Bakes on Mesh Feedback Thread

[Blush Bravin]

8 hours ago, Callum Meriman said:

I get the feeling a large portion of them are old textured clothing business owners. They look back at the previous decade with their rose-coloured glasses, recalling how anyone with a few graphic skills and a copy of Gimp. could make texture clothes. They moan incessantly how mesh was the death of the creativity and how fashion suffered when mesh clothes came along. Their businesses faded way with the passing of that decade, and since the end of those glory days nobody but a few 2004 fossils wanted those painted on things any more.

Now they have hope again, they want it rushed out half finished, because they believe they can restart their 2006 era businesses in all their vintage glory. They see promises of waterfalls of L$ falling before their eyes while they imagine a return to the heady days of leisure suits, flares, polyester, padded shoulders, texture clothing, prim bulges, and flexi skirts.

 

I am one of those who made system clothing way back ... have absolutely no plans to make system clothing aside from stockings, which I never stopped making. I don't think there are many creators who think or want to go back to the old painted on system clothing look. Applier clothing is only useful in a very few instances like for layering under mesh clothing, undies, stockings, and for some who don't like the look of long mesh skirts and still cling to having flexi movement in ballgowns.

The biggest reason I am excited and don't want to wait for the project to be released is the ability to wear multiple layers with alpha channels that do NOT glitch. I love wearing tats with stockings and lace panties. We can't do that with the current onion skin bodies. I'm looking forward to being able to wear multiple tattoos as well. Although, I don't really see how we can have stockings without at least one onion layer so that the stockings have the proper toe and do not wrap around the individual toes of the feet.

Also, I'm excited that we won't have to depend on alpha cuts on the bodies for our fitted mesh clothing. Unfortunately no matter how many alpha cuts we were given some necklines simply never worked well. With BoM we will be able to make custom alphas for individual pieces of clothing the way we were able to back in the standardized mesh clothing days.

I've always been the impatient type. I want everything yesterday, so it's natural for me to not want to wait. Especially when the features they are asking us to wait on can be implemented later. Not waiting doesn't mean that those features are dead. And perhaps, if the system is out and there are a lot of people still asking for those features, in the long run we might end up with those features implemented sooner than we would have if we simply waited for all the features to get included before the release. 

[Kyrah Abattoir]

Personally I want onion skin bodies to disappear for ever. And why stop there, get rid of their creator too  because anyone who thought "hey this is gonna be just fine" Should be considered too incompetent to have mesh upload rights.

[Cesartje]

On 20/05/2018 at 10:39 AM, Blush Bravin said:

...

I've always been the impatient type. I want everything yesterday, so it's natural for me to not want to wait. Especially when the features they are asking us to wait on can be implemented later. Not waiting doesn't mean that those features are dead. And perhaps, if the system is out and there are a lot of people still asking for those features, in the long run we might end up with those features implemented sooner than we would have if we simply waited for all the features to get included before the release. 

Yes, i agree 100% - I still use my classic body with slink hands with some outfits, I dont wear the mesh body 100% of time and some painted thirts under a jacket wont hurt anyone. Also I want to be able to wear other skins with my head cause lets face it, there is a brand that dominates the market, and if you have a different head, you can hardly find appliers for it (specially of you are a guy). I am not saying bad things about the dominating brand, she is an amazing creator, her heads are amazing - but I happen to have a different one, so not many options there. And I want to have options !

[Klytyna]

On 20 May 2018 at 2:39 PM, Blush Bravin said:

the ability to wear multiple layers with alpha channels that do NOT glitch.

LL have had 15 years to fix that... They might even have done so if they didn't muck about with special projects for special users, requested at the damn "Lick-A-Linden" meetings by the un-chosen few.

E£very dev-hour and $ wasted on Bake-Fail is a dev-hour and $ that COULD of been spent on something ACTUALLY useful.
 

[Theresa Tennyson]

43 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

LL have had 15 years to fix that... They might even have done so if they didn't muck about with special projects for special users, requested at the damn "Lick-A-Linden" meetings by the un-chosen few.

E£very dev-hour and $ wasted on Bake-Fail is a dev-hour and $ that COULD of been spent on something ACTUALLY useful.
 

Of course they could... *snort*

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/shawnhar/2009/02/18/depth-sorting-alpha-blended-objects/

Note how many cases are, "You can't fix that; don't do it."

