http://community.softimage.com/showthread.php?t=250

Well, I am obviously going to end up buying Crysis soon I’ve held off till now, but I’ve been drooling over its character pipeline for a good long while to experiment with custom built avatars and viewing architectural models and furniture I’ve built in real time.

I’ve also been working with XSI Mod Tool for the last weeks, learning the animation tools. It’s a fine free package, with very few limitations (a polygon limit and none of the really high end XSI features, but you don’t need them for making game mods - the animation is not nerfed in it). XSI’s rigging is stellar, and I am finding I am enjoying it a great deal.

Eventually I’ll cough up and buy XSI Foundation just for the animation once I get my skills to the level I feel comfortable, for now though I’m happy futzing with Mod Tool. I highly recommend it to learn a high end 3d package for no cost and the ability to use work you created with it in pro editions of the product, something you can’t do with Maya Personal Edition.

Ah, LL drops another bomb reducing functionality rather than fixing the scalability problem in SL. Sighs.

Changes to Groups, New Rules on Group Notices

In short - large active groups with a lot of group notices (say, Fashion consolidated, Live Music Enthusiasts) have an archive of a few days to a week at best now. An archive vulnerable to users scrolling it actively, rather than the purely time based 30 day archive we had before.

I’ve proposed this JIRA to help protect our archives from spamming - Group Notices -> limit number of notices sent by an individual to a set number within a set length of time.

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-7083

It would work by simply using the group rules to set the number of notices a person can send in a set amount of time, say one notice per day and per week. This would stop people from trying to abuse the archive and keep most active groups under the 200 a day limit.

So it’s asked. Who the heck reads the group archives? Well! I’m an archive reader, and a lot of people in Fashcon are archive readers. Why do we read the archive?

Because delivery of notices is haphazard at best, a bug that’s going on for a YEAR. Yes, a year. It not only impacts Fashcon, it also impacts the live musician’s groups, Live Music Enthusiasts being just as active as Fashcon, just live music instead of fashion. It can also hit the art community groups as well, which also function similarly to Fashcon.

When things like event notices and search functionality are broken or simply not working optimally (which is a lot more frequent than it should be), the groups serve a valuable service letting people know about events and products they are interested in, in a timely fashion.

Groups hold SL together folks - it is just as vital as search. You can’t realistically have the number of people in a sim that you can talk to over a group chat or reach via a group notice. Without proper functioning groups and search, SL is just a mostly empty 3d landscape. Save our group archives and please vote on the Jira. Thanks

Lets hope it goes a bit better this time. It’s a NVIDIA 8600GTS with 512 MB of RAM, so far so good, no blue screens, no black vista at startup, I might be home free

crossing my paws and claws

my new card

well, its about time I quit limping with the crap 7200 I have. This was the card I was waiting for … a sweet 9600 GT from Sparkle, bought paid for and waiting for delivery

Wish me luck with Windlight and SL with the drivers

I’ve made two major suggestions for a new revision of sculpted prims.

• Edge stitching in a linkset 
  http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-5189
• Implement skeletal rigs and skin weights for animating sculpties
  http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-5191

Edge Stitching Abstract

The obvious method to a geospherical prim! 6 sculptie planes, edge stitched to each other. Boy won’t that making head sculpture so much easier.

Or say you need long strands of cylinders for some reason (you’re making a sculpture and you need to edge stitch your character’s parts together). Edge stitch them.

This would revolutionise sculptie topology, allowing them to be rendered more smoothly and evenly and with less waste due to level of detail - currently I have to design sculpties that deal with level of detail by devoting more geometry to the join areas - these could be eliminated totally with edge stitching. Or say you want to implement boned sculpties at some point (the obvious method to better animating them than the current “morph” technique of using multiple sculptie maps) - this would revolutionise both the features of sculpties and improve the lag that people currently experience, by reducing textures and triangles needed for a sculpted work.

I’d also like to throw in there the ability to edge stitch any open edge to itself to create a pole. say a hemisphere out of a cylinder, etc.

Skeletal Rigs and Skin Weights for Animating Sculpted Prims Abstract

Yes, the obvious answer to deal with animation of sculpties.

We want rigging! I want to use BVH files to animate my sculpties! YESSSSSSSSSS. 

On a side note, I want my sculpted avatar attachments to have the optional feature of using the avatar’s skin weights. I stress OPTIONAL - I dont want it to be forced on me, some things need to remain static. But I would like the checkbox “Use Skin weights” Let this be a feature that you allow for individual prims, not the entire object, please. Some things are just not MEANT to be deformed!

 Concluding Notes

These are new features, but they have the added benefit of fixing some major drawbacks to sculpted prims as we now have them. Namely in the area of animation. It is currently very texture and script intensive to animate a sculpt - a highly inefficient method of doing so. Using sculpt maps to morph animate sculpties is a very limited and possibly quite lag intensive endeavor, far better taken care of by a skeletal rig. Being able to use avatar skin weights on a sculptie will allow us to create far better sculpted prim clothing accessories and accents. Edge stitching will further streamline sculpts by allowing for more continuous mesh and better edge flow for sculpture projects, both animated and not. This can allow a prim savings over the current methods.

 So go vote for a better future for sculpties!

I’ve moved on… to Modo. Behold my first sculpted shoes I’ve baked… and made and textured in Modo (with fine sculpting done in Zbrush). They can be bought in my ArtSeduction store.

Kerwin at Lovecraft Forest has posted my mod for his testbed for Modo to bake sculpted prims so go get it at the following link - Lovecraft Forest - Cool Alternative!

Yes, they can.

But now ask this question -

Can sculpties improve lag?

Yes, they can.

Oh my. How do we get the same answer to the opposite question?

