Has the introduction of Mesh stiffled creativity in SL?

[French Couturier]

No, but I think the introduction of 50 different mesh bodies stifles motivation to create and sell mesh clothing. Each one of these mesh bodies has different shape and weight painting. And often times the mesh body creators don't even give you a rigging file to use. But even if they did, it would take way too much time to readjust and re-rig one piece of clothing 10+ times to cater to all these mesh bodies..

[Orwar]

   A lot of creators 'solve' this issue by only catering to a handful, or even one, mesh body of their choosing. It's fairly well known which bodies have the largest markets, and if a mesh body creator fails to be inclusive or outright refuse to offer rigging files for creators, they're pretty much shooting themselves in the foot as no informed consumer would want to purchase a body which they can find no clothing for. Then again, certain brands seem to live off of people's ignorance and stupidity.

[French Couturier]

Some of the popular mesh bodies are Slink, Maitreya and Belleza. And none of these offer rigging kits unless you ask and get approved by them. I applied and never got a response. What's even more annoying is that Slink and Belleza don't just sell one simple avatar..Slink has two bodies, and for some reason Belleza has THREE different bodies. And the only difference between these three bodies is slight differences in muscles. It seems pointless when the user can simply go into avatar appearance and adjust the avatar curve/muscle sliders if they want to be more muscular. I think they also have three different "breast versions" with each body, to make even more work. I think Belleza just wanted to torture clothing creators.

Edited July 15, 2019 by French Couturier

[steeljane42]

1 minute ago, French Couturier said:

And the only difference between these three bodies is slight differences in muscles. It seems pointless when the user can simply go into avatar appearance and adjust the avatar curve/muscle sliders if they want to be more muscular. I think Belleza just wanted to torture clothing creators.

Their shape is different and I don't mean the "sliders shape". In a way they are like bento heads, all react to the same sliders (more or less), but initial rig/shape does matter a lot. That being said, I also think 3 bodies for one brand is an overkill, but I can understand the creators. Their first body was Venus, which is similar-ish to Maitreya and had pretty rough start with some random DMCA and some ugly issues (which took them forever to fix). So their re-start already had isis and Freya to get their share of the market without competing with Maitreya as much. I guess they didn't want to drop Venus too, despite it being almost neglected by creators then and now too.

So yeah, most creators rig to the most popular ones: Maitreya, Belleza Freya (and often Isis too) and Slink Hourglass (often with petite chest addon. which, I think, is one of two reasons why Hourglass got its popularity to begin with, other is same as Freya's - curves). Now some also rig to the scammy TMP Legacy body too, which is in my opinion a waste of resources and time, it's like the worse version of Freya without omega, but with terrible web based hud. But I guess it's the only "big" new mesh body release in years, so they are trying to get their money from certain fashionistas who would buy it just because it's "something new".

[Paul Hexem]

Why should any of us be creative when LL is perfectly fine with the grid being littered with stolen content sales?

LL's happy to sell stuff on the MP and take their cut whether you spend weeks creating from scratch or if you just take 15 minutes to export from a Bethesda game. Why bother with the former?

[Coffee Pancake]

Oh come on .. you know just as well as anyone how the DMCA works.

 

[Fionalein]

2 hours ago, steeljane42 said:

Now some also rig to the [...] TMP Legacy body too, which is in my opinion a waste of resources and time,...

No it isn't - the buyers of that model are desperate for some cloth - right now there might just be enough money to be made to pay the rigger for an extra rigging. But let's see who will stick to provide support for it in the future.

[Drayke Newall]

5 hours ago, French Couturier said:

No, but I think the introduction of 50 different mesh bodies stifles motivation to create and sell mesh clothing. Each one of these mesh bodies has different shape and weight painting. And often times the mesh body creators don't even give you a rigging file to use. But even if they did, it would take way too much time to readjust and re-rig one piece of clothing 10+ times to cater to all these mesh bodies..

True and this was a huge area of negligence on Lab for not realising (when it was pretty obvious) that even whilst told many times their system body needed to be improved they never did improve it at the most practical of times, when mesh was introduced. This decision or lack of one resulted in (rather than a mesh body market for the more out there robot or furry avatars) human avatars making the default body pointless. This further meant that rather than being able to work on another project, Lab are now looking at how to re-introduce BoM onto new mesh bodies, when if they had just updated the system body it wouldn't have been necessary or would have been a side project rather than main.

That said, and whilst I assume it wouldn't be easy, I wish Lab would look into this further to solve the multi body clothing issue once and for all. Personally, whilst it wouldn't be easy to implement I think the best way Labs could handle this situation is to create another skeleton identical to the current skeleton, however with a lot more customisation and offset distance and use this as a clothing skeleton. This would mean that people can use fitted mesh clothing on the designated clothing skeleton independently from a fitted mesh body which would be on the body skeleton. Chances of this happening is zilch and if it did it would probably take a couple of years based on their other projects to introduce, but one can dream.

