Creator's Opinions on Fitted Mesh

[Medhue Simoni]

To my astonishment, Fitted Mesh was released today. Now, either I'm missing something, or the avatar is missing a bunch of stuff.

I've been playing around with Fitted Mesh since it's initial announcement. I would weight things until I couldn't weight things anymore, without making things worse, and then wait for the next update. The last time I waited, which was a month ago, I got no updates until now. I don't know what is exceptable to others, but I don't see where this release is exceptable at all. Like I said, I could be missing something, but I really don't think so.

Let me explain my results on my pants. Pretty much most of the body sliders work, and aren't a problem. There is a hip width slider that doesn't seem to be deforming quite right. It seems like it should be a bone scaling, so I don't understand why it is not evenly stretching the mesh in the hip area. The Butt morph slider, I can only get to work about 75% of the slider. The leg muscle morph slider doesn't affect the calves right, which I have no other things to weight it to that can make it morph right. The biggest problem by far, is the body fat morph slider, which morphs fine width wise, but doesn't morph the front of the pants at all. Please, some1 tell me I'm missing something here, or doing something wrong. There are no other collision bones to match the head morph sliders. How exactly are we going to make mesh hair that deforms with your head? I didn't make hair, but I did make a hat. It doesn't deform to the sliders at all, other than head size, which is a scaling bone. What about the male avatar? I haven't tried anything with a male yet, but the male has another morph slider for the crotch. Where is the collision bone to morph with that? I'm hoping that I just need a completely different weighting combination, but I fear this is just another oversight.

Like I said earlier, I have no idea what is exceptable to every1 else, but this is not exceptable to me. Even with the body sliders that do work, I feel like I'm still missing a collision bone that would allow me to make it all perfect. The Body Fat morph slider, I have no idea how I'm going to get that to work, other than make a mesh that starts in that shape with the slider all the way up. Yeah, as is, this solution might work for 70% of the avatars, but IMHO that's not enough, when it could easily be 100% including head gear.

I really want to hear from other creators. What are you seeing? How good can you get it? Where are your problem areas?

[Monti Messmer]

Hello, i´m wondering a bit  too this is released to public.

For pants, there is a belly bone but didn´t get it to deform the pants front. The male upper legs, if they are bit muscular, do exactly what you said, no good deforming.

The crotch area doesn´t do any at all, no bone, no weighting.

My testing didn´t go beyond a trouser so i cannot tell about the other body parts.

Did they just make a new rig wait a while then release or really worked with creators to improve, there where some comments on the JIra left.

I stopped creating when mesh was introduced then the TOS disaster, maybe i just sit and wait a bit longer.

Monti

[JackRipper666]

Nice to see you get this far already Medhue. I also am not sure about this besides maybe making use of those physic's bones on a female avatar. But until I get a chance to try it I won't know what I think of that if it works lol. The way I see this skeleton as a use for me is only if I decide to make any clothing or armor available not only to my avatars I build but also to the second life default avatar after I adjust the parts to the default AVI then rig it. This would allow customers to scale the parts off the body and not along with the default avatar shape. Since everyone has their own shape they like to use you'd need a seperate control to keep the body from poking through if they have a large shape it would easily poke through the clothing, armor etc. But this is how I took this skeleton to be useful or used in SL since from the video it shows how  creators had the body of the default avi poking through their clothing if they didn't build it away from the body enough. This new skeleton seems mostly just for adjusting that that problem giving you that control to scale it away from your stomach enough so that it fits.

 

The physic's bones if they work will be nice. But I'd probably just add those to my current skeleton I use in Maya using the same naming convention. That works when I rig my avatars face with some extra deformers named after the attachment point bones. Can't see why it wouldn't for the new programmed in physic's bones as long as I use their naming convention. As for the collision bones I won't use them with my avatars I build. Since I build it custom to fit the shape of the characters body before it's even uploaded. Therefore when any of the sliders are adjusted the avatar's clothing/armor scales with it. Besides the sliders that don't work at all just yet. I know it could still be useful for my own custom built avatars but I thoroughly test the avatar usually before I upload to beta to see if it pokes at all. Then run a bunch fo different AO's to see if any animations show a part of the body that is poking through the clothing etc. But it could save me if I put in the time to add these into my current rig. Since even if the clothing isn't perfect you could just scale the clothing off the body pretty far to fix that using skin weights and should save me time in that way.

