Are Casual Amateur Creators Done for?

[Jennifer Boyle]

We used to just have prims and textures to use, and everyone could build simple things using free, inworld tools that looked good enough in comparison with professionally-produced objects to be useful. Then we got mesh, which greatly improved the quality of content in SL but put creation out of reach of those of us who found Blender to be overwhelming. We could, however, continue to produce simple objects, which we could texture using simple images, with Mesh Generator. Now, we have PBR, which promises to provide the possibility of skilled creators producing much-improved content. It also seems overwhelming to me. Are amateur creators with limited skills like me done for? If not, what does the future hold for us.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 hour ago, Jennifer Boyle said:

We used to just have prims and textures to use, and everyone could build simple things using free, inworld tools that looked good enough in comparison with professionally-produced objects to be useful. Then we got mesh, which greatly improved the quality of content in SL but put creation out of reach of those of us who found Blender to be overwhelming. We could, however, continue to produce simple objects, which we could texture using simple images, with Mesh Generator. Now, we have PBR, which promises to provide the possibility of skilled creators producing much-improved content. It also seems overwhelming to me. Are amateur creators with limited skills like me done for? If not, what does the future hold for us.

I don't think it was mesh that caused the decline of in-world building as much as it was the way creators and residents have utilized it.  Apparently LL initially presumed that residents would use mesh to make small modular components (similar to the way people utilized sculpted prims).  If their prediction had turned out to be correct then in-world building would simply have swapped from using prims as building blocks to using a combination of prims and mesh components.  Unfortunately the majority of residents don't seem that interested in building things and prefer prefabs so the number of available modular building kits is quite low (and expensive since they're predominantly used by creators and merchants in the creation of yet more prefabs).

As for PBR, there are varying degrees of complexity involved in the creation of PBR materials vs their use.  Much like creating a new PBR material in Substance Designer can be a very complicated and involved process but applying premade PBR materials in Substance Painter can be as simple as dragging and dropping it onto the face of an object, the same seems to be the case with PBR in SL.  Whether you're using prims or a well-constructed modular mesh kit using PBR materials to texture them is a lot simpler process than actually creating your own, and there's a vast number of PBR textures already available online (quite a few of which have already been imported to SL and turned into easy to apply PBR assets).

[Persephone Emerald]

I think we should remember that animations have also been part of the equation for creators. Most have to buy their animations, which adds to the cost of furniture with animations in it. If one doesn't have great construction and animation creation skills, it might be easier for them to stick with items that are more decorative or which use only a few animations they can easily reuse in multiple pieces.

Edited July 18 by Persephone Emerald

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

16 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

I think we should remember that animations have also been part of the equation for creators. Most have to buy their animations, which adds to the cost of furniture with animations in it. If one doesn't have great construction and animation creation skills, it might be easier for them to stick with items that are more decorative or which use only a few animations they can easily reuse in multiple pieces.

I must admit I avoid making things that require overly complex animations because creating animations is really not my thing (short animations and poses aren't so bad, but anything requiring longer realistic animations gets put on my to-do list right below "buy a mocap kit").

I do think the effectiveness/usefulness of modular building kits decreases in proportion to the size of the objects you're creating.  While larger objects like buildings, etc. will be comparable when using a kit and putting it together in-world, things like mesh furniture, ornaments, etc. made entirely in Blender are still going to be more efficient than something made in-world because of the way in which land impact is calculated (which, by the way, is a terrible metric and does absolutely nothing to promote better content creation practices).

Edited July 18 by Fluffy Sharkfin
typo

[Pierre Ceriano]

Hello Jennifer and all the Builders community

I am not sufficiently expert on the economic model of Second Life but, simply because building tools have always been part of Linden Labs' marketing message to attract residents, LL should not neglect them (the builders and the building tools) . Not to mention the fact that using prims to build large elements leads to a significant gain on the servers.