 

As far as animesh goes, yes it might look DOA at the moment but I think it will improve. Despite the impact it has, if people learn to build correctly and resourcefully and save land impact from the main structures then 20LI per animesh npc would be nothing. One of the sims I created (now closed) with a friend out of all mesh had a multi level sci-fi sim wide city, with apartments, shopping mall etc. with a lot of all the usual city clutter assets and full materials in the air that only took up 3000 LI and a forest below that took up 1500LI. This all when 15k LI limit was still in place for full regions meaning 10500LI remaining. I could have had 50 100LI animesh NPC's or objects and still have 5500LI to spare.

It would also be the same, I dare say, for Penny Patton's resourceful and well optimized building on her parcel. People need to either learn to build/mesh properly or stop thinking they can just build a large space using assets bought on the MP from people who don't care about optimisation. Harsh maybe but as they say the proof is in the pudding.

Edited July 16, 2019 by Drayke Newall

[MaxSilverDragon]

mesh is actually more demanding mesh objects take forever to load their textures sometimes it takes 45 minutes for the loading and that's using a GTX 1050 TI

people use 4K textures on their models and second life only allows you to use 512 megabytes texture memory

and now it's time to talk about Avatar rendering some mesh avatars are greater than 750k it is really hard to find a good one under 100k

me and my friend went through our avatars the reduce our rendering cost we took everything off or base bodies for mesh my kimono body was 60k is body with 41k after taking all our clothes off the most ridiculous item we had for our avatars we were able to take off the list they were very demanding my friends ding dong and my fishing hat with the highest demanding things on our avatars is ding dong  62k my fishing hat was 52k

[Parhelion Palou]

2 minutes ago, MaxSilverDragon said:

mesh is actually more demanding mesh objects take forever to load their textures sometimes it takes 45 minutes for the loading and that's using a GTX 1050 TI

people use 4K textures on their models and second life only allows you to use 512 megabytes texture memory

and now it's time to talk about Avatar rendering some mesh avatars are greater than 750k it is really hard to find a good one under 100k

me and my friend went through our avatars the reduce our rendering cost we took everything off or base bodies for mesh my kimono body was 60k is body with 41k after taking all our clothes off the most ridiculous item we had for our avatars we were able to take off the list they were very demanding my friends ding dong and my fishing hat with the highest demanding things on our avatars is ding dong  62k my fishing hat was 52k

Max texture size is 1024x1024. The Linden viewer only allows 512 MB texture memory; the third party viewers allow more.

My usual rendering cost is between 40K and 80K, depending on outfit, with a mesh body & standard head. I can't use my old prim hairs, because they were 90K and higher by themselves. My female alt (mesh body & mesh head) generally has a rendering cost between 50K and 80K.

[Drayke Newall]

27 minutes ago, MaxSilverDragon said:

mesh is actually more demanding mesh objects take forever to load their textures sometimes it takes 45 minutes for the loading and that's using a GTX 1050 TI

people use 4K textures on their models and second life only allows you to use 512 megabytes texture memory

and now it's time to talk about Avatar rendering some mesh avatars are greater than 750k it is really hard to find a good one under 100k

me and my friend went through our avatars the reduce our rendering cost we took everything off or base bodies for mesh my kimono body was 60k is body with 41k after taking all our clothes off the most ridiculous item we had for our avatars we were able to take off the list they were very demanding my friends ding dong and my fishing hat with the highest demanding things on our avatars is ding dong  62k my fishing hat was 52k

Mesh does not load any slower than any other object and if texturing is done right with a UV map it is far quicker as it is only one texture for all faces of the object. Either it us using a different 1024 texture on all sides of the object or texture thrashing.

If your hair is old prim hair or sculpts and has the usual hair texture with alpha at the tips, more than likely they use the older alpha blending. Try editing them if possible and change the texture alpha to alpha masking set at about 90 and adjust from there.

As to other older objects 9/10 times they will have an attachment point cube on them with a 512 texture on that specific prim alone. If this is the case and its mod change that to either a plain white 16x16 texture or lower or even the 16x16 transparency texture everyone should have and then change it to alpha masking set to its max. It is also sometimes possible to remove these cubes at attachment points entirely, or link multiple objects together on the same attachment point and remove the cubes from all but 1. Note however sometimes the textures on these cubes are necessary due to the script the creator uses and this is seen a lot of the time with furry heads or the like where textures need to flicker to create blinking etc. and therefore these textures wont be able to be removed.

To reduce render weight even further turn off full bright on objects as well as glow if they aren't necessary which generally they aren't.

