Can I know more details about "BAKE ON MESH" property?

[IntrovertBV]

More advanced residents!!

Can you help us to know more about the bake on mesh thing?? And how to use it correctly if already available in any viewers ?

[suzyst]

BOM is still under developement, which means it could be released tomorrow or we could still be talking about it in a year. From what I've read it's something that allows you to use old system clothing on the new mesh bodys. I suspect this will result in a mass clearance of inventories when we see what those old outfits look like again. There are a few threads spread throught the forums, but I wouldn't worry about it before release. When it is released you will know cos it will probably be the subject of every other thread in the forums :)

[Janet Voxel]

There’s a whole forum devoted to it. Just mosey on over there and read the sticky thread.

[Orwar]

   As mentioned above, there's a whole forum board dedicated to the topic, but in short (and as far as I understand it); Bakes on Mesh will allow texture layering on mesh in Second Life in a manner similar to the way system clothing layers on a system body do; i.e. you can put textures on top of each other on a single layer. The way mesh and textures work now is you only have one texture (diffuse) layer, as well as the material layers (bump and specular). To compensate for this, most mesh bodies have several layers - Maitreya for example has 4 (skin on the body itself, then a tattoo layer just on top of that, an underwear layer on top of that, and finally a clothing layer); this means that you're basically walking around wearing 4 bodies worth of mesh, and have a bunch of layers whose alphas don't always want to play ball with each other, and when the body distorts through movement the layers may overlap causing an underlying layer to show through (knees and elbows often glitch through applied clothing textures, for example).

   What it's going to change when it gets out? A lot of people say they miss their own system layer clothing, some creators talk as if it's the coming of the Messiah, but it's difficult to tell whose estimates and expectations are the closest to reality for now (if only because there are so many different opinions and perspectives). We'll see when we get there.

[Blush Bravin]

I think those who believe Bakes on Mesh is the answer to wearing their old system clothing are going to be disappointed with the results. That's not really the best use of this proposed feature. Orwar is right on target with his explanation. I really doubt that we will see many of the bodies removing the onion layers, which is unfortunate, but as long as Bakes will not work with appliers, people are going to want those layers so they can use the appliers they've spend thousands of linden on to continue working. In the short run, I think the most successful use of bakes will be adding details to the skin layer, such as tattoos, freckles, body hair, and so forth. Right now with the alpha glitching between layers it's nearly impossible to use all those features on the bodies and heads at the same time.

Edited July 8, 2019 by Blush Bravin

[Nalates Urriah]

Orwar has it right. I'll say the same thing a different way with different emphasis.

The original Classic avatar was and is a single mesh body (everything in SL is mesh - press Ctrl-Shift-R to see it). The system allowed us to use 4 layers, skin, tat, underwear, and clothes. The viewer downloaded the 4 textures and composited them on the avatar body. The problem is everyone downloaded the 4 textures and their viewer did the 'baking' - made the composite.

It was decided it would be more efficient and provide better performance if those textures were baked server side. Instead of everyone downloading maybe 12 - 1024px textures (like 36MB of textures) they would grab the server side bake (SSB as it was called then) and download about 4.5MB of texture (512x512 was max size returned) plus the viewer would not have to do the bake. It made a decent improvement in viewer performance for CPU load and download and it also gave us the name "bake-fail", when we are a particle cloud.

Along came mesh bodies as attachments. In SL nothing other than avatars uses texture layers. An attachment to an avatar is not treaded as an avatar. The attachment is still just a prim like thing.

Mesh body designers were to be able to imitate the Classic avatar layers by creating 4 copies of the body that we call onion-skins, like Russian dolls, each just a tiny bit larger. These are modified a bit so that applier clothes avoid looking like they are painted on... they bridge across the breasts rather than adhering like skin. The inner most is for skin and outer most for clothes.

Designers stuck with the 3 textures per avatar idea, head, upper body, and lower body. They took us back to 36MB of texture per body that everyone gets to download and then their viewer renders a resulting composite look. BUT... we look really good.

So now the Lab trying to reduce the load with mesh bodies as they did with the Classic body. The SSB - server side bake service and viewers are being modified to work with mesh bodies. They are increasing the size of the resulting composite from 512 to 1024. Plus the signaling (inter-viewer-server communication) is being designed to recognize things to apply the baked textures to. This opens up some interesting possibilities. The Lindens are targeting avatar attachments. Users are considering what else they might use the feature for.

A serious limitation is the lack of Materials Support in the bake service. I am seeing more and more bodies using materials, both specular and normal. So, will we give that up on mesh bodies? Probably not.

The emphasis has never been on allowing us to reuse old Classic skin, tats, etc. with our new mesh bodies. Since designers could only ever get a 512 texture on the Classic body with SSB, most only uploaded a 512 to feed to the SSB service. Now that the BoM service is producing 1024's those old skins, etc. are not likely to look that good. I am waiting to see how my old stuff looks before deciding to keep or trash it.

The idea here is to reduce onion skin bodies from 4 body copies to one, less polygons to render. Also, the number of textures we download and render. This gives us the possibility of significant improvement. The question is how well and much will the service be used?