 

So that's pretty much how I took fitted mesh as if it's made for taking care of the mesh clothing, armor etc that you build around the default avatar. Which would just resolve poking through depending on the shape of the default avatar giving you the flexibility you need to keep your clothes fitting nicely. As for it controlling the body fat etc. I didn't think it would be used for this. Fitted mesh that name just implys to me fitted mesh clothing if you know what i mean. Not so much take care of the body adjustment sliders that don't work on the first skeleton released. I could be completely wrong though but that's my only assumption as to why you're having problems with those sliders. 

[Rhys Goode]

I've been playing around with the new collision bones for a month, trying to make a "one size fits all" skimpy bikini.  Skimpy, because with the old SL bones, the bikini bottom can be locked to mPelvis and the bra to mChest, and you are done.

Now with collision bones, the bikini bottom is easy, so I have a prototype for 1 size fits all panties.  But no way fort the bra.

I can make a mesh bra and have it grow and shrink with the sliders easily enough.  But the "shape" is not particulary close to the SL avatar shape.  And if you keep careful track of the tip of the bra, as you change sliders, you can see systematic changes in the shape of the SL avatar mesh that are simply not there for the fitted mesh.  Even if it is the exact same SL avatar mesh you are trying to rig.  The SL avatar mesh, rigged to the original CHEST bone, simply deforms differently with the sliders than the precise same mesh linked to collision bones.  

And while it does work well for some clothing styles, it just is not an easy solution if you want to make womens clothing that includes a bit of cleavage. I suspect that at the end of the day, I will be able to make a custom fitted top that allows the use of physics, but will not do a good job at all for an avatar with sliders more than about +/- 5 points from the design avatar for breast cleavage, breast size, body thickness and body fat sliders , and  maybe +/- 2 points for breast bouancy. (Mesh rigged to the he orignal SL bones scaled perfectly with body thickness)  There are really only 3 of the collision bones that are useful to rig a bra, and it is hard to fix 5 different sliders with only 3 levers to adjust.

The people who are thinking this will be the end of alpha masks are going to be sorely disappointed.  And the notion that you can "keep your own shape" while wearing the new stuff is simply delusional.  You may be able to keep the same slider values, but the shape is going to be different, you will still have to alpha mask out your own shape, and go with whatever the clothing designer came up with for that particular garment.  

[Medhue Simoni]

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Monti Messmer wrote:

Hello, i´m wondering a bit  too this is released to public.

For pants, there is a belly bone but didn´t get it to deform the pants front. The male upper legs, if they are bit muscular, do exactly what you said, no good deforming.

The crotch area doesn´t do any at all, no bone, no weighting.

My testing didn´t go beyond a trouser so i cannot tell about the other body parts.

Did they just make a new rig wait a while then release or really worked with creators to improve, there where some comments on the JIra left.

I stopped creating when mesh was introduced then the TOS disaster, maybe i just sit and wait a bit longer.

Monti

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Thanks for confirming I'm not crazy. lol

 

I hear you about the TOS disaster, and I'm not really creating much of my own stuff for SL right now because of it. What I am doing tho, is rigging and weighting clothing items for other creators. They took 1 look at the whole rigging fiasco and asked me to do it for them. I'll have many more clothing items to test with soon, but I'm trying to sort everything out before I work on their stuff.

[Medhue Simoni]

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JackRipper666 wrote:

Nice to see you get this far already Medhue. I also am not sure about this besides maybe making use of those physic's bones on a female avatar. But until I get a chance to try it I won't know what I think of that if it works lol. The way I see this skeleton as a use for me is only if I decide to make any clothing or armor available not only to my avatars I build but also to the second life default avatar after I adjust the parts to the default AVI then rig it. This would allow customers to scale the parts off the body and not along with the default avatar shape. Since everyone has their own shape they like to use you'd need a seperate control to keep the body from poking through if they have a large shape it would easily poke through the clothing, armor etc. But this is how I took this skeleton to be useful or used in SL since from the video it shows how  creators had the body of the default avi poking through their clothing if they didn't build it away from the body enough. This new skeleton seems mostly just for adjusting that that problem giving you that control to scale it away from your stomach enough so that it fits.

 

The physic's bones if they work will be nice. But I'd probably just add those to my current skeleton I use in Maya using the same naming convention. That works when I rig my avatars face with some extra deformers named after the attachment point bones. Can't see why it wouldn't for the new programmed in physic's bones as long as I use their naming convention. As for the collision bones I won't use them with my avatars I build. Since I build it custom to fit the shape of the characters body before it's even uploaded. Therefore when any of the sliders are adjusted the avatar's clothing/armor scales with it. Besides the sliders that don't work at all just yet. I know it could still be useful for my own custom built avatars but I thoroughly test the avatar usually before I upload to beta to see if it pokes at all. Then run a bunch fo different AO's to see if any animations show a part of the body that is poking through the clothing etc. But it could save me if I put in the time to add these into my current rig. Since even if the clothing isn't perfect you could just scale the clothing off the body pretty far to fix that using skin weights and should save me time in that way.

