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Bakes on Mesh Feedback Thread


Alexa Linden
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1 minute ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

I'm more thinking about them just releasing a free update, "body X, BOM/light version, use the one you prefer!" with no mesh slices or onion skins.

So much more efficient in the draw call department.

Having a one-piece BoM body provided in addition to an non-BoM body in the same update would definitely be the best compromise in my opinion.

However that still creates a fairly significant issue.  Mesh clothing creators probably will not support both variants.  Mesh clothing creators usually make their items so that they stop on the seam of an alpha cut rather than in the middle of one for obvious reasons.  However there will be no such need for BoM mesh clothing to do this and currently the creator has to stay limited to the existing alpha cuts to stay compatible or provide two versions of the item.  Sadly, I predict that support for the non-BoM version will get dropped very quickly by the mesh clothing creators with increased flexibility of alpha cuts being a primary reason.

It is still desirable to have both though because it enables older clothing to be used whilst still being supported with updates.
This is especially so for people who bought their mesh body after the BoM change-over but who may still wish to buy older clothing.

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14 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

MeshMesh  clothing creators probably will not support both variants.   Mesh clothing creators usually make their items so that they s t op on the seam of an alpha cut rather than in the middle of on e for obvious reasons. 

This is actually not very true.

From my experience, most mesh clothing either needs no sections to be hidden, or all of them (in cases of leggings, full-length pants, closed jackets, etc).

Whenever I run into clothing that does hide sections, the clothing doesn't stop on alpha seams. Only the sections that are totally covered by the clothes are hidden, anything halfway stays visible and this makes perfect sense, since you don't want holes to show up.

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Current alpha cuts can still be left in place as well as having BOM. Use the BOM alpha texture or if you wish set an alpha cut to transparent use a HUD.

Mesh designers don't actually have to remove the alpha HUD. All they have to do is just remove the Onion layers.

No need for it with BOM.

Although they might need an  extra layer for different materials that BOM cant handle. 

But my understanding is LL is looking at adding normal and specular maps to BOM at some future point.

 

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32 minutes ago, Jolney Cheri said:

Current alpha cuts can still be left in place as well as having BOM. Use the BOM alpha texture or if you wish set an alpha cut to transparent use a HUD.

Mesh designers don't actually have to remove the alpha HUD. All they have to do is just remove the Onion layers.

No need for it with BOM.

Although they might need an  extra layer for different materials that BOM cant handle. 

But my understanding is LL is looking at adding normal and specular maps to BOM at some future point.

 

The reason alpha cuts on meshs are even needed is because otherwise it's impossible to hide a portion of a mesh avatar the same way you would with alpha layers on the classic avatar.

Using BoM with alpha mask would be a lot more flexible in this regard, and cost a lot less to render on screen.

My understanding is that BoM doesn't require scripts/appliers, all you need is for the content creator to provide their skins/makeup parts using the old classic avatar clothing layers, simply wearing them will cause the BoM texture on your mesh body to update with the new composition.

Edited by Kyrah Abattoir
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Considering how many layers one can use with BoM, I don't foresee it really being an issue to combine standard alphas to get the desired result when wearing a piece of mesh clothing that doesn't have a provided alpha for the item. I remember back with standardized sizes, before mesh bodies, that you could buy sets of prepackaged alphas to use with your system body. Those are a viable choice once again with BoM. 

For those with even the smallest amount of experience with Gimp or Photoshop, creating a custom alpha is a fast and easy process. 

Like my momma always said, "Where there's a will, there's a way." 

Edited by Blush Bravin
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55 minutes ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

The reason alpha cuts on meshs are even needed is because otherwise it's impossible to hide a portion of a mesh avatar the same way you would with alpha layers on the classic avatar.

Using BoM with alpha mask would be a lot more flexible in this regard, and cost a lot less to render on screen.

My understanding is that BoM doesn't require scripts/appliers, all you need is for the content creator to provide their skins/makeup parts using the old classic avatar clothing layers, simply wearing them will cause the BoM texture on your mesh body to update with the new composition.

Your right the idea of BOM is to remove the onion layers  and you don't need Alpha cuts or a HUD. With that the rendering costs come down.

