Codewarrior Congrejo

In general you should not move the pivot point of the avatar's model (unless you just need it to build clothes and attachments around) And even here it could become tricky. One of the reasons why you can't rotate it in certain directions might be what the other person already suggested. But apart from that it also might depend on if the mesh / model you have is being parented to a bone armature and thus underlying it's constraints. Moving the pivot point will in that case also mess with your ability to pose this rig (if it has one) in order to test if your clothing or rigged items work properly. As well as it can cause a lot of other problems like how an object would be rezzed or placed inworlds etc. (it could move a model to unwanted positions when it contains an armature / boneset and its pivotpoint would move - since SL considers the pivot of the avatar and the armature to be at "origin" 0,0,0 location and 0,0,0 rotation) One way is as he suggested to try and switch the axes in maya and see if either Y or Z up brings some help. Another way would be to not rotate about the pivot point rather then switching to rotate about a meridian point or the active object. Also check all constraint settings for this object it may have some constraints on it. And change them to your needs. (but always keep one untouched original of it for when you actually have to export your mesh with bonepositions included) Cheers! Code

In addition to the above replies, have a look here : http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Building-and-Texturing-Forum/Blender-tutorials-for-Second-Life/m-p/1913727#M8606 In this post I have given the user several links to tutorials of that matter. (such a Gaia's Tuts on making clothes for SL etc) In this Post here you will find my answer regarding workflow and editing of pants: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Proportional-Edit-Sizing-Workflow/m-p/1915101#M19530 Also the "lining up" of vertices with the original Avatar or custom avatarmesh that will wear this piece of clothing 'is' important on 'certain spots'. Especially keeping the edgeflow and similar location of certain loops where the underlying avatar would bend and reshape when being animated. (such as knees, neck, shoulders, elbows etc) You can hide the avatar beneath with an alpha texture but it won't help when the knees kinda rather bend on an area above or below (unless its wanted that way) because you maybe have a big single loop with huge faces going in a weird angle around that area instead of some edgeloops of the same flow. Also important as in being able to have similar areas of loops and vertices to assign weights to for certain bodyparts. (if you have one big faced loop around the belly you could not bend your model correctly in that spot it would rather just fold on the lower end of that loop and in a very harsh manner. And just adding more faces and loops is also not a desirable solution. Since you have to keep the poly and vertices count optimized and as low as possible. When creating clothing items you kind of have to keep the mesh-'anatomy' / topology of the avatar mesh which should wear those in mind. Plus the positions of joints in the bone's armature to know where certain edgeloops have to be. As well as a similar mesh density and the all-over topology being close to the model that piece of clothe will be assigned to. This is not only to ensure similar looks its also necessary to create a usable piece that will work well together and behave correctly with the avatar model beneath. so yes in general the best way to make a good piece of clothing is to model it around the avatarmesh and keep eyes on its structure and bonepositions weightings etc. and yes again: a cube with subdivision modifier is mostly where it all starts ; ) Have fun creating, Cheers! Code

@ Drongle: latest version of Blender now also finally has the decimator with preserving UV capabilities. They finally made it work (from Version 2.65a on ) =) And i still like to work with decimators in some cases. Especially for lower LODs of objects that dont need a very precise shape definition. And with cutting your model in half and mirroring it before decimating also the uneven distribution of triangles isnt really an issue, after applying a mirror everything is even on both sides again.

