MESH... Merchants....and the Market

[Medhue Simoni]

Earlier this week, I watched a video that talked about the upcoming mesh release. The only real problem I had with the video is that they did not have any people that really knew the ins and outs of mesh, so a lot of what they said was somewhat speculation. Tho, they were not totally off on most things. The bottom line is that it is confusing.

Now, I'm no mesh expert, but I have played with it enough, and stayed tuned in to all it's complexities. Plus, I know the Mesh section of the forums is pretty active, so it would not be hard to get some people with more experience to clear up any misconceptions. It is hard to really know what exactly the affects of mesh will be, or what creators will do with it, but we can at least talk about what we might expect to happen.

Personally, I'm still pretty dang excited about mesh, despite all the highs and lows of the past couple months. PE, which stands for Prim Equivalence, has been a roller coaster ride. For example, I created a mesh Hot air balloon, a week ago it's PE was 58. Yesterday, I checked it, and now the PE is 20. So, basically, last week, I thought I'd not even be able to sell it cause the PE would be too high, but now, it seems somewhat reasonable, or more than before.

Oh, and I also had to fillout the new Questionnaire, to qualify to upload a mesh. You need to have PIOF, or Payment Info On File, and pass the questionnaire to be able to upload a mesh. This "privilege" can also be revoked, if you are deemed to be a repeat IP infringement offender. Most of the questions are all about IP protection and what you can and can not do.

Please feel free to express all your concerns, or hopes, or thoughts, or predictions, or whatever on the topic of mesh and the market. What fears might you have? What can you do to get ready? Will this affect your market, and how? Collectively, I think we can easily calm any fears and hopefully educate people about mesh.

[Arwen Serpente]

Well, I'll dive in here. I'm excited to have new building tools in addition to our current prims and sculpties. More opportunity to express creativity after getting through a learning curve (like with learning how to use sculpties).

What I find interesting about your post, Medhue, is the "qualification screener/questionnaire" to be able to upload them to the grid. I understand from a technical standpoint, LL wants to be sure the creators of mesh know what they are doing. What I don't understand is if a creator does NOT qualify due to past IP infrigements, why are they allowed to create anymore at all? Seriously, if someone infringed on another Creator's IP rights, they shouldn't be able to create with anything, they shouldn't even be in SL, period.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Arwen Serpente wrote:

What I find interesting about your post, Medhue, is the "qualification screener/questionnaire" to be able to upload them to the grid. I understand from a technical standpoint, LL wants to be sure the creators of mesh know what they are doing.

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I just want to make clear that the questionaire is not asking you questions about if you know how to make a mesh, just IP questions.

 

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Arwen Serpente wrote:

Seriously, if someone infringed on another Creator's IP rights, they shouldn't be able to create with anything, they shouldn't even be in SL, period.

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Although, I agree relatively with your statement. It is not always as black and white as that. There are many false DMCA's or DMCA's that get countered and then dropped. In reality, few people "completely" understand all the complexities of IP. Plus, LL is not the judge, as this is the job of the real authorities. It is perfectly alright for LL to abide by judgements made in actual court cases, but it would not be right for LL to take sides on any IP issue, other than doing the standard DMCA procedures. Just take a look at the current breedable court case going on right now. Or just take a look at 1 of LL's first videos with mesh, where they uploaded a green muscler guy that many are familiar with.

[Catwise Yoshikawa]

O_O I thought I was reading all about meshes in forum and now I see we have to fill out the a questionnaire? Did read about people suggesting to LL to make something like this, but didn't know was a reallity ^^'
Where is the info about this?

thanx

[Medhue Simoni]

This page does not say alot, but it does mention it.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Uploading_a_model

[Qwalyphi Korpov]

The resident who provided the previous content, if any, has replaced it with this generic statement.

[Medhue Simoni]

Sorry, just want to clarify that these are my words, not LL's. As you can see, official statements about this are not abundant, lol.

[Claireschen Hesten]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

to qualify to upload a mesh. You need to have PIOF, or Payment Info On File,

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i am kinda curious as to why this restriction was added, it doesn't bother me as i don't plan on trying out mesh uploading but if i wanted to, being restricted to and not having PIOF i and other NPIOF'S couldn't try it 

[Arwen Serpente]

I must have misread the post wrt "qualifications", thank you for clarifying.

