Blender – Ciaran Laval

July 23, 2013

Blender 2.68 Now With Improved Weight Painting Tools

Gaia Clary has announced in the official forums that the latest version of Blender, 2.68, now has improved weight painting tools. I’m not familiar with these sort of tools, so I don’t know how much of an improvement they are, Gaia, who does know about these matters seems pretty impressed. Gaia also helps to develop these improvements, so deserves much credit. I’ll embed Gaia’s video explaining the improvements at the end of the post, but this video is aimed at those who already have a knowledge of weight painting.

Gaia and fellow colleagues have worked on development with Blender to make it more useful for the Second Life community, for example they have been instrumental in seeing that Collada support is maintained and their work also saw options mentioning Second Life, coming to the Blender client.

However they don’t do this alone and Gaia thanks the main devs too for their assistance, so it seems there’s a very good working relationship at play, which is positive for Second Life going forward.

Version 2.68 also has other improvements over previous versions of Blender.

Continue reading “Blender 2.68 Now With Improved Weight Painting Tools”

December 26, 2012December 26, 2012

2012 Reviewed – April To June

April

The teething problems with Direct Delivery meant that initial migration deadlines for getting rid of magic boxes had to be pushed back, there is still no definite date for migration.

Pathfinding started to get rolled out for testing and I volunteered a sim for the tests. I experimented with some patrolling prim cubes, unfortunately I haven’t got much further!

Image For Fantasy Faire 2012 Should Be Here — Fantasy Faire 2012

Fantasy Faire 2012 ran from April 21 – 30th, it was extended by one day, I took a look at a few stores.

Inara Pey reported that Linden Lab had obtained the rights to sublicense Havok. Linden Lab produced a page on the Wiki for this. The result was that TPV’s had to abide by LL’s agreement to obtain the sublicense, which is perfectly fair.

After their call to bloggers earlier in the year, Linden Lab made a more quiet call to specific artists regarding images for their website. Strawberry Singh being one of those asked to produce work for Linden Lab. This created a small ripple of damned if you do or damned if you don’t when there was some criticism of the nature of this call for assistance not being open to all. However the results were widely greeted in a positive light.

Continue reading “2012 Reviewed – April To June”

June 17, 2012

Blender 2.64 To Have Second Life Options

I’m seeing Second Life adverts in my Google Adsense stream again, I haven’t noticed these for a while but it looks as if Linden Lab are utilising adsense again in another marketing campaign, which is good to see. However this post is about the forthcoming release of Blender 2.64 and new features that have Second Life in mind.

Gaia Clary, who has been working hard with others to ensure Collada support in Blender is improved and maintained, brings us news on the official forum of new features in Blender 2.64. Collada is the format we use to import Mesh objects to Second Life, Blender were talking of dropping support for Collada as it was a buggy format, but Gaia and others have risen to the challenge of helping to improve it.

Blender 2.64 isn’t officially released yet, but the new improvements include:

Geometry data is now again named similar to the Object names (Object names are preserved).
The order of export for objects can now be sorted (avoid LOD matching problems).
Apply modifiers is non destructive. You no longer have to apply the modifiers before exporting. This works also with Mirror Modifiers and Shape keys.
You can now export a rig with stripped control bones as long as the deform bones define a complete SL Skeleton.
The reimport of exported collada files to Blender is still not fully fixed. But for static meshes it now works reasonable well (not so important for Second Life users though).

Gaia goes into further detail in a blog post on the subject, including a photo of an export option for Second Life, which will load some presets that you’ll generally want when you export your Mesh to Collada for use in Second Life.

Continue reading “Blender 2.64 To Have Second Life Options”

February 23, 2012February 23, 2012

Blender 2.62 Now With Second Life Compatibility Option For Exporting Armatures

Back in January I reported that there was talk of Blender dropping support for Collada. This was a tad concerning but as I pointed out at the time, not the end of the world. Collada is the format used to get Mesh into Second Life, so in Second Life terms it was important but you can happily use older versions of Blender to create content. Blender 2.62 hasn’t ended this discussion, but Collada support is not only still there, there’s now a mention of Second Life with the addition of a compatibility option for exporting armatures, which you can read about here.

There is also a mention of the issues with Collada and Blender there too:

“There has been much discussion about the state of the Collada integration, it’s not currently working very reliable yet, and this needs to be solved somehow. A new team now started working to improve Collada support to get it more useful for integration with external tools and game engines, improving the existing OpenCollada based I/O module.”

Continue reading “Blender 2.62 Now With Second Life Compatibility Option For Exporting Armatures”