What character creation *could* look like given modern tech ...

[Katherine Heartsong]

This is less than ten minutes of fooling around in a modern, in-game character creator engine with a much better UX/UI. No instructions read, just dove right in.

Ten minutes. Ten.

I haven't even begun to tinker much, either. These are completely unedited except resizing and hiding the UI.

No stresses about neck seams, head and body, clothing fitting, etc.

I'm just saying, this is what SL's avatar creation could be.

[Love Zhaoying]

With that level of "realism", and that ease of creation, I wonder if creating avatars such as that would a) put body / head creators our of business, and b) hurt the SL Economy!

But, that would be offset by all the incredible benefits (easier adoption of SL by new users, etc.).

 

[Resi Pfeffer]

Just 3 days ago Firestorm announced the lastest non-PBR viewer to never get blocked, for all the folks unuable or unwilling to upgrade.
https://www.firestormviewer.org/firestorm-6-6-17-will-not-be-blocked-but-you-will-lose-your-voice/?click_source=firestorm_splash

I wouldnt count on easy/appealing avatar creation to happen anytime soon.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

10 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

With that level of "realism", and that ease of creation, I wonder if creating avatars such as that would a) put body / head creators our of business, and b) hurt the SL Economy!

But, that would be offset by all the incredible benefits (easier adoption of SL by new users, etc.).

 

Assuming that the character creator is only adjusting the values of bones and deformers in the same way as the SL appearance sliders do (just in a less clunky and more intuitive way) then it probably wouldn't impact SL businesses or the SL economy to any noticeable degree (although it would most likely impact creators in as much as they'd probably have a new set of hoops to jump through).

 

6 minutes ago, Resi Pfeffer said:

Just 3 days ago Firestorm announced the lastest non-PBR viewer to never get blocked, for all the folks unuable or unwilling to upgrade.
https://www.firestormviewer.org/firestorm-6-6-17-will-not-be-blocked-but-you-will-lose-your-voice/?click_source=firestorm_splash

I wouldnt count on easy/appealing avatar creation to happen anytime soon.

Why would a decision concerning the availability of third party viewers have any impact on LL updating the appearance editor at some point in the future?

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Assuming that the character creator is only adjusting the values of bones and deformers in the same way as the SL appearance sliders do (just in a less clunky and more intuitive way) then it probably wouldn't impact SL businesses or the SL economy to any noticeable degree (although it would most likely impact creators in as much as they'd probably have a new set of hoops to jump through).

Certainly. I was focusing on the "realism" of the face in the example.

2 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

12 minutes ago, Resi Pfeffer said:

Just 3 days ago Firestorm announced the lastest non-PBR viewer to never get blocked, for all the folks unuable or unwilling to upgrade.
https://www.firestormviewer.org/firestorm-6-6-17-will-not-be-blocked-but-you-will-lose-your-voice/?click_source=firestorm_splash

I wouldnt count on easy/appealing avatar creation to happen anytime soon.

Why would a decision concerning the availability of third party viewers have any impact on LL updating the appearance editor at some point in the future?

My thoughts also, it was hard to understand how this related to the topic.

Edited August 21 by Love Zhaoying

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

13 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Certainly. I was focusing on the "realism" of the face in the example.

Ahh, I think I see what you were getting at now and, from that perspective, yes it might possibly impact creators.  However in this case I'm not sure that would be enough for me to discount the idea because essentially it's the same as saying "LL shouldn't provide anything too attractive to their customers because doing so would reduce the amount of money other residents can make from them! " (not that I'm implying that that's what you were trying to say, but that could well be the message that we're sending to LL by rejecting the idea for those types of reasons).

I think improving the character creation process would still allow plenty of scope for creators to provide custom bodies and heads because there's a very wide range of tastes in SL and, no matter how well done the in-viewer character creation process may be, people will always be looking for something new or unique to help express their individual creativity (it may require them creators to up their game a little and change their workflow but then that's par for the course in content creation both in SL and in RL).

Edited August 21 by Fluffy Sharkfin
clarifying who "them" refers to...

[Resi Pfeffer]

13 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Why would a decision concerning the availability of third party viewers have any impact on LL updating the appearance editor at some point in the future?

I was assuming that a feature like a modernized avatar creation would also need more computing power, just how PBR does recently.
If people are unable to upgrade for PBR, they wont be unable to upgrade for other new and shiny things that make SL look better

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 minute ago, Resi Pfeffer said:

I was assuming that a feature like a modernized avatar creation would also need more computing power, just how PBR does recently.
If people are unable to upgrade for PBR, they wont be unable to upgrade for other new and shiny things that make SL look better

There's no reason that a more comprehensive character creation system would require more computer power (at least not to anywhere near the degree that the current implementation of PBR does).

