Codewarrior Congrejo

Blinking eyelids can be either done by having animated textures on the eyes that contain the eyelids and their different looking states (hence how it has been done for a looong time on furry eyes) - the textures are animated by script in that case. The other way of doing it is to animate the 'non rigged' eyelids by a script to move up and down / by using local ROT and EULER. Expressions for these faces would have been done by including all of these facemodels in the same model, which would blow it out of proportion in polygoncount and bring up also other problems. So that is nothing i'd suggest. the best is you have the jaw and the eyelids being non rigged attachments which will be moved by scripts. i've seen someone rigging a jaw to the unused ear bones, but this solution requires a lot knowledge and also there is no guarantuee that this will continiue to work inworlds. As they are changing and fixing things that behave like they aren't supposed to. To answer in addition your question what to do first : rig and make your skins / weights work correctly first. Upload it as many times to the Beta-Grid until everything behaves correctly. Especially while the ongoing weightptocess you might have to remove a whole half of your model several times, or replace polygons, or might find areas where u need to reduce the loops or egdes or add more.. this would break your UV layout all the time and by that require you to redo the texturing as well.

Thanks for adding more Info Chic. I'll just join Chosen here as he basically went into all the points i would have added at this state as well. It might be really a good idea to get your friend here ( as Alt or as himself - we really don't care =)) and try to describe explicitely his issues with his own words and at what steps, what exactly happens. Just as chosen i don't see how the roof would inflict the bakes - other then what i wrote in my former answer if his UV layout would be overlapping and sharing the same diffuse or AO image map. Certain bakes are just not possible with overlapping UVs. Cheers! code

I ahve read about some others having scale issues when going back and forth between topo and Zbrush or Topo and Maya. Try not to use any Go-Z links and just import the model directly. PS: why on stand still ? just note yourself the correct measurements and rescale the model at the very end. That shouldn't be really a hurdle. =)

If you want to use the 'technology' of secondlife, and do not want to 'rent / purchaise a parcel' where you can do your educational trainings, you might want to have a look into the Open-SIM Project. (http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page ) here you will be able to connect and own locally based (on your computer) region to the grid. Also keep in mind that generally Secondlife can be used for free - making accounts does not cost anything, and neither does downloading or using the viewers. And also usage of regions or parcels other users have set to be publically accessable is free. The only thing you would need to pay for is if you want own land, if you can not afford this. Look into the link i gave you above.

In addition to Val's good suggestion: also make sure you are not having any kind of inspect tools open (like of chrome or firefox) these allow to intermingle with how the website is represented to you. Some people accidentally hit these shortcuts then minimize it and unwillingly change settings. If you have one of these open - close it. PS: also check if your browsers flash plugin version is up-to-date.

Framerate is more of the prcessing through your graphic card. (you forgot to add details about your GPU, your OS and other relevant information *) Make sure that your graphic card is amongt the listed and supported graphic cards for SL: http://secondlife.com/support/system-requirements/ If it keeps "unresponsive" also make sure to run it in adminmode (rightclick the exe - properties - compatiblytiy tab - run as admin) And also ensure that any antivirus software does not intermingle with the viewer exe or any of its plugin executeables. (make sure to set allowance rules ) some AV's will run it in sandboxed mode if you didnt allow it, which can cause the program to not function properly. * If you want to add more deatils to your post - use the EDIT function - do not start a new thread.

