Dain Shan

Yeah thats what i meant too. Here when is set this paramenter as shown, even when rebaking, it never ever generates an Alpha Channel. Are you sure that, when you bake onto the same texture, you had set the "clear" option in the baking panel?

The render settings cause this to happen. If the preset allows for Alpha textures to appear ( Set to RGBA ) you can, if you have black Surfaces in the Texture create an Alpha by accident. Heres what to do. 

Depends on what you call a "Decent LOD" Also you said it yourself.. its a sculpt / MESH combo.

A Degenerate Triange can also mean that there is a face with a surface size of 0 So the triangle is so small, that the uploader is not able to calculate a surface area from it. This Vertex0: [r-0.250000,r-0.250000,r0.250000] Vertex1: [r-0.000004,r0.250000,r-0.250000] Vertex2: [r-0.000004,r0.250000,r-0.250000] Are Position coordinates of 3 vertices that build an triangle.. As you can see they sit on entire the same spots. Or, to make it easier to understand lets translate the numbers a bit Vertex0: it sits on 1,1,1 ( x, y, z ) Vertex1 sits on 2,1,1 ( x, y, z ) Vertex 2 on 2,1,1 also ( x,y,z ) So in a triangle 2 corners ( 2 and 3 ) are sitting on the exact same position. therefore the entire size of the surface they are supposed to build is 0. This is a degenerated Triangle. Oh as an addenum: You are probably able to find those in the model in Blender by taking the object into edit mode. Make sure nothig in selected and also that you are in Vertex select mode. Go to the selecet menue at the lower end of the 3d Window. From this menue go to "Select all by Trait" -> "Non Mainfold" Or push "Shift+CTRL+Alt+M" Sometimes Blender is able to catch such unwanted Mainfolds. Its not a guanrantee, thought.

I Had this before. If i recall that back right, i found a polygon with more then 5 faces and triangulated it. But the error was still there, i rotated the edges of the polygons and then it worked. I guess that there are a few instances where the uploader cant figure out a proper sollution for triangulation. Thats when this errors happen After this i took special care to avoid the issue by looking out for faces with more then 4 vertices. Addenum: Oh it was a static mesh !

Ok that eplains it Well in this case. In Edit mode: Select all faces Then goto Mesh --> Normals --> Recalculate Outside Or Press CTRL+N This should correct the facing of the normals. Also check if in the lowpoly all the face - normals point outwards also.

Its definately the face count here. Around 24000 faces ( afew more ) the assigned Material slot will overflow for SL Means the uploader will assign 1 additional material slot to the uploaded modell. Now the kicker .. if in one LOD the face margin drops below the treshhold for this ( and i assume here that Sl has assigned more then 2 Material slots dur to the high face count ) it will drop one of those material slots again. BUT then the uploade will recognize this as a missing material

What ou see here is a claasic. The artifacts are comming from intersecting surfaces, I bet when you look at the unwrapped UV map, you will find overlapping faces. Correct those and the problem will be gone.

Have you checked if every part of the mesh is rigged towards the correct bone? Also have you checked if all vertices have a weight? You can check this in Blender in the following way: Select the Mesh. --> switch to edit mode --> set the selection mode to "vertice select" --> make sure nothing is selected --> go to the "Select " menue in the lower menue bar --> from the select menue select "Ungrouped Verts" Look in the 3D View if vertices are selected (highlighted) now. Those dosent belong to a group then and you have to weight them manually. Whooohs .. also make sure that all vertice groups are present in the mesh, even if you have groups that dosent have any vertices attached.

Yes you can. Set the skeletton into pose mode Then select you mesh and switch into Wight paint mode. (make surde the skeletton and the mesh are on the same layer, or blend the layers together.) Then you can selevt an single bone and can choose the automatic weight, or from envelope weight option from the "weights" menue from the menuebar at the lower end of the sceen.

Also please make sure to check if you have the CUDA support enabled. Ok this only works with a certain range of grafic cards, but speed up the process immensly. As you can see ther are 2 places to do this. In the render settings where you also set the samples. And also in the prefernces of Blender. In the 1rst screenshot you set the the Devise to GPU. But this only works when in the prefs (screen 2 ) your card is recognized. See the blue CUDA Button down left in the second screenshot? Well normally Belnder would recognize your grafics card. But there are cases where this diddnt worked. This can mean A:) You card is too old to support CUDA B.) Somehow blender was not able to verify your card. In the second case you can click the drop down field ( that the one where GeForce GTX 770 is noted ) and choose your card manually. If that dosent work, well see pont A. Sorry, no more speed. After this is set and you where able to choose a card or one is recognized already, make sure the CUDA button is clicked ( blue ) and then set the render setting "Device" from screenshot 1 to GPU. This should speed things up.

This is a classic. The Objects have to many vertices. Reduce your vertexcount and the bounding box will fit again.

You are indeed missing something. Fitting a mesh around the body dosent mean it will behave exact with every animation. This 2 areas ( fit the body and moving while animate ) may overlap to an extend but still are separate issues. The Deformer will only make sure that a mesh objecte will fit thighter and more accurate around the body shape of the avatar. But if you Animate that said Avatar its a total whole new level. In short i depends highly on the used animation if the mesh follows to 100% the movement. And while looking at the most liked and popular AO sets, i dont believe that this will happen to 100%. Also the Avatar bone structure in SL is very simple. It dosent supports complex rigging and therefore you cant have too complex movements or control parameters for the rigged mesh. In short, the deformer will be a BIG help in fitting mesh objects ( e.g. clothes ) around the avarat, it will be also a small help to animated Avatars, but it will not be a 100% sollution to this. p.s. Jeez i lost it halway through. Indeed is Rigging and Fitting the mesh 2 total different issues. The Deformer will only make sure that the vertices of the object ( clothing ) will stay above the shape of the avatar. Right now without the deformer this said mesh is only reacting to settings like lenght or height of the avarar bone set. So Armlenght for example is a no issue since the mesh follow those settings if you chnage them.- The Problem is the so called Morph targets like Muscles and Body fat for example, this settings have nothing to do with the bone settings, and mesh, till now, cant follow if you change such a slider in the apperance. The deformer will change this. That is the point of said deformer.

Yeah .. thats an issue with the Gouraud Shading. The little problem you have here is, that you have a tiny triangle in that corner. Try to change this triangle into an quad and the problem is gone. Well of course it is a bit effort to rearrange the faces then. But it pays off

Thanks Drongle and Jenni Thats really helpful. The problem is, that some people with a slower DSL connection seem to have issues with rez times if there are many mesh obejcts around. I can not verify that, So i came to the idea that maybe the pure size of the downloaded files might have been the cause of that. The person whos hit the hardest have an connection that is called "DSL - Light" here. That equals a 384kbit connection at max. I will test that a bit more to see if we have the cause here.