Mesh Mistake by LL

[ChinRey]

11 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

I wholehartedly agree. Such an important, if not the most important part of the product, should have been made to some standards, fully modifyable by the company. Leaving such a core part to amateurs (polycounts, LODs, texture res etc. anyone?) was a mistake in my opinon as well.

Oh yes!

LL never had any valid argument against doing the job. The mesh bodies certainly don't add variety - avatars tend to look far more similar now than before. Mesh bodies don't strengthen the "free market" illusion - they weaken it since it raises the threshold for getting into the market. And as for backwards compatibility, I can't imagine anybody in the right mind will claim that an upgraded system body would be less backwards compatible than the current mesh bodies...

It's too late though, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. LL made a huge mistake years ago and now they have to live with it. Oh well, at least it gave me and all the others who saw it coming and warned LL about it, irrefutable proof that we're smarter than any Linden.

[Theresa Tennyson]

7 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Oh yes!

LL never had any valid argument against doing the job. The mesh bodies certainly don't add variety - avatars tend to look far more similar now than before. Mesh bodies don't strengthen the "free market" illusion - they weaken it since it raises the threshold for getting into the market. And as for backwards compatibility, I can't imagine anybody in the right mind will claim that an upgraded system body would be less backwards compatible than the current mesh bodies...

It's too late though, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. LL made a huge mistake years ago and now they have to live with it. Oh well, at least it gave me and all the others who saw it coming and warned LL about it, irrefutable proof that we're smarter than any Linden.

Linden Lab made mesh avatar bodies.

They were less backward compatible than the current user-made mesh bodies.

If Linden Lab did the job, they would do it in the way that any rational company would - to make things the way that would have the most benefit for them. That would be to 1) keep server load low and 2) come in on budget.

If your priorities lie elsewhere, you'd be better off doing things yourself or have someone with a direct financial motive do things for you.

 

[ChinRey]

4 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Linden Lab made mesh avatar bodies.

I wasn't talking about making "official" mesh avatar bodies, Theresa, I was talking about upgrading the mesh and rig of the system body itself to add more polys and more controls.

 

6 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

If Linden Lab did the job, they would do it in the way that any rational company would - to make things the way that would have the most benefit for them.

Yes but my point is that LL misjudged the situation. They didn't think it through and solutions that seem to be the most cost effective at a casual glance are often the most expensive in the long run.

[Medhue Simoni]

During the Bento Beta meetings, I brought up the idea of LL making a new system body. The group and LL brought up many good reasons why it would not really fly. I was totally bringing it up for compatibility issues, and a better avatar and clothing market. I have also asked LL to make their newest mesh avatars openly available to us. Meaning, give us the source files, so that we can create accessories for these avatars. Who knows if that will happen.

In the end, I do think it is better for the community to drive the avatar market. For this market to be better, LL needs to help the creators do the things they want to do with their avatars, like having layers for others to more easily make accessories for them. This is what the upcoming Texture Baking system will do. This will help to almost eliminate the onioning that so many mesh bodies are doing to be able to alpha out parts of their bodies, making those bodies ridiculously inefficient. Oh, and Of Course, Bento make mesh avatars many times better than the actual default avatar.

As far as the female and male body markets go, and them not being very consumer friendly, I say to all those feeling this way to be patient, and politely express your concerns to the body developers. Markets are constantly changing, especially the avatar market in general. Yes, things are crazy right now, but give the market time to iron all these things out. After texture baking is released, there will be another big change in the market. After that, I would think the market will settle and when the dust clears, the consumer base will have many more options with better compatibility, and more accessories for all, as making these clothing accessories will be vastly more creator friendly.

Just my thoughts.

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

5 hours ago, ChinRey said:

I wasn't talking about making "official" mesh avatar bodies, Theresa, I was talking about upgrading the mesh and rig of the system body itself to add more polys and more controls.

 

And that still wouldn't have helped make mesh clothing fit because the body would, I presume, still use morphs that mesh clothing couldn't use (unless, of course, they allowed mesh clothing makers to include all the morph data in the meshes that are uploaded to the viewers - weren't we already upset about the amount of data that needs to be sent now?)

Of course, the avatar could have been changed to use bones instead of morphs when it was being updated. Then, as anyone who's tried to use "fitmesh" clothing on a system avatar could tell you, an existing avatar would very likely look substantially different - in other words, it would break existing content because it's incompatible.

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, Medhue Simoni said:

During the Bento Beta meetings, I brought up the idea of LL making a new system body. The group and LL brought up many good reasons why it would not really fly.

There are lots of good reasons now, yes. But there weren't five or six years ago when LL should have done the upgrade, before the introduction of fitted mesh.

 

[ChinRey]

41 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

weren't we already upset about the amount of data that needs to be sent now?)

Yes. I'm looking for an old post by Medhue but can't find it. It was back before LL launched the Bento project and Medhue was arguing for more detailed facial expression controls. One of his main points was that although those extra bones would add a lot of load, it would still be a lot lighter than the hacks content creators would come up with as substitutes. Fortunately Linden Lab did listen this time and announced Bento in the nick of time. They ignored the warnings and all the obvious warning signs back when it was time for a system body overhaul though.

 

41 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Of course, the avatar could have been changed to use bones instead of morphs when it was being updated.

Yes, probably. But even a simple increase in teh vertice count a few places and maybe a minor rethinking fo the hand and feets shape would have helped a lot and wouldn't have broken anything.

 

41 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Then, as anyone who's tried to use "fitmesh" clothing on a system avatar could tell you, an existing avatar would very likely look substantially different - in other words, it would break existing content because it's incompatible.