Contrary to popular opinion not every feature that LL adds requires high-end hardware to run it (if adding extra features to the viewer caused that much lag then everyone using Firestorm would need supercomputers).

[Resi Pfeffer]

4 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

There's no reason that a more comprehensive character creation system would require more computer power (at least not to anywhere near the degree that the current implementation of PBR does).

Contrary to popular opinion not every feature that LL adds requires high-end hardware to run it (if adding extra features to the viewer caused that much lag then everyone using Firestorm would need supercomputers).

Not a tech person here:) I just see a good looking pic and imagine it to need more computing power ingame.
Hope you are right about

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 minute ago, Resi Pfeffer said:

Not a tech person here:) I just see a good looking pic and imagine it to need more computing power ingame.
Hope you are right about

If it's any consolation judging by how the SL appearance editor has barely changed in the last 20 years I doubt it's likely we'll ever find out if I'm right or not.  

[Love Zhaoying]

39 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

51 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Certainly. I was focusing on the "realism" of the face in the example.

Ahh, I think I see what you were getting at now and, from that perspective, yes it might possibly impact creators.  However in this case I'm not sure that would be enough for me to discount the idea because essentially it's the same as saying "LL shouldn't provide anything too attractive to their customers because doing so would reduce the amount of money other residents can make from them! " (not that I'm implying that that's what you were trying to say, but that could well be the message that we're sending to LL by rejecting the idea for those types of reasons).

My personal opinion is, "screw the creators!" (and possibly even the SL economy) if we get a "light-year leap forward" that can attract more users, make creation easier, put SL "on par" with other systems, etc. The benefits would far outweigh any "competition" issues.  Imagine if "Senra" was actually good.

[AmeliaJ08]

Could.

Given the howls of outrage about the basic hardware requirements of the PBR era though do you really fancy rendering a club full of avatars like that?

That character has very highly detailed geometry and textures. Looks lovely but getting good performance from SL's ancient and comparatively primitive engine rendering avatars like that would be nearly impossible, it's a lot more doable with static, unchanging character assets in modern games of course but we've still not come up with many good ways of lessening the render load of high quality avatars in SL because a lot of the usual tricks don't really apply.

I do think the whole starter avatar experience needs some (understatement) work though. There's no excuse for Senra looking as bad as it does, none at all. It's not even particularly light to render. The character builder thing is a good start but the avatar itself just looks terrible and that's a shame.

Edited August 21 by AmeliaJ08

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Why would a decision concerning the availability of third party viewers have any impact on LL updating the appearance editor at some point in the future?

Because it signals an unwillingness to move forward. It's being kept around to keep older hardware supported and able to access the grid which is noble but the concern is that allowing this to continue forever will only hold back the push for higher quality visuals.

Being able to disable ALM led to a whole lot of content not coming with any materials support, it took years for that to become the standard. You also still see baked shine, fake shadows etc on relatively new content due to more 'advanced' graphical features often being disabled.

[Janet Voxel]

Not trying to be funny, what does that do that we can’t do in SL?

 

 

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 hour ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

That character has very highly detailed geometry and textures. Looks lovely but getting good performance from SL's ancient and comparatively primitive engine rendering avatars like that would be nearly impossible, it's a lot more doable with static, unchanging character assets in modern games of course but we've still not come up with many good ways of lessening the render load of high quality avatars in SL because a lot of the usual tricks don't really apply.

I'd be willing to bet that the character in that screenshot has significantly lower resource usage than a lot of bloggers SL avatars you see on Flickr, etc.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 hour ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Because it signals an unwillingness to move forward. It's being kept around to keep older hardware supported and able to access the grid which is noble but the concern is that allowing this to continue forever will only hold back the push for higher quality visuals.

Being able to disable ALM led to a whole lot of content not coming with any materials support, it took years for that to become the standard. You also still see baked shine, fake shadows etc on relatively new content due to more 'advanced' graphical features often being disabled.

Well, like I said...

1 hour ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

If it's any consolation judging by how the SL appearance editor has barely changed in the last 20 years I doubt it's likely we'll ever find out if I'm right or not.  

LL's reluctance to implement or update a feature not withstanding, changing the UI for the appearance editor to make it more intuitive and expand its capabilities has very little to do with PBR or the need for more powerful hardware (MMOs like Black Desert have been doing it better for years now).

I just think it would be nice if not every thread devolved into a discussion about how evil LL have ruined SL with PBR, there are about a hundred other threads dedicated to that subject already.

[Raspberry Crystal]

Some users are reporting quite a lot of lag using this tool though, and the game is as yet unproven in that respect, so I think it is wait and see time.
I spent a bit longer than ten minutes.

