NUX Avatar

[Coffee Pancake]

50 minutes ago, Teagan Tobias said:

I could be wrong but I am guessing the bodies from LL will not be as well supported as the mesh bodies being sold. And I am willing to bet they will not be as good as the bodies being sold.

From what we have seen so far, it's looking like they will indeed be perfectly viable avatar bodies and should rightfully get decent 3rd party support.

The lack of "alpha cuts" is a very good thing, that's a work around that needs to be put to bed once and for all. 

 

 

[Conifer Dada]

1 hour ago, Teagan Tobias said:

The one thing the LL bodies will do, hopefully, is retain more first time users, and when they get the bug they will be upgrading to better bodies. Or at the very least add to the number of users in world, and that has to be good for the economy.

If the NUX bodies are good, and there's no reason why they shouldn't be, then most people won't feel the need to 'upgrade'  to better ones. Then, only those people who want to go beyond the shapes possible with NUX, or to have non-human avatars, would need to look elsewhere.

Edited June 28, 2022 by Conifer Dada

[Love Zhaoying]

Now, if the NUX bodies were 0-Second Orb Resistant..

[Maitimo]

On 6/26/2022 at 4:41 PM, Drayke Newall said:

What I did say however was that the Jake body (V3 - the LATEST) has not had its skin mesh set to Alpha Masking by default and therefore alpha BoM layers dont work. If you dont want to keep scripts in, you have to edit the mod version and set the body segments i.e. Body 1,2,3,4,5,6 etc. to Alpha masking (alpha blending causes alpha issues) so that when an alpha layer is put on it alphas.

If you want to use the no mod version you have to use a the HuD and press the tiny little none button next to the BoM button (that does absolutely nothing a left over from the old version)

That little button works (and I mean yes it actually does work) on the mod version too. You don't need to go setting each individual segment to masked one by one. I have all four Belleza bodies, the newest version of each, my alt has two, and I've done this process for all six with no problem.  That button wasn't a left over from the previous version; it wasn't included in the old versions at all, that's why they had a third party BOM applier in their main store and it STILL didn;t permit the use of alpha layers.  

But yes, it should have been set to Masked out of the box, that's the one thing that Belleza got wrong. And they really should have done away with the no-mod ones altogether and put only the mod version in the pack, like Kalhene did with Erika.

That aside, I think the NUX looks great. Especially for guys who want a slimmer body shape, because since the decline of Slink, there really isn't any commercial mesh body available these days that isn't over-muscular.

[Maitimo]

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

From what we have seen so far, it's looking like they will indeed be perfectly viable avatar bodies and should rightfully get decent 3rd party support.

The lack of "alpha cuts" is a very good thing, that's a work around that needs to be put to bed once and for all. 

 

 

I agree and I see no reason why creators shouldn't pick up on support for them. I mean, it hasn't been long since they really stopped supporting Standard Sizes, which is what newbies have always used before (except for that one brief time with those hideously ugly ones). If they could make standard sizes, they can make for this too.

Though it would be nice if NUX fits at least approximately with something already in existence, even if it's an old, declining body (*cough*slink*cough*), at least users would be able to get something to wear off the MP right from the start. Actually a deal like this might benefit all parties; it would give new users an opportunity to upgrade to a fully-featured Slink body, it would encourage clothing creators to pick up support for Slink clothing again and give more options to those people who already own one. 

[Drayke Newall]

31 minutes ago, Maitimo said:

That little button works (and I mean yes it actually does work) on the mod version too. You don't need to go setting each individual segment to masked one by one. I have all four Belleza bodies, the newest version of each, my alt has two, and I've done this process for all six with no problem.  That button wasn't a left over from the previous version; it wasn't included in the old versions at all, that's why they had a third party BOM applier in their main store and it STILL didn't permit the use of alpha layers.  

But yes, it should have been set to Masked out of the box, that's the one thing that Belleza got wrong. And they really should have done away with the no-mod ones altogether and put only the mod version in the pack, like Kalhene did with Erika.

Why do some people keep misreading my posts and yet others like Qie get what I am saying perfectly fine. I am saying that if you use the mod version, mod it and then remove the scripts then you have to either reload a new scripted version because most dont realise you need to press that little button or edit the mesh itself and apply alpha masking manually.

If you use the no mod version, it requires the hud to change it but some people dont know about it and therefore dont realise you need to press it as it is not written anywhere in the user guide with the body, and also can bug out especially if someone presses the BOM button next to it which screws up your normal textures etc. That is ALL I am saying.