But if some people want to use the HUD there is no reason why they cant.

That's all i am saying.

You have the Omega Applier that allows you to wear BOM textures on existing avatars.

Not everyone will be running to update their avatar for whatever reason.

Me i don't have alpha cuts on my avatar or onion layers, I Created my avatar for BOM. For now while BOM isn't officially released all i do is when i buy a new piece of clothing i create my own alpha for my skin texture (as i have a full perm skin texture). and then put it in with the folder of that item of clothing.

This is because i don't want to create an onion layered avatar.

As i made my avi for me i can wait for BOM to be released.

 

 

 

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I'm really hoping that creators will do a plain BoM body with no onion layers, and provide a separate onion layer for applier clothing that can be attached when needed.

As one who much prefers applier stockings to mesh stockings, I really want that separate layer so the toe area of my stockings and socks fit properly. There's no way I want to have my socks wrap around my toes as though it's my skin rather than a sock. I also use tank tops under many of my mesh shirts that have too low a v-cut and prefer that the fabric of the tank not mold to the skin between the breasts so again, I need an onion layer to accomplish my desired look.

I am really excited and looking forward to BoM, though I have to admit that many in my circle of friends have grave misgivings about how well the feature is going to be accepted, especially with the problem related to using their thousands of appliers that simply will not work with BoM. 

 

 

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I think that Mesh Creators will look at the issue very carefully:)

the one thing i would say it needs to be in two parts and only used  if you need it.

Say you get the mesh avatar and then a separate mesh layer. (for the clothing items you want to wear).

This way the avatar isn't wearing an onion layer when it doesn't need to.

For optimization.

 

 

 

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3 hours ago, Blush Bravin said:

Considering how many layers one can use with BoM, I don't foresee it really being an issue to combine standard alphas to get the desired result when wearing a piece of mesh clothing that doesn't have a provided alpha for the item. I remember back with standardized sizes, before mesh bodies, that you could buy sets of prepackaged alphas to use with your system body. Those are a viable choice once again with BoM. 

For those with even the smallest amount of experience with Gimp or Photoshop, creating a custom alpha is a fast and easy process. 

Like my momma always said, "Where there's a will, there's a way." 

Also, in order for a mesh body to use alphas it has to be set to alpha masking, and with a mesh the cutoff for the masking can be set per face from 0 to 255. If you use a gradient texture for the alpha wearable you can do things like having a skirt alpha that can go from ankle-length to mini-skirt length or anywhere in between by adjusting the cutoff.

Edited by Theresa Tennyson
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On 2/6/2019 at 5:23 AM, Fionalein said:

So you volunteer to paint the alphas for all the clothes? How noble!

Sounds like a business opportunity to me. :)

If a custom mesh body designer doesn't want to go through the effort of making their updated BoM bodies compatible with existing clothes by releasing alphas of all the individual parts of their onion skinned bodies then I can see someone making a nice business of selling alpha fat packs for those bodies.

It would probably take a day or two for a custom mesh body designer to create the alpha textures and upload them to SL if they don't already have them.   Most likely they already have them in one form or another.  If they already do have them it take a day at most to organize them and upload them.

My guess is most clothing designers will make their most current creations compatible with BoM by releasing an alpha update.  For clothing designers it take about 5 or 10 minutes to create an alpha for each of their clothes.

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17 minutes ago, Cathy Foil said:

Sounds like a business opportunity to me. :)

If a custom mesh body designer doesn't want to go through the effort of making their updated BoM bodies compatible with existing clothes by releasing alphas of all the individual parts of their onion skinned bodies then I can see someone making a nice business of selling alpha fat packs for those bodies.

It would probably take a day or two for a custom mesh body designer to create the alpha textures and upload them to SL if they don't already have them.   Most likely they already have them in one form or another.  If they already do have them it take a day at most to organize them and upload them.

My guess is most clothing designers will make their most current creations compatible with BoM by releasing an alpha update.  For clothing designers it take about 5 or 10 minutes to create an alpha for each of their clothes.

Funny enough this has already been a thing before.

I have a few folders of "alpha masks" made by generous creators to help SL users with their clothes.