As for putting forward the argument that improving building tools would hinder the thriving market for meshes, it is fantasy and short sighted. Nothing prevents a builder from completing her/his build with meshes, and vice versa.

In my opinion, Linden Labs would benefit from putting things right : first the possibility of making superb builds, then the meshes.

There is a debate on this subject and one way would be to add shapes :
https://feedback.secondlife.com/feature-requests/p/add-new-primitive-types-for-building

For my part, I would prefer that we have more options on the existing primitive types. Such as having access to vertices, being able to subdivide, associate (booleans), in short the essential functions offered by any 3D computer graphics software tool. Don't tell me it's difficult to set up technically. LL developed the building tools based on voxel technology, and this defines the entire technical framework of Second Life. As usual and as with any structure or individuals, you just have to get to work...

There is a topic on feedback.secondlife, tracked by LL (Go vote massively!) :

https://feedback.secondlife.com/feature-requests/p/feature-request-in-world-mesh-creation-tools

Have all a good time building !

Pierre

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

2 hours ago, Pierre Ceriano said:

LL Mojang developed the building tools based on voxel technology, and this defines the entire technical framework of Second Life Minecraft.

FIFY!

There is absolutely nothing even remotely voxel-related about SLs in-world building tools or its technical framework.

[Sid Nagy]

11 hours ago, Jennifer Boyle said:

We used to just have prims and textures to use, and everyone could build simple things using free, inworld tools that looked good enough in comparison with professionally-produced objects to be useful. Then we got mesh, which greatly improved the quality of content in SL but put creation out of reach of those of us who found Blender to be overwhelming. We could, however, continue to produce simple objects, which we could texture using simple images, with Mesh Generator. Now, we have PBR, which promises to provide the possibility of skilled creators producing much-improved content. It also seems overwhelming to me. Are amateur creators with limited skills like me done for? If not, what does the future hold for us.

I have no intention whatsoever to start to learn the new tricks needed for PBR at the moment.
So yeah, I might call it a day in the near future with content creation, but first I wait how things work out. 

So far I don't see a drop in sales of my non PBR merchandise. My goal is (and always was) to make enough money to finance my piece of land that I rent and so far so good, I still can fiddle around with things in SL, without pulling my RL wallet.

Edited July 18 by Sid Nagy
Almost Saturday. Close enough anyway 😁

[Yorkie Bardeen]

I use meshgenerator for some small projects but (Firestorm at least) viewer has an exporter that you can use to create mesh items from prims that you created.

https://gyazo.com/a0ca48c7cc4cc6ca416730db49bbd1bb

Prim-To-Mesh objects always look a bit primmy but I have a few things that look decent. One of the biggest benefits of the PBR release is that people have uploaded 100s of full perm PBR materials including the base textures. Making prims look nice (new floors and wall covers to update old mesh buildings is my current project) is possible.

 

[Extrude Ragu]

12 hours ago, Jennifer Boyle said:

Now, we have PBR,

12 hours ago, Jennifer Boyle said:

It also seems overwhelming to me

12 hours ago, Jennifer Boyle said:

Are amateur creators with limited skills like me done for?

 

No.

[Extrude Ragu]

Hehe I made a roman column~

Well maybe not everyone will agree with me, but I think this is fun , making shiny prims from materials, was EZ-PZ to do too

 

 

 

 

 

[ChinRey]

6 hours ago, Pierre Ceriano said:

LL developed the building tools based on voxel technology, and this defines the entire technical framework of Second Life.

As Fluffy already said, SL's prim system has nothing to do with voxels.

Prims are created from simple mathematical formulas. The system was originally a college project by Avi Bar-Zeev. (Polylist) mesh wasn't really an option for a complex virtual world back in 2002 and LL was trying to find a more efficient solution. Philip Linden happened to meet a young and when Philip Linden heard about Bar-Zeev, he hired him to implement the system in SL.