If your body is split into sections like the aesthetic body or I think signature and you are wearing full pants covering the entire lower body, don't wear the lower body and save the outfit as such. Sometimes it isn't the best to wear the entire mesh body and rely on its alpha only.

Edited July 16, 2019 by Drayke Newall

[Selene Gregoire]

30 minutes ago, MaxSilverDragon said:

mesh is actually more demanding mesh objects take forever to load their textures sometimes it takes 45 minutes for the loading and that's using a GTX 1050 TI

I'm running a GTX 1050 OC with the setting at half way between High and Ultra and it never takes more than a minute or two for textures to load; mesh, prim or sculpt. A lesser card than yours and faster load times. I run DD at 64 - 128 and have a frame rate of 100fps plus more often than not. You ought to start troubleshooting.

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, MaxSilverDragon said:

mesh is actually more demanding mesh objects take forever to load their textures sometimes it takes 45 minutes for the loading and that's using a GTX 1050 TI

I hope that is an extreme exaggeration.

If it's not, and you're not on a very slow connection. Then you have some troubleshooting to do.

First up, it's nothing to do with your GPU .. the poor thing will be bored silly while it waits for SL to fetch and decode everything. As part of working on Catznip, we test on a variety of hardware, and even on a lowly integrated graphics it shouldn't take much longer to resolve everything than on a high end card assuming the CPU & connection are comparable.

Make sure you have no packet loss, it's less of an issue than it was, but it can be indicative of a broader connectivity problem. If your connection is poor, then you're going to be left waiting around. This is especially true if you're on wifi; if you can't use a cable, trace a line of sight between your machine and router and move any metal or water (like your body) out of the way.

Asset fetching and texture decoding are very cpu and disk intensive. Disable shadows while rezzing. Add your cache folder as an exception to your anti-virus / windows defender. Make sure SL has a clear shot at as much system ram as it needs (so close chrome). Drop your draw distance (even a little can dramatically reduce the load). Don't have the texture decode console open.

[kiramanell]

On 6/27/2019 at 11:46 AM, Evangeline Arcadia said:

I've heard the line of thought mentioned here and there that before Mesh, when Prims were used to create objects and clothing, there was more variety, more 'creativity', but also maybe more possibility for anyone to create in SL (I'm talking mainly about items to sell inworld or on the Marketplace).

For example, with the steps creators now need to go through to create clothing in SL it appears a greater skill set is needed compared to learning to use prims to create, so I wonder if it actually inhibits people creating for SL (i.e. you need learn a 3D modelling program, learn rigging, and also have to create for a number of different mesh bodies, not just the standard avatar, plus others skills I may not be aware of) . I'm not saying it definitely does, I'm wondering if this is true.

Sure, before there was some learning curve to in order to build well with prims , but to me this is far less steep ( and maybe daunting for some) and involved than having to learn 3D modelling and rigging. If this theory is correct, then that may lead to fewer creators, and therefore potentially less variety. This seems to me to be true, just by what I see on the marketplace and inworld (but that could just be my tastes). In Prim days, because you could so easily rez prims and get to creating right there inworld, I would guess that more people were likely to give it a go. Of course, nothing to stop anyone doing so now, but in terms of selling items to others I think it's far more challenging in competitive terms because Mesh is better for land impact, and maybe because of realism etc. But I accept this may be a misconception,  and would like to hear others thoughts and perspectives on this.

I'm not knocking Mesh as such. In terms of reduction of land impact, and I think probably the ability to create more 'realistic' items, I think Mesh is great. I only ever buy stuff that's low LI now. If I were to see a mesh house that's say less than 25LI and a similar one I like that's made from prims that's 100LI or more, I know which one I'm gonna get:). 

It's possible that the introduction of Mesh has brought more creators to SL (those who had the 3D skills or background), which offsets the loss of creators who don't learn the skills and stop making new items for SL.

What do you think?

• Does the greater skill set that comes with Mesh mean less people are creating for SL? If not, why do you think so?
• Is another impact that there is less variety of objects created for SL? If not, why don't you think so?
• Do you think there isn't much difference now compared to 'Prim' days, just a different set of creators plus those who transitioned to Mesh?

 

 

You ask a very good question.  Way I see it, the question has to be answered differently, depending on your POV. For competent mesh creators, they can obviously do a lot more with mesh builds than was possible before; but there also me, the lowly 'tinkerer', who loved to mod the homes I bought, and turned into near completely new creations. You could say my creativity has been stifled some with the advent of mesh, yes, in that these new mesh homes are almost... too perfect, LOL. They're so finished, so realistic, with baked shadows and all, that I often feel there's nothing left to do for me any more.  And even things I do change, with prim addons I create, tend to look odd compared to the perfectly baked mesh base-home, so to speak. Not sure that all made sense, but there it is.