NUX Avatar

[Qie Niangao]

Speaking of Blake… I spent a little more time with him today and observed something maybe useful. Before I'd stuck to a height of about six feet, and found it impossible to adjust his proportions to a reasonable girth around the midsection. What I discovered is that I can more or less recreate the shape I thought I saw in the demo by cranking the height slider all the way up before tweaking the other sliders. In essence, when he's taller there's just more room to expand some dimensions while leaving others at minimum, the extra height adding flexibility to his overall proportions. That's probably obvious to folks who make a lot of shapes, but I've worked with a variety of mesh bodies at much shorter shapes to get reasonably slim proportions (to my eye). So I guess in summary, Blake wants to be "big": he's either gonna be really tall, or he's gonna be a little pudgy.

(Again, though, the caveat: maybe the model and shape sliders we're using are not representative of what's going to be released as the body and its customization controls.)

[AmeliaJ08]

42 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Speaking of Blake… I spent a little more time with him today and observed something maybe useful. Before I'd stuck to a height of about six feet, and found it impossible to adjust his proportions to a reasonable girth around the midsection. What I discovered is that I can more or less recreate the shape I thought I saw in the demo by cranking the height slider all the way up before tweaking the other sliders. In essence, when he's taller there's just more room to expand some dimensions while leaving others at minimum, the extra height adding flexibility to his overall proportions. That's probably obvious to folks who make a lot of shapes, but I've worked with a variety of mesh bodies at much shorter shapes to get reasonably slim proportions (to my eye). So I guess in summary, Blake wants to be "big": he's either gonna be really tall, or he's gonna be a little pudgy.

(Again, though, the caveat: maybe the model and shape sliders we're using are not representative of what's going to be released as the body and its customization controls.)

Oh great, more 8 feet tall men, just what SL needs

 

 

[PearlettaStone]

Simple Bloom other Creators said they be on board this a beautiful project this Cute body needs love. 

[Ceka Cianci]

1 hour ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Oh great, more 8 feet tall men, just what SL needs

 

 

once they reach 6ft tall, they all look 8ft tall to me, even in RL.. hehehehe

[Jennifer Boyle]

My alt went over to the beta grid and tried out Blake.

I was surprised that the clothing didn't fit better than it did. With movement, the underlying body poked through---a lot.

I was disappointed to see that there were alpha masks for the clothing, though they were surely needed. If the goal is to make something that works well in the hands of new users with as little effort on their part as possible, shouldn't something like the Maitreya autohider be used instead of alpha masks?

[Qie Niangao]

Inara Pey did indeed summarize the Content Creator User Group meeting where NUX Avatars were discussed. One thing seemed (to me) a little different about the avatars appearing in the Library and then being withdrawn:

Quote

• This was apparently not an error on LL’s part, but rather the result of an issue with the avatars being noted, prompting their removal from the Library.

[Gabriele Graves]

So "Oops" but totally meant to do it? 

[Hunny Bunny]

8 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

So "Oops" but totally meant to do it? 

[Sasy Scarborough]

Busting out the Glance Skin Lana and some Pig Bodysuit and League Shorts. I totally plan on creating multiple outfits with the Senra avatar so that when at the Welcome Hub it is clear that some changes can be made and you can be ADORABLE. I did not use the included shapes, because I just wanted to alter my own. 

 

Edited July 22, 2023 by Sasy Scarborough

[Gabriele Graves]

4 minutes ago, Hunny Bunny said:

So torn between a like and a laugh emoji

[Rowan Amore]

10 minutes ago, Sasy Scarborough said:

Busting out the Glance Skin Lana and some Pig Bodysuit and League Shorts. I totally plan on creating multiple outfits with the Senra avatar so that when at the Welcome Hub it is clear that some changes can be made and you can be ADORABLE. I did not use the included shapes, because I just wanted to alter my own. 

 

What ever happened to Glance?

[Sasy Scarborough]

7 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

What ever happened to Glance?

she left a long time ago, SL was not her main job, so she let it go. There was talk of her coming back and doing a collaboration, but not sure if that happened or she is here with another name/brand. But I am so glad I still have her skins, I wear this one often, so to be able to move it over to Senra is great. I understand us oldbies have different inventories than new users, we will benefit greatly from that, as we have with BOM so far ( I love bom, I love making alpha layers etc) But this will be a great way to help new users find alternatives and maybe to be a bit more creative along the way.

[Marianne Little]

12 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I don't at all disagree, but I've highlighted the bit about content creators because, for this to work properly, these older products need to be "repackaged," in a sense. Not necessarily "improved" or "updated" (although that would be nice), but made easy to find and use for noobs.

