Bakes on Mesh Feedback Thread

[Blush Bravin]

I've been making mesh clothing using Marvelous Designer for Sansar clothing. Many of those are complex outfits with multiple garments worn as a one piece outfit. I have to make one texture for all the pieces as we don't have faces for MD clothing yet in Sansar. Consequently, I have been using multiple normal and roughness (specular equivalent for SL) maps and layering those in the proper order and then flattening to make the complex normals, etc. I don't know why this method would not work for Bakes on Mesh.

[daFlesh]

On ‎6‎.‎04‎.‎2018 at 3:22 AM, Cathy Foil said:

For mesh clothing on a custom mesh avatar using the Bakes On Mesh system you just wear an alpha created by the clothing designer just like you do when you wear mesh clothing on the LL Default System avatar to hide poke through.

so far as I understand,  it means that no need for alpha cuts anymore for a mesh body about solving poke issues while wearing a mesh cloth (for that body) I am about to finish developing my mesh body, if so I'd better not upload it as alpha cutted and remove from HUD options. Alpha cuts are having issues with high altitudes (that problem is solved but it is still better to have a one piece body rather than sliced and 8 faced of many pieces  

Edited April 13, 2018 by daFlesh

[daFlesh]

On ‎11‎.‎04‎.‎2018 at 3:46 PM, Vir Linden said:

I see some discussion here about selling things in the marketplace based on bakes on mesh. To agree and expand on some of the discussion above: it's great that the project is working well enough at this stage that some people want to base products on it, but It's also important to realize that currently this is just a first-pass project viewer. That means that it is new and experimental code at an early stage of development. Like any project at this stage, it's possible that it will change substantially before release, and it's even possible that it could be canceled entirely. This would leave any products based on this stage of the feature in a tough spot, either working in an incomplete or incorrect way, or not working at all. For this reason we would strongly recommend waiting until the project is released before selling products based on it.

Hi

I just heard about the Project is still on two days ago and I am excited about it. I thought the Project was cancelled, there was no news since last year. (perhaps I should have asked people) I hope the Project will not be canceled, even though I already spent so much time for making my alpha cuts and onion layers, (I am developing a mesh body)  it looks like really reliefing to get rid of that onion layers on mesh bodies (mine have 4 of them) and what is more , alpha cuts (around 25 pieces each divided into 8 materials so over 200 parts- sliced mesh body. About mesh bodies usage. as everybody already know thats just so many stuff,  x4 polycount, many texture loads, unnecessary,  making SL experience just struggling  for new users (I cannot imagine the feeling of new person in SL, trying to figure out the mesh body HUDs system, alpha blending masks, etc etc.  I still remember when I was new in SL, that (mod copy trans) thing-adjustments was something needed to be figured out for me. someone explained it imho SL shouldnt be more complicated after an update, "mesh" itself was a great step after sculpts, but it came up with its complications (mesh body using) so far what I read in the forum (I am still trying to figure out )  this update seems like, it can provide back users and creators more simple way of SL experience compared to current one.

now, I am changing my mesh body development path into this Project. I was going to start preparing the HUD but as I just mentioned above, I see this as a chance to make things all simplier.

Edited April 13, 2018 by daFlesh

[Henri Beauchamp]

The Cool VL Viewer now supports "bake on mesh".

On a side note, this feature would be better named "avatar texture bakes on attachments" since it does not bake textures for any given mesh (i.e. meshes with UV coords not matching the SL default avatar won't show right) and allows to display baked avatar textures on any kind of attachments, including non-mesh ones and HUDs: this could possibly be of use for scuplties (if you can manage to build one that would map natively with Av UVs), but I fail to see any practical use for simple prims and HUDs...

Questions for the implementers:

• Will "bake on mesh" apply to "animesh" attachments ?
• Won't it be better to prevent bake textures on non mesh attachments (for speed optimization purpose and actual usefulness of the feature).
• Will there be some way to disable auto-hiding of avatar parts (I see a corresponding check box in the texture picker code, but it is currently not active and lacks any code for this kind of support). The idea is that you could wear, say, a rigged mesh calico which mesh won't cover the collar part around the neck neither the arms, and won't want the full upper body to get hidden as a result. Or, think of mesh "boobs" that could also use bake on mesh on SL avatars *if* it was possible *not* to hide the upper body part. As for how to implement it, the simplest way would probably be to affect a different pseudo-texture UUID for bakes without auto-hiding (e.g. IMG_USE_BAKED_UPPER_NO_HIDE in excess of IMG_USE_BAKED_UPPER).