 

So that's pretty much how I took fitted mesh as if it's made for taking care of the mesh clothing, armor etc that you build around the default avatar. Which would just resolve poking through depending on the shape of the default avatar giving you the flexibility you need to keep your clothes fitting nicely. As for it controlling the body fat etc. I didn't think it would be used for this. Fitted mesh that name just implys to me fitted mesh clothing if you know what i mean. Not so much take care of the body adjustment sliders that don't work on the first skeleton released. I could be completely wrong though but that's my only assumption as to why you're having problems with those sliders. 

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I think you slightly misunderstand the purpose of Fitted Mesh. The clothing doesn't work independent of the avatar, they work along with the avatar's sliders. It would actually be much, much better if the clothing had it's own sliders, then the user could over compensate and have a little more control over the clothing and how it fits. Personally, I really don't understand why LL didn't add collision bones for the Pants and Shirt sliders. This would make a tons of sense because they actually give the users more control.

I was thinking about redoing my Lycan Avatar to take advantage of sliders and customization that Fitted Mesh brings, but there is no way in the world I'm going to do that if this is the kind of results we are getting. It would almost be impossible for the clothing I made for him to work correctly, or to the point that is was useful. We'll see. I'm sure that if I get bored, I'll play around with it.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Rhys Goode wrote:

I've been playing around with the new collision bones for a month, trying to make a "one size fits all" skimpy bikini.  Skimpy, because with the old SL bones, the bikini bottom can be locked to mPelvis and the bra to mChest, and you are done.

Now with collision bones, the bikini bottom is easy, so I have a prototype for 1 size fits all panties.  But no way fort the bra.

I can make a mesh bra and have it grow and shrink with the sliders easily enough.  But the "shape" is not particulary close to the SL avatar shape.  And if you keep careful track of the tip of the bra, as you change sliders, you can see systematic changes in the shape of the SL avatar mesh that are simply not there for the fitted mesh.  Even if it is the exact same SL avatar mesh you are trying to rig.  The SL avatar mesh, rigged to the original CHEST bone, simply deforms differently with the sliders than the precise same mesh linked to collision bones.  

And while it does work well for some clothing styles, it just is not an easy solution if you want to make womens clothing that includes a bit of cleavage. I suspect that at the end of the day, I will be able to make a custom fitted top that allows the use of physics, but will not do a good job at all for an avatar with sliders more than about +/- 5 points from the design avatar for breast cleavage, breast size, body thickness and body fat sliders , and  maybe +/- 2 points for breast bouancy. (Mesh rigged to the he orignal SL bones scaled perfectly with body thickness)  There are really only 3 of the collision bones that are useful to rig a bra, and it is hard to fix 5 different sliders with only 3 levers to adjust.

The people who are thinking this will be the end of alpha masks are going to be sorely disappointed.  And the notion that you can "keep your own shape" while wearing the new stuff is simply delusional.  You may be able to keep the same slider values, but the shape is going to be different, you will still have to alpha mask out your own shape, and go with whatever the clothing designer came up with for that particular garment.  

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Yep, and that is really my point. This is not even close to finished. You can't even make a Hoody and have it form to your head. No offense to the coders or LL, but this is like half-assed. It would be something if it was simple for us and half-assed, but we got super time consuming and half-assed.

Maybe I'm just harsh about these things, but this is the opposite of what I think of when I think of SL. To me, the beauty that is SL, is what it is because of the passion that each of us has for whatever we do or make. So, if you make clothing, you love clothing, and you will spend whatever time it takes to make that clothing perfect, and make your customers happy. If you make avatars, you study the character. You watch tons of videos on the subject. We have characters on the grid that come with incredible amounts of detail and features. I myself, when I sit down and want to make that EPIC AO, spend months on it giving the customer hundreds and hundreds of animations for them to use and play with. I don't see that kind of commitment on this Fitted Mesh solution.