What we don't want, I think, is new residents being told to scour the backrooms of skin and clothing makers looking for hidden away gems from the past. It needs to be upfront, easy to find, and clearly associated with Senra.

About "scour the backrooms". You are totally right. What a feeling it will be, to hear that only old content works for you. 😒

Repacking yes, and marked with new labels. "Senra Blake" and "Senra Jaime".

I find it easier to say NUX because we have called them NUX for so long.

But I should be used to say "Senra" since that's what the folder in the library is named.

So sad that the best creators, (well the best for me), has retired their system clothes. You can't texture them better today. My COCO clothes, as I use in one of the pictures, is great. And the sculpted pant parts meet the textures so good. I just added them and moved them up a little, no fine adjusting. I see that I could have edited a tiny bit more... oops. But I was in a hurry. 

 

Edited July 22, 2023 by Marianne Little
added a picture and the part about pants legs

[Marianne Little]

My mAlt can't access the Beta grid. 😢

I know he has done it before, because in the start entry on my computer is he listed with both:

@Second Life 

@Second Life Beta

He and I are the only ones of my accounts with the "Beta" option. Maybe he lost access because it's a very long time since he was there last? 

No Blake testing for him. 

 

[BlueMoonLightz]

Many what to test and try it and want to create but we want get this going. We need it like when bom was getting tested. 

Edited July 22, 2023 by BlueMoonLightz

[Marianne Little]

I sent a ticket for my mAlt. I managed to log in to the test grid. But all his inventory folders was empty. The only things he had was the Library folders, including Senra. I spent hours trying the Firestorm tips for inventory problems, and I also downloaded the official viewer to see if it helped. No luck.

I hope I can get his inventory sorted out so I can try Blake with his inventory items. That account is almost as old as Marianne, and he has skins and clothes from way back in time.

 

[Qie Niangao]

Slight tangent about BOM clothes: If I recall correctly, when BOM was introduced, all the baking resolutions went from 512x512 to 1024x1024. Does that ring a bell? If so, those ancient system clothes are likely to be disappointing, and not representative of what can be done today. I'm supposing the creators will have stuck with that limited resolution for texture uploads because they'd bake down to that resolution anyway, and that way they'd have direct control of the reduced resolution image. I think if they created clothing with higher res textures, those would now bake to that higher resolution, but this is all a vague recollection about something I wasn't paying much attention to at the time.

[Marianne Little]

5 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Slight tangent about BOM clothes: If I recall correctly, when BOM was introduced, all the baking resolutions went from 512x512 to 1024x1024. Does that ring a bell? If so, those ancient system clothes are likely to be disappointing, and not representative of what can be done today. I'm supposing the creators will have stuck with that limited resolution for texture uploads because they'd bake down to that resolution anyway, and that way they'd have direct control of the reduced resolution image. I think if they created clothing with higher res textures, those would now bake to that higher resolution, but this is all a vague recollection about something I wasn't paying much attention to at the time.

I do not remember when, but I think creators has uploaded higher textures and the uploaded compression gives a much clearer result than working on a big texture and resize it before upload.

But since I'm no creator I can't say how long this worked before BOM. Look at the replies here under the article, it is more informative. https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2019/02/high-res-textures-firestorm-secnd-life.html

Yes, I was so giddy when BOM was introduced. I had boxed a lot of skins and makeup, and trying them on was a shock. They looked so bad! Awful skins and even worse makeup. A few out of 100 in the box was a quality I could wear, and I have showed two on 2 pictures with Jamie here.

Same with clothes, a lot of pure rubbish. The irony is that those who had a much better quality than others retired their products. And the junk lives on the Marketplace for ever. Maybe some of those with low quality will rename their clothes to be "for Senra". We can't be sure that rigged new mesh is rigged and textured well either, I see some template mesh for other avatars/bodies that's not looking nice... to say it mildly.

It would be good if LL had some quality control, IF they make a Senra product shop at the Welcome Hub. Maybe a job for Strawberry Linden?

Edited July 22, 2023 by Marianne Little

[Arielle Popstar]

11 hours ago, Marianne Little said:

My mAlt can't access the Beta grid. 😢

I know he has done it before, because in the start entry on my computer is he listed with both:

@Second Life 

@Second Life Beta

He and I are the only ones of my accounts with the "Beta" option. Maybe he lost access because it's a very long time since he was there last? 

No Blake testing for him. 

 

Just an FYI, I initially had trouble logging in too with an FS beta viewer so tried with a SL beta viewer and was able to log in fine. I then retried with the FS beta and re entered my account and password even though it was showing as already saved. That then allowed me to login to the beta grid with the FS viewer.