[Kyrah Abattoir]

On 5/21/2018 at 5:23 PM, Klytyna said:

LL have had 15 years to fix that... They might even have done so if they didn't muck about with special projects for special users, requested at the damn "Lick-A-Linden" meetings by the un-chosen few.

E£very dev-hour and $ wasted on Bake-Fail is a dev-hour and $ that COULD of been spent on something ACTUALLY useful.
 

Is it blame-a-linden day again? Every platform has limitations, all of them.

Good artists don't complain about the limitations of the medium, they use it as a way to challenge themselves.

[Cesartje]

Any date when Bakes on mesh will be fully avaliable? And not only on beta?

[Kyrah Abattoir]

On 4/10/2018 at 7:29 AM, Cathy Foil said:

I am going to do some experiments on how to combine two or more normal maps and specular maps.  I think I have an idea of how it could be done but I don't know if LL will have the resources to make the code necessary for it.  Like I said don't give up yet.

"Overlay" in photoshop works reasonably well for normal maps but you should normalize the length of the resulting vector after you do this (hah).

[tabletopfreak Toocool]

On 4/4/2018 at 3:56 PM, CoffeeDujour said:

If this feature isn't developed hand in hand with makers of the main onion skinned avatar bodies and once released, onion skinned avatars are aggressively punished using ARC and jelly dolls. Then all that will happen is onion skinned avatars will incorporate some of this functionality in combination with existing onion skinning. Perhaps even going as far as just releasing an additional "special" onion layer to be used on top of existing products, compounding the problem and giving us the worst of all worlds.

It is of special note that the avatar body and clothing industry in SL in general are paranoid to the point of insanity. Nothing is released modify and any requirement to do so will never gain any traction as vendors will simply write it off as unusable. 

Appliers exist for one reason only. They keep the actual texture that is being applied a secret. They would be used for this purpose even if the bodies were sold fully modify by the end user (which most aren't).

I hate to say it, but this feature is practically DOA if it isn't forced. Consumer demand alone will never be enough to change the SL fashion industries entrenched position.

 

Other that that, awesome! Please combine this beautiful carrot with a big stick.

there are still people who sell mod clothing and some of us only support those kinds of sellers

[Kyrah Abattoir]

To be fair, the biggest potential feature of bake on mesh (in my opinion) isn't really clothing.

There is a much more interesting potential gain (for the end user at least) with skin customisation ex:

"I want the skin from X, with the makeup from Y but slightly more red (using the garment color picker, assuming that the item is kept as mod) and the freckles from Z"

No need for the body to support custom makeup mesh faces or for the skinmaker to share their textures, it just works.

 

Second attractive point in my opinion is freeform alpha masking, so we could even get rid of mesh body slices.

Due to the 8 face limit, making slices is a hassle for creators and makes a huge mess when creating lod models, and since slices are effectively separate models from the CPU/GPU standpoint they also have an additional rendering cost.

Edited June 4, 2018 by Kyrah Abattoir

[Blush Bravin]

2 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

To be fair, the biggest potential feature of bake on mesh (in my opinion) isn't really clothing.

There is a much more interesting potential gain (for the end user at least) with skin customisation ex:

"I want the skin from X, with the makeup from Y but slightly more red (using the garment color picker, assuming that the item is kept as mod) and the freckles from Z"

No need for the body to support custom makeup mesh faces or for the skinmaker to share their textures, it just works.

 

Second attractive point in my opinion is freeform alpha masking, so we could even get rid of mesh body slices.

Due to the 8 face limit, making slices is a hassle for creators and makes a huge mess when creating lod models, and since slices are effectively separate models from the CPU/GPU standpoint they also have an additional rendering cost.

I totally agree. I love wearing tattoos and sheer stockings but that's nearly impossible with the alpha glitching that happens now. Being able to use custom alphas once again is a huge boon and will allow mesh bodies to become one mesh instead of being broken up into dozens of smaller pieces to accommodate alpha cuts. I'm looking forward to the return of more interesting necklines since creators won't have to create around predetermined alpha cuts. I use a bento mesh head and even though it has extra makeup layers I still never have enough options for makeup so that is another aspect that I'm really excited about.