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On 2/7/2019 at 10:34 PM, Kyrah Abattoir said:

Funny enough this has already been a thing before.

I have a few folders of "alpha masks" made by generous creators to help SL users with their clothes.

If we discuss what I think we discuss, all the mesh clothes made before mesh bodies, are still on the Marketplace with the alpha layers. Getting the free demos will give you the free alpha layer. They are not marked "demo".

I don't know how much an issue this will be. Many alpha cuts are rather similar, and it is an open question: How much of my old inventory will I use? How much work is it to get alpha layers for my favorites, do I need alpha layers for the minidress from 2012? Am I still using mesh clothes from the start of the mesh era?

Is using the alpha cut HUD for a mesh body so high cost to render?

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2 hours ago, Marianne Little said:

Is using the alpha cut HUD for a mesh body so high cost to render?

It's not that the HUD is so high cost, though it's not cheap, and there's really no reason to wear it when not in use. The real issue is that the body has to be cut up into smaller chunks in order to get all the cuts. 

Edited by Blush Bravin
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5 hours ago, Blush Bravin said:

It's not that the HUD is so high cost, though it's not cheap, and there's really no reason to wear it when not in use. The real issue is that the body has to be cut up into smaller chunks in order to get all the cuts. 

So each cut is adding to the cost? I see. Still, with the modern mesh weighted so well against bodies (at least female bodies), I think general alpha layers can be added to fix most issues.

In my experience, the times I had to use alpha cuts with the existing HUD, it is mainly around the waist, the butt and the legs. It is probably because the designer want a thinner waist or shape the butt and legs a bit different from the mesh body. Thin straps over the shoulders and hips (like a bikini) can not use cuts anyway. Deep cut cleavages has to fit well and not hide more than the nipples, because looking in from the side or top down will show the "gaps" created by alpha cuts.

Alpha layers for covering big areas like breasts down to hips, or pants, etc, should be pretty straightforward to make, or use existing.

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11 minutes ago, Marianne Little said:

So each cut is adding to the cost? I see. Still, with the modern mesh weighted so well against bodies (at least female bodies), I think general alpha layers can be added to fix most issues.

In my experience, the times I had to use alpha cuts with the existing HUD, it is mainly around the waist, the butt and the legs. It is probably because the designer want a thinner waist or shape the butt and legs a bit different from the mesh body. Thin straps over the shoulders and hips (like a bikini) can not use cuts anyway. Deep cut cleavages has to fit well and not hide more than the nipples, because looking in from the side or top down will show the "gaps" created by alpha cuts.

Alpha layers for covering big areas like breasts down to hips, or pants, etc, should be pretty straightforward to make, or use existing.

Nowadays, you can buy mesh clothing that fits so well, you really don't need alpha cuts that much. And yes, it's not going to be difficult at all to get alphas to use with BoM. You can find them even now on the MP. There are quite a few already there from pre-fitted mesh days. Also, I'm pretty sure once BoM is widely available, there will be more creators who take the opportunity to put out generic alpha packs.

Edited by Blush Bravin
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8 hours ago, Marianne Little said:

So each cut is adding to the cost? I see. Still, with the modern mesh weighted so well against bodies (at least female bodies), I think general alpha layers can be added to fix most issues.

From a rendering standpoint, each separate cut is a unique mesh.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Bakes On Mesh has sort of been on the back burner for months and months as Lindens get pulled into other projects.  Finally those projects are coming near to completion and work on Bakes On Mesh will hopefully resume full speed.  There has already been some progress made in the past few weeks.  We had an update to the Bakes On Mesh test viewer a week or so ago.  I am not sure when it happened but we did get two new bake channels.  A "BAKE - LEFTARM"  and "BAKE - LEFTLEG".  They appear to work just like the Baked Aux channels.  I assume this is to make it easier for people to use for things like different tattoos on each arm or a single tattoo on one arm.  There is no built in limitation in having to use the two new channels and can be easily thought of as bake aux channels 4 & 5. 