Edited July 22, 2023 by Arielle Popstar
grammar or something

[Persephone Emerald]

5 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Slight tangent about BOM clothes: If I recall correctly, when BOM was introduced, all the baking resolutions went from 512x512 to 1024x1024. Does that ring a bell? If so, those ancient system clothes are likely to be disappointing, and not representative of what can be done today. I'm supposing the creators will have stuck with that limited resolution for texture uploads because they'd bake down to that resolution anyway, and that way they'd have direct control of the reduced resolution image. I think if they created clothing with higher res textures, those would now bake to that higher resolution, but this is all a vague recollection about something I wasn't paying much attention to at the time.

Long before BOM, I bought clothing textures to make Petite clothing. Some of these had a choice between 512 or 1024 resolution textures. I decided at the time to make normal sized system clothing with the 1024 textures and Petite clothing with the 512 textures. Now that I have a BOM compatible Petit from Jinx, I just use the normal system/BOM clothing at the 1024 resolution. I have other system clothing that seems to have good details, so I don't think it's all 512 resolution.

Edited July 22, 2023 by Persephone Emerald
no change

[Persephone Emerald]

34 minutes ago, Marianne Little said:

I do not remember when, but I think creators has uploaded higher textures and the uploaded compression gives a much clearer result than working on a big texture and resize it before upload.

But since I'm no creator I can't say how long this worked before BOM. Look at the replies here under the article, it is more informative. https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2019/02/high-res-textures-firestorm-secnd-life.html

Yes, I was so giddy when BOM was introduced. I had boxed a lot of skins and makeup, and trying them on was a shock. They looked so bad! Awful skins and even worse makeup. A few out of 100 in the box was a quality I could wear, and I have showed two on 2 pictures with Jamie here.

Same with clothes, a lot of pure rubbish. The irony is that those who had a much better quality than others retired their products. And the junk lives on the Marketplace for ever. Maybe some of those with low quality will rename their clothes to be "for Senra". We can't be sure that rigged new mesh is rigged and textured well either, I see some template mesh for other avatars/bodies that's not looking nice... to say it mildly.

It would be good if LL had some quality control, IF they make a Senra product shop at the Welcome Hub. Maybe a job for Strawberry Linden?

It's true that pre-BOM skins generally don't have the detail that we're used to now, though there are some exceptions. Any skins by Lumae or Ritual still look lovely to me, though I've purged most of the older ones that were for system bodies or appliers to mesh bodies. Now I'm gonna be sad if those old system skins work best on Senra Jamie or Blake.

Btw, 7DS has some old male skins in a box of group gift skins that could be tried on Blake.

[Qie Niangao]

19 minutes ago, Marianne Little said:

I do not remember when, but I think creators has uploaded higher textures and the uploaded compression gives a much clearer result than working on a big texture and resize it before upload.

But since I'm no creator I can't say how long this worked before BOM. Look at the replies here under the article, it is more informative. https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2019/02/high-res-textures-firestorm-secnd-life.html

There are several different resolutions involved in BOM content.

1. Creator's tooling image resolution. This can be arbitrarily high, 8K is common, and staying at this full resolution through all steps of image editing will produce the best result (except for very specialized visual effects where granularity is the target).
2. Upload resolution. This is the one the NWN article talks about, but using a higher resolution for upload is not guaranteed to have a good result. Old school folks like me believe—perhaps superstitiously—that our choice of rescaling options in Gimp get better results than whatever the SL uploader uses, so we always upload at true power-of-two dimensions, 1024x1024 maximum.
3. Storage resolution. This is 1024x1024 maximum and has been since long before I joined. If a texture is uploaded at a higher resolution, or at any non-power-of-two resolution, the uploader scales it to an appropriate storage texture.
4. Clothing resolution (hypothetical).  I am not sure but I doubt this texture actually exists; rather the clothing may simply contain a pointer to the texture in its native storage resolution. It would only have made sense to store a separate, rescaled texture in the clothing asset if there was a lot of savings in having it available at the baking resolution rather than having to rescale the stored image when baking.
5. Baking resolution. This is the resolution the baking service uses to paint the final texture on the avatar surface. Before BOM, this was a maximum of 512x512 for each region. Back before BOM we were told there was no reason to upload any higher resolution textures for clothing, skins, etc because it would all get baked down to 512x512 anyway. (This assumes the textures were normalized to 512x512 before being combined in the baking process, which was probably true.) I think, though, that uploading at 1024x1024 back then would mean those clothes would now bake at 1024x1024 on BOM avatar surfaces (or the system avatar, for that mater).