I'm not saying this is a terrible solution, just that it needs more work. I'll admit, I fully believe that the Mesh Deformer is a million times better, in every way possible, especially for the creators and users stand point. If Fitted Mesh is what LL wants to go with, I guess I have to play along, but at least give me something reasonable. I'll predict right now that people with larger, heavier type of avatars are going to not like Fitted Mesh at all, and many of them are going to waste a buttload of lindens on them, only to be sorely dissapointed. I mentioned that I was going to try making my pants fits the largest extreme, and uploading it to fit that, but with this Fitted Mesh solution, I don't think I can do that. It is gauging the deforms from the sliders, not the actual mesh. With the Mesh Deformer, if you had problems with very extreme avatars, you could just make the clothing to fit that extreme size. When you upload it, the clothing would still work on most other avatars, but it would fit best in that extreme size that you created it for. I seriously don't think you can do that with Fitted Mesh, as it just works totally differently. So, based on that observation, I will conclude that any1 with any kind of extreme avatar, including child avatars, will not have a good experience with most Fitted mesh clothing.

[Medhue Simoni]

I'm posting this as a comparison.

 

The clothing in this video is not Fitted Mesh.

 

 

I don't expect Fitted Mesh to work quite as good as this, but it should be, at the very least, close. The biggest part that annoys me is the extra work that LL is forcing us to do. With the Mesh Deformer, you just need good normal bone weights, like you would create on any avatar you would ever make for any platform possible.

 

In my honest opinion, this Fitted Mesh solution further puts a divide between default clothing creators, or any1 new to 3D clothing creation, and those that master this extremely quirky solution.

[Marielle Caerndow]

 

I'm also very sad that the deformer was denied, and the cBones are now the way to go (or not).

My problem is not the extra work, nor that there'd be something new to learn - my problem is that it simply doesn't work.

 Take a pair of knee high boots. As soon as the customer hasn't sraight legs, 'Fitted Mesh' suddenly stops to fit. Like Rhys said, +/-5 ok, but every shape that's more different to default will not get proper fitting. (And the legs/knees are only one area of the problem.)

After a lot of testing and considering the fact that it's not possible to rig the avatar-mesh in a way that it deforms like the in-world avatar-body does, I'm not sure if it makes sense to jump into this. Really pondering with the question if it's worth the effort, when only a small number of customers benefit from it - those whose shape is near the defaults.

 

 

[JackRipper666]

Well I guess this is why it confuses me lol. According to the video it says it's for mesh garments.To me it should work independently from the avatar. Because my mesh clothing or armor always scaled along with my mesh avatars with the first skeleton. So i didn't see a need for more bones there just for the sliders that didn't work yet. So I started assuming they were half way there or something thinking fitted mesh was only for indepent control.  So are they trying to kill two birds with one stone then, clothing and all the rest of the body demisions with this new skeleton? 

 

But I do see some independent control here if you look at the video again. I see the clothing scaling off the body and trying to match the body demsions of a smaller frame. At aboutt 1:18 to 1:21 you'll see a female mesh top doing just that in the video.  Now that I think about if you build your own avatar you'll use all these bones to get the rest of the sliders to work on your avatar as your doing Medhue. But if you create just mesh clothing for the default avatar it seems it works off a different set of bones or something if it's independent control like this in the video. So maybe I answered my own question with it killing two birds with one stone. lol

So eventually I'l have to see if it works well since you seem to find it's lacking.

 

[Medhue Simoni]

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Marielle Caerndow wrote:

 

I'm also very sad that the deformer was denied, and the cBones are now the way to go (or not).

My problem is not the extra work, nor that there'd be something new to learn - my problem is that it simply doesn't work.

 Take a pair of knee high boots. As soon as the customer hasn't sraight legs, 'Fitted Mesh' suddenly stops to fit. Like Rhys said, +/-5 ok, but every shape that's more different to default will not get proper fitting. (And the legs/knees are only one area of the problem.)

After a lot of testing and considering the fact that it's not possible to rig the avatar-mesh in a way that it deforms like the in-world avatar-body does, I'm not sure if it makes sense to jump into this. Really pondering with the question if it's worth the effort, when only a small number of customers benefit from it - those whose shape is near the defaults.

 

 

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You know, I'm not a clothing designer at all. I'm a guy that cares very little about clothing, in RL and in SL. So, why the heck am I complaining about stuff that has to do with clothing? Well, because I feel for my fellow creators and know just how important a good mesh clothing solution is. For whatever reason, things have also progressed to the point that clothing creators are seeking out others with more experience in rigging, as this solution is far more complex than any creator would normally encounter.

As a business person, I cringe everytime I here a customer, not even my own customer, complain about something they spend their hard earned money on. From a business stand point, I see the dollars flying out the window. From a creators standpoint, it hurts even more to know that you can't do anything about that customer not being satisfied, except give them a refund. When you add in all the extra effort, only to still have unsatisfied customers, it's heartbreaking to even deal with. From that business side of me, I know this can't be good for business, even tho I might have more satisfied a small percentage. It's still going backwards, not forward.

