Problems with Wearing Overlapping Mesh Clothing Items (and Potential Solutions?)

[Jennifer Boyle]

Yesterday, I put together an outfit that included a mesh skirt and mesh coat from the same designer, who makes really nice clothing.  I knew I might have problems, but thought I might not because, coming from the same shop, they might have been designed to work together.  First, I donned the size small ones, my usual size. (My shape is a standard size small.) That coat definitely didn't work, I tried the medium, and it looked great.  I was so proud of my outfit.

Then I went out to show my friends my new outfit.  I was standing there chatting and my AO changed poses, and my butt poked through my coat.

I wondered if we would ever be able to have nice 3D clothing that we could layer.  I had a couple of thoughts.  I'll describe my idea for a workaround first, so people will read it before they get tired of reading my drivel and quit.  Could mesh clothing creators offer. as a bonus for people who buy two products that, like these, could be worn together a single mesh item that included both that would look just like they two separate should look together?  Is it hard to make such a mesh object when you already have the two parts?

As I continued to think about this, I wondered why we can't eventually have a complete solution (that would solve some other problems, too).  This is involved and hard to express clearly.  The shape and position of everything in SL is actually just a lot of numbers stored digitally that represent coordinates of points in space.  Therefore the system (potentially) knows if two objects occupy the same space, i.e., overlap.  Why can't there be a number stored in the objects properties that represents it's susceptibility to deformation by other objects; the lower the number, the easier it is for objects that it collides with to deform/move it, and the higher it is, the easier it is for it to deform other objects that it touches.  In this example, the number would be higher for the skirt than the coat, so the coat would move instead of being penetrated by the skirt.  Another way to do this would be to use a similar system, but instaed of deforming one object, not render the parts that penetrated the other.

I realize that something like this would require massive, complex computation, perhaps more than is feasible with today's hardware.  Is that the only reason we don't have something like it, or are there other reasons that are not apparent to a non-programmer?  If that's the only reason, then we should be able to have it in the future as hardware rapidly becomes more powerful.  

 

[kerryn Paragorn]

Ive been trying to figure out how to wear 2 invisable prims with my clothes, like for a dress mesh and sculpted shoes.  BTW Jennifer, fantastic style and look !!

Kerryn

 

[Jennifer Boyle]

Thanks.  Invisiprims are obsolete because they don't work when people view them with lights and shadows enabled in their viewers, as I almost always do.  Now, to hide body parts properly you need alpha masks.  You wear them like clothing.  Think of them as another clothing layer that is solely used to determine what body parts will be invisible.  They are usually included with mesh clothing and with some prim shoes, although some of those don't work well for everyone.  There are also free, generic ones available.  Sometimes one intended for use with one pair of shoes will work with another.  They are easy but time-consuming to make.  You can make them using a free program that you can download.  I start with clothing templates when making them and wear a tattoo layer made of clothing templates.  That really helps you know where on the template a point on your skin is.  Firestorms temporary texture upload is a real boon when making them; you could also use the beta grid.

To wear more than one invisiprim, alpha mask, or anything else, choose add instead of wear on the menu for the second and subsequent ones.

[Maeve Balfour]

Jennifer: What you are seeing there is pretty much a universal issue in 3D in general (not just SL). For example, users of Poser clothing often get the same "poke-through" problems (when posing figures for 3D rendering/animation, different items of mesh clothing will intersect, creating the sort of problem you pictured) - the solution there is often to use morphing parameters which allows a degree of "tweaking" of the clothing meshes to fix it - but that is not feasible for realtime environments like SL.

An idea I have as a mesh creator (I'm not currently a merchant), which I'm surprised no clothing makers have picked up on yet, is the use of material zones in clothing meshes to potentially reduce the amount of poke-through. Each mesh object, be it clothing or whatever, can have up to EIGHT material zones defined (same principle as faces on prims - each material/face can have its own texture, colour, transparency etc - just that mesh allows creators to define their material zones however they like). My concept would be, for example in your skirt, to have a few material "bands" around the top of the skirt, each with the same original texture, BUT with the ability for the customer to change transparency to 100%.... so if the top two material bands were poking through a top, for instance, they could be made invisible to hide the issue. Of course, there would be limits of how well this could work, depending on the clothing items being mixed, but surely it would help to some extent.