With regard to the whole IP infringement issue, yes, I understand it is not a black and white situation. When I read the post, I kind of hoped it meant there was going to be a "tightening" up in the future to help protect honest creators.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Claireschen Hesten wrote:

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

to qualify to upload a mesh. You need to have PIOF, or Payment Info On File,

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i am kinda curious as to why this restriction was added, it doesn't bother me as i don't plan on trying out mesh uploading but if i wanted to, being restricted to and not having PIOF i and other NPIOF'S couldn't try it 

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I think, essentially, this gives LL the easiest way to verify that you are a real person. Given the histeria around importing copyrighted meshes, this at least allows them to give some1 a real name that can be verified. Personally, I don't really see importing copyrighted meshes as a problem, it's not that easy or feasable. As I've stated before, if you can figure out how to do all it takes to import a good mesh, then you could have just made the dang thing yourself. Most stuff will not just import directly, and the prim count will matter alot. Those that can import the easiest, won't really be worth importing. Plus, you have to pay more to upload the mesh, which has a 150 linden low limit. If some1 plans on using a copyrighted model as an avatar, then they will have to rig the mesh, which is probably 1 of the harder things to do. So, again, i don't see this all as an issue, which is exactly what I said, almost a year ago.

[Josh Susanto]

Anything that is left to be said about Mesh before it is released at this point should really be prefaced by THIS:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmoo

[Madeliefste Oh]

I was pretty exited about mesh for a long time. At cYo we have invested a great deal of our time last year in learning to work with professional 3D programs. So our sculpty production for the brand was on very low level, because we were investing in the future.We did not invest a great deal of time yet in creating meshes for cYo but more in learning all ins and outs of modeling and animating 3D models.

We have been waiting for the prim count and the adaptance of mesh by third party viewers and the respondance of the market when it comes to meshes, before we wanted to invest much in a mesh productline for cYo. And as it stand now I'm glad we choose for this strategy of wait and see.

I haven't been on beta grid this week yet, but as the prims count stays the same as it was announced lately by LL, we will abondon our plans for mesh in SL. The prim count is simply too high compared to sculpties. We rather prefer to model the hard way (sculpts) for a lower prim count, then the easy way (mesh) for a higher prim count.

Most of our products are single prim objects, and we don't want to see the prim count doubled for simulair products in mesh, or quatro doubled when you also want to put a script into it. When the announced PE count won't change, our decision is clear, we will stay a sculpty shop. We might do a mesh line for avatar attachments but certainly not for rezzable objects.

Do I feel I have invested a lot of time in 3D for nothing? Not at all, it has been worth every single minute I have spend on it. Mesh is great, you can do a lot of very cool things with mesh, and one of the best things about it that the use of mesh is not restricted to SL. Last week I got my first order from a RL compagnie for some mesh animations, my collegue creator is also working at an order from another RL compagny at this moment. So for us the future of mesh will be more and more in RL in stead of in SL. And when we have some time left to make things for SL we will simply stick to the good old low prim sculpties

 

 

 

[Medhue Simoni]

Well, indulge me a bit while I go over some different products that I think will be greatly affected by mesh. Oh, and I plan on ruffling some feathers here.

So what is mesh good for?

 

MESH SHOES

Sculpty shoes are wildly inefficient, and generally are dozens of prims, if not hundreds. A good percentage of all the lag in SL can be attributed to shoes. Yeah, it doesn't really matter to you if your shoes are 200 prims, but it sure does matter to every1 else. A mesh shoe or boot, or any kind of footwear, will be 10 times better looking, and actually be super efficient, graphically. So, ladies.... be ready for a huge new line of shoes, and you can tell your boyfriend that you have to, to help with lag. It's like being an environmentalist, but we are talking prim polution.

