Improve UVs for SL compatible meshes

[Gaia Clary]

Hi;

A few days ago i got aware that the Second Life Avatar does not have a fixed UV map. Actually the UV Layout gets recalculated based on the Shape Slider values. Bad news: This feature is not available for custom mesh characters.

However, for those who work on Avatars with Second Life compatible UV Layouts i have created a new Tool Tip which explains the background and shows a method how you can do a similar treatment to your UV Maps as Second Life does in its automated process (i use plain Blender in the video):

Enjoy

Gaia

[Nalates Urriah]

Thanks... I would never have figured that out.

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

Oh dear, I feel an outbreak of pedantry coming on.

I have seen distortions with Shape Slider changes on skin and system clothes for ages. Even since I made myself a few t-shirts...

The UV mapping is not changing. The UV map is a set of data which links mesh vertices to specific points on a texture map. When a slider changes the shape, the mesh vertice moves. Which means the texture pixels move to track it.

You can see some ugly vertical movements along the center line of the chest, even for a male AV. And that's just where you put a t-shirt logo. It's nearly a decade since I started using Poser and the underlying tech is just the same. The problems are the same. But the figure meshes (and there are a lot of them) have huge numbers of polygons, and that makes it possible to minimise the distortions.

 

[Gaia Clary]

---

WolfBaginski Bearsfoot wrote:

The UV mapping is not changing. The UV map is a set of data which links mesh vertices to specific points on a texture map. When a slider changes the shape, the mesh vertice moves. Which means the texture pixels move to track it.

---

While editing within the Shape editor we see that the textures distort because they "follow the movements of the vertices". And when lookin into Blender, we see exactly the same thing happen with the mesh replica of the SL Avatar. And this is exactly what should happen when the UV map is fixed.

However shortly after you have saved your edits in Secondlife, the distortions get automatically reduced a lot. And this is done during a texture rebake. So if the UV map remains fixed, then what else makes the distortions go away ?