Just in addition and to keep in mind for future meshes you make: As Drongle already said 30 K tris for just some pants is way too much. Its not only heavy on the graphical side it also is on CPU and memory because for the moving avatar and its animations all these vertices and their positions, their weightinformation and much more have to be stored and updated all the time. As comparison for you: the whole SL default mesh avatar has around 3668 vertices / 7186 Tris (plus a few for the eyes / and lashes) and that is a full avatar. Gamecharacters in general for an engine and environment like SL should allways have around a maximum of 6-7 K tris for the avatar itself and keep the attachments and addons also close to the amount of the single bodypart they are being close to. Normals, Smoothing and other tricks will help you achieve everything needed with way less polygons =) For the best allways build your clothes similar to the density and edgeflow of the avatarmesh which is supposed to be wearing it. This will give you a ca. value of how many tris you should use and also ensure that the clothing item will move and work well along with the avatar when being in motion / animated. I know its easy to become lost with all the things that are needed to know, so for tricks on how to achieve the most with the lowest amount of polygons possible have a look at Polycount.com: http://www.polycount.com/forum/ and here : http://wiki.polycount.com/ have fun creating, Cheers! Code

As Fizz said JASS is one good solution. Edit: (for a an up to date link and more informations about 'JASS' see also Gaias comment) But maybe with the now implemented Mesh Support you possibly want to think about skipping sculpties completely and directly upload your model as mesh as you have way more control especially over its LOD (level of detail) in certain view distances and much more. And you are not limited to the rather quirky way and requirements sculpties have to be made (due to them being as texture with height information). Such as having parts where vertices are not merged (like 2 pipes sticking into one another etc- which has to be made in a rather uncomfortable manner when it comes to sculpties) And also allows you to use way different amounts of vertices then the required values that sculpties need to have. If you need help on the mesh subject there is a lot helpful posts in this forum, and also feel free to ask at anytime. Greets, Code

Hello, don't give up so easily =) Its always nice to have an object with several options. Especially since it might be re-used in different places. (apart from users not having shadows enabled also some Sims have objects in the sky or a whole megaprim covering the sky area preventing shadows from being casted. In such cases a version with artificial shadow would be nice to have) in general I'd suggest just making one more single Polygon on the object ( a quad in this case with 4 vertices) size it as big as the shadow would need to be and move it to the ground position. Edit: Good input from Drongle - separate objects might be better in this case this way you can keep the shadow plane non-physical. Make sure the Normal of that polygon is facing the right way (upwards in your case) since SL has no double sided rendering and the backside of each normal stays invisible / unrendered. Now select this face and assign a new material to it. (you can have up to 8 faces / materials per one object/mesh) you just have to ensure that all LODs will have the exact same amount. UV unwrap that one polygon and distribute it over the full size of a newly created image (make its background white and the resolution max. 512x512 that should be way enough for a simple shadow) in blender which you will assign to this new material and its UV area. (that one polygon) Now in blender you can bake the shadow path onto your texture. (go on the material tab and make sure its 'receiving shadows' set the shadow type in the Lamp object to raytrace and the amount of samples to around 5. In the world-tab set the Gather for the shadows also to raytrace and to an amount of around 15 samples. (this will help smoothing the shadow). With that one polygon still selected and its UV and Texture open in the imageview: switch to the render tab and under 'bake' you choose shadow. Set your 'output' to RGBA to ensure Alphatranparency and the format to PNG. Now bake and save your image. This will bake you the shadow onto your image. Which you can either use directly when the alphachannel was assigned correctly. Or just quick edit in Photoshop/Gimp to get it to be transparent in the needed spots. Since you assigned a second material to your object you can now after exporting the model and editing it in SL select this one polygon just as a single face on a cube and assign your shadow texture to it. In order to have a choice between the two versions (with/without shadow) just make a second version where you simply pull a fully transparent texture on this one face. PS: i would recommend instead of putting way too many vertices into your model and have a second model surrounding it completly do a shadowbake for your building itself too. and overlay it with a slight Multiply value onto your Objects texture. So that the beams etc also have shadows from the roof of it with the same light angle. And assign this texture to your building for the artificial shadow version next to the shadow texture on the ground polygon) (repeat: don't forget to add this additional polygon in all of your LODs and to assign the shadow material to it) Have fun creating, cheers! Code