[Theresa Tennyson]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

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Marielle Caerndow wrote:

 

I'm also very sad that the deformer was denied, and the cBones are now the way to go (or not).

My problem is not the extra work, nor that there'd be something new to learn - my problem is that it simply doesn't work.

 Take a pair of knee high boots. As soon as the customer hasn't sraight legs, 'Fitted Mesh' suddenly stops to fit. Like Rhys said, +/-5 ok, but every shape that's more different to default will not get proper fitting. (And the legs/knees are only one area of the problem.)

After a lot of testing and considering the fact that it's not possible to rig the avatar-mesh in a way that it deforms like the in-world avatar-body does, I'm not sure if it makes sense to jump into this. Really pondering with the question if it's worth the effort, when only a small number of customers benefit from it - those whose shape is near the defaults.

 

 

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You know, I'm not a clothing designer at all. I'm a guy that cares very little about clothing, in RL and in SL. So, why the heck am I complaining about stuff that has to do with clothing? Well, because I feel for my fellow creators and know just how important a good mesh clothing solution is. For whatever reason, things have also progressed to the point that clothing creators are seeking out others with more experience in rigging, as this solution is far more complex than any creator would normally encounter.

As a business person, I cringe everytime I here a customer, not even my own customer, complain about something they spend their hard earned money on. From a business stand point, I see the dollars flying out the window. From a creators standpoint, it hurts even more to know that you can't do anything about that customer not being satisfied, except give them a refund. When you add in all the extra effort, only to still have unsatisfied customers, it's heartbreaking to even deal with. From that business side of me, I know this can't be good for business, even tho I might have more satisfied a small percentage. It's still going backwards, not forward.

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I don't have any technical experience with mesh clothing but I have a great deal of experience with real-world clothing and with putting together avatars of a wide variety of sizes, some quite non-standard. I also have experience as an end-user with the parametric mesh deformer, both when it was in beta on SL and currently on InWorldz. When the deformer was being tested it was actually clothing creators who had the most complaints about it. If you're using anything but the very simplest tight-fitting garments - for example, a suit with a lot of 3D detail- and you use it for an avatar with an unusual shape it will quckly make those garments fail in ugly, unpredictable ways. Clothing designers in InWorldz don't have to make five different sizes of clothing any more - they make SIX (five standard and a deformable version) because they don't trust the deformer as a one-size-fits-all solution.

I've also tried clothing based rigged to collision bones - yes, they don't perfectly respond to the avatar's shape, but I feel they look much better than the results of the deformer for avatars with unusual shapes.

There are now three design strategies for SL-type mesh clothing systems - standard sizes, liquid/fitted mesh and the parametric deformer. The first two systems were actually developed BY clothing creators, unlike the third . If I was starting a new world I wouldn't rely on any of these methods but we don't have that luxury.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Theresa Tennyson wrote:

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I don't have any technical experience with mesh clothing but I have a great deal of experience with real-world clothing and with putting together avatars of a wide variety of sizes, some quite non-standard. I also have experience as an end-user with the parametric mesh deformer, both when it was in beta on SL and currently on InWorldz. When the deformer was being tested it was actually clothing creators who had the most complaints about it. If you're using anything but the very simplest tight-fitting garments - for example, a suit with a lot of 3D detail- and you use it for an avatar with an unusual shape it will quckly make those garments fail in ugly, unpredictable ways. Clothing designers in InWorldz don't have to make five different sizes of clothing any more - they make SIX (five standard and a deformable version) because they don't trust the deformer as a one-size-fits-all solution.

I've also tried clothing based rigged to collision bones - yes, they don't perfectly respond to the avatar's shape, but I feel they look much better than the results of the deformer for avatars with unusual shapes.

There are now three design strategies for SL-type mesh clothing systems - standard sizes, liquid/fitted mesh and the parametric deformer. The first two systems were actually developed BY clothing creators, unlike the third . If I was starting a new world I wouldn't rely on any of these methods but we don't have that luxury.

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Well, I was just finishing up a dress with a puffy top, and skin tight bottom. I decided to upload it to InWordz to see how it performs. It was flawless. The puffy top didn't have even 1 issue. Notice how I didn't do any extra work to that dress to make it work with the deformer. When creators were complaining about the deformer, I explained to them that they need perfect weights to get perfect results. Getting near perfect weights for normal deform bones is not really that hard. So, basically, they complained about the deformer, and LL gave us this, which is 1000 times harder to weight. It's nonsensical.