Bar-Zeev's system is extremely efficient both in terms of bandwidth and CPU/GPU resources. Any prim shape only needs a few hundred bytes of data to be transferred and the original code only had a few hundred lines. They still had to simplify it a bit to make it work in SL though.

I wish LL had developed the prims further. There is so much that could have been done to expand it to add more shapes. Just to give you an idea, look at this:

https://drajmarsh.bitbucket.io/supershapes.html

This shape generator works on principles very similar to prims it would be farily easy to add all the fucntions it has to the prim system (with lower curve resolutions of course, those shapes have fiendishly high polycounts) and that would still cover only a tiny little fraction of what a prim style shape generator can potentially do.

 

6 hours ago, Pierre Ceriano said:

There is a topic on feedback.secondlife, tracked by LL (Go vote massively!) :

https://feedback.secondlife.com/feature-requests/p/feature-request-in-world-mesh-creation-tools

No I won't. The thing about building with polylist mesh is that it is complicated and often counter-intuitive. Embedding the editor into the viewer isn't going to change that. My opinion would change if somebody could come up with a simple user-friendly mesh editor that could consitently produce mesh render efficient enough to work in a dynamic environment but nobody has managed to do that so far.

Thinking about it now, maybe the most effective thing LL could do to encourage in-world building at this stage would be to upgrade the linkset handling to remove the heavy LI penalty prims suffer from compared to mesh (and sculpts). As a rule of thumb, expect 1 LI of mesh to equal about 20-30 prims in terms of client side load and probably more than 100 in terms of bandwidth. So in theory it's better to make an object from 15 linked prims than from a 1 LI mesh (provided it can be made from 15 prims of course). The problem is server side. The simulator doesn't recognise linksets at all so it handles that 15 prim linkset as 15 separate objects. If the server had handled linksets as single objects, we could have seriously reduced the load on the simulator and thus the LI of many items, especially - but not only - complex prim builds.

[Pierre Ceriano]

4 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

FIFY!

There is absolutely nothing even remotely voxel-related about SLs in-world building tools or its technical framework.

Oh indeed, this is what happens when I don't want to use my translator before posting ^^ I meant Vertex and not Voxel (Voxel is for imagery).

[Flea Yatsenko]

On 7/17/2024 at 7:14 PM, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

I don't think it was mesh that caused the decline of in-world building as much as it was the way creators and residents have utilized it.  Apparently LL initially presumed that residents would use mesh to make small modular components (similar to the way people utilized sculpted prims).  If their prediction had turned out to be correct then in-world building would simply have swapped from using prims as building blocks to using a combination of prims and mesh components.  Unfortunately the majority of residents don't seem that interested in building things and prefer prefabs so the number of available modular building kits is quite low (and expensive since they're predominantly used by creators and merchants in the creation of yet more prefabs).

As for PBR, there are varying degrees of complexity involved in the creation of PBR materials vs their use.  Much like creating a new PBR material in Substance Designer can be a very complicated and involved process but applying premade PBR materials in Substance Painter can be as simple as dragging and dropping it onto the face of an object, the same seems to be the case with PBR in SL.  Whether you're using prims or a well-constructed modular mesh kit using PBR materials to texture them is a lot simpler process than actually creating your own, and there's a vast number of PBR textures already available online (quite a few of which have already been imported to SL and turned into easy to apply PBR assets).

It was the lack of lighting options, which lead to creators, specially skyboxes, interior spaces, etc. baking all the lighting into the diffuse texture. Once this is done, lights and shadows get completely broken if you move things. You can not make any real modifications to baked lighting builds because the lighting is on the texture. I.E. if you have a dark room in your skybox, the actual brightness from the lights is in your texture. So adding any sort of other objects, changing walls, etc suddenly makes something really bright when it shouldn't be. Which is why so many baked skyboxes are filled with furniture that looks completely out of place, because it's too bright or too dark.

