Kitsune Shan

It's fine to buy Caspervend system now or should people who does not own it yet wait untill things are changed/settled?

Leaving asides all the questions in regards to new features added or not, more importantly, will the way of acquiring the system for residents who does not own it already change? Like will it be an implemented featured for everyone or still a paid system? Do we need to fully buy it? Will be there different "packets" options now too? Will this ever go into subscription model? Does the system may be integrated deeply enough into the viewer to not rely on scripted objects and just replace the basic vendor system already included? If this one be a default included free feature for everyone, could this be considered as being added to some of the already existing premium packs considering that the premium plus it's even aimed more towards business? Now, if we need support with our vendor system, would we need to contact LL directly through ticket support or there will be people directly in charge of the vendor system support?

Here is my 30 seconds entry from TikTok. You can watch the full dance version with better quality on my Flickr: https://flic.kr/p/2ngFoS5

Setting it to alpha masking isn't enough without a proper cutoff value set. Also, this thread should be left about questions regarding BOM or problems at time of using it. I don't think that it's the best place to ask for support to dedicated products. You could always ask on each mesh body group or directly to their creator. Most people here can't assist you at all since most mesh bodies are no mod.

Bake on Mesh it's primarily for skins and tattoos more than layers clothing. There is not necesity on using layers for clothes since we can make them out of mesh. Before, this was impossible so the only way was doing layers. But clothing layer does not look that good and it's an extreme minority of the whole actual wardrobe of SL. So, besides some underwear, there is not much use. And even for those you can still wear them mesh anyway. Avatars would need such options but I don't see these being top priority.

Probably intended. It was limited to 128px before while the rest was 512px so I guess it's now limited to 512px while the rest remains at 1024px. Not good since you could use such slot for whatever thing, but now you can't.

You can use Head, Upper and Lower plus the extras that you need for your avatar but only using the Universal Tattoo wearable. You could also just rely on the Universal Aux channels if you wanted to. On the Universal Tattoo, you can leave empty as many slots as you want.

There are some advantages on using PNG tho. SL preserves the whole color depth of images and does not compress them. So when you use PNG, you can use 48bits images instead of 32 from TGA. In fact, you can even use 64bits PNG just fine. I have never tried with higher bit depth images because even if they would work we wouldn't see any difference. But the difference between 8bits and 16bits per channel images are hugely noticiable specially on normal maps.

As Blush poined, that would be the easier path. Skin for bodies white a simple color head with the base color and tattoo layer for head skins. Another solution would be to bundle head with body skins just like we has been doing for a lot of years before meshes. Yeah skins would be more expensive probably. The ideal case would be to be able to wear more than one system skin and be able to leave empty slots on them without having to rely on other kind of system layers like tattoo.

And you can do that just fine as long as the avatar has support for bake on mesh and properly made UVs.

That's related with SL UVs and not with BOM at all. You can always make whatever UVs you want so they don't stretch that much.

SL it's old and back then there weren't any real material system so, just like with some other stuff, they named that wrongly or weirdly. But to bring that on a threat knowing that we all are referring to the textures based materials it's silly and only shows lack of basic understanding.

Not sure if being serious or just trolling but in my whole life as professional 3D artist neither as game developer I have ever seen using the word material to refer to the physics of an object. You usually use words like "physical", "cloth simulation", "dynamic bones", etc... But never "material". Not on offline renders, not on real time engines like Unity or Unreal, not even on CryEngine. I'd recommend to search for the words material and shader so you will understand the real meaning of them. Also, would be great if we keep the subject to BOM.

That's not the right definition of materials, what you refer to it's faces or ID's/groups. Materials are the group of different "textures" to get certain effects. In SL case, we refer to materials to the system composed of more than plain diffuse texture adding also normal and specular maps channels among their different use of their different alpha channels. And the primary purpose is not to use old skins and clothing since you would barely fit them over actual mesh body UVs but it's still a possibility to certain degree on certain bodies I guess. The main purpose is to stop using different layers of mesh bodies to increase performance and visual quality.

Well, can't deny that you have a really good point. But it's SL, everything it's always half implemented. That doesn't makes BOM a failure still. By the time that we got materials it was already outdated. I don't see a better system anytime soon, SL development it's not just slow but it also lacks useful features for creators that could help grow the market and the user base. It has been always like that and not sure who it's responsible of that but as long as that person or persons are still in the team, we won't see any changes there. I myself have requested very useful features that would help increase performance and quality but instead we may get another feature that no one asked for except the typical guy that goes to every single meeting even tho it doesn't represents the majority of SL users neither is a knowledgeable creator. But hey, we will be able to save WL to inventory. It may take two years of development but I am sure that a lot of people that left SL and even new ones may come and stay since it's a really requested feature. Oh wait...

Why so? It's true that there are few caveats that should have been done on release but I don't see why BOM would be a failure. Even without all the extra channels, it would be still very useful.

And it goes between the tattoo and the body layers. He didn't said skin so as I understood, he always meant to say body layers as clothing layers.

That's not how it works neither how it worked always. Textures are just textures, square ones. What bake on mesh does or even the old system did, it was simply to stack images one on top of the other and render as a new image just like you would in Photoshop using layers and saving as a new flat image. No UVs are or has been involved ever. What you suggest isn't even possible at all since UVs aren't on textures but meshes.

None of them use any UVs at all so even the default older ones can be used for whatever.

You have 5 actually.

I suggested this long ago. I think the ideal case would have been where all old elements have it's "universal" counterparts, at least for skin, alpha and tattoos. Clothing would be good too even if it's a generic single one since it's very unlikely that people will wear more than one layer (it's very unlikely they will use even layer underwear if the mesh clothing fits right but well, still nice to get it). I really don't know why we got BOM without these basic ones because without alphas isn't like you can use any extra channel for a mesh body at all. But I also doubt they will sort that at all. I guess it was more important to make it usable as a HUD and let people easily steal skins than to make it really useful and creator friendly adding the minium required features.

Sadly that's "not possible" because they had the awesome idea of not including an universal alpha among the universal tattoo so the extra channels that are meant for leg and arm among the rest are pretty much useless for a mesh body. It would have little sense on using them if you will end using alpha cut-off again. That would completely destroy the purpose of bake on mesh.

You can't do that. You can't add repetitions to one layer but not the other. Even if it were possible, everything would end being baked into a single 1024 texture so it would be the same as tiling on a 3D software and baking.

But that's the thing. Alpha masking it's not a simple feature to left behind, it's a key point for BOM. And I can understand the issues of updating old assets (to which I already suggested a solution anyway) but if they could create an Universal Tattoo, they could also create an Universal Alpha for the same matter. The point here it's that we really need these preferibly on all channels but having arm and leg would be enough. Isn't a matter about discussing if it's possible or not because, obviously, it's possible and there is always workarounds and fixes for any issue that could appear neither we should discuss about it's difficulty to implement beccause wether it's hard or easier it may be subjetive and it still doesn't changes the fact that it's necessary to be able to use BOM. Not sure if people realized this already but it wont have any more use beyond avatars. The examples about using it for clothing pieces makes no sense and would make it completely unnecesary.

Btw the bug I refer to isn't on the JIRA it seems. Or at least I couldn't find it at all.