doing MOAP? I've seen many comments since MOAP came out concerned about the direct access to third party web servers from the SL client, allowing those third parties to associate IP addresses to avatars. I think a fair number of people disable MOAP just so they can remain more anonymous, and having some sort of default proxy service might help adoption.

Well, good luck and keep at it! I don't know what more to suggest (maybe someone else has some ideas). If you'd like me to take a look at sample blend file, feel free to send me the URL in an IM or something. I can't promise I'll see what is wrong, but I'm happy to be another pair of eyes.

I got your IM Parker, unfortunately I'm pretty busy in RL today and can't get in-world until late afternoon or early evening. Looking at your picture, one possibility is that you need to apply scale and rotation to your model in Blender before you export (in Object mode, Object > Apply > Rotation and Scale). I'm not 100% sure what this option is doing mechanically (I think it is pushing the scale and rotation transformation on the object down to all the vertexes in some manner), but what it does operationally is to make it so that your object is considered to be at unit scale and non-rotated in its current state. The reason this is helpful is that several portions of Blender interact oddly with transformations. UV unwrapping gets all kinds of wonky if you haven't applied rotation and scale first, as an example. I don't know for sure, but rigging would probably also have a problem with it. It might also help to try Apply > Location too, for that matter, but I've never tried that or heard that it causes problems. (Here's a little something on applying transformations): http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/7298/why-is-it-important-to-apply-transformation One other possiblity that comes to mind is that when you import something rigged for Kemono you have to be careful to import just the skin weights and not the joint positions or Z offset). Since the Kemono avatar already deforms the joint positions in SL, that's present in the Blender armature you rig against but you don't want it brought over again with your attachment. That said, the problem you see doesn't look like it has to do with the bone offsets, I would expect you to see pinched or distorted shoulders in that case.

This may not be a terribly helpful answer, but it is all going to depend on the process the designer is using in making the clothes. The order in which you do things and the techniques you use are using will change how things map to you textures. For example, let's say you are using the Solidify modifier on a model. If you UV unwrap the original model first and then apply the modifier to get the full mesh, then the inner and outer faces generated by the modifier will map the the same area in the UV map. Essentially the UV mapping you did on the original mesh gets inherited by both sides of the new solidified mesh. If, on the other hand, you apply the Solidify modifier first and then do the UV unwrapping, the inner and outer faces are treated as completely different faces by the UV unwrapping function and will be placed in different areas. The UV unwrapping code basically has no way to know that the two faces are really the same spot on the dress. I don't know the specific methods you are using or what the other designers are doing, so it's hard to have an exact answer, but I expect it is something along those lines. One other point somewhat related to your question. It's really a secondary consideration, but it's a point about efficient design. I would recommend considering carefully if you need the interior faces. More precisely, I would recommend considering which interior faces you need and which you don't. When a dress is being worn, some of the interior surfaces will be visible from different angles but some won't ever been seen. On the dress you show in your screenshots, the interior faces on the corset and upper skirts at the very least are not going to be seen since they're going to be pressed up tightly against the body. Those faces are unnecessary and increase the download and rendering cost of the mesh without providing benefits. It's not terrible that those faces are there, but it's a place where the mesh could be a bit better. Removing them altogether would make that dress just a little bit easier for everyones' viewers to render. If the dress's rendering cost is fine as it is, however, removing those faces would leave room for additional detail somewhere else in the dress. I hope this helps.

I'm not sure what this would have to do with turning on Skin Weights necessarily, but that last picture looks like your normals are reversed (the far faces are rendering while the nearer faces like the front are not... if you were to move the camera around to the back a little, the front face would proabably pop into view). Blender renders both sides of a polygon (well, at least in object and edit modes), but Second Life renders only the "front" side of the polygon. Check in Blender which directions your normals are pointing. In edit mode, bring up the properties panel with the N key, under Mesh Display there are options for showing the normals. You will likely need to reduce the size of the normals because the scale is large compared to the Kemono avatar (I have mine set to 0.10). All the normal lines should be pointing so they are emerging from the front side of the polygon and pointing out (in the case of the front panel of your backpack, the normals should point from the backback more or less forwards). If this is the problem, this sort of thing happens to me all the time. I usually find that I can correct the problem by being sure to Merge Doubles on the vertexes and then use the Normals Recalculate Outside option (CTRL-N in edit mode). If the normals won't recalculate correctly, check for internal edges (that is an edge that is completely inside the object) or edges with more than two faces. Both situations can happen depending on your building technique and both confuse the normal calculations. I hope this helps.

