Automatic clothing layering adjustment - proposed feature

[animats]

Goal: make clothing layer properly without user pain.

Suppose we had something which compressed inner clothing layers a bit to prevent them showing through outer layers.

Roblox is adding a clothing system. The same items fit different bodies.  They're gaining on us!

Yes, they're not great clothing items. It's a tech demo. Roblox is automatically adjusting the rigging slightly when you put on a clothing item. 

Should SL have something like that? Catch up with Roblox?

Roblox has to add "cage layers" to clothing to make it force-fit any avatar. Think of that as a possible future "Fitmesh Plus". Probably too much trouble for SL, because existing SL clothing doesn't have the extra info needed for that.

What could be done with existing SL clothing. A simpler, more compatible system would just squeeze inner layers inward a bit. Only when necessary, so they didn't peek though. This would eliminate the need for alpha layers for clothing, the need for alpha HUDs, and the need to break skins up into a hundred tiny faces. Basic rule: if it doesn't peek through in pose stance, it should not peek through in any stance. So you try on clothing in pose stance, and then it Just Works.

This would be done automatically when the user changes clothes. Much like BOM baking, and probably as part of the same system.

Good idea? Comments?

Of course, there's the occasional item of clothing which layers in an unusual way.

Shirt tucked in on one side only.

So this trick won't work for everything. Have to be able to turn it off for some items. How much clothing is like that?

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

11 hours ago, animats said:

Goal: make clothing layer properly without user pain.

Suppose we had something which compressed inner clothing layers a bit to prevent them showing through outer layers.

Roblox is adding a clothing system. The same items fit different bodies.  They're gaining on us!

Yes, they're not great clothing items. It's a tech demo. Roblox is automatically adjusting the rigging slightly when you put on a clothing item. 

Should SL have something like that? Catch up with Roblox?

Roblox has to add "cage layers" to clothing to make it force-fit any avatar. Think of that as a possible future "Fitmesh Plus". Probably too much trouble for SL, because existing SL clothing doesn't have the extra info needed for that.

What could be done with existing SL clothing. A simpler, more compatible system would just squeeze inner layers inward a bit. Only when necessary, so they didn't peek though. This would eliminate the need for alpha layers for clothing, the need for alpha HUDs, and the need to break skins up into a hundred tiny faces. Basic rule: if it doesn't peek through in pose stance, it should not peek through in any stance. So you try on clothing in pose stance, and then it Just Works.

This would be done automatically when the user changes clothes. Much like BOM baking, and probably as part of the same system.

Good idea? Comments?

Of course, there's the occasional item of clothing which layers in an unusual way.

Shirt tucked in on one side only.

So this trick won't work for everything. Have to be able to turn it off for some items. How much clothing is like that?

 

Every additional rigged mesh worn by the avatar is a performance suck. The Second Life de facto system of having a "body" and then wearing additional "clothes" on top of it is a bad idea which most other similar environments don't use. Most games combine clothing and underlying bodies into the same mesh. That wasn't practically possible with Second Life as mesh clothing began as something worn over the system body and then became something worn over a mesh body that had semi-permanent textures; however, with Bakes-on-Mesh it would be perfectly possible to, say, wear a shirt which included the exposed portion of your arms which could pull textures from the avatar bake automatically. The idea of adding new technology to allow people to wear additional rigged meshes that won't be seen is... well...

[animats]

10 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

however, with Bakes-on-Mesh it would be perfectly possible to, say, wear a shirt which included the exposed portion of your arms which could pull textures from the avatar bake automatically.

If the first part of this proposal works, then this "mesh baking" phase could be used for further optimizations. Merging meshes during clothing changes is one potential optimization. There's also the possibility of removing triangles that can't possibly be seen from the outside. But that would require developing new technology. So, initially, I'm just talking about adapting something the competition already has working.

What I'm talking about won't add more meshes to an avatar. Just the existing meshes, with slightly different rigging weights.

This needs a demo add-on in Blender to be a convincing proposal. IM me if interested.

[Mollymews]

if Linden was going to devote resources to this then I would like the capability to add a layer with a script. Something like:

llLayerAdd(string name, layertype, integer level);  

llLayerRemove(integer layertype, integer level);

where layer type is BODY_LAYER_TATTOO, BODY_LAYER_ALPHA, BODY_LAYER_UNDERSHIRT, BODY_LAYER_PANTS, ... etc. And BODY_LAYER_SKIN

the named layer in object contents

if we had this then body makers and body wearers be able to dump the whole shell thing