As I said earlier, I don't really make clothing. For the most part, I'm just rigging the clothing for other creators. My advice to them, is going to be to start selling in InWorldz, where they have a good solution. I suspect that the people that complained about the deformer were LL buddies, which is why the deformer got scrutinized to death, and Fitted Mesh saled thru without even head morphing cbones or a crotch cbone for male avatars. The difference between how LL handled both projects show the bias that LL had. It's just sad.

 

The best solution would have been to allow creators to import morphs, or shapekeys. Implementing something like that would have be awesome for many more people and uses than just clothing. Unity3D just implemented shapekeys. You can even animate the shapekeys. LL tho, they twiddle their thumbs and respond with, "That's too hard".

[Rhys Goode]

Oh, there is no doubt that it works, after a fashion, and even makes a sexy looking turtle neck.  But thats because the SL avatar is pretty much fully masked out.  You are seeing how the mesh of the sweater changes with sliders, not how the SL avatar changes, it would be bulging out left and right.

Now, this is not really all *that* bad a thing.  When I wear a top like that in RL, between my bra and the sweater, my shape is changed by the clothes.  They do not look painted on. No, the bad thing is that it will only really work for cases where the clothing mesh completely covers the whole chest.  

It just seems that there is a fundamental conflict between Fitted mesh and decolletage.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Rhys Goode wrote:

Oh, there is no doubt that it works, after a fashion, and even makes a sexy looking turtle neck.  But thats because the SL avatar is pretty much fully masked out.  You are seeing how the mesh of the sweater changes with sliders, not how the SL avatar changes, it would be bulging out left and right.

Now, this is not really all *that* bad a thing.  When I wear a top like that in RL, between my bra and the sweater, my shape is changed by the clothes.  They do not look painted on. No, the bad thing is that it will only really work for cases where the clothing mesh completely covers the whole chest.  

It just seems that there is a fundamental conflict between Fitted mesh and decolletage.

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Exactly! LL's video is created to hide all the problems with Fitted Mesh. The whole process is convoluted to start with. I dare some1 to make detailed instructions on how to make a perfect set of collision bone weights, as It just can't be done. Even explaining it to some1 is more like explaining how to solve a rubic cube puzzle. This is a hack, and it is still a hack, not a functioning system to solve a problem.

This is not how finish solutions are handed to creators. If LL wanted to use this system, then IMHO, the proper way would have been to create a cbone for every single morph on the avatar. Meaning the Butt cbone only controlls the Butt morph, and a Body fat cbone controlls only the Body fat morph. In this way the creators know exactly which bones they need to weight to get the right affect. Yes, this would mean many more bones, but once you got some good weights on all those bones, you could use them on most of your clothing with minor adjustments. What LL made for us, is a puzzle with no good solution.

[Cathy Foil]

My hope is that LL hears from enough residents to realize they need to put some more development time into the Fitted Mesh system.

I was quite active in testing Fitted Mesh and reporting in the Jira's.  I am very familiar with the limitations and drawbacks of Fitted Mesh as well as its positive qualities and advantages.

Fitted Mesh is really good for looser fitting clothing or tight fitting clothing that covers most of the avatar's skin.

Fitted Mesh is not very good for skimpy or tight fitting clothing that shows a lot of skin.

There have been some wonderful suggestions here that could be implemented that would drastically improve Fitted Mesh.

I really like the idea of adding a section in the Editing Appearance menu of having sliders just for the Collision Bones.  I would suggest one slider for each collision bone and three buttons to control which axis the slider was affecting.  A fourth button would set the slider so it scaled all three axis equally. 

There definitely needs to be a male groin joint.  It never occurred to me nor did anyone else mention the need for one during testing.  Now it seems so obvious how did we all overlook it.

[SolasNaGealai]

Hello medhue, thanks for the great video! I to love the way Inworldz's deformer works, i spent hours in maya rigging to the new SL bones and after about 2 tries it still needs more work. Tell me, do you know if it's best (when in SL ) if the "person" wears the default avi shape, puts on the fitted mesh, then change to the shape they want or should the fitted mesh adjust instantly to any shape when it is warn?

[Medhue Simoni]

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SolasNaGealai wrote:

Hello medhue, thanks for the great video! I to love the way Inworldz's deformer works, i spent hours in maya rigging to the new SL bones and after about 2 tries it still needs more work. Tell me, do you know if it's best (when in SL ) if the "person" wears the default avi shape, puts on the fitted mesh, then change to the shape they want or should the fitted mesh adjust instantly to any shape when it is warn?