This is going to be a bit longer but its a bigger subject so lets go into that.. Okay, there are some things you need to understand first in order to know why the proportional editing will kinda mess with a weighting that would have worked on the former not scaled / edited mesh. And to know why you most likely always will have to do some new weighting or at least editing for each size of your shorts. - edgeflow : edgeflow describes edgeloops and their orientation / flow around the model (this here is a good example to see certain edgeflows on a face. http://tiruspage.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/edgeflow.jpg .The same of course goes for other parts on the body. (knees, elbows, neck etc) you always want to keep your mesh's structure and its edgeflow very close to the underlying model (the avatar wearing it in your case) in order to make it work when being moved with that model and animated. Or they will move very differently and have results even extensive weight-editing can't really fix. - Now this effects you in several ways when it comes to different 'sizes' of your shorts. * lets say you want to make a 'longer version' so you move in a proportional manner to keep the face-distribution evenly the legs further down. Of course now you will have an issue with your former weighting. Because Vertices inside of the loops / the mesh) now sit on different locations and will need a different weighting. Lets say an edgeloop (or a few vertices) that have been before above the knee are now below the knee.. this means of course you have to re-edit their weights now and assign them to the knee and decrease the weight they had from the leg above. - Also you should keep in mind that just proportionally moving / or moving parts into new spots won't be always the right solution. In some cases you will need to actually add more / new faces in order to keep the mesh evenly distributed and to have a certain density of edgeloops around bending parts like knees etc and not i.e.. A long row of very big faces which simply can't behave correctly on such a spot. Mentioning all this should make you see that there is no 'one way solution' and you always will have to retouch the weighting or even completely overwork it for every changed version of your mesh. I wouldn't go as far as copying the weights always new for each size when just certain areas are changing and you can simply fix it by overworking the weights in these areas and leave the others untouched. Cases where it can work still with the old weights is all the parts that do not really move their position in a different size of the shorts. Like let's say when you just scale the edgeloops around the hips wider. Without moving them out of their Z-Position (conform scaling - stays in place and just gets 'wider' without changing height- in blender that is i.e.. ALT+S) - in those cases the former weighting should still work fine. But as soon as adjacent vertices / loops / faces start moving out of their former positions a retouch on the weighting is needed for sure. Also boneweight copy is always just a 'starting point' it will never be 100 % precise. (especially depending on how different your mesh's topology is from the one you copied the weights from) and often need intense editing until it behaves correctly. Weighting is after all an own artform as you will hear a lot 3D artists say : ) Hope this helped you a bit. Greetings, Code

yeah , you understood me wrong here =) was just saying after watching the vid it was obviously clear you couldn't find it due to it being bound into the new window so was just confirming that there seems to be no independent / separate local chat window anymore. And true, what makes a good UI is the right mix of flexibility and many options but packed in a minimalistic way - easy to access, intuitive and not clustering the interface (or in your words 'shadowing' the world) . And you bet that's why we are here. No matter if for social interaction or building / being creative if that would to be covering half of our screen it starts to defeat the purpose of a better communication with my surroundings - when I actually can't see them anymore. - Then we all could have stayed on Skype or any other messenger if we just want to chat or voice but don't need to see a surrounding world or avatars ; )