I have talked to many users of the Jake body that are shocked to learn that alpha layers work as they thought it didn't as they never knew you had a button there in the first place. Even Qie who is certainly no new user of SL admitted to the same problem of not knowing alpha layers worked on Jake. Many of my furry friends who mod the body more than what most usual human avatars or furry avatars do, found it out to late and had to re-mod their body due to this.

Even with all that said, it is generally a moot point anyway as 99% of male clothing creators do not include an alpha layer with clothing forcing people to use the alpha cut system unless once again they have modding know how.

That is why in my original post my main and really only point was that the NUX body needs to have only alpha layers, replace the default mesh entirely, offer more BoM places and offer no complications for new users.

Instead we have 2-3 pages of people going of on a tangent because I made an on the fly comment on how some bodies dont allow alpha layers 'cause they are no mod (Note not Jake) and have them set up wrong and used Jake as an example to respond to another user of them being set up wrong and causing issues.

Good grief...

Edited June 28, 2022 by Drayke Newall

[Marianne Little]

4 hours ago, Teagan Tobias said:

 

I could be wrong but I am guessing the bodies from LL will not be as well supported as the mesh bodies being sold. And I am willing to bet they will not be as good as the bodies being sold.

But one thing you are leaving out is the cost of mesh bodies, they are expensive, and if you don’t think so then you have a lot more money to throw around than I do. And yes they are expensive, and many first time users will not spend that much money just to look around Second Life without being told they look funny.

The one thing the LL bodies will do, hopefully, is retain more first time users, and when they get the bug they will be upgrading to better bodies. Or at the very least add to the number of users in world, and that has to be good for the economy.

Yes. When users get more and more adventurous with their clothes and appearance, an almost-fit will work badly. All mesh lingerie, bikinis, bathing suits, piercings and harnesses (and similar tight fit) clothes and accessories need a perfect fit. Alpha layers does not help.

An avatar who cover the body with much clothes can wear other sizes than what's made for the body. As long as the neck, wrists and ankles fit.

One of my female alts had the 1 L meshbody for a while. She could wear Legacy clothes if they covered the back so she could have an alpha layer there. Same with the waist, a bad waist fit was helped with a long sweater or jacket over.

Of beach wear she had only one bathing suit, made for the old TMP. It was not possible to wear other sizes without cut in the body or floating around it.

So I got a Maitreya body in a Black Friday sale and it is so much easier.

A male alt had the 1 L version for guys too, but since he is in Victorian gentleman wear all the time, he was wearing a full alpha that only show the hands and a tiny triangle of the body up in the neck. I still got the Jake body when it was on sale, just so he could have one or two modern outfits that does not hide so much.

A free mesh body with some support is great to keep new people in SL, and after a while they will purchase a body with better support if they need it.

Unless the Nux body will be a super hit, the bodies you have to pay for will manage just fine.

 

Edited June 28, 2022 by Marianne Little

[Sparkle Bunny]

10 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

It will be interesting to see if LL adds a special HUD you have to use for the NUX body, or a new dialog in the SL viewer.  (The dialog would only come up if you were wearing a NUX body.)

I'm not sure an entry-level BOM mesh body actually needs a HUD.  Skins, layers and alphas can all be handled with BOM. You can vary heel heights by having old-school detachable feet, which should also reduce complexity. (Nails are trickier, but could be detachable like feet to vary the length, with another BOM layer to apply polish.)

Heads, though, are an entirely different matter...

[Persephone Emerald]

8 minutes ago, Sparkle Bunny said:

I'm not sure an entry-level BOM mesh body actually needs a HUD.  Skins, layers and alphas can all be handled with BOM. You can vary heel heights by having old-school detachable feet, which should also reduce complexity. (Nails are trickier, but could be detachable like feet to vary the length, with another BOM layer to apply polish.)

Heads, though, are an entirely different matter...

Starter avatars don't need to have variable nail length. - Not unless LL wants to make that a new slider, which I doubt.

NUX avatars shouldn't need a HUD.

[JeromFranzic]

33 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

Starter avatars don't need to have variable nail length. - Not unless LL wants to make that a new slider, which I doubt.

NUX avatars shouldn't need a HUD.

I agree. With the few Ruth2 takes I've done, I rarely used the HUD. I'm kinda itching to make a few of those right now haha, but mostly in Open Sim. I wanna go retro lol... all of this hyped up high res body biz... JK, anyway...

[Sparkle Bunny]

56 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

Starter avatars don't need to have variable nail length

Yeah, that's probably true. I get annoyed when I can't change the colour, but most of my alts have short nails and don't complain.