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You should be able to wear the Fitted Mesh without changing your shape at all, and (supposedly) it should form to you. Fitted Mesh is based on those shape morphs and you shouldn't need to reset your avatar for them to work.

[Cathy Foil]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

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SolasNaGealai wrote:

Hello medhue, thanks for the great video! I to love the way Inworldz's deformer works, i spent hours in maya rigging to the new SL bones and after about 2 tries it still needs more work. Tell me, do you know if it's best (when in SL ) if the "person" wears the default avi shape, puts on the fitted mesh, then change to the shape they want or should the fitted mesh adjust instantly to any shape when it is warn?

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You should be able to wear the Fitted Mesh without changing your shape at all, and (supposedly) it should form to you. Fitted Mesh is based on those shape morphs and you shouldn't need to reset your avatar for them to work.

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Medhue is correct in that there is no need to wear the default avi shape Ruth first when putting on Fitted Mesh.  However Fitted Mesh does not use the Morphs at all to achieve its shape.  The Collision Bones Fitted Mesh is weighted to just changes their scales to roughly match your avatars shape.  There is an invisible avatar mesh everyone in SL is wearing named the "Collision Skeleton".  It is a very crude simple boxy mesh that is used to calculate when an object collides with your avatar.

The Collision Skeleton mesh was made this way to keep down lag and because it was a lot simpler to calculate collisions from it than the more complex avatar mesh.  The Collision Skeleton mesh is actually made up of individual Octahedrons.  Each Octahedron is weighted to a single collision bone.  When you change your shape in SL with the sliders they do two things.  They use Morphs to change your avatars mesh shape but they also change the scales of the Collision Bones which in turn change the size of the Octahedrons in the Collision Skeleton mesh to roughly match your avatars meshes new shape.

So any vertices of a mesh rigged and weighted to the Collision Bones get scaled up or down as you change your shape in SL with the sliders.  More Collision Bones had to be added because the original Collision Skeleton didn't have Octahedrons for the breast or male package area.  LL wasn't concerned with objects colliding in those areas I guess.

So you can now see why Fitted Mesh is a challenge.  Content creators have to rig and adjust the weights of vertices to bones that change their scale to get their mesh to follow the size and shape of the avatar mesh that doesn't change it shape in the same way.  Hence why looser fitting clothes is easier because there is more room for error and why clothes that cover more of the avatar because the avatar is hidden with alphas.  Tight and or skimpy clothes that show a lot of avatar skin there is way less room for error.

If LL would add individual sliders just for the Collision Bones that would allow us to be able to adjust the scales in X, Y & Z independently.  That would help make Fitted Mesh fit a whole lot better.

Hope that helps.

Cathy

[Rhys Goode]

The main problem with the fitted mesh/collision bones scheme is that meshes do not deform the same way as the SL avatar.  Now, one way to do this is to replace the SL avatar mesh with the rigged mesh mesh, and blank out the SL avatar mesh with an alpha mask.  That is what the lady in the turtle neck was doing, bouncing around in the linden feel good flick.

If I had a way of *legal* using an avatar's skin, applying it to a mesh, rather than just the SL avatar....  Not so easy, but doable, making a mesh avatar with the same texture faces as an SL avatar.  If you happen to have your own .tga files for the skin, then it is easy to make mesh clothes that "fit" arbitarty slider positions.  Just mask out the SL shape, and bring on your own, and weight the clothes to follow the skin.  Starlite is nice, but being able to use the same textures that go into a proprietary skin on a mesh avatar (conforming to the same UV map) does not seem like that big a deal in the IP department.  But I do not know if the technolgy would allow it.  

I know very little about the dark arts of copybotting, and it is sufficiently unacceptable, that I have not delved there myse. However friends tell me it is not impossible, with a bit of trial and error, to get the UUID of the particular textures..in question.

My question... is there a way to do this without trampling all over someones copywight rights?   Or a way for a copyright holder to sanction such use?  It would make living with "fitted" mesh, a lot more palatable.

 

Is there

[Cathy Foil]

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Rhys Goode wrote:

The main problem with the fitted mesh/collision bones scheme is that meshes do not deform the same way as the SL avatar.  Now, one way to do this is to replace the SL avatar mesh with the rigged mesh mesh, and blank out the SL avatar mesh with an alpha mask.  That is what the lady in the turtle neck was doing, bouncing around in the linden feel good flick.