I'm afraid this answer will be a bit more to read again: As the above already mentioned the SL environment is not a simple flash game or 3D game that is similar to some 3D games written exactly for the limited resources, graphical powers, computing and memory of a mobile device. Thus as far as it goes for now is apps with functions like this: http://www.pocketmetaverse.com/ Making SL fit onto a mobile device would not just require to create a viewer which would limit the graphical output drastically, it would also mean to recreate SL itself for that purpose. Take The Sims 3 Freeplay (for iphone and android) as example, it has a graphic quality similar to the looks of SL. But here we are in a controlled environment / level design with limited objects, and a maximum of 16 avatars being displayed at any given time. (meaning a limited and controllable amount of vertices, faces and textures) and also this game already needs a fairly high amount of resources as in file space (700 MB min. ) and in computing / graphical power of the mobile device. Now lets think in SL terms, the uncontrollable amount of textures in all possible resolutions that could already be on one avatar, depending on what they are wearing and have attached. Same goes for all objects in a Region which could be in worst case scenario up to 15 thousand prims with each having a different 1024x1024 texture. And you would need to load all of these textures (at least the ones within your view distance) into the mobile device's graphic memory. (plus an SL avatar has quite a few more vertices then the meshes in games made for mobile devices) So you would need to replace each avatar with a lowpoly version, and also maybe limit its texture / skin to a predefined number of looks / sets. The viewing distance would need to be decreased dramatically so you would only see and render a tiny area that your mobile device could handle. and it still would not solve the whole object and data realtime updating system that sl runs in the background. Even Minecraft's Version for iphone / android is still extremely limited - to find another comparison. The world is extremely smaller and there is way less functionality, and a lower render quality - less things going on compared to the PC version. You see its not a matter of 'just' writing a simple client or viewer. The few approaches being done (as the other users here also have mentioned) are rather instable, also very limited, and I'm afraid until the mobile devices reach similar power to our personal computers or the SL engine and environment would be overdone in a version just for those.. it won't happen : S

Mirrors or reflections are based on so called raytracing. Which is a fairly intense graphical process. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_(computer_graphics) - http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/~langer/557/lecture17.pdf Given the circumstances that SL is not a closed environment like other games where you have a fix environment / scene / leveldesign this would easily lead to problems rendering this. (taken into account all the objects that could be rezzed, moved and avatars in range of this reflective surface which would need to be traced and, computed and updated at rendertime) Even fake-methods without raytracing still consume a fairly high amount of computation and graphical power when there are so many objects to keep track of and compute / render. Now we imagine someone going wild and dropping a hundred objects with reflective surface - something that would never happen in a controlled game environment but would be possible in SL.. I think now you know why the introduction of reflective materials most likely will have to wait until no computer would choke anymore on rendering such a scenario =) (and don't forget not every user has top notch hardware) And it also explains why water is kind of the only reflective surface we have available. Due it it being 'one - controlled' surface bound into the region / scene. This ensures also that rendering and computing of these reflections are limited to a certain optimized amount.

As Rolig already suggested Splashtop is a great solution. However it will need a paid version if the computer which is being used is not the main station in your local network. And to control it from other computers (apart from just 'receiving' the stream) you need the splashtop 'everywhere' pack which is also not free. Apart from that due to it being used in schoolenvironment would not fit with the free version which is for private / single person- use only. Teamviewer is a good application as well. Downside here it doesnt work too well with transmitting Highresolution and still being able to fluidly control the remote connected computer so you would have to choose a setting optimized for speed instead of quality which might be hindering a fluid and visually good show-off. Another good solution is l-i-v-e-s-t-r-e-a-m.com (just remove the - dashes inbetween - the forum blocks the word so i had to break it into parts) Its free and you can even store your videos, or setup a whole streaming program, so your students could tap in at any moment even outsides from the school. As well of course as streaming to your students what you are doing on your computer. It supports also mousepointer highlights,has complete audiosupport, you can blend in yourself via videocamera, can talk to them and even chat with them. Or of course just talk to them while streaming / demonstrating being in the same room with them. Another good point here with this solution you or your students won't need to install anything on the used computers. they can simply watch the streaming on your streaming webpage. If you just want to 'demonstrate or show' something to them this might be the easier and more comfortable way to go instead of connecting all students computers via VNC and setting up the networks and controls and permissions etc.

As Ansariel already said it can be related to settings in your Antivirus Program. Due to the described windows being Web-Content (like websites) and thus can be blocked by your antivirus. If allowing the secondlife viewer completely as trusted application in your antivirus doesn't help (make sure to allow all subprocesses too) you also might check to update your adobe flash driver since the displayed content contains flash elements.