[Vincent Nacon]

A thousand years later, we finally get it.

 

They really need to pick up the pace, there are so many other things they have fallen behind over time.

I've written this article 10 years ago on the wiki. https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Avatar_2.0

[Lucia Nightfire]

15 hours ago, Maitimo said:

But yes, it should have been set to Masked out of the box, that's the one thing that Belleza got wrong.

I'd argue leaving the V6 "BOM" body in onion layer form factor and not separating it like Maitreya did was another thing they got wrong.

[OptimoMaximo]

On 6/28/2022 at 1:28 AM, Bree Giffen said:

Where’s the equality of creation here? Isn’t that  the new mission stated by Linden Lab? If you can work hard enough….and own prohibitively expensive 3d software like Maya that costs $1,785 a year you can make money in SL.

 

On 6/28/2022 at 1:47 AM, Coffee Pancake said:

This exactly.

Blender is the great leveler in terms of making content, and so what if you optionally need to buy some extensions here and there, they are for the most part very affordable and entirely community developed. 

Well, this isn't a matter of equality.

First, Maya for indie developers with an indie license is around 350 dollars per year. Easily the sum one would spend in "affordable plugins". So let's make the first thing straight.

Second, for SL, buying Blender extensions is not optional. They are needed to pull out something from the software that also complies to the expected standard. About the point of Blender being the leveler, that's debatable in regard of SL content creation. Actually, for static items it is. When it comes to rigged stuff, what comes out of it is thee result of scripts operations needed to make basic architecture features work (bind poses in the first place, and all that comes from them.. Which is WAY more than what you may think) that leave behind a modified mesh, not the exact original, with an absolute mess of orientation matrices mess. If you're interested I can list all the hacky operations that at least one of these add-ons do to make it work, and what is the result when imported to Maya. And before anyone could just come up with "ah but that is a Maya problem, if it works in SL it's OK so fix your Maya", the issue is the other way around: the avatar was made in Maya following its architecture, a well formed collada or fbx should be imported just fine as it is right out of the box. Instead, in the best of the hypothesis, it comes in with 2 transformation offset, if not sometimes 3, a wrong bind pose pointing to a transformation matrix that is manipulated at least 2 times to compensate the orientation faults, and the shape keys baked in if any slider value was applied from the neutral pose.

So a devkit that comes as a Blender scene is definitely big fat giant NO. or at least until these issues are actually being LEVELED, to use the same term.

[OptimoMaximo]

On 6/27/2022 at 2:53 PM, Drayke Newall said:

Replacing the system body mesh should be easy as pie for LL to do as it is literally a replace with the new look mesh if they are keeping all the same sliders/bones etc.

Additionally, why would Linden Lab who actually can replace the system avatar mesh even consider using the mesh BoM system that was only introduced because content creators cannot replace the system mesh themselves? It makes no sense for LL to even consider not replacing the default mesh.

I agree to this, it SHOULD be that easy. But it's not. The body is dumped in each single viewer as a proprietary binary data dump file, one for each section (head, upper and lower body), which contains also the blendshapes data for the sliders to work (or shape keys as they're called in Blender, or morph targets, etc) because the system used on the mesh bodies, with collision volume bones, does not affect the avatar mesh.( From what I could observe, those joints were used to generate the blend shapes, back in the day.). Then, these mesh files are being assembled inworld at runtime, removing the obvious seams probably by merging a list of vertices pairs, unifying their vertex normals, so it is something that is definitely very specific to the body itself which doesn't make the replacement process as simple as drag-drop-overwrite existing file-click on yes. Plus all the xml configuration files related to the sliders. Definitely this is something that a Linden would stay clear from at least 50 meters away.

[Cinos Field]

8 hours ago, Sparkle Bunny said:

I'm not sure an entry-level BOM mesh body actually needs a HUD.  Skins, layers and alphas can all be handled with BOM. You can vary heel heights by having old-school detachable feet, which should also reduce complexity. (Nails are trickier, but could be detachable like feet to vary the length, with another BOM layer to apply polish.)

Heads, though, are an entirely different matter...

The only reason *any* mesh body needs a HUD is because the creators make them no mod, and even then, nowadays most don't. I deleted all scripts from my Maitreya ages ago to save on resources.

As for if these will get support or not? Assuming that they're even half-decent, they'll be what every newcomer uses, and if they're actually good, those newcomers will never buy a third party body. So yes, they'll get support.

[Anicha Heartsong]

On 6/25/2022 at 1:30 PM, Patch Linden said:

In The Future™

Those darned Lindens have trademarked everything.