Edited April 14, 2018 by Henri Beauchamp

[Ramses Meredith]

Hello, as a mesh body creator, i am more than interested to know more about this - how can I find more info, so I can start on a update and on a beta program. I am also ready to helpin any way i can!

[Nalates Urriah]

On 4/13/2018 at 2:07 AM, daFlesh said:

I just heard about the Project is still on two days ago and I am excited about it. I thought the Project was cancelled, there was no news since last year. (perhaps I should have asked people)...

Every week there are User Group meetings where we capture Lindens and torture them until they reveal what they are working on... It is amazingly difficult to effectively waterboard in SL.  The schedule is here User Groups. Those meetings are held during SLT office hours. So, for many it is hard to get to them as it is the middle of their night.

There are blogs that follow those meetings and report the SL news. Inara Pey and my blog are two that report the step-by-step development of projects. Hamlet's, Daniel's, Cirran's, and others are less technical and tend to report the official announcement of features. The blogs make it easy to stay informed.

The Linden reported announcements are in Featured News in this forum. But, those posts tend to be just as or after a feature is released. Not much of a heads up for developers. So, one has to find a blog or other good source of insider news.

[Nalates Urriah]

5 minutes ago, Ramses Meredith said:

Hello, as a mesh body creator, i am more than interested to know more about this - how can I find more info, so I can start on a update and on a beta program. I am also ready to helpin any way i can!

The post just below yours... 

You can read up on the details here: The Great Bakes-On-Mesh Debate

You can watch the videos in this thread here and here.

Download the Project Viewer for Bakes On Mesh and read the release notes.

[Isis Owatatsumi]

On 4/6/2018 at 3:07 AM, Klytyna said:

We have a LINDEN claiming that Bake-Fail on mesh will eliminate the need for full perm template mesh, because... We can just bake our 2006 system clothing onto it, no need to be able to modify it with custom made textures, strongly suggesting that at least one of the two Lindens posting so far in this thread isn't aware than most mesh clothing doesn't use SL System avatar uv layouts.

I was thinking the same thing , that most full perm clothing is not using system uv templates . Im still trying to understand how this work . Should I hold off on buying any full perm clothing until Bakes on Mesh is released ?

[Babette Ultsch]

hello, i love the feature! its much less trouble then clicking alpha slices on a mesh body e.g. Anyhow using the bake for BAKE_SKIRT i get some weird texture when taking of the system skirt clothes from my avatar:

The consequences are that when you don't wear a system skirt clothing, you end up with that yellowish texture which seems to be some kind of clothing or hair texture. I would expect if you take off the system skirt, the bake would be transparent.

this is how it looks as expected using the skirt_bake with a system skirt using a texture that belong to the dress (bake_upper,bake_lower):

Edited April 15, 2018 by Babette Ultsch
adding info

[Ramses Meredith]

11 hours ago, Nalates Urriah said:

The post just below yours... 

You can read up on the details here: The Great Bakes-On-Mesh Debate

You can watch the videos in this thread here and here.

Download the Project Viewer for Bakes On Mesh and read the release notes.

Thank you very much!

[VaIentine]

Ok, I am going to throw this out there. I don't know if anyone else has suggested this before, but I am going to. 

When setting a mesh object to utilize the baking system... it would be great to be able to also mark it to only bake certain types of clothing layers. Say.. one for skin and tattoos. And a second 'onion layer' to only accept clothes thing layers.. underwear, shirts, pants, etc.

This would still lower the number of onion layers needed on mesh bodies. But still be able to utilize the baking system, as well as alpa's with the baking system.

Edited April 16, 2018 by VaIentine

[Whirly Fizzle]

9 hours ago, VaIentine said:

Ok, I am going to throw this out there. I don't know if anyone else has suggested this before, but I am going to. 

When setting a mesh object to utilize the baking system... it would be great to be able to also mark it to only bake certain types of clothing layers. Say.. one for skin and tattoos. And a second 'onion layer' to only accept clothes thing layers.. underwear, shirts, pants, etc.

This would still lower the number of onion layers needed on mesh bodies. But still be able to utilize the baking system, as well as alpa's with the baking system.

Yes, this has been suggested.
BUG-216061 - [BAKES ON MESH] Additional Bake Channels for Existing Assets

[Ramses Meredith]

6 hours ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

Yes, this has been suggested.
BUG-216061 - [BAKES ON MESH] Additional Bake Channels for Existing Assets

Good option.. hope they integrate it quickly

[LittleMe Jewell]

On 4/14/2018 at 8:14 PM, Babette Ultsch said:

 

So, we may be returning to the days of 'hair up the bum' and no need to even TP to have it happen.  Awesome 

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

So, we may be returning to the days of 'hair up the bum' and no need to even TP to have it happen.  Awesome 

I’m more used to seeing a hairy bum on a guy!