Generally as Pam said: the creator should avoid using PNG or TGA files. Especially if he/she is maybe unexperienced and don't know the things one can stumble upon and accidentally include some alpha into a texture, without having it clearly visible while creating. he/she can either just reopen these and "save as" JPG. (but make sure to choose a good quality to prevent from becoming pixelated or having artifacts) JPG can not contain any transparency, and every existing transparency will be removed upon saving into this format. Attachments and other things of that kind should generally be made in this format. Unless you really know what you do when using PNG or TGA. Because otherwise they can give a lot issues with overlaying structures, as hair, closthing items etc.

in addition to Rahkis i'd also like to see a screenie of the weightpainting. Rigs can work fine in blender but insides SL there are other things playing in as well. Certain animations that move bones in ways you didnt check your weightings against, and much more. A wireframe screenie and a weightpainting screenie would be really helpfull. In general for correct weights it's rather nothing about settings (the operator preset in blender from above 2.65 - 'Secondlife rigged' is far enough for exporting them), and in the SL uploader there is no 'tweaking weights' by ssettings - as someone suggested here - it only has 'include weights and include joint positions as options. The other settings in the uploader are only for physics, and LODs that has nothing to do with the weights. So it all boils down to creating the weights already correctly in blender : )

I am not 100% sure: - is this a 'Shopping question' seeking for a tip of good mesh avatars to buy? In that case you are rather wrong here and might retry with asking your question in one of these : http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Wanted/bd-p/Wanted or here http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Fashion/bd-p/Fashion - or is this a question on how to create a good muscled furry mesh ? In this case you'd be correct here but it would be needed to ask more speciffic, and to add information about what programs you are intend to use for creation etc) Cheers! Code

maybe you accidentally changed the export settings in Zbrush. You have to be carefull about import and export values in all 3D programs, those are the reason why the 'size' would change while being im/exported back and forth. In Zbrush there is a slider under the export options to set the scale value. http://www.ryantan.net/content/ZBrushtoMayaandbackagain/exportfromzbrush.gif Make sure that tool > export > scale factor is NOT set to 0 in your project file - when you attempt to export. (1 would be the default value)

Heya Chic, kinda same problem for me as Chosen had - the question or problem is not completely clear: He is in Maya. When he uploads the house with the roof (I am assuming joined) he cannot get a bake on the interior walls, ambient or full. If he leaves the roof off all is fine. Maybe you just expressed that a bit unfortunate ? But i cant understand what the "upload" has to do with creating a texture "bake" for the model. Is it like Chosen asked that he already baked them but he seems to be unable to apply them in SL when the roof is in the same object ( but that's not a bake-fail though ) or does he have issues to bake the maps in Maya ? If it fails in Maya, what 'kind' of bakes is he trying to do (i know you said AO and full map bakes) but what renderer Vray, Mental Ray, Turtle ? they all have their own quirks to take care of. One thing that could cause certain bakes to fail - just to give one method indepent suggestion - already when combined would be if the UVs are overlapping and sharing the same texture space / 'and the same image map' that is baked to (i,e, if the Roofs UV areas would overlay parts of the houses UVs) If that's not it, and so you have something to give him to look at, while you are hopefully able to get a bit more helping infos out of him ... ... here a link (lower area goes exactly into baking AO and color for a room with roof and interieur) http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/autodesk-maya/baking-ambient-occlusion-color-and-light-maps-in-maya-using-mentalray-3/ PS: *waves at chosen* it must be this time of the year... i just came back from hospital myself. >.< i hope you're getting better soon!

Maybe it changed your graphic settings again. make surte to check under the graphic preferences to disable / uncheck the Open GL vertex buffers. But if it hangs on the login i'd say in general that might either be a problem of the region you are trying to access (too busy or full / laggy) or your own internet connection. Try to test your internet speed with some online check (like www.speedtest.com etc), makre sure you are not using Wifi but a cable connection, and try to login to another location from the login screen. use something like 'Pooley' and see if you can login and load faster on such an unbusy sim. Also try to check if you wear anything that might be heavy to load, like too many HUds and too crazy heavy mesh attachments - take them off and try logging in again and see if there is any change in how long it takes. There also have been posted issues with Mac OS lion since its release 2011. maybe one of the entries on this forum will help you. just type Mac OS lion will help you to found out more : http://community.secondlife.com/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/message?filter=labels%2Clocation&location=qanda-board%3Asla_technical&q=mac+OS+lion

