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.