Linden Lab just announced a new feature in the Release Candidate viewer called Avatar Rendering Costs. A.R.C. will let you gague how an avatar and all their attachments is effecting your graphics rendering performance.

What an abosoltely wonderful idea! Finally we have some concrete in-world evidence that ‘hoochy hair’ really does lag up an area. :) Seriously though, I think that this tool will really encourage people to be a bit more aware of how they are constructing their content and a bit more careful about how they dress up their Avs.

Check out the LL blog post for more specific details, then download the new RC viewer to try it out for yourself. The post hints that there will be more similar features in the future. Here’s hoping that there will be something similar for every in-world object. Can you imagine the improvement on the grid if low-lag was the new buzzword?

So what is your Avatar Rendering Cost score? I’m going in-world right now to find mine. :)

Daz3D has added some Sculpted Prim tools to it’s Hexagon software. You can create and texture your sculpties using Hexagon then export them directly to a TGA sculptmap for upload to SL. The modeler looks pretty spiffy and includes advanced 3D painting tools, too.

I’m excited to see more commercial 3D applications including support for sculpted prims. The more tools we have to make sculpties, the better! I’m still hoping for some native sculpty support in ZBrush. :)

A shotgun blast of metaverse goodies.

I stumbled on this cool weekly video series about Second Life called Metaverse Week in Review. Lots of stuff features every week with interviews, machinima, news, and all sorts of shiny virtual world goodies. It’s produced by Mal Burns who also runs a blog, the Mal Burns Annex. Mal’s a busy guy - regular blog posts, this weekly video show, and who knows what else. The sites and videos are a bit scattered, but there’s a lot of great info to be found. Looks like I found a new addition to my RSS reader. :)

One of the next big changes in SL will be some changes to the way the scripts are run on the LL servers. The back-end that executes all of the scripts on the grid will be upgraded to something known as Mono. I don’t know a lot of the nitty-gritty details, but I do know that it will be much faster. You can see a good example of how much faster by watching this video created by Blueman Steel and Babbage Linden.

You can find more info about Mono on the SL Wiki.

Here is another cool example created by Amanda Levitsky

Thanks Hotspur!

This last Monday I host a big party at my newly re-opened New World Gallery. Lots of friendly art lovers showed up and we all had a great time. I especially enjoyed collaborating with musician MoShang Zhao, providing live visuals to along with his live concert.

Hotspur O’Toole was in attendance and he took the time to make this awesome video record of the show and party. So glad to have this to commemorate the show. :) The Organic Symmetry show will be on display for a couple of weeks and then I will being a series of shows feature other SL artists. Stay tuned for details.

Special thanks to AutoPilotPatty for directing traffic as people arrived at the Highlands Telehub, Bettina Tizzy for inviting the NPiRL group, MoShang for his amazing live performance, and everyone who made it to the party.