PBR and the new lighting system with reflection probes are designed to get rid of baked texture builds forever. So the lighting moves to the viewer instead of being pre-calculated and baked into a texture. Which means it's more demanding on a viewer. But suddenly those lights that were in Blender and having the lighting baked into the texture are now in the viewer for anyone to play around with. Which means you have in world choices for lighting.

It changed my builds, specially my sewer/bunker kits. I used to have to bake the lighting and shadows, if I wanted to make one with red, white, yellow, etc lighting, each one was baked in Blender and sold as a different product. But trying to connect a red to a yellow would be a huge pain to get to look right because the lighting from one piece wouldn't match up right so you'd have to do something like make a totally dark transition piece. Huge pain.

With PBR I just make one sewer/bunker kit or room or whatever, and all the lighting is controlled in world. Builders or whoever are using it can make them as bright or dark as they want, remove stuff, add stuff, break it into pieces, etc and the lighting is in world and they can keep using it how they want. I have always tried to sell builder kit oriented stuff and honestly PBR has done a lot to shift building back into the hands of people who can't use third party tools or don't want to learn them. I think things are going to shift back towards more in world building and that PBR has completely taken a huge advantage of building with third party tools away, by making texture baked lighting completely out dated. In short, a build made with third party tools using PBR is a lot closer to an in world build with PBR, than a third party build with baked lighting is to an in world build with no lighting and nothing but tiled textures and maybe a few projectors. Reflection probes are a real game changer for in world building by forcing third party tool builders to use PBR and in world lighting instead of baked lighting.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

3 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

I think things are going to shift back towards more in world building and that PBR has completely taken a huge advantage of building with third party tools away, by making texture baked lighting completely out dated.

I'd have to agree there (although I think LL could have done a better job on the lighting part of the equation, but there's still time for that).  As I mentioned I think that what SL really needs is more readily available mesh building components rather than yet more prefabs.  Prims were (and still are) very convenient basic building components and sculpties were a novel stopgap measure, but if there were more modular mesh building kits that people could use alongside PBR materials to build things in-world then it would make the transition to newer PBR content a little quicker and give residents something more to do while they're online.

[animats]

7 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

I think that what SL really needs is more readily available mesh building components rather than yet more prefabs.

There are nice windows, doors, vents, and such on Marketplace.

Now if we had constructive solid geometry, where you can make a hole in a wall, using those would be easier. That's mostly a CAD program thing; FreeCAD, SolidWorks, and Autodesk Fusion have it. We could then have windowless building shells, into which windows could be placed.

Without that, you have to go through the whole process of building a mesh wall with holes of the right size. This is a pain.

There are parametric building systems, such as Archimatrix. Stretch a wall, get more windows, not wider ones. Good idea that didn't seem to get much traction.

Does anyone know of a building system which, if bolted onto SL somehow, would do what you want? It's getting the UI right that's hard. Not the implementation. Blender is too general and too hard.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

2 hours ago, animats said:

There are nice windows, doors, vents, and such on Marketplace.

Now if we had constructive solid geometry, where you can make a hole in a wall, using those would be easier. That's mostly a CAD program thing; FreeCAD, SolidWorks, and Autodesk Fusion have it. We could then have windowless building shells, into which windows could be placed.

Without that, you have to go through the whole process of building a mesh wall with holes of the right size. This is a pain.

There are parametric building systems, such as Archimatrix. Stretch a wall, get more windows, not wider ones. Good idea that didn't seem to get much traction.

Does anyone know of a building system which, if bolted onto SL somehow, would do what you want? It's getting the UI right that's hard. Not the implementation. Blender is too general and too hard.

As awesome as it might be to have something as advanced as that in SL I just don't think the likelihood of LL implementing such features is that high (and if it were I wouldn't expect to see any results from such a project for at least a couple of years).