The answer lies with how you use sculpties. Design is everything.

The two culprits to why sculpties cause lag and can improve lag are the two Ts:

Textures and triangle count

Textures

Sculpties require two textures - one for the sculpt map and one for the color texture. That’s a serious improvement over some varieties of the famous cut and twisted torus, which actually can and do outclass sculpties for lag. Each cut side of a tortured twisted hollowed torus (or its friends - the ring and the tube) requires a texture - if its a realistically textured torus, you could be looking at double or more of the textures a sculptie uses.  Cut and twisted tori still outrank sculpties in sheer triangle count - part of what lead to the development of the sculptie was to minimise use of these prims in attachments such as hair and shoes. Hair made from sculpties are far more efficient in terms of client lag than their torus created kin. They use less prims - which translates to fewer textures and to our next topic of discussion - triangle count.

Triangle count

There is nothing more lagariffic than entering a sim with sculpties that comprise every bit of plant life and landscaping. In many cases, sculpties are modelled very inefficiently, resulting in far more used than necessary, causing a huge download for the visitor, who may not ever see your build download entirely. Even with repeating textures on every sculpt, the client lags horrifically on some lower end systems. Why? Triangle count is your culprit. This is the single most taxing thing your computer graphics card has to do, render everything around you. Simply put, more triangles in your scene means more for your graphics card to display to you. It’s why even the next generation games resort to tricks to fool the eye into believing there are more polygons than actually are there - with technology such as normal and parallax mapping.

So you want to do two things - reduce your textures and triangle count, therefore reducing client side lag for your visitors. Reducing textures also reduces sim lag - the single most frequent reason for sim reboots in my experience, is for image cache times skyrocketing.

Rules of thumb with sculpties and textures.

Use as small textures as possible for your sculpt maps and color textures.

Sculpt maps do not need to be larger than 128 x 128 pixels, and can be as small as 64×64 pixels. For landscaping sculpts - consider whether you really need to use lossless uploading - there is usually not much difference in appearance for terrain and rock sculpties and the load times for lossy sculpts are dramatically faster.

Use texture atlasing and offsets - a large texture comprising many small textures can dramatically decrease loading time for color textures. Many times you don’t need larger than a 256 x 256 texture for landscaping sculpties (sometimes even 128×128 will do you!), and you can fit four of those 256×256 textures on one 512 texture. Oftentimes repeating textures work just fine for landscape sculpties too. Another method is to build a large one piece multipart sculptie which you then cut apart in a uvmapping application to create smaller sculpties (use UVMapper for this!) - while creating a full color texture across the uncut sculpt to use as an instant texture atlas.

And the one time I will break the rule on 1024×1024 - if you find you can put ALL your color textures in your build on one or two 1024 textures - do it. Your textures will load far faster for your visitors, and as a result, your sculpties will be faster to load too. Fewer calls to the asset servers is why this works.

Rules of thumb with sculpties and triangle count.

Be an efficient sculptor. Think of how you can use one sculpt to comprise what several prims might have ordinarily done.

For large landscape areas - use megaprims when the situation calls for it. Why megaprims? Because you can dramatically reduce the amount of sculpt prims, and therefore sheer triangle count. (as a side effect, fewer sculpt textures as well!) The beauty of megaprims and sculpties means you can develop landscapes that look more aesthetically pleasing in both shape and color, yet reducing the number of prims that you’d have ordinarily used. Keep them phantom and build normal transparent collision prims for people to walk on - they’ll never know the difference. As the collision prims are invisible, you can model them more efficiently without trying to make them look pretty (which is effectively impossible for organic structures) - stick to the box and cylinder prims (and the occasional sphere, if necessary) for this.

For many sculpted terrain areas - you can even use the sim terrain itself as the collision plane, terraformed to lie just underneath the sculpted phantomed prim. You can achieve interesting terrain effects this way, by clever use of sim terrain textures combined with sim terrain terraforming and sculpted terrain.

And lastly - don’t use sculpties when a regular prim would have been equally fine with a good texture map. Boxes and cylinders still have far fewer vertices than a sculptie does, use them when the situation calls for it, especially in background and fill areas where fine detail isn’t necessary. Sculpties are best for those large organic models that would have been high prim and not nearly as aesthetic to do the old fashioned way. Yes, this means that you can make small filler vegetation just fine with two box prims and a good texture. Use billboarding when the situation calls for it!

I hope this missive helps a few folks!

My latest work.

I was contracted to create the sculpted lion for the Alhambra Court of the Lions, located in Al Andalus Alhambra in Second Life. I had so much fun creating it, it was a beautiful challenge artistically. The Alhambra has always been dear to me, due to its influence on the art of M.C. Escher, my most favourite artist in the 20th century.

http://museumofbeauty.biz/

The Venus de Milo - 3d scanned and interactive. Though its a commercial Konica Minolta site (promoting their latest 3d scanner technology) - the site is truly gorgeous and VERY instructional. (beware it is an interactive Flash site)

 I have seen the Venus de Milo in real life (at the Louvre), and she never fails to inspire. A delight for all who love classical art

http://remix.nin.com/

 I will get lost, very lost, on this site I have been a NIN fan for many years… it is wonderful to see such a resource online. And sponsored by the artist, no less.

I know its been around a while, but I’ve been lax in my WWW music artist surfing. And I will urge, if you ever get the chance to see Trent Reznor live… run run… do not walk, RUN… to that concert! I’ll never forget standing in the middle of a former airfield, feeling the wall of sound penetrate my body, so utter and entire. With the band right in front of me.

 The closest I ever felt to being a maenad…

 And just because this song is so beautiful…

lyrics here - http://wellnowwhat.net/nin/rwib.html