Bakes on Mesh for animesh

[animats]

There's been some discussion at the Creator Forum on how Bakes on Mesh should work for animesh, and how system clothing could be made to work on animesh. Here's a mockup of doing that.

Animesh character wearing system clothing as a top. I left her walking around Animesh1 on the beta grid, so you can see for yourself.

How this was done:

• Wear some system avatar that takes standard clothing.
• Dress it the way you want your animesh to look. You can only use clothing areas where your animesh has a similar face. For example, this animesh model has no "dress" face, so she can't wear a dress.
• Bake the areas of interest.
• Look at the baked textures in Edit. Take a screenshot and clip. This gets you a 128x128 texture. (That's why the top is so low-rez.)
• Upload clipped screenshot. Apply to appropriate face of animesh model.

The animesh model does not have to be the same as the avatar used. They only have to have similar faces and UV maps. The animesh model can be much lower poly than the avatar.

This is just a proof of concept, of course. It shows a way to get system clothing onto animesh without having the bakes on mesh system modified much to support for animesh.

This beats having to assemble all the layers in Photoshop.

The only missing feature is some legit way to copy a baked texture to another mesh. Proposal: do this with the "eyedropper" icon in the edit window. You'd make the bakes on your own avatar, then select the target animesh and edit the correct texture. Then click the eyedropper icon on the appropriate area of your own avatar. The texture gets copied over. No new user interface components required. Maybe no viewer mods.

Issues:

Approach: is having to wear your animesh to make it too upsetting to some people? During this process, you're "editing appearance" and look awful. See the Bakes on Mesh tutorial.

Permissions: allow this only if all the inputs to the source texture are "copy".The resulting texture would be "transfer" only if all the inputs were "transfer". It's always "mod" unless the user makes it non-mod. Open questions:

• Should it be allowed to copy a "non-mod" texture?
• Who's the creator of the resulting texture? The user doing this, or "Baking service"?

Asset storage: Where does the new texture go? Does the copied texture get its own UUID and go into asset storage, or what? If so, do you get charged L$10 to do this, like an upload?

Comments?

 

[mehllama]

There are some cache viewers that would offer a better resolution bake. The primary issue I see here is just with permissions. I would make sure there are no licensing issues or other such before re-uploading. On the other hand, if they're your own textures, you're all set. 😃

[OptimoMaximo]

On 5/19/2019 at 8:29 PM, animats said:

Comments

There are too many shaded areas with this approach. I think LL should work on a proper method to use the wearable assets in compliance with the permission system, instead of leaving holes that may lead to easy to achieve improper practices. While your proof of concept with the eyedropper would be fine, as it retains resolution and may also be charged as an actual upload for permanent storage, it defeats the purpose of bakes on mesh system as a whole by using it as a medium to compose a new static texture as opposed to its intended dynamic nature to quickly add and remove wearables. 

I understand that you can't wait to make your animeshes with this degree of customization, really. But BOM is already limited and some functionality doesn't properly work yet for serious production other than for legacy avatar uv mapping. The lack of alpha support for all channels makes it unusable already for custom uv mapped avatars, figure if LL can afford to extend it now to use for animesh at its current state.