I don't see anyway around having at least one onion skin layer after BoM is implemented to use for clothing and applier stockings. I know we have mesh stockings now, but for sheer stockings I still prefer applier 95% of the time over mesh. No matter how well mesh stockings are made there are some shoes that simply won't work with mesh stockings. And though most of us tend to wear mesh clothing 24/7 there are still times when applier clothing is the best choice for layering.

[Klytyna]

21 minutes ago, Blush Bravin said:

Being able to use custom alphas once again is a huge boon and will allow mesh bodies to become one mesh instead of being broken up into dozens of smaller pieces to accommodate alpha cuts.

... And losing alpha cuts means no more "autohide" alpha feature in mesh clothing, and a return to the bloody awful days when you had to hope like hell the creator included copies of the textures for the alpha layer so you could make combined alphas because you can only have 5 alpha layers worn at any time, and with your boots, gloves, waist corset, neck corset, eyes, and hair, etc., all needing their own alphas, if you can't combine to get back under the 5 limit, you are royally screwed...

Bake-Fail on Mesh, One small step forward two large steps back, forward to the past, and the return of inferior avatar technology.

Just accept, that DFoM is a cynical bid by tired old vendor-fails to resurrect their back catalogs of system skins, clothes, and tats from the graveyard at "World-O-Crap Discount Freebie Warehouse - All the worst of 2008 in ONE box for ONE L$!"...
 

[Theresa Tennyson]

52 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

... And losing alpha cuts means no more "autohide" alpha feature in mesh clothing, and a return to the bloody awful days when you had to hope like hell the creator included copies of the textures for the alpha layer so you could make combined alphas because you can only have 5 alpha layers worn at any time, and with your boots, gloves, waist corset, neck corset, eyes, and hair, etc., all needing their own alphas, if you can't combine to get back under the 5 limit, you are royally screwed...

 

As opposed to creators setting setting up autohide in no-mod clothing that turns off sections that don't need to be turned off leaving visible holes with no way to fix them? Or bizarre autohide glitches that frequently pop up if you use multiple copies of your mesh bodies so you don't need to reapply your underwear if you prefer to wear mint lingerie with one outfit and nude with another?

Meanwhile, we've been able to wear over fifty of any single type of wearable, including alphas, for at least a couple of years, Rippa van Winkle...

[Kyrah Abattoir]

1 hour ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Meanwhile, we've been able to wear over fifty of any single type of wearable, including alphas, for at least a couple of years, Rippa van Winkle...

Fifty wearables at the cost of... only 3 diffuse maps per avatar, no matter how many are layered together.

I still want normal & specular bakes but i'm not sure how things like gloss and environment settings would handle it.
Hell, I want it for things that are not avatars so we can go full on "Substance Designer"... that's probably a really bad idea, but I can dream.

Also nomod clothing, a rant for another day

[Fionalein]

2 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

As opposed to creators setting setting up autohide in no-mod clothing that turns off sections that don't need to be turned off leaving visible holes with no way to fix them? Or bizarre autohide glitches that frequently pop up if you use multiple copies of your mesh bodies so you don't need to reapply your underwear if you prefer to wear mint lingerie with one outfit and nude with another?

Meanwhile, we've been able to wear over fifty of any single type of wearable, including alphas, for at least a couple of years, Rippa van Winkle...

shh,.... rez autohide(ous) cloth to ground - delete annoying autohide script no one wanted - pick up new improved copy - be happy

Edited June 4, 2018 by Fionalein

[Shnurui Troughton]

On 5/17/2018 at 3:52 PM, Theresa Tennyson said:

Do you have a drivers' license for your digital cars? A permit for your digital guns? 

No.

Why do you have to have one for your digital clothing?

If your example holds up, which it doesn't, then my point is unnecessary.

Letting You use Your copies of No transfer system clothing on objects You own, should never have violated the No Transfer rules.

Bakes on Mesh restores your ability to use your clothing on your avatar, whether you choose to go full mesh OR full system, or ANY COMBINATION there of.

[Shnurui Troughton]

11 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

Fifty wearables at the cost of... only 3 diffuse maps per avatar, no matter how many are layered together.

I still want normal & specular bakes but i'm not sure how things like gloss and environment settings would handle it.
Hell, I want it for things that are not avatars so we can go full on "Substance Designer"... that's probably a really bad idea, but I can dream.