In the simplest case it could be just a bake fail or a corrupted cache, To rebake press CTRL+ALT+R, To clear the cache : Open your viewers preferences and clear the cache. Possibly even open that folder location (listed in the settings) and remove manually 'all folders and files' within the cache folder. Try also to stop all animations. Sometimes messed up or glitchy animations can offpose your avatar's mesh as well. (Me > Movement > Stop animating me ) If none of the above helps have a look here : http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/fs_bake_fail or here: http://modemworld.wordpress.com/tutorials/avatar-a-cloud-inara-pey/

Just a sidenote in addition to Rolig's correct answer: If you are only interested in exchanging and selling this certain ingame currency (L$) and possibly even raise income from it - it might be generally a good idea to be 'willing to read' what you call 'all the stupid terms of LL' . So you know what you are dealing with, and what is possible and what not and to be aware of other limitations or regulations. It's like you'd like to trade at wallstreet but not be willing to learn how to do so, and learn about restrictions, laws, etc. Or if you buy a new technical device but don't want to read the manual to learn how to operate it. But that's a question of the general 'mindset' one has, i guess ; )

Heyaa Zly, well you can upload a rigged mesh in another position of the bones, if you choose to 'include bonepositions' in the uploading process. BUT: that goes for a changed T-Pose. means if you did changes to the relaxed state and the all over appereance of your armature (i.e. to fit to a different avatar or even creature) When exporting it will always export the 'base' positions of an armature. Which is the t-pose / relaxed pose. The changes you do to test your shirt are different 'poses' of this certain armature, and have nothing to do with how the bonepositions are set up in general. Poses are just moving the existing already defined bones around in order to create animations or static poses. But i don't understand your problem completely. Once you uploaded your mesh, and you 'wear' it, it will wrap around the avatars skeleton ingame, and they have their shoulders mostly also relaxed and the arms down (if not changed by a certain animation overrider), so in this case you can just see it as it behaves on an avatar who is not standing with spreadout arms. Of course when you just rez it on the ground it will have this T-pose look. But that's not how your rigged shirt will be used anyways. So in order to have it look just as in your skeleton/ Armature pose in blender you : either have to create an own animation file (BHV) from this exact pose and upload it to SL to play it inworld and watch the avatar and the shirt in this pose, or you just rely on the existing default animations which anyways have the arms relaxed and down. PS: keep in mind that animations and animation overriders etc will move avatars into all sorts of poses, so you always will want to make sure that the clothings you make do 'not' just look 'correct only in a certain pose'. You always will want to ensure to make a rigged attachmentd or cloth which will go along well and undistorted with almost every possible movement that it could be put through. (and think about it: arms are used a lot especially in dances, fighting animations, expressions etc.. so if the arms of your shirt only look good when the shoulders are hanging down - you might want to retouch and redo this part of your shirt then.)

Heya Audio, that is because the values that effect the arm-/legs-length are effecting the bone-length and not the mesh itself. They are stretching the avatar's skin to fit to their size, whereas shapesliders such as breastsize etc move vertices to certain pre-defined positions. And you only export the 'mesh' but not the skeleton. I think the advantage of using avastart is that you can reproduce all shape-values on their rig / avater meshes. They have all shape sliders available to deform the parented mesh. This way you could reproduce your extreme arm / leg length - if you don't want to edit that on your own on the armature skeleton within blender. But to be 100 % sure try to contact Gaia Clary via a PM here on the Forum. or via their webside http://blog.machinimatrix.org

yikes.. ! i think the others pointed it out already. but i have to repeat that too.. The outcome of what you made in your 'iPod app' is absolutely not usable in this state. You have to use a decimator on it, or even better: consider to retopologize it within blender. As Aquila already stated: the complete SL avatar has appr. 7000 tris. That's a whole character and a typical amount of polygons for a game character for any platform of that type / similar to SL's graphics engine. (5-7 thousand polygons) When you now look at just your 'one' bodypart and how much polygons it has and how much renderimpact, serverimpact etc. then you know how much over board you are =) If you need help with the attempt of decimating or retopologizing it. Just ask again. We all are willing to give advice and help for that : )