 

MESH HAIR

Yeah, this is a double whammy for the ladies. Sure, I know there is some great hair out there, but, again, hair is a lag monster. I don't think too many people are going to want mesh hair only, but a mix of mesh hair and flexy hair. Using Mesh as a base to create off of tho, will cut back massively on the amounts of prims, your ARC, and the amount of textures needed for good hair. This will be a tricky blend, which i would guess will take quite a bit longer to catch on than Mesh Shoes. Please tho, every1 should consider mesh hair just to lower the amount of lag for every1.

 

MESH CLOTHING

Jackets that actually flair out and don't look weird as heck, or maybe a shirt that is messily untucked. I'm a guy, so give me a break. I'm sure the ladies can think of all kinds of stuff that will look awesome in mesh. Clothing will probably be the biggest market for those clothing creators who actually figure it all out. Any rigging will double the learning curve for mesh. Don't expect to see alot of mesh clothing creator at the start, but the 1's that do workout all the details, are bound to make alot of money. Let me point out tho, that some clothing attachments, or wearing numerous mesh attachments does have a chance of raising your ARC, so you still have to be smart about it and make sure you are not wearing a milliion polygon jacket. Also, there could be other potential problems with mesh clothing, but I haven't tested it enough to know exactly.

 

MESH WEAPONS

Sculpty and prim weapons of any sort, are notoriously prim heavy. Ridiculously prim heavy! This is another area where mesh will cut the prim count drastically, which should also lower your ARC. If you are in a gun battle with 20 other people, if every1 is using a mesh gun, you will definitely see an improvement in gameplay. I'd even venture to say that prim and sculpty weapons will some day just be novelties.

 

MESH AVATARS

If you are an avatar collector, you will be in heaven. Again, I doubt there will be alot of mesh avatar creators, but those who do will be rolling in dough. Things like werewolves, and furries are a must in mesh. There are still issues with eyes and stuff, but I'm sure the creators will work all that out, whether they just make the eyes sculpts or whatever. Tinies can now be small and have a normal skeleton, so full motion tinies, Yay! The options for full avatars are vast, so I would expect this to be a very exciting market as time goes on. Oh, I can't wait to get my hands on some of them to start animating them.

 

MESH VEHICLES

This still seems very viable to me. Last night, I had a ride in a well made mesh vehicle and it was quite amazing. Granted, I'm not a vehicle maker and I have no idea what all the obstacles are, but it looks very doable to me.

 

MESH MAYBEs

There is still alot that is up in the air. Even tho the recent PE costs are lower than it was, I still think big things are very iffy at best. Smaller mesh, say under 3 meters, will be very reasonable costs, but anything over that will definitely be a judgement call. Trees are iffy. Homes are iffy. Basically, anything you don't wear, and is over 3m, is iffy. The current PE does give me some hope. If mesh is released with these numbers, and then dropped later, after evaluation, then that would be the perfect scenario. So, I'm crossing my fingers.

[Madeliefste Oh]

You forgot MESH JEWELRY.

 

But MESH CLOTHING...

For mesh clothing I see a lot of problems around the corner. Moving avatars and mesh clothes don't combine very well. There are some exeptions, clothes that don't fit very close to the body can be well done in mesh, like capes, skirts of wide gowns and scarfs and such.

My teacher used to say: "You can use the clothing tag in your 3d prog for a lot of things, flags, sails, curtains, tablecloths and so on... but don't use it to make clothes for your characters. In 3D it is normal to model the clothes fixed on the characters. So basicly if your character needs three sets of clothes, you have to model the character tree times with different clothes fixed to the body."
Because when the character starts to move, what we as avatars do constantly, the body will stick out of the mesh clothes. In SL we do have a trick to prevend this, we can cover parts of the body with transparency, so it won't stick out... But we have another  problem as well: every avatar has a different size. A mesh that might fit fine for a long legged small breast avatar, just won't fit a short legged big breast avatar.

Till now we live in world where everything fits almost anybody. You must adjust some prims sometimes to fit prims or sculpted clothes better for your figure, but in general you can think of a SL a one size fits all community.
I'm curious to see if and how mesh will change this. Will we have a future where shops have clothes in different measures? Or will avatars become more and more look-a-likes?  Will we in a few years have a sort of 'Victoria 4' avatar that everybody must wear to be able to fit the newest fancy mesh clothes?

