LL Adding Collision Bones Mesh Deformer Shelved!? :(

[Cathy Foil]

It was announced today that new collision bones are being added to support the Liquid Mesh way of creating mesh clothing.  It now looks like the Mesh Deformer is not going to happen. :(

Personally I like to see both available.  I have worked extensively with weighting mesh to collision bones and have spent weeks playing with the Mesh Deformer.  The Mesh Deformer is better by far!  Rigging to the Collision Bones and getting the weighting just right is more difficult since they are offset to the normal bone placement. 

The Mesh Deformer is so much easier to use.  Just rig to the normal bones of the skeleton and in the upload window select one or two settings that's it!

Rigging to Collision Bones just inflates or deflates the vertices weighted to them.  It is sort of like inflating and deflating balloons wearing clothes.  However the avatar mesh does not change size and shape in this manor it uses Morphs.  The Mesh Deformer uses the vertex position of the avatar mesh to in influence positions of the mesh clothing so no matter what shape the mesh clothing changes shape appropriately.

Linden Lab Please, Please, Please let us have both Collision Bone / Liquid Mesh and the Mesh Deformer.  If you don't want to put the Mesh Deformer in your LL default viewer please let third party viewers put it in theirs.

[Chic Aeon]

I reported on the demise of the Deformer project in SL awhile ago on this forum . The person with the insights and talent (sorry forgot his name) has left SL partially because of the new TOS and partial according to his blog post (the rest of the site had been deleted when I wrote about this before) because The Lab repeated refused to answer any of his questions and was not interested (aparently) in the process.

Who knows why, but it does not appear that it will happen on this grid. It IS on others and working as I understand it  .

 

 

[Nalates Urriah]

The Deformer did what it was requested it do and then some. But, it still had problems. For those making large and small avatars, they found it falling short of what they wanted. Plus people piled on as the Deformer neared completion asking for more fixes and features. I beleive these user base requests lead the Lab to look for a better solution.

Some users were complaining of viewer delays (performance hits) using the Deformer. The new Fitted Mesh process omit the calulations some felt were a problem. While there was a fix that improved performance, there was still a small load added from the having to do the needed calculations. Performance in SL is an important issue.

All in all, it looks like this is a solution most of us will prefer. 

 

[Cathy Foil]

Have you worked with Collision Bones?  They are a pain in the butt!  They are much more difficult to get a decent weighting than normal bones.  Why partly because they are offset from the normal bones position.  Partly because the rotations are not at zero.   Partly because their scales are not set to one in XYZ.

Even if those things were fixed, which I doubt LL will make any effort do, when you set your avatar settings to extremes all deformed mesh no matter if it is mesh deformed by Collision Bones or the Mesh Deformer will have flaws and texture deformations.

There building methods for creating mesh that can compensate for the deformations caused by both the Mesh Deformer and Collision Bones but I doubt LL will help in creating plug-ins for either Blender or Maya that would be needed.

As far as performance issues for the Mesh Deformer there were really no issues with the original deformer.  Even so Qarl made performance increases by updating the Mesh Deformer code so that it ran 21 times faster.  So instead of taking a second or two for the deformer to kick in it took less than a second.

Who are you to talk for most of us when you make the statement "All in all, it looks like this is a solution most of us will prefer."?  Did you take a poll?

How much experience do you have with creating and using the Mesh Deformer or Collision Bones?

I have extensive experience with both and can tell you from a content creators perspective that the Mesh Deformer is hands down way easier and way less work than using Collision Bones to create deformable mesh.

The only work load LL seems to care about is LL's work load not the content creator.  Had a few SL content creators not paid out of there pockets thousands of real US Dollars to Qarl to make the Mesh Deformer I doubt LL would have even made new Collision Bones.

LL instead of satisfying just some of us why not satisfy all of us and let us have both the Mesh Deformer and Collision Bones?  Each has their advantages and disadvantages.  I wouldn't care if the Mesh Deformer was only available in third party viewers.  Make it an option in the Preferences under the Graphics setting to turn on or off the Mesh Deformer for those on really old computers.  At some point LL you have to stop worrying about residents on old low performance computers.

[Syntella Rhapsody]

I have tried the "Liquid Mesh" clothing in-world. It didn't fit my avatar any better than any of the mesh clothing made in standard sizes. Although I have not tried rigging to the collision bones yet so I can't speak to the difficulty. I have tested the "Deformer" over at Avination and it worked really well and it was not any harder to make use of it than making regular mesh clothing. I understand that it may not work for extreme sizes, but honestly I explore SL quite a bit and rarely see extreme sized avatars. To not use the "Deformer" because it may not work as well for extreme sized avatars which are a miniscule percentage of the SL population is ridiculous. I think LL's move to use the "Collision Bone" method is more political than quote "it is likely to be the more maintainable solution and to perform better for a wider range of users.". The "Deformer" is done. It needs nothing more than LL letting it be implemented, why won't they? What vendeta do they have against Qarl? As it seems more the case to me than either function actually working better. 

" Neither approach completely eliminates the occasional need for an alpha clothing layer to prevent small parts of the avatar skin from appearing through garments, but both work quite well at resizing garments so that they fit the avatar and move naturally with it."

Direct quote from their post.