Generally SL is compatible with W8. See here for more information and also some known issues: http://virtualoutworlding.blogspot.dk/2012/11/kit-is-windows-8-compatible-with-second.html But W8 is fairly new and still not all drivers for hardware are really optimized and might bring up various issues. You also might want to make sure to that your graphic card's driver is the latest version and one that is compatible with W8. And check the settings in the SL preferences. Depending on if you are running ATI or Nvidia there might be some tweaks to make. Since presumably SL was also fresh installed and had to make new graphic settings by detecting hardware and drivers of your new Windows installation)

Hello Niki, i remember a few people having similar problems. If it is related or even the same problem ( it pretty much sounds like it) this could maybe solve it for you as well: - ATI's latest Catalysts have something called game-profiles. Those can overwrite the general settings your main Driver has. So even if you set it there i.e.. to 32 Bit - once you start the application / a certain game this would be applied with whatever profile is calculated. - In order to have a controlled outcome try and setup a profile for the SL application yourself. Try out several settings to see if any of them fix your problem. And tweak both main settings and profile settings. Also look for OpenGL settings and see if changes there solve your problem. (http://www.tweakguides.com/ATICAT_6.html) - also one thing to still test with ATI cards is to turn off the VBO in SL (Preferences > Graphics > Hardware-Button > disable "OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects") Depending on what model of graphic card you have and how old it is - the OpenGL support wasn't really good with ATI cards until recently. Now they have a rather native OGL support but this is still something to test if it helps. - if it still keeps going you can try to remove the SL viewer completely in case some settings would be still saved even after uninstalling ( go to the folders location and delete all folders after uninstalling) and reinstall it. Or try to uninstall and reinstall Catalyst once again, just in case something went wrong with the installation. Wish you good luck, Code

Gawd i feel rather bad that you need to find someone first.. i thought changing dresses is that one thing every female in SL would love to attempt to ! (okay count me out of this rule.. i'm rather into making that stuff then actually having fun going through outfits lol .. i'm too technically minded for that i guess = ) ) From the top of my head i'd already know several ladies who are insane when it comes to organizing their outfits, spending hours and days on changing and fiddling folders together with certain outfits, even assigning a screenshot to each folder .. this is one of these things i will never understand - but that's just me ^.^ I wish you good luck and some fun times when you found someone to share the dress up time with you =) And don't forget to post your 'worst outfits' pictures.. i allways have more fun in seeing those then the 1 million'st perfectly styled avatar picture.. X D

it might also be, that certain folders are duplicated (depending on 'how long' you haven't been logged in) in order to fit to the newer inventory system. Especially Clothing got into other folder locations now (My Outfits, and in addition the linked sections where its not the items but a link to them) Also you might have several folders for other viewers which can sometimes - we have experienced that - lead to duplicates which are located within those viewers speciffic folders, still listed in your complete inventory - thus showing up several times. But generally if they really are all directly in the same folder just several times beneath one other and don't have any different content, I'd also suggest updating your viewer to the latest build, clear cache. and make sure to log into the maingrid and see what happens. In some cases changing your password (on the accountwebsite / profile settings) also forces your account and its content to update and might solve that issue. (the latter can take up to 24 hours, because it's dependend on the serverupdate-intervals) Wish you luck, greets - code

As the others above already mentioned best way is to use a Posestand to give yourself a fix pose so your avatar won't move anymore. In general to adjust things like that and to have less hurdles you should do it in an unattached state. Rezz it, and move it to the position where its supposed to be on your posed Avatar. (this way you can easily just hop of the posing stand if you need to select it and do some changes, jump back on the poser to see how it works out and so on. Because zooming into your avatar with the attached object in a difficult spot, can be - even with disabled camera constraints - sometimes hard to manage depending on if you have voluminous hair attached, meshparts where bounding boxes would cover that area and many more reasons. If it is objects which are scripted like the tongue, it is sometimes best to change into a region where scripts are disabled. or if its controled by a single or just a few scripts to pull them out first, store them in your inventory and put them back in after editing. (but the change into a no-script zone or region is definitely the easier choice : ) )