It's the one thing or the other that must happen for mesh to become big in the clothing industry. People must either give up on individuality and take a standard avatar that fits almost everything (or fits every thing of a certain designer) or designers must start making clothes in severals sizes.
I really have doubts that mesh clothes will fit well into a world where both creators and shoppers are used to a one size fits all culture.


 

[Medhue Simoni]

As I said before, I have not played with mesh clothes enough to really be sure that everything will work as it should. What I do know tho, is that mesh clothing will react to the morphs(meaning that it will stretch in the body editor). Not all sliders will affect the mesh, but I think most that stretch the avatar, do work. Poking thru should not really be an issue if the mesh is rigged properly.  I'm not saying that mesh clothing will have no problems. Poking thru might still be a problem, I don't know. Adding a bit more geometry to the mesh should also make the avatar poke thru less. There are other things that LL can do to make sure that mesh clothing will fit most avatars, but those things will come after the initial release, hopefully. I read that BM had similar issues with clothing and they found a good solution. It seems that this may also be possible in SL, or some version of this.

Oh, and Madeliefste, I think LL has definitely ensured that sculpties will be around for quite awhile, which I'm sure makes alot of creators happy, including myself.

[Catwise Yoshikawa]

thanx a lot ^^
Mesh IP Tutorial link is broken. Not sure what's that, guess I have to wait until they fix it

[Medhue Simoni]

You have to download the latest Mesh viewer, goto a mesh enabled sim on the beta grid, then try to upload a Model. At the bottom of the mesh upload window, you will see a Warning set of text with a link. That link will send you to a page to qualify to upload a mesh.

here is the link to the page to download the mesh viewer.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Alternate_Viewers

[Medhue Simoni]

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Arwen Serpente wrote:

I must have misread the post wrt "qualifications", thank you for clarifying.

With regard to the whole IP infringement issue, yes, I understand it is not a black and white situation. When I read the post, I kind of hoped it meant there was going to be a "tightening" up in the future to help protect honest creators.

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As I understand it, the collada format, in relation to the format to view the mesh, create an added barrier for IP protection. So for creators, that is a very good thing all in itself. Most of the procedure and policies that LL is doing, seem to be more related to lessening fears of SL'ers using mesh from creators outside of SL, which is fine too.

For creators of mesh, there are many benefits. Too many see creating inside of SL as such a big deal. I do not. I make animations most of the time, which all happens outside of SL. When I'm done tho, I bring them in and now thousands of people have access to them. It is no different for objects. People talk about collaboration, but they don't really talk about how that happens. You don't generally have 2 builders working together to make something. You usually have 1 person that specializes in that area and does that job, whether it be building, or scripting, or animating, or a texture artist. Many of us have multiple skills, but few of us can do it all, or do it all well. For example, the builder sits and makes the objects, no different than if they did it in Blender or 3ds Max. Maybe they lose people watching them build it.

[Catwise Yoshikawa]

Only in beta grid? Thought we could try it now on main grid. I'm confuse ^^' my mistake

edit: I just open my mesh viwer and asked me to update, I did and open it. Again ask me to update...a loop with update thing that won't allow me to login to beta grid with mesh viwer ^^' and looks like I'm in the same loop to find mesh viwer download link for windows from the wiki

Ok, just notice CYGWIN is windows I'm having a bad day

[Phil Deakins]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

PE, which stands for Prim Equivalence, has been a roller coaster ride.

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I read a mesh thread today and saw the Prim Equivalent numbers for the first time. I didn't understand it until your post but I still don;t know if I understand it. So, a question...

If I make a sofa using a single mesh, for instance, as some people made 1-prim sofas with a single sculptie, would the sofa be given an arbitrary PE number and be counted for the land as that number prims?

[Madeliefste Oh]

When you have 1 prim sculpt sofa, and you make a mesh of exact the same model, the prim count will be at least 2.
The lowest possible primcount for a mesh is 1,5 this will be rounded upwards. So basicly the sofa costs two prims. But that is not all there is to it. When you want to script your two prims mesh sofa the primcount goes x 2. So the prim count of a scripted prim sofa is always minimum 4 prims.