...I do not quite understand this part: ... ok let me explain differently: - another technique to have parts of the model looking differently in other LODs, without having to assign more material faces and different textures - is to use a different area on the same texture. Lets say you have a Window with a wooden cross in the middle and the cross is made of actual geometry in the highest LOD. But for the lowest LOD you just want the whole thing to be 1 quad-polygon with a flat texture. Now for optimization, and knowing the viewer / user is going to be so far away when this lowest LOD is reached, it is quite enough to have maybe a 100x100 pixel big area for that where u would have the window and the cross now just as 'Painted' and not as geometry anymore. You could paint this 'window' on a 100x100 pixel space i.e. onto the upper right corner or your material's texture, and just move this one Polygon on the UV map to this area. Means you still have the same material and the same texture, but it shows a 'different' area of the texture when being in another LOD. This way the people who have to load this model don't need to load a ton of textures. It's one way to keep things optimized =) Now i don't understand one of your sentences: Actually I just put the default blank texture on the med lod since the window is white anyway. How do you assign the SL default blank texture to the medium LOD ? The reason why all materials have to be apparent withing all LODs is because you can not select their faces indepently within the LOD versions to assign different textures to a material- so you have to assign their materials already and just define which ploygons are assigned to it wihin a certain LOD. hm.. if you have set up everything like this and all other windows behave, its hard to say why this one denies to do so as well. Did you try to unassign its material once and just re-assign it, and also the image. And do this for all 4 LODs. It could be that along the way the information got corrupted. You could also check in the DAE file (opening it with an editor) if it maybe assigned a wrong texture / material to it. and repair it there. But i prefer fixing it in the file- to have a steady solution.

i can't quite read out how you got your materials set up. But generally it has to be like this: - all LODs have to have the exact same amount of materials / and those have to be the same materials. - The area /amount of polygons assigned to a certain material can differ throughout the different LOD levels , as long as the above remains true. - The texture that is assigned to one material-area / face will stay the same within all LODs. So if the face should show something different on another LOD you will need to move the UV islands of this area to another texture space on the UV map in the lower LODs in order to have them show a different area on the texture. When i understand you correctly you have used a 'different' material in the medium LOD model, and another one in the High LOD version of the Model. To make this work you need at least BOTH materials to be assigned in all versions (all 4 LODs of your model). You can make 1 hidden polygon somewhere and assign i.e the Low-LOD material to it in the high LOD model. So it's "there" but not visible. same you will have to do the other way around with the material you used in the HIgh LOD version, you will have to assign it to at least 1 polygon in the other LODs. As the first rule i wrote on top always has to be kept. All used materials need to be present in all LOD versions.

its often best to first start with an equal sided object so you can cut in half / mirror etc. and later on when all is done just combine it and change the parts that are not supposed to be symmetrical and just adjust weights or textures a bit on those. How to use the transfere tool is easily explained: - The source and destination Object need to be on the same layer or on different layers being visible at the same time (shift click layer-dots). - Both objects need to be in the same local space / location. - Then select the meshes (source first, then destination) and bring up the Transfer Weights tool from the spacebar menu or the Tool Shelf. - Select the following options: Group = All, Method = Nearest, Replace = Weights - Hit enter - and you're done. But keep in mind.. especially since you mentioned that your object/model is asymetric - so i am assuming its nothing close to the default avatar's topology - that copying weights and transfereing weights always only works good when the both topologies / geometries are very similar or even equal. If they differ too much you will just have a mess, and weird results. In that case i suggest starting with either Empty weights or automatic weights - and refine / adjust those. And you'll be prolly way happier