If I had a way of *legal* using an avatar's skin, applying it to a mesh, rather than just the SL avatar....  Not so easy, but doable, making a mesh avatar with the same texture faces as an SL avatar.  If you happen to have your own .tga files for the skin, then it is easy to make mesh clothes that "fit" arbitarty slider positions.  Just mask out the SL shape, and bring on your own, and weight the clothes to follow the skin.  Starlite is nice, but being able to use the same textures that go into a proprietary skin on a mesh avatar (conforming to the same UV map) does not seem like that big a deal in the IP department.  But I do not know if the technolgy would allow it.  

I know very little about the dark arts of copybotting, and it is sufficiently unacceptable, that I have not delved there myse. However friends tell me it is not impossible, with a bit of trial and error, to get the UUID of the particular textures..

in question.

My question... is there a way to do this without trampling all over someones copywight rights?   Or a way for a copyright holder to sanction such use?  It would make living with "fitted" mesh, a lot more palatable.

 

Is there

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Rhys you bring up some good point and good ideas.  Yes a custom avatar rigged as Fitted Mesh would help though only if the custom avatar mesh was weighted the same as the mesh clothing.  Meaning that the vertices of the custom mesh avatar and the vertices of the mesh clothing nearest to each other were weighted the same to the same collision bones then they would deform exactly the same.

In theory this would solve the problem but there are a couple of issues.  One the chances of the custom avatar mesh vertices and the mesh clothing having identical or near identical weights is remote though they probably don't have to be that close to get a decent result.  Problem number two the custom avatar mesh, even if it is the default avatar mesh weighted to the collision bones making it Fitted Mesh, won't be the same shape as the real avatar mesh it is covering.  For some people it may be close enough for others I am sure how are attached to their shape it may not be.

Finally the last and perhaps biggest problem.  The custom avatar meshes face would be expressionless.  The eyes would not blink the mouth would not open or close or smile or anything.  I know I tried it and it is creepy.  Now if LL made it possible for such a mesh to access the Morphs that would be good and solve that problem.  It could also solve the skin problem at the same time because such a mesh would have all the same texture layers as the default avatar weighted to the normal bones we have now.

It is also possible for LL to write new code that would allow totally new custom avatar mesh we make to be textured automatically by what ever skin and other textures your default avatar was wearing.  It would basically take all the textures your default avatar mesh was wearing and collapses them into three textures.  One of the head, one for the torso and on for the legs.  Only problem would be again the avatar's face would be expression less because we can't upload Morphs.

InWorldz however using the original Mesh Deformer custom mesh avatars faces do move and have all the same expressions as the underlining default avatar because of the way it works.  I know I have tested it.  If your name is Rhys Goode in InWorldz I will send you my custom mesh test head so you can see for yourself.  It is a completely different mesh head than the default avatar.  I made it with a program named Makehuman.

[Perrie Juran]

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Cathy Foil wrote:

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InWorldz however using the original Mesh Deformer custom mesh avatars faces do move and have all the same expressions as the underlining default avatar because of the way it works.  I know I have tested it.  If your name is Rhys Goode in InWorldz I will send you my custom mesh test head so you can see for yourself.  It is a completely different mesh head than the default avatar.  I made it with a program named Makehuman.

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For those of us who don't do IW could you post a video?

[Cathy Foil]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

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Cathy Foil wrote:

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InWorldz however using the original Mesh Deformer custom mesh avatars faces do move and have all the same expressions as the underlining default avatar because of the way it works.  I know I have tested it.  If your name is Rhys Goode in InWorldz I will send you my custom mesh test head so you can see for yourself.  It is a completely different mesh head than the default avatar.  I made it with a program named Makehuman.

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For those of us who don't do IW could you post a video?

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OK here you go Perrie.

Hope you enjoy it.  Sorry no sound.  Didn't have time to edit it.

[WhiteRabbit0]

I too am stuck on this butt weighting problem.  I'm not sure what to do about it as it leaves this new rig almost completely unviable for clothing and dress making.  I tried inverting the bone weights.. adjusting the scale etc etc.. tons of things to try and get the ass to not fly out and expand for no reason at SL AV slider values for butt size that range from 0 to 27.  But I have had no luck..  Has anyone posted a JIRA about this or is this working as intended?

[Medhue Simoni]

Well, recently, I decided to make a full body suit. This time, when I weighted the cbones, I didn't really use the butt bone. I left it as is, with only minor adjustments when I saw it would help in the areas of love handles and keeping the groin from getting crazy. Most of the morphing below the chest, at least that I have found, is controlled by the Pelvis, and Belly bones. I hope this helps a little.