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Tattoo Making once mesh is up and running


Astrid Schoonhoven
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Mesh is not really going to affect tats, as far as I can tell.

When someone decides to wear a mesh as an avatar replacement, that will change things. But, then it is a language syntax thing. A mesh replacement avatar is sort of a clothing item and the avatar is hidden by an alpha layer. The tat texture you provide to be worn on a layer of the avatar will not appear on the replacement mesh. It will still go on the avatar and be hidden, just as it would be by anyother clothing.

Tats for mesh replacement avatars will be something the one making the replacement mesh will have to build. If they sell a template (UVMap) for the mesh you['ll be able to make textures to apply to the mesh. But there are no layers on prims and meshes are eight face prim like objects in SL. So, no layers.

I could have this wrong, but I think that is right.

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Tattoos will still be tattoos. They will not changem for non-mesh avatars.

But Tattoos that work on a Mesh avatar body will have to be custom-made to work with the UV mapping for that body. There's no reason at all to assume that a maker of a mesh avatar body will use the standard SL avatar body UV mapping, and many, many reasons why they should discard the old mapping and make a better mapping of their own. Like, maybe, one that has two arms, and doesn't trash the details in the groin area.

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If humanoid meshes really catch on it will not be possible, as already stated, to apply them to the mesh replacement as we do to the  standard avie.  They'll need to be integrated into the texture based on their unique uv mapping. It's possible that some mesh artists will make available the uv texture template that goes along with a mesh, just we all have for the SL avatar, so individuals who buy it  can create their own skins.   In that scenerio you could sell designs that people could purchase for baking into their texture maps.

However, I think mesh will create a greater diversity of avatars into the non-human realm, but not so much the human.  Everyone likes to be an individual and living with a shape that can't be tweaked will be too limiting for most people. A gazillion identically shaped and textured barbie dolls is a real nightmare, imho.  I remember when everyone walked around looking like one particular star..I forget her name, but can't seem to forget her face..scary.   So I think we'll see human meshes, but ones worn by their creator that are unique to them.   I reserve the right to be completely wrong about this.

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Nacy Nightfire wrote:

 It's possible that some mesh artists will make available the uv texture template that goes along with a mesh, just we all have for the SL avatar, so individuals who buy it  can create their own skins.   In that scenerio you could sell designs that people could purchase for baking into their texture maps.

A gazillion identically shaped and textured barbie dolls is a real nightmare, imho.

* Yes, I do provide UV templates with my mesh avatar for that exact purpose.  There is no need to bake the tattoo, since I am providing a two layer avatar.  The first layer is for skin texture, and the second is for tattoo/makeup/inner clothing.

* I wish people would stop saying mesh bodies will all be the same shape.  They are affected by the appearance sliders which change avatar bone size and position (because the body is rigged to those bones).  So they are customizable.  For the skin geometry which is defined by the mesh, a content creator can make a variety of morphs in different shapes, but sharing the same UV map and offer those as a set, or alternates.  Then you would be able to buy skin A with morph Z, and and then further adjust the shape in Appearance.

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"* I wish people would stop saying mesh bodies will all be the same shape."

By people, I suspect you mean me, and I am duly chastened. I apologize for spreading any mis-information here.   Although these days I mostly wander around as a rigged mesh house cat and less as "people".  (and I did reserve the right to be wrong!)

How is it possible to have a mesh with two layer textures?  Are they seperate material groupings or do they overlap?

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I was not picking on just you, Nacy.  It's a persistent rumor about mesh, and is as incorrect as saying "all prims look alike".  If there are 100 body shapes made by creators, and 100 different skins to fit them, potentially you have 10,000 combinations.  The trick to making that work would be to adopt a common set of UV templates, so any skin will fit any shape.

My avatar is actually two mesh objects (so you don't have to wear both if you don't need the second layer), but separated by 1 mm, and with the same vertex weighting so they move exactly the same way.  I recognized that people want flexibility in their avatars and would want to combine a skin with optional makeups, tattoos from a different source, or clothes from yet another source.

A better answer, though, would be to have layer baking for attachments like we have for the base avatar.  That would not add extra mesh geometry for the viewer to render like my solution does.  For anyone who does not know, the standard avatar gets their skin + clothing layers + tattoo layer "baked" into a single texture by the simple process of starting with the skin, and then layering each layer on top of that and replacing pixels as needed, then sending the result to the server.  That gets sent to other people instead of the full set of layers.

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I wasn't feeling picked on, but thanks for saying that.   I was just responding to your posting in a friendly teasing fashion :matte-motes-smile:, (and really I don't want to give out misinformation, so I'm glad you jumped in to correct my mistake.)

Thanks so much for explaining your technique for creating a second layer and for explaining how the layer system works on the default avie  Your solution for mesh avies is incredibly clever. 

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