A couple of things. Have you looked at Avastar? It's an addon for Blender that makes several things a bit more stream lined for Second Life use... especially in the area of rigging, importing avatar shapes, and exporting the DAE files you need. Avastar costs money, but it is not outrageously expensive and it's under active development. Also, they have a number of tutorials on how to use the tools. Also, have you been looking around on YouTube and so on for tutorials on how to make mesh clothes for Second Life? There are a number of helpful ones out there, as well as a number of helpful resources just in general for Blender. There's even a Blender group in-world, if I recall correctly. As for tool selection, depending on your level of committment, I'd recommend sticking with Blender. While it's a pain in the patootie to learn how to use, I think most of the serious 3D tools really are. The task of creating a mesh, especially clothes, is just complex at its heart. There's a lot of stuff you have to do: make the shape, describe how it moves with the body, describe how a flat texture should map over it, and so on. In terms of price and SL support, Blender is a pretty strong tool, and it's powerful enough to do the things you want to do. It just takes time to learn how to do it. So, if you want to make your own meshes, I'd highly encourage you to persevere. Go watch the tutorials, try things out, practice practice practice. Eventually, you'll start to understand it... but expect it to take time, it will be a whole new skill for you (and I mean that quite literally, not as a warm and fuzzy platitude... it's really a whole new set of skills). On tutorials and such, don't limit yourself to the ones aimed at SL, by the way. The mesh workflow is largely the same whether you're making something for SL, Unity, or a custom game engine. Consequently, the skills you'll learn in mastering this process for SL will apply in large part to other systems. While the specific details may be different, the over all process is similar. Oh, also, from what I've seen: yes, people are still using mesh clothing. In fact, I see more men wearing mesh now than in the past. I hope this helps.

There is no way to be 100% invisible, in the sense of your status being shown as offline. There are a couple of options in the viewer that get you part of the way there, but there are limitations. First, in the Privacy tab on the preferences panel, there is an option "Only friends and groups know I'm online". As the name suggests, if you check that, only your friends and member of any groups you are in will be able to see that you are online. The general public will not see your online status in the viewer (more on the emphasis in a moment). If you don't want your friends to see that you are online, you can go through your friends list and remove the permission for "See my online status". In the standard viewer: right click the friend in your friends list, open their profile, click on the gear icon, and select "Pemissions". Uncheck the "See my online status" line. In some of the Third Party Viewer (e.g. Firestorm), you can do it directly from the friends list. Now for the caveat. A simple script will allow any Second Life user see the online status of any other Second Life user, regardless of their preferences. So, if someone really wants to know if you log in, they will. Also, I believe your online status will always be shown in the group members list of any groups you happen to be in, so there is that too. A few words of caution, from personal experience. I have used with the friends visibility settings when I didn't want to advertise that I was on and ended up making a good friend thinking I was mad at him and had removed him from my friends list. Yikes! So, that is not something I'm ever going to do again and would recommend to use the option only with caution if at all.

Yes, you can use this to make an in-world web server, but there are some serious limitations. First of course is the memory limit of the LSL scripts (for someone used to server coding in PHP, 64kB can be tiny). Second, your server cannot send HTML as a response (more precisely, you cannot set the content type of the response as HTML) to the client unless the client is the Second Life viewer and is owned by the same person who owns the server (see the comments on llSetContentType). Finally, the actual URL allocated to the script can change during the life of the script (e.g. sim restarts or the prim moves to another sim, etc.), which can make using a prim as a long-term server a bit tricky. Short answer: serving plain text or JSON are quite doable, and there are some examples on the LSL wiki... serving HTML is possible but rather constrained. I hope this helps!

I haven't been there in a while, but you might check out Kannonji (https://secondlife.com/destination/kannonji-zen-retreat). I believe they have regular meditation sessions scheduled throughout the day and at least used to have recorded guidance playing on the audio stream during the session that you could listen to or not as you prefer.

Some pictures might help. One thing I have seen is that when you change the shape, you can end up changing the bounding box of the over all sculpt. Since you have only 256 steps along any axis of the bounding box, if you stretch one axis too much, a change in, say, the x-axis of 1 between two vertices can result in very strong visual step. That might be what you're seeing, but it depends on how you're bending the shape, I would think.

If you want to give out multiple objects in one transaction, you might find llGiveInventoryList does what you need. Besides giving the recipient all the items in the list, it will also keep them organized in the recipient's inventory under a single folder.

Ave, Rodvik (would the vocative of "Rodvik" be "Rodvike?") and welcome to the insane asylum. I hope as you settle into the day-to-day at Linden Lab that you will be able to continue exploring the grid. I am always amazed at the creativity of the residents; there are so many strange and wonderful people, places, and things out in the grid. I hope you will be able to continue exploring and seeing some of the wonderful, odd, and crazy things people are doing here.

Thanks for posting this Torley. Sadly, my old Mac seems to be a bit too old to see the effect. Is there any information on minimum graphics card capabilities needed to see depth of field? For instance, if your graphics card is too weak to render shadows, you can't see it? Or is it that some other option needs to be turned on (like antialiasing)? Regardless, shadows and depth of field are starting to make me think it's time to splurge on a new graphics card!