[Qie Niangao]

There are all kinds of tradeoffs possible in how avatars might be constructed, and without more knowledge of the process it's kind of impossible to know what's good or bad. 

For example, it could be that everything—clothing, skin, animations, etc—are merely selections from some modest-sized menu, but those selections are more appealing than what SL offers out of the box. Here, our expectations are that the starter avatars are good enough for the Welcome Hub and then everybody better be motivated to hang lots more expensive, high-resource-demanding content off those frames. If instead we merely put together a complete avatar from a single source of designed content, it could be both fantastically realistic and stupidly efficient.

In fact, SL faces a harder problem than just a bewildering array of content sources. It also supports multiple generations of confusingly "compatible" content formats available for use in any combination on each avatar, all with vocal supporters and active creators.

It's a miracle any characters get constructed at all.

Edited August 21 by Qie Niangao

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

3 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

There are all kinds of tradeoffs possible in how avatars might be constructed, and without more knowledge of the process it's kind of impossible to know what's good or bad.

You're absolutely right of course.  Realistically there are only so many features that could be adopted from character creators in conventional games without expecting all SL creators to adopt the same workflow and adapt to whatever alterations/new features were introduced to support an upgraded appearance editor/avatar system.  Additionally you'd need to continue supporting the old avatar appearance system so that residents could continue to use all the older content created prior to the new appearance editor features.

While it would be great to have a more advanced character creation/editing process trying to implement anything more than a better way to tweak the existing bones (and perhaps introduce some additional support for user created blend shapes/deformers) on a platform filled with user created content would be a hot mess!

[AmeliaJ08]

46 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Well, like I said...

LL's reluctance to implement or update a feature not withstanding, changing the UI for the appearance editor to make it more intuitive and expand its capabilities has very little to do with PBR or the need for more powerful hardware (MMOs like Black Desert have been doing it better for years now).

I just think it would be nice if not every thread devolved into a discussion about how evil LL have ruined SL with PBR, there are about a hundred other threads dedicated to that subject already.

Oh you mean like the shape/appearance panel?

LL have implemented a character creator of sorts for new users... it's not exactly great though.

I do think the whole shape system could do with an upgrade, there should be 'advanced' options that allow fine adjustment of every single bone. I feel this could be done without breaking compatibility even. I'm someone with a pile of bone deformers on at all times though, I'd like to get rid of them and do what they do using the shape system.

 

 

Edited August 21 by AmeliaJ08

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

15 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

I'm someone with a pile of bone deformers on at all times though, I'd like to get rid of them and do what they do using the shape system.

Yes, bone deformers are essentially just changing the transformations of certain bones in the SL avatar so you'd think that it would be possible to do the same thing programmatically and provide some way to control the values via the UI.

[Ayashe Ninetails]

3 hours ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

This is less than ten minutes of fooling around in a modern, in-game character creator engine with a much better UX/UI. No instructions read, just dove right in.

If that's what I think it is, I'm planning on trying it a little later. Definitely not thrilled about the 35-45 gig download, though. 👀

 

3 hours ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

I'm just saying, this is what SL's avatar creation could be.

Just to note - this is going to be a single-player game/experience. I believe some multiplayer features are planned, but it sounds more limited and not exactly MMO-like. I would absolutely hate to try and run this thing with thousands of other avatars moving about. I played Black Desert Online, which has a similar but less sophisticated character design system, and man, that game ran HARD once you got into a bustling town/city center. Definitely looked gorgeous, but quite literally a slideshow with high settings on all but the top end systems.

[Solar Legion]

Until a game/avatar customizer comes along that exactly matches what makes Second Life, Second Life ...

No, something like this is not possible, period.

The limitations are known. How Second Life differs from pretty much everything else is known. All of it has been explained repeatedly over the years.

Stop trying to pretend that what a AAA studio or what is possible using premade assets that only change in terms of color or texture at best is anywhere even close.

[Extrude Ragu]

The trouble is if LL tried to do it we'd all look like Senras.

 

[AmeliaJ08]

6 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Yes, bone deformers are essentially just changing the transformations of certain bones in the SL avatar so you'd think that it would be possible to do the same thing programmatically and provide some way to control the values via the UI.

Absolutely, that's all the Shape file does... as far as I know, anyway. It's just quite limited. I'm not sure if the limitations are specifically in the file/how it is formatted or in the viewers.

For example why some sliders are 'linked' etc. Would be neat if we were able to disable all the linked controls entirely, just give us translation/scale/rotation controls for every bone individually in an advanced panel.

Would also be nice to be able to rotate bones using shape/bone deformer rather than having to use an animation for this purpose.

Edited August 21 by AmeliaJ08