Also nomod clothing, a rant for another day

Are you saying no mod clothing shouldn't be a thing?

[Kyrah Abattoir]

6 hours ago, Shnurui Troughton said:

Are you saying no mod clothing shouldn't be a thing?

Maaaybeee?

[Theresa Tennyson]

7 hours ago, Shnurui Troughton said:

No.

Why do you have to have one for your digital clothing?

If your example holds up, which it doesn't, then my point is unnecessary.

Letting You use Your copies of No transfer system clothing on objects You own, should never have violated the No Transfer rules.

Bakes on Mesh restores your ability to use your clothing on your avatar, whether you choose to go full mesh OR full system, or ANY COMBINATION there of.

It wasn't me who started saying that digital assets (i.e. "clothing") should be treated like their RL equivalents...

[Tapple Gao]

I investigated bakes on mesh viewer, and It seems that bakes on mesh just uses 6 special texture uuid's to represent "this face should be BAKED_UPPER", very similar to how media and invisiprims work. I created a wiki page listing those UUID's: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Internal_Textures

Is Bakes on mesh going to keep working this way? Will these UUID's likely change? if not, I can see creators releasing updates to add a hud button or an omega applier to apply the bakes on mesh textures, and then users can get to using system skins

[Kyrah Abattoir]

1 hour ago, Tapple Gao said:

I investigated bakes on mesh viewer, and It seems that bakes on mesh just uses 6 special texture uuid's to represent "this face should be BAKED_UPPER", very similar to how media and invisiprims work. I created a wiki page listing those UUID's: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Internal_Textures

Is Bakes on mesh going to keep working this way? Will these UUID's likely change? if not, I can see creators releasing updates to add a hud button or an omega applier to apply the bakes on mesh textures, and then users can get to using system skins

At the moment bake on mesh has no script functions to insert textures in the stack, it's all using legacy "garments" I believe, so this is not an option (yet?)

[Theresa Tennyson]

4 minutes ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

At the moment bake on mesh has no script functions to insert textures in the stack, it's all using legacy "garments" I believe, so this is not an option (yet?)

I think Tapple was referring to the textures that are used to receive bakes on mesh data, which can be assigned to a mesh with an applier like any texture and in fact can be already.

The exact UUID's may have to change before official rollout because they look to be 24-bit textures which cause problems when an object that has the bakes-on-mesh textures is manipulated when it isn't worn (doing so right now turns off the alpha mode of those faces, meaning that alpha wearables can't be used until it's reset while being worn.)

[Kyrah Abattoir]

Right, my mistake!

[OptimoMaximo]

On 20/5/2018 at 1:36 PM, Theresa Tennyson said:

Meanwhile, Mr. Meriman's argument is that we should wait until it's possible to make crappy painted-on clothing with materials!

No, the thing is... to not patch up a old feature to partially work, the thing actually is....

KEEP DEVELOPING THE NEWER FEATURES LIKE MATERIALS AND ADD THE ABILITY TO LAYER MATERIALS ON ANY FREAKING TYPE OF CONTENT THAT SUPPORTS MATERIALS (MEANS: EVERYTHING), NOT ONLY MESH BODIES!

So far, all this non sense is based on reviving a dead corpse like necromancers would, instead of MOVING FORWARD and try to, at the very least, get closer to what is common standard in practically any engine, nowadays.

[Theresa Tennyson]

21 minutes ago, OptimoMaximo said:

No, the thing is... to not patch up a old feature to partially work, the thing actually is....

KEEP DEVELOPING THE NEWER FEATURES LIKE MATERIALS AND ADD THE ABILITY TO LAYER MATERIALS ON ANY FREAKING TYPE OF CONTENT THAT SUPPORTS MATERIALS (MEANS: EVERYTHING), NOT ONLY MESH BODIES!

So far, all this non sense is based on reviving a dead corpse like necromancers would, instead of MOVING FORWARD and try to, at the very least, get closer to what is common standard in practically any engine, nowadays.

How do you propose layering materials should work? How will layered normal maps indicate that one item is above another in space when both layers have normal maps designed for single stand-alone objects, meaning that it's entirely possible that the "lower" item will may have indications that it has elements that are "higher" than the "upper" item? How do you determine the glossiness of two layered specular maps when Second Life sets glossiness as a variable per face instead of as a map?