[Nalates Urriah]

Cathy Foil has a new video out showing the problem of using BoM for mesh-attachment-clothes and a solution. If you want to disagree, disagree. But, avoid being disagreeable.

Toward the end, she gets to a bit of a reason for why people would want to use BoM for mesh-clothes and other accessory attachments. And people certainly use layers for all sorts of neat things in other places. It seems reasonable to assume having layers for all things in SL via BoM would allow some surprising uses.

However, Cathy's thinking that there will be few conflicts with a million or billion texture channels is probably wrong but is probably the best for a simple solution. I say wrong because people very predictably pick certain numbers even when they try to pick random numbers. There are studies and empirical evidence it is what we humans do... which has lead to our use of dice and other randomizers, physical or computer, for picking numbers when we need to avoid conflicts/duplicates. 

Also, the ETA for BoM is pure speculation. The Lab has been working on BoM for some time already. I was digging around in my blog looking for when it was first being talked about. I doubt that is as informative as it could be. I think it may be more informative to look at when they hired the programmer for BoM. We can't really know if this was his first project or whether or not he has been pulled off for other urgent tasks. Assuming it was and he hasn't... I think the Lab already has about a year in the project. So, I consider a couple of months to 6 or more as reasonable guesses... GUESSES.

Edited April 17, 2018 by Nalates Urriah
add guesses

[Vir Linden]

37 minutes ago, Nalates Urriah said:

I was digging around in my blog looking for when it was first being talked about.

For those interested in the history of the project, the first discussion I can recall was during the bento project. Cathy talked about it, and the first feature request filed was from polysail: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-10980 aka "Option to "Unwear" the default SL avatar". That was created Dec of 2015. This eventually started getting called bakes on mesh and has been on our backlog since then, and has been a popular recurring topic at the content creators meeting.

We've only been actively working on it recently, though, since Anchor picked up the project earlier this year.

[Les White]

I script a few mesh bodies and I like this. I have a few thoughts and questions if anyone is interested.

For materials - I would be happy with just combining the maps as some suggested (if such a thing is possible), but you are still going to lose all the unique gloss, environ and spec rgb values.

I want to make an alpha applier thing. Applies slices of alpha to help a user fit older clothing (all of the alphas none of the calories!). Can I do this with script? I can't figure out how. I will cry many tears if I can not add textures to the bake stack via script. Ideally I would like to be able to add and remove via script and not deal with actual system clothing objects at all. Perhaps you can. I'm new at this!

Where can I find the system UUIDs so that I do not have to set faces manually and this set up should be explained on line one of the wiki and introduction.

The thing that scares me the most is the talk of using skirts for arms and all this goldberg machine type structure already building up on this. For the love of god give these people another arm (hands! feet!) so we don't have convolution right out of the gate. Mesh bodies are already 3 degree beyond insane.

Sorry if my questions are silly. I'm getting up to speed. I'll try to make some meetings.

Edited April 18, 2018 by Les White

[Ramses Meredith]

3 hours ago, Les White said:

I script a few mesh bodies and I like this. I have a few thoughts and questions if anyone is interested.

For materials - I would be happy with just combining the maps as some suggested (if such a thing is possible), but you are still going to lose all the unique gloss, environ and spec rgb values.

I want to make an alpha applier thing. Applies slices of alpha to help a user fit older clothing (all of the alphas none of the calories!). Can I do this with script? I can't figure out how. I will cry many tears if I can not add textures to the bake stack via script. Ideally I would like to be able to add and remove via script and not deal with actual system clothing objects at all. Perhaps you can. I'm new at this!

Where can I find the system UUIDs so that I do not have to set faces manually and this set up should be explained on line one of the wiki and introduction.

The thing that scares me the most is the talk of using skirts for arms and all this goldberg machine type structure already building up on this. For the love of god give these people another arm (hands! feet!) so we don't have convolution right out of the gate. Mesh bodies are already 3 degree beyond insane.

Sorry if my questions are silly. I'm getting up to speed. I'll try to make some meetings.

Hello Les

1) materials can be created from the mesh body creators (like i have made) so you can have a generic effect which is compatible with different skins.

2) you can script alpha appliers it is not hard to do it;

3) the system uuid are in the "item profile" if you use viewer like firestorm, or using official viewer right click on the texture and then select uuid.

to have another arm and another hand it is easy on mesh, I, as example, have 2 different arms totallycompatible with old uvmap hehe

Hope to have help!