And then when you have your 4 prims sofa in world and you decide to make it a giant sofa where you can sit 20 avatars, the primcount won't stay the same. The larger you make the sofa the higher the primcount will be.

Compare that to sculpts. Minimum prim cost of sculpt is 1. You can put like hundred scripts in your sofa, prim count is still 1. You can make the sofa as large or as small as you like, the object is still 1 prim.

In an economie where rezzings prims costs money in land fees prim count is a most important factor. It will only be a very small group who will be willing to pay for high prims variation of a object that is available in a low prims version as well with comparable quality.

[Madeliefste Oh]

Then we have the factor qualtiy. The expectations for mesh is that they will bring a much better quality to SL compared to prims and sculpts. After hanging around for a while on the mesh test grid I doubt that.

I did a test to compare the LOD factor of a mesh and a sculpt that look very much alike the same at first sight. Results are very desatisfying. On the left you see the mesh on the right the sculpt:

Pic 1: At level 3 and 4 both stay in shape
Pic 2: At level 2 both start to loosing shape
Pic 3: At level 1 sculpt stays the same as at level 2, while mesh even looses more shape

So actually I don't see it, this much better qualtiy of a mesh. In my eyes the lod of the sculpt is better, at least in this test. It looses its shape in a less drastic way, and it does not loose again at level 1.



And then I did not even compare the uploads costs of both. To upload the mesh to SL you will pay 150 L$, uploading a sculpty costs you 10 L$.

[Phil Deakins]

Thank you for your excellent replies, Madeliefste. For a personal reason, I didn't bother getting into mesh and I'm glad I didn't as it seems like it won't be any good for my field (furniture) so, even if I were planning on keeping my store for the forseeable future, I haven't missed out on anything by not looking into mesh.

I've never made a 1-prim couch or chair because, when the arms and/or back are higher than the seat, as they need to be, the bounding box is no good for a sofa or chair. I used it as a simple example for the question.

[Toysoldier Thor]

 

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Phil Deakins wrote:

Thank you for your excellent replies, Madeliefste. For a personal reason, I didn't bother getting into mesh and I'm glad I didn't as it seems like it won't be any good for my field (furniture) so, even if I were planning on keeping my store for the forseeable future, I haven't missed out on anything by not looking into mesh.

I've never made a 1-prim couch or chair because, when the arms and/or back are higher than the seat, as they need to be, the bounding box is no good for a sofa or chair. I used it as a simple example for the question.

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I agree.  I am somewhat relieved actually that the first generation of MESH has so many limitations and weaknesses and heavy initial upload and PE costs associated with it.  For my area of landscape sculpty packs, the MESH technology will be completely non-feasible.  Can you image the upload and more importantly what the PE cost would be for a large mesh waterfall or shoreline or mountainrange or desert hoodoo???

Since LL is making MESH costs non-competitive to Sculpties and not feasible solutions in the areas of LANDSCAPE SCULPT MAPS... it means that it gives more time for all the bugs to be worked out in MESH for the first year without me having to worry about my competitors running ahead of me making MESH mountains and rivers.

Now I can experiment over the next year with new mesh landscapes... LL can clean up the countless limits and bugs that we all know MESH will have... and then they will eventually re PE cost price the mesh to make them competitive.  By that time, I will have Mesh landscapes ready as packs.

It will be real cool some day in the future to create MESH landscapes for sims that will honor the physics to match the terrain (ie. not massive bounding box or needing to create alpha physics prims ) and where I do not have to dumb down the details of a mountain or a volcano cone.  But it seems LL's MESH is still very far away from that target state for SL.

 

[Medhue Simoni]

Notice, I did not say MESH FURNITURE.:smileysurprised:

Yes, this is the major sucky part. Unless, you are replacing furniture that uses multiple prims or sculpts, then you are not going to get a smaller prim count with a mesh.

Script penalties for mesh need to be eliminated. LL is trying to overide our own judgement by penalized us beforehand. This is ridiculous as we are already penalized for doing stupid crap by lag.