Heya Ark. 8 material faces per Object is already a lot. especially since its [8 x (1024x1024 px)] that's actually a LOT of texture space. Keep in mind not every Wall needs an own texture. you can easily fit up to 4-6 walls onto one image. Its all a matter of how good you place the UVs and how much texture space you give each element. In games you can texture with 8x 1024*1024 almost a whole landscape scene when being done clever. Remember that certain Areas often can be repeated and just use the exact same texture area, and not every wall needs to be full resolution and an own texture. way not. If you make a house with lets say 24 full resolution textures thats a lot to load for the player / user as well and thus becoming heavy on the machine. Keep it optimized - And you'll see that 8 faces is a really a lot to work with =)

As Aquila already has been showing you with a nice example. This is the kind of 'detail' you should create for your ingame model. The sculpting process itself to create high details is often misunderstood as of its usage: - you just use it to either create rendered Images - or to create high detail that you then will bake out in textures and maps and apply back onto your very low poly model (the most common use for game characters and ingame objects and landscapes / scenes etc). but you do not use the sculpted object itself. - If you start the right way around you actually start with your lowpoly model and then pump a copy of it up to the higher levels and add more details etc, which you then use for the texture baking processes and apply them back to your lowpoly model. The decimation masters are mostly anyways not a good choice and only an option if you 'had' to start with the high polygon model for some reason. and they still require a lot of clean_up and refining after being run over a model. The problem that your model seems to not be apparent can have several reasons and it would be more then helpfull to see screenshots of the wireframes of your model / and everything else that shows off where the 'issues' could be. Because it can be anything from using the wrong export methods, up to creating the mesh wrong, forgotten to apply certain modifiers, or to make the meshes real, flipped normals, UV issues and so much more. Especially when u had the dynamic topology sculpting process inbetween there is a lot things to take care of. And no one-way solution / one-way tutorial that would explain it all including how to get it back onto your lowpoly model and whatnot. thats just a 'row' of things you will have to learn here : ) Once we know what exactly could be the problem within your workflow it would also be easier to direct you to exact videos and tutorials for the current blender version, including explicitely those steps. Otherwise i would just need to hand you the full range of tutorials on how to create every possible step in blender. that wouldnt be too helpfull .. except of course for the general learning of blender =)

yeah that's what i was saying. I still bet its only the texture. (but i guess you were answering to the thread in general, and just hit reply on mine hehe )

Well, I tried all those manipulations with normals, but it had no effect. I missed to mention, that I use different material for each element in the building since i trying to make every room in different color. Would thaat be a problem? It displays the whole thing correctly in Blender. Only when i load it to test grid, it gets corrupted. So did you try to change the textures ? Save them once as JPG ( because this can not save any transparency - opposed to TGA or PNG) and load them to SL and apply them onto your building. And see if these areas are now shown / opaque. I am thinking it's only the texture itself having a wrong Alpha info somewhere. Applying materials in Blender does not affect or flip the normals. Plus as you already figured yourself by recalculating them several times with no effect - that it didnt help. Obviously because they have been in the right directtion all the time. Also in addition we have to mention that with the upcoming SSS (server side baking) there have been problems of materials / texture faces not being shown upon rightclicking them, up to whole objects only showing up when right clicking them. So make sure its not just this bug. Do not export with more then max 8 materials. This is the maximum SL will handle correctly. Check how many you had and remove everything above this number. If none of the above helps try to delete one of these faces in blender and create a fresh face, move it onto its correct spot on the UV map, and export it again to see if anything changes. Then you know for sure if there was an issue with the model itself.

Heya Voodoo, without seeing your actual Objects, and Wireframe screenshots (to be able to tell if the geometry is right or has issues), and some screenshots of what happens inworld - it is hard to help you or tell where you possibly did something wrong. It can be so many things... - like a not supportive Topology for being animated (misplaced faceloops and edgeloops that just can't bend in the way you thought), - Too dense or too light geometry not having the right amount of vertices to behave as you wanted. - Wrong Weighting - wrong influences from bones leading to parts of it being pulled towards other bones and areas and thus sinking into the avatar or sticking out and all other possible weird results. We'd really need to see a bit of it - as said above - to determine what could have gone wrong and to give you some tips on what to fix. Cheers, Code