[Theresa Tennyson]

9 hours ago, Les White said:

I want to make an alpha applier thing. Applies slices of alpha to help a user fit older clothing (all of the alphas none of the calories!). Can I do this with script? I can't figure out how. I will cry many tears if I can not add textures to the bake stack via script. Ideally I would like to be able to add and remove via script and not deal with actual system clothing objects at all. Perhaps you can. I'm new at this!

Okay -- why? I'm honestly curious.

[Julia Blackwood]

Question:  I logged in using the Bakes On Mesh Project viewer for Mac with one of my rarely-used alts. The viewer worked great! Super fast and smooth, no freezes. Then I logged in with my main account and instantly had multiple micro-freezes, then froze entirely and eventually crashed. The only difference between the two accounts that I can think of is inventory size. One is very large and one is very small.

Also, What is Python?  It launches as a separate program (Second Life Launcher?) when I launch the Bakes On Mesh Project viewer from LL as well as the Second Life version 5.1.1.512121 (5.1.1.512121) viewer from LL, then it freezes and reads as "not responding".

 

[Vir Linden]

39 minutes ago, Gretchen Janick said:

Also, What is Python?  It launches as a separate program (Second Life Launcher?) when I launch the Bakes On Mesh Project viewer from LL as well as the Second Life version 5.1.1.512121 (5.1.1.512121) viewer from LL, then it freezes and reads as "not responding".

I'm not sure why it's not responding. One recent change with the SL viewer is the addition of a separate launcher process, so instead of just starting the viewer, you're really starting a launcher, which then does things like checking for updates, handling crashes, etc, and is responsible for starting the actual viewer executable. So if you see something about python (a programming language used by the launcher), or Second Life Launcher, that's what it's about.

Re: the crash, you may want to retry and just wait a bit while everything gets loaded and cached. If that all works correctly, you may get better performance the next time you log in with that account. If it crashes consistently, please try with the SL default viewer, and then file a JIRA to let us know about the problem. Please give any details like "only crashes with bakes on mesh viewer" or "crashes consistently with both viewers".

[Vir Linden]

On 4/14/2018 at 8:57 AM, Henri Beauchamp said:

Questions for the implementers:

• Will "bake on mesh" apply to "animesh" attachments ?
• Won't it be better to prevent bake textures on non mesh attachments (for speed optimization purpose and actual usefulness of the feature).
• Will there be some way to disable auto-hiding of avatar parts (I see a corresponding check box in the texture picker code, but it is currently not active and lacks any code for this kind of support). The idea is that you could wear, say, a rigged mesh calico which mesh won't cover the collar part around the neck neither the arms, and won't want the full upper body to get hidden as a result. Or, think of mesh "boobs" that could also use bake on mesh on SL avatars *if* it was possible *not* to hide the upper body part. As for how to implement it, the simplest way would probably be to affect a different pseudo-texture UUID for bakes without auto-hiding (e.g. IMG_USE_BAKED_UPPER_NO_HIDE in excess of IMG_USE_BAKED_UPPER).

Applying to animesh attachments has been discussed. Of course the problem is that animesh objects don't have an associated avatar, so there's no natural source of baked textures for them. To allow this we would first have to have a way of defining what is supposed to be included in such baked textures, and then modify the baking service accordingly. So it's a fairly big project. Something we might consider in the future but that won't be part of the initial bakes on mesh release.

Prevent baked textures on non-mesh attachments: I'm not sure if we would want that limitation. How about something like a rigid piece of armor, which might be defined in the same UV space as the system avatar, and where you might want to apply a texture derived from a clothing item? I'd be curious to hear if anyone plans to use bakes on non-rigged meshes.

Disabling auto-hiding, or more generally giving the user more control over what gets hidden, has also been discussed. No final plan on that yet.

[BinBash]

1 hour ago, Vir Linden said:

I'd be curious to hear if anyone plans to use bakes on non-rigged meshes.

I'll be using it, if it's available in this way, to allow end users to texture my clothing, instead of having a HUD and multiple meshes in their inventory.  Some of my things are not skinned/rigged but are worn as part of an outfit so I would certainly utilize it there as well.

[Chellynne Bailey]

5 hours ago, Vir Linden said:

I'd be curious to hear if anyone plans to use bakes on non-rigged meshes.

 

Yes. There are a plethora of unrigged mesh bits and bobs that I currently offer applier support for that will have a baked option added, either by their original creator or by me.