I don't really know when BoM will be released.  It could be a month or two or six or eight months.  It probably all depends on how many features and functions will be added to it.  A lot of people want some new LSL functions added to make BoM more flexible and easier for content creators to port over their existing textures over to it.  It appears many people make and sell textures solely for mesh bodies and thus haven't put their textures in system clothing so would have to create them. 

An LSL function that allow a script to be ran that read a note card with UUIDs or textures placed in the inventory of a prim and then ran to make the system clothes would speed up the process and cut down the work load of these content creators.  Better yet an LSL function that could read UUIDs or textures in a prim's content and bake them to a single texture would be awesome!  This would allow the LL servers to only need to pull one UUID for a single system clothes item instead of perhaps  2 to 11.  The resulting single UUID of such a function could not only be used for systems clothes and BoM but the UUID could be used to texture a prim or other object directly.

Really it is one of the simplest functions in Photoshop.  Think of each texture as a layer in Photoshop and all you are doing is flattening the layers to a single layer.  Of course the order of the layers will affect what the final texture will look like.

Anyway I hope that answers some of your questions. :)

Cathy  

 

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Thank you Cathy Foil for that update. I like your ideas. because frankly as a purchaser I need it to be simple. and as one who wanted to create, but found the whole process too tedious, Id just like something simple. Give me a script. tell me where it goes and Id be back on board. The more complicated it gets the less time I have for any of it. 

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  • Lindens

As always, it isn't done until it's done. However, we're hoping the BOM viewer can move to RC soon. The only blocker was a needed update to the appearance (bake) service, which is deployed now. So now it's just down to how things go in viewer QA. Once BOM is out as an RC viewer, it's likely that new bugs will be found - that's usually the way it goes when you have more people testing something - so how long from RC to release just depends on how the process of finding/fixing bugs goes.

Re: Cathy's proposal for supporting direct baking in LSL: for the initial release we will be using the existing wearables system to control layers. There are proposals for some alternative mechanisms - those may be considered in follow-on releases. For now we're just focused on getting BOM tested and shipped in its current form.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Baked texture showing on HUD?

Once I found this page: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Internal_Textures I decided to try using my HUD for my RuthToo RC3 mesh body to see if I could modify the HUD to add BoM. (I am already getting requests to make RuthToo BoM-able even though it is not fully released yet.)

It was actually very easy. My HUD uses a Notecard with texture UUIDs to set the mesh body textures, (which also sets the HUD textures so you can see what you're applying, normally skins that came with RuthToo.) So, all I had to do was enter the "Internal_Texture" UUIDs from the above page into my Notecard for the "BAKED_HEAD", "BAKED_LOWER", and "BAKED_UPPER" and use my HUD to assign them to the mesh body, which also assigns them to the HUD itself.

In addition to having classic skins and clothes appear on my mesh body, the final baked texture also appears on my HUD in a flat square area. That area of my HUD is very small, but it would be very easy to expand that area of the HUD and display the baked texture big enough to grab a copy of the normally not seen texture. I thought this was not going to be allowed. I am guessing a few content creators would not be happy about this happening with access to any of their classic skins/clothings.

All this was done on the main SL grid with the official "Second Life Project BakesOnMesh" viewer.

RuthTooBoMHUD.jpg

Edited by Sean Heavy
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Sean, one of us is confused with what you're interpreting.

I want people to be able to move my non mesh textures onto their mesh bodies.

I know I will never recoup the lost lindens from the shift to mesh, but BOM gives me a chance to start making more, hopefully more attractive textures.

What we don't want us texture ripping, which on a high enough resolution screen is impossible to completely prevent.

What we do want is for those that buy our textures, to be able to use those textures.

No, we don't want uuid(s) shared, if that even works.

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I have been anxiously awaiting good news about BOM,  there are so many instances where the old system lalyer (now on appliers for mesh) are needed because in most cases mesh pants do not ever fit under longer mesh tops without poking through  unless the mesh is made for them to work together.  Thus I am stuck with using a mesh top/jacket etc. with applier pants.. and quite honestly, I am reluctant to make any more appliers.. they are so time consuming.. BOM is the answer.  But having said that, yes I do want protection for my textures so having them show up on a hud like that just would not do at all.. :( 

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