Fitmesh didn't exist back then. There were two user developed hacks - liquid mesh and rigged mesh - but they weren't that common, they weren't supported by LL and they hardly ever fitted anyway.

Edited August 26, 2017 by ChinRey

[Macrocosm Draegonne]

After being away for almost five years and returning recently, I had to go through this process, but it was fun lol.  I had loads of old incompatible inventory (and ideas about how things work) to clean out too.  I started with the Adam body as I hadn't found any other yet, it wasn't exactly what I wanted, so I kept hunting.  Now i have Signature & Belleza too, which I love & use both: I got the catwa head first which im super happy with.  Skin's & hair are another fun hunting process.

This is one of the best "features" to SL, its not like an MMORPG where everything is so limited & predetermined, thus the creativity is through the roof here, I love it!  I'm even making some of my own unique custom stuff now too.  The more the merrier IMO, I love going to the club and seeing everyone looking completely different, it truly wasn't so diverse & detailed back in the day, all this competition (and incompatibilities) adds more flare and spice to the world, and will continue to do so exponentially. 

Customer service and outreach will determine which bodies are more popular, and supported by designers, catwa did a great job for me being almost a noob again, their help-group was always available, and helped me a ton.. and their products are excellent, so they get my repeat business & praise.   That said, the free mesh avatars are not half bad as a starter, they should be plenty for a noob to get around and explore, it even overcomes the duck-walking by having an AO included lol. >.<

The Mesh tex baking system that's coming seems like it will add even more goodness to this mix!  Bring it!

[Chase01]

For years, people pleaded and begged LL to do it, but that was long before this market had matured. That need has been met by the community, in spades. Now, when you want to go mesh, you look for a community made product, which is the way it should be.

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

Yes. I'm looking for an old post by Medhue but can't find it. It was back before LL launched the Bento project and Medhue was arguing for more detailed facial expression controls. One of his main points was that although those extra bones would add a lot of load, it would still be a lot lighter than the hacks content creators would come up with as substitutes. Fortunately Linden Lab did listen this time and announced Bento in the nick of time. They ignored the warnings and all the obvious warning signs back when it was time for a system body overhaul though.

 

Yes, probably. But even a simple increase in teh vertice count a few places and maybe a minor rethinking fo the hand and feets shape would have helped a lot and wouldn't have broken anything.

 

Fitmesh didn't exist back then. There were two user developed hacks - liquid mesh and rigged mesh - but they weren't that common, they weren't supported by LL and they hardly ever fitted anyway.

I remember reading an old high-end stereo magazine from the 1980's. Someone wrote an article saying that we should go to a high-definition analog television system and the government were a bunch of philistines because they hadn't pushed it through.

Of course, the government didn't listen.

Of course, the high-definition analog system would have been obsolete years ago if they'd done what the writer said anyway.

-----------------------------------------------------

Okay, we obviously need to talk about terminology:

All mesh capable of conforming to the movement of the avatar mesh is rigged mesh. It's been official and supported for as long as mesh was on the table for SL. I've seen a video from 2010 where someone was wearing a rigged mesh avatar in a Second Life testing environment. Rigged mesh is rigged to bones. The default Second Life avatar mesh has some aspects of its shape determined by bones, but others that represent "soft tissue" are determined by morphs that are hard-coded into the definition of the avatar itself. If you wear a piece of mesh in Second Life, it simply can't reliably follow the morphs of the default avatar. Morphing, for our purposes, is the equivalent of analog television. The reason for "standard sizes" of mesh clothing was to set the morphed aspects of the default avatar to predictable values so it wouldn't be obvious that mesh clothing couldn't respond to those slider values.

Fitted mesh is also rigged to additional bones in the skeleton called "collision bones",  most of which were already there but lying dormant, which can approximate the effects of the morph-changing sliders. The skin of the default avatar isn't rigged to these collision bones though. Mesh rigged to the collison bones can therefore respond to the sliders which make the default avatar morph, but not exactly the same way the default avatar does. This is why fitmesh clothing usually doesn't work reliably on the default avatar.

Even if you added polygons to the default avatar and improved its weighting this wouldn't mean that mesh clothing would be able to respond the same way as the body does to the "soft tissue" sliders that cause the default avatar to morph. You'd need its skin rigged to some system of bones, and there's no guarantee it would still look and act the same way that the default body does at any given slider setting.

However, if you attach a mesh body to the skeleton you can have mesh clothing and avatars that respond the same way to the sliders because they're both speaking the same "language."

 

[Medhue Simoni]

3 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

And that still wouldn't have helped make mesh clothing fit because the body would, I presume, still use morphs that mesh clothing couldn't use (unless, of course, they allowed mesh clothing makers to include all the morph data in the meshes that are uploaded to the viewers

Theresa is exactly right here. And even if LL made a mesh default body at that time, it would have massively failed because of the lack of facial expressions and finger movements. Today, yeah, there is a better argument for LL to make a new LL body with mesh and bento, but I think with many of these new tools, and the leg up the creators have, LL's would also fail. Now, when this new texture baking is released, I think everyone is going to have to upgrade, because the competition will become extremely fierce. Don't be surprised if I'm involved in a new female avatar project.

[Solar Legion]

@Theresa Tennyson has nailed it in pretty much one go. To be very blunt on the whole topic; There is no way whatsoever to upgrade the system avatar body without breaking years worth of existing content, some of which still holds up even today. There is no argument that can be made which outweighs that simple, cold truth.

Edited August 27, 2017 by Solar Legion