Sadly, probably due to NO MOD perms set by most merchants, they probably won't allow users to tweak transparency manually because the dreaded customers might then change the texture or colour (heaven forbid!) and cost them sales. Even so, a HUD option for setting transparency could be a workaround.

If I ever get around to being a merchant, it's something I would definitely explore - maximising customers' ability to mix and match clothing. Having been a Poser user in the past, hiding clothing parts etc was second nature to me - and it would be ideal here in SL with the material workaround.

:matte-motes-smile:

[Tamara Artis]

I have it in wine color and I wear no skirt benath lol. Just wanted to say great look and don't mind the occasional AO accidents:)

[Anaiya Arnold]

I had a simlar thought, but instead of the option to make transparent, I thought a creator of mesh making a jacket and skirt for instance, could put an interior surface face on the top jacket where it will cover the skirt, and a separate face on the skirt (or pants) where the jacket/top covers to induce an alpha sorting glitch that hides the bottom part of the outfit when it does clip through the top part.

When the items are textured, a copy of the skirt/pants is made but the texture that goes on the faces that will be covered by the jacket/top has an alpha channel.  The interior (not visible when the item is worn) faces also have a texture saved with an alpha layer.

So the exterior of the jacket and all of the skirt that is supposed to show when you have the jacket on is made with textures saved with no alpha channel, and there is a layer inside the jacket and  on the parts of the skirt/pants that are not supposed to clip through the jacket that have alpha channels saved into the texture.  The sorting glitch will prevent the skirt (or pants) showing when they clip and by keeping the effected textures to those parts of the skirt that will be hidden by the jacket, this should prevent unwanted "side effect" glitches. 

When the outfit is sold, the idea would be to provide two texture versions of the pant/skirt.  One with no alpha channel on any of the faces to wear alone, and one with the alpha channel on textures applied to the specially created faces, only where the matching top is worn.  That way the alpha glitches is only happening to faces that are covered and supposed to be glitching, and not when someone is walking past windows or standing in front of a plant.

Individual creators of course can take their existing stuff and redo the texture layout to add the faces at any time, but even Commercial full perm sellers could create series where say skirts and pants from series A fit and have faces designed to work with any jacket or top from series A.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

we demand photo-graphical proof that you wear this jacket without a skirt under it...

[Jennifer Boyle]

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Tamara Artis wrote:

I have it in wine color and I wear no skirt benath lol. Just wanted to say great look and don't mind the occasional AO accidents:)

---

Well, that's certainly a solution for the problem.

[oncophys]

I've purchased a lot of mesh clothing from hoorenbeek... pieces such as a shirt may have several different meshes depending upon how the clothing will be layered... a shirt might be worn on its own, or layered under a jacket or blazer, and combined with high- or low-rise pants. There are also 3 different sizes (S, M & L)... it makes for a lot of options for a single garment, and undoubtedly adds to the expense. The net effect, though, is a good one.

[Sassy Romano]

Pick up here and read onwards https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/STORM-1716?focusedCommentId=360264&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-360264

That's the thread for the mesh deformer, the result of the discussion was that if we could upload a mesh model and the source avatar shape against which it was made, that's used by the deformer to produce the end result to fit the clothing to you.

The final suggestion was that instead of this:-

Deformed model = Standard Default AV shape + Mesh object + Imported source shape + YOUR shape

that it instead be:-

Deformed model = Standard Default AV shape + Mesh object + Imported source shape + ANY shape

We can all create shapes, we have a UI to edit shapes, so just deform against a specified shape instead of your current shape.  Now if you could do that per item of clothing, you could fine tune the fit of clothing in layers for different places of the body.

Idea was shot down, won't happen, give up, deal with it, move on, nothing to see here.

[Jennifer Boyle]

I'll check them out.

 

Thanks.