I agree that it can be a pain to create a decent, versatile modular building kit but there are plenty of tutorials online that show how to do so and, while you're never going to be able to achieve the versatility of a parametric building system using nothing but pre-built components, having a wide range of modular building kits would dramatically increase the possibilities of what residents can create when building in-world.  Sure windows and doors, etc will need to come in a variety of sizes but we can resize things in-world and minor changes to dimensions (i.e. making a window or door a couple of inches longer or wider) isn't going to make any noticeable visual difference to the end result.  Let's also not forget that we do still have prims and with PBR applied they can look just as detailed as more complex mesh so, for example, you can create a wall out of prims and choose the position and size of any hole to fit the windows and doors you wish to use.

As much as I'd love to see a parametric building system in SL I don't think it's going to happen anytime in the near future given all the other projects LL have in progress whereas increasing the number of modular mesh construction kits available in-world is something that's entirely under the control of residents/creators and doesn't require any participation by LL whatsoever.  It may not be as user-friendly, convenient or elegant a solution as an automated system that does all the hard work for you but then building with prims wasn't exactly intuitive either and plenty of people took hours/days/weeks of practice before they could achieve the results they wanted when building in-world.

I think any option that provides more capabilities for residents to create things in-world rather than having to settle for whatever prefab most closely matches what they really want would be an improvement and it would be unwise to discount any easily implemented solution which contributes to that end simply because it isn't the best solution.

[Quistess Alpha]

9 hours ago, animats said:

Does anyone know of a building system which, if bolted onto SL somehow, would do what you want?

More generalized linear transformation (we already have scale, we'd just need skew and mirroring to be 'complete') would probably be an easy start. A complete implementation of 'boolean operations' might be difficult, especially to figure out how those should be textured, but, even just 'negative prims' that can cut into the (physics?) shape of other objects would be quite useful and (in my naive assumption) not too hard to tack on.

Edited July 20 by Quistess Alpha
two too to

[ChinRey]

10 hours ago, animats said:

Does anyone know of a building system which, if bolted onto SL somehow, would do what you want?

Yes. It's called prims.

I'm serious. I know I'm repeating myself here but although the original purpose of prims was to create a buiding tool with the lowest possible server load, it also happens to be the most intuitive and flexible in-worl building system any virtual world/game engine has ever come up with.

The current prim system only has seven (official) basic shapes and 15 modifiers. That's enough to create every single prim build ever seen in SL and more. Add a handful more and we have a far more flexible system that is still more processing efficient and user friendly than any polylist mesh editor. On top of that add a way to merge prims seamlessly, a couple of predefines alternative UV maps, maybe Archimatrix style nodes and/or static rigging (or even dynamic rigging!) and perhaps manual vertice displacement and there's hardly anything you can create with a 3D editor that can't be done easier with prims.

 

11 hours ago, animats said:

Now if we had constructive solid geometry, where you can make a hole in a wall, using those would be easier.

...

We could then have windowless building shells, into which windows could be placed.

CSG is very processor heavy so it's probably not an option. Even plylist meshes that were originally created using CSG tend to be heavier to render than ones that were made by other methods.

But the wall with a window opening can be easily done with a prim. It is a bit awkward the way it's done today but add three more parameters (x and y shift and x-y proportions, also useful for many other purposes) and let us have full access to 32 bit resolution for each parameter and we've got that covered.

[skorreynimble]

Oh my, and I am thinking of starting creating and selling! I have another post about my small house prefab, as I want to make these and sell them for low cost. Kinda came up with this as I am new, like houses, and had a hard time finding small houses for cheap. Since I know CAD, it is not to hard for me to create mesh house. Texturing in Blender is another thing, geez!

So for instance, I am not even a creator who sells anything yet, but this house will be my first. I want to sell it on the marketplace, with an inworld link so people can go in it. I made everything, and textured it with PBR on one, and regular on the other. I want to sell full modify. How much? I am going to sell this for $50 Lindens. Fine with me for fun, and low cost for people like me without to much Lindens. Anyhow, yea, there is room for small creators, but what do I know... I have only been here for a year!!!