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Anicha Heartsong said:

On 6/25/2022 at 8:30 AM, Patch Linden said:

In The Future™

Those darned Lindens have trademarked everything.

Eventually they'll trademark "Later", to cover "Sooner or Later".

[Love Zhaoying]

2 hours ago, Vincent Nacon said:

A thousand years later, we finally get it.

 

They really need to pick up the pace, there are so many other things they have fallen behind over time.

I've written this article 10 years ago on the wiki. https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Avatar_2.0

Is unintentional insult? Maybe "incompatible" was meant? Quote from the article at your link:

"Last thing Linden Lab would like to do is making all existing skin and clothes textures incompetent and making creation more complicated for beginners."

[Qie Niangao]

2 hours ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

I'd argue leaving the V6 "BOM" body in onion layer form factor and not separating it like Maitreya did was another thing they got wrong.

Maitreya may do something different (make the layers whole separate attachments? certainly possible), but at least Jake's onion layers are separate links so with the Mod version it's possible to just unlink and delete all but the ones you want. (They have handy names so it would be easy to do it with a script, but I did it by hand as "editor therapy.")

I'd removed all scripts by then so can't say whether they'd "find" the remaining links and still work.

It's quite astonishing how little difference this makes to rendering complexity as reported by the viewer. I understand the viewer really does not render full alpha textured attachments, so maybe that's more legit than it seems.

[Blaise Glendevon]

I'd want a HUD for feet height and nail lengths and other fine details. You can't omit them if you want anyone to use the body beyond the first three or four months - and if people are going to abandon it ASAP, what's the point?

[Jenna Huntsman]

15 minutes ago, Blaise Glendevon said:

I'd want a HUD for feet height and nail lengths and other fine details. You can't omit them if you want anyone to use the body beyond the first three or four months - and if people are going to abandon it ASAP, what's the point?

I highly doubt there will be any kind of HUD for the NUX body. As Patch said, they aren't trying to make a full competitor for the existing class of mesh bodies. Things like nail lengths I doubt will be included. (That said, there would be nothing stopping creators from making a nail addon!)

That said, feet height - It's *possible* that the feet are bento-rigged, meaning that the feet can change height via animations (similar to the Cinnamon & Chai body).

[Cinos Field]

39 minutes ago, Blaise Glendevon said:

I'd want a HUD for feet height and nail lengths and other fine details. You can't omit them if you want anyone to use the body beyond the first three or four months - and if people are going to abandon it ASAP, what's the point?

Why a HUD instead of simply attachable, different parts? It's a senseless waste to have three or more nail lengths and foot positions always glued onto the body.

[Coffee Pancake]

3 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:

First, Maya for indie developers with an indie license is around 350 dollars per year. Easily the sum one would spend in "affordable plugins". So let's make the first thing straight.

Say's the guy selling an affordable L$ 8000 Maya plugin 

Sure you don't need Avastar for Blender, you can do it all wit JUST blender. But Avastar cuts the work down by an order of magnitude, and no one had to pay anyone $350 just to come to the party.

Once upon a time 3D Studio was the defacto way of doing things. Those days are gone.

 

[OptimoMaximo]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Say's the guy selling an affordable L$ 8000 Maya plugin 

Sure you don't need Avastar for Blender, you can do it all wit JUST blender. But Avastar cuts the work down by an order of magnitude, and no one had to pay anyone $350 just to come to the party.

Once upon a time 3D Studio was the defacto way of doing things. Those days are gone.

 

Well well well... See what argumentation we bring forward... The difference between a plug in needed to make things work for SL, otherwise Blender would NOT do what SL expects for fitmesh items and something, like my plug in, that does something that NO software can do natively is not that subtle.

So get vanilla Blender and export a working fitmesh, without the use of Avastar derived starting points, like the avatar workbench. Oh! Instant fail? Hhmm guess why...

Now get a Maya trial version and export a rigged mesh from the provided skeletons.... Oh! Instant success? Hhhmmm guess why...

So there is a difference between add-ons/plug ins, aside from the fact that there is technical knowledge behind and my time has to be paid back somehow. And about the "affordable", yes it is. It is a one off payment against a 11k yearly subscription because... uuuhhh...  I've got a job in RL in the RL industry as pipeline and character TD... And I don't NEED survival income from my plug in, but I won't even throw it out free.

Once upon a time, Notepad was the de facto way to write anything. It's not the case anymore. This fits best, considering the compared level between Blender, the notepad with all its shortcomings, and Maya