Couple references about this:

• Vir Linden post from April 2018 in a BOM feedback thread: "1024x1024 support is coming. It requires a change to the baking service, separate from the viewer work for bakes on mesh, so for now you will still see baked textures at a max of 512x512 resolution."
• Item in ancient, 2016, pre-BOM, but still most recent "Clothing Tutorials" on the wiki: "All outfit textures in SL are baked at 512x512 when worn on the avatar, no matter what. So, don't forget to downsize your output files to 512x512, before you upload them to SL. Otherwise, you'll just be wasting resources."

[Gabriele Graves]

6 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

There are several different resolutions involved in BOM content.

1. Creator's tooling image resolution. This can be arbitrarily high, 8K is common, and staying at this full resolution through all steps of image editing will produce the best result (except for very specialized visual effects where granularity is the target).
2. Upload resolution. This is the one the NWN article talks about, but using a higher resolution for upload is not guaranteed to have a good result. Old school folks like me believe—perhaps superstitiously—that our choice of rescaling options in Gimp get better results than whatever the SL uploader uses, so we always upload at true power-of-two dimensions, 1024x1024 maximum.
3. Storage resolution. This is 1024x1024 maximum and has been since long before I joined. If a texture is uploaded at a higher resolution, or at any non-power-of-two resolution, the uploader scales it to an appropriate storage texture.
4. Clothing resolution (hypothetical).  I am not sure but I doubt this texture actually exists; rather the clothing may simply contain a pointer to the texture in its native storage resolution. It would only have made sense to store a separate, rescaled texture in the clothing asset if there was a lot of savings in having it available at the baking resolution rather than having to rescale the stored image when baking.
5. Baking resolution. This is the resolution the baking service uses to paint the final texture on the avatar surface. Before BOM, this was a maximum of 512x512 for each region. Back before BOM we were told there was no reason to upload any higher resolution textures for clothing, skins, etc because it would all get baked down to 512x512 anyway. (This assumes the textures were normalized to 512x512 before being combined in the baking process, which was probably true.) I think, though, that uploading at 1024x1024 back then would mean those clothes would now bake at 1024x1024 on BOM avatar surfaces (or the system avatar, for that mater).

Couple references about this:

• Vir Linden post from April 2018 in a BOM feedback thread: "1024x1024 support is coming. It requires a change to the baking service, separate from the viewer work for bakes on mesh, so for now you will still see baked textures at a max of 512x512 resolution."
• Item in ancient, 2016, pre-BOM, but still most recent "Clothing Tutorials" on the wiki: "All outfit textures in SL are baked at 512x512 when worn on the avatar, no matter what. So, don't forget to downsize your output files to 512x512, before you upload them to SL. Otherwise, you'll just be wasting resources."

1024x1024 textures for system clothing was enabled years before BoM came along and it was for quite a while and then LL nerfed it back down to 512x512 until BoM came along.  I have quite a few system clothing items from then that are 1024x1024.

You may not also be aware that for a tiny amount of time LL enabled the storage of 2048x2048 textures.  There are a small hanful still floating around the grid.

 

[Qie Niangao]

15 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

1024x1024 textures for system clothing was enabled years before BoM came along and it was for quite a while and then LL nerfed it back down to 512x512 until BoM came along.  I have quite a few system clothing items from then that are 1024x1024.

You may not also be aware that for a tiny amount of time LL enabled the storage of 2048x2048 textures.  There are a small hanful still floating around the grid.

I'd heard about the 2048x2048 textures but they were always described as ancient—and I arrived in 2006 so they must have been really early-on.

A 1024x1024 resolution for system clothing seems related to what I've been trying to understand: Did they actually bake to the avatar at that resolution, or was that simply the maximum image storage resolution in the clothing assets?

I remember for a long time (but ending well before BoM) the baking process was done in the viewer, so raw clothing and skin textures got pushed down the network to be baked, with lots of image IP leakage. I don't recall the resolution changing at the same time they switched to a server-side baking service, so either I just don't recall (very possible) or any reduction from 1024 would have happened before, while the baking was still viewer-side.

I guess none of this much matters for Senra; I'm just obsessing over what quality of old bakeable content might still exist.

[Gabriele Graves]

1 minute ago, Qie Niangao said:

I'd heard about the 2048x2048 textures but they were always described as ancient—and I arrived in 2006 so they must have been really early-on.

It's possible it was an early thing but I only heard about it third-hand and it seemed to me to be a much later on thing.  I think @ChinRey might know for sure.

1 minute ago, Qie Niangao said:

A 1024x1024 resolution for system clothing seems related to what I've been trying to understand: Did they actually bake to the avatar at that resolution, or was that simply the maximum image storage resolution in the clothing assets?

I'm pretty sure it was baked at that quality because those clothing items looked far better.  This was at a time when there was only the system body.  Mesh wasn't even on the grid in any form at this point (not even sculpts as far as I recall).