As shown in the video i suppose the local chat / nearby chat is replaced by the new communications window. So i guess your search for the local chat tab was clear to fail : S I assume it is as usual a matter of getting used to it, plus it is still in beta so many things might still advance. And i agree the more people test it early and give an insight of their thoughts or constructive suggestions - the higher the chances are, those wishes will be heard and taken into account =)

Okay let me give you and everyone else who feels the need to start modeling with blender some links at hand that are really helpful: For learning Blender in general and how to model, do UVs, LODs, materials and everything else you should have a look at blendercookie it is one of the best pages you can come across: - http://cgcookie.com/blender/category/tutorials/modeling/ Next I'd advise to have a visit at Polycount and Polycount forum, here you will learn a lot of the ins and outs of modeling and optimization as far as limiting your polycount goes as well as learning the raw basics and knowledge behind everything. modeling, normals, displacement, smoothinggroups, poly- / vertices- and faces- counts, topology, edgeflow and many more things... Because knowing what everything is /and does and how to achieve certain things- is a good step towards being able to produce "useable" content. (and there is a lot to know ^.- ) - http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryTutorials - http://www.polycount.com/forum/ Next: (as Branda also mentioned )Gaia Clary has made a really nice tutorial series on youtube about meshes, up to rigging clothing items etc. I keep refering it to people who are new at it because Gaia explains it very simple and understandable. Most of it is made for Avastar the Blender-Modding Product they are selling but they contain a lot things which are applying also in general. Its definitely worth to watch for beginners (especially since everything is being set towards modeling or rigging for SL in certain): - http://www.youtube.com/user/gaiaclary/videos?view=0 For more usage and knowledge about Blender i can also suggest visiting Blender-Guru. Here you will find also many helpful tutorials: - http://www.blenderguru.com/ Furthermore for menues, functionalities and Help here is the official Blender-Wiki: - http://wiki.blender.org/ Apart from all of the above: Google is your best friend and a good advise: learn as much as you can and practice practice practice.. and keep optimization in mind, because a usable outcome is what counts rather then something that will have an incredible amount of landimpact and memory impact on everyone who has to render it =) One last tip: to test your meshes ( no matter if rigged, physic or static models) use the enable Grid-Login option of your viewer and log in to the Aditi Grid / also named Beta-Grid. Here you will be able to upload your builds without actually spending your real SL money on them. And once it is stable and in its final state you can upload it in main secondlife. (this will save you a lot Linden, especially since mesh uploads - depending on vert/faces count, physics, normals and LODs can be a lot more expensive then just the usual 10 Linden for an image) (how to get into the testgrid ? - you can find many helpfull infos about that on this forum and here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Preview_Grid) Hope this helped you to get started. Greets, Code

ok thanks Monty. Crossing fingers its gonna be solved soon. =) Maybe someone can leave a short Info on the Gridstatus Website or in this Topic here when it's resolved. (was checking on daily basis there but couldnt really find any infos)

Is it still having issues or officially resolved? I still can't login there with the same error : "inventory system currently unavailable". (viewer 3.4.5 (270263) - Betagrid) It's been 3 days now. So i am wondering if it is officialy resolved, and if i need to take any further steps to get back in, or if the problem still exists.

thx for the link Xandria. thats the link the client is supposed to link you to. As it seems in some cases it reroutes you to an invalid php page which makes it impossible to reach this IP tutorial and verify for mesh upload. Tried it even with opening from aditi / my account / mesh upload status from within a regular browser, even that lead to the wrong and dead link - in those cases you obviously have to go manually directly to this link. much appreciated, thx for sharing.