Fluffy Sharkfin

The problem is the sheer amount of relevant information available given all the various commonly used workflows and tools. Some folks spend 3 or 4 years at university just to gain a solid foundation upon which to build their knowledge and skills and will continue learning and developing those skills throughout their professional career since the software and techniques used in the content creation process are continually evolving at a fairly rapid pace. Sure the vast majority of SL creators aren't interested in creating content professionally but that doesn't make learning to do it properly any easier in the same way that wanting to be a brain surgeon "just for fun" doesn't makes brain surgery any less complicated (thankfully the stakes in content creation aren't as high, you may burn out a few GPUs but you probably aren't going to kill anyone). I would like to see LL provide more resources for creators but I think it would be more impactful if creators were encouraged to expand the scope of what they learn beyond how to make stuff for SL. All the necessary relevant information is already available online but only a small portion of it is covered in tutorials that focus purely on creating content for Second Life, so a lot of creators end up just learning the bare basics of 3D modelling along with a few SL specific skills like exporting and uploading mesh to SL, rigging mesh for specific bodies and how to make a mesh with a land impact of 1 (even when it should be higher 🙄) rather than actually learning all the important do's & don'ts of creating content for platforms like Second Life.

To be fair, that sentiment wouldn't be particularly out of character for me either!

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The first sentence was and the very next sentence clarifies the point being made by saying It really helps if you read all of the post and try to understand the context of what's being said rather than simply reading until you find something you disagree with then replying.

That's probably far more likely given the number of threads complaining about people getting banned from some random region because of a dispute with the owner/staff but, other than the occasional clash of egos, I honestly doubt that the majority of people that randomly hop around from sim to sim looking for popular places/people to interact with know or even care who the owner of the region is.

I doubt Rowan was trying to suggest that residents are looking through landmarks and saying "I'm not going to that sim, I just don't like the continent it's on...", I believe the point Rowan was trying to make is that the majority of popular destinations are hosted on private regions rather than any of the mainland continents. It's not about residents choosing to avoid certain continents, it's about the majority of people responsible for creating and maintaining these destinations choosing to house them on private regions.

It's a little worrying that he's received no accolades since 2017, clearly the man is a work-shy slacker!

For the same reason we used to burn witches, they do stuff we don't understand and therefore we must fear and revile them!

If you have the UV map for the skin you created and the UV map for the head you intend to adapt the skin to (and assuming the UV mapping for both heads is similar enough that you only need to tweak the placement of facial features slightly) you can try using the Liquify tool in Photoshop. Just load up the target UV and add the original UV as a new layer and use the Liquify tool to adjust the original UV so the features align with those on the target UV, then save the resulting liquify mesh. You can then apply that liquify mesh preset to any new skin you create for the original UV/head to automatically tweak it to fit the target UV/head (you may need to do some additional manual cleanup depending on how accurately you managed to align the two UVs and how compatible/similar the UVs for the two meshes are). If you plan to make multiple skins for multiple heads then selecting one head to use as a base and creating liquify presets to help adjust skin textures to fit other heads may save you some time in the long run.

@DulceDivaI'd recommend searching for the term "hair cards" in order to get the most relevant results (since there are other methods of creating hair so it's best to be specific). Rather than using flat or bent "cards" for the entire thing I'd suggest trying cones or tapered cylinders for the arms (don't forget to remove the top and bottom) and using the cards for the torso area. You may also want to try using quite high resolution tiled textures and setting the transparency to alpha masking rather than using alpha blending, otherwise you're likely to encounter a lot of alpha sorting issues with hair, etc. Lastly, if you want to save a few tri(angle)s then you could try creating the base as a system/BOM layer rather than as part of the main mesh (but it really depends on the style of jacket, anything too bulky and you'll probably want to make the base out of mesh too).

@MmaseiI'm afraid I can't really help you with specifics since I'm not a Blender user, but I'm sure there are plenty of others here who can. I'd suggest searching these forums for terms like "problems uploading rigged mesh" and creating a check list of issues and related fixes then running through them to troubleshoot your current problem then, once you have the upload process working with the basic cube, you can move on to trying it with your finished model(s). There are quite a few different issues you can run into when creating and uploading rigged mesh for SL, one which sometimes trips me up is the limit on the number of bones you can include when uploading, since the full bento rig contains more bones than the maximum number allowed so you can't simply select the entire rig and export it with the mesh, you have to remove the superfluous bones such as the hind legs, tail, wings, etc. before you can export and upload your mesh.

@Mmasei When attempting to diagnose upload problems, rather than trying to troubleshoot a complex object which may potentially be suffering from multiple issues, I sometimes find it useful to try something simpler just to rule out a few possibilities. For example you could try creating a new file and adding the avatar rig and a simple low poly cylinder, rig the cylinder to an arm or leg and then export and upload that file. If it uploads okay with the rigging intact then you can rule out any issues with export settings, etc. and concentrate on working out what the issue is with your original model (and if it doesn't work then you know that at least one of your problems is related to your export settings/workflow).

Take a look at the examples on the wiki pages for llDetectedTouchUV or llDetectedTouchST which demonstrate how to determine the precise location of the cursor on the face of an object when a user clicks on it.

It's done by making an outer layer/shell which covers the entire body, but then flipping all the faces on the mesh so they point inward. That way you only see the "inside" of that outer layer and the mesh body underneath blocks out most of it so you only ever see the edges (unless you use alpha cuts).

At this point pretty much everyone has their own personal definition of what they consider the metaverse to be but, given that in order to create anything of that magnitude there needs to be a clear profit incentive before anyone will consider investing the necessary capital, it seems unlikely that the metaverse will spring up purely as a social/entertainment platform. Personally I suspect that the metaverse will begin with applications such as this... ...shortly followed by virtual meetings and boardrooms and eventually, rather than just moving between one digital twin workplace to another, having social hangouts and forms of entertainment such as games and live events hosted on the same network of platforms that house the digital twins at which people work.

I'm not going to try and tell you how you should or shouldn't create content for SL (and even if I were so inclined this thread really isn't the place to do so) but I will say that, if I were confronted with an asset that required that many textures, I would seriously consider trying to use more trim sheets and tiled textures even if it meant removing some of the more intricate unique details and adding additional edge loops/polygons to the model so that I could rearrange the UVs to make better use of seamlessly tiled textures, it may raise the land impact slightly but as far as performance goes I would personally find that more preferable than using that many unique textures. Anyway, that being said... Peeve: being generally too laid-back to have any real peeves with which to steer this thread back on topic...

The solution would be to have two attachments, a HUD to control the particle system and a regular non-HUD attachment which emits the particles.

Nvidias focus certainly seems to be primarily on creating a real-time collaborative platform for business purposes but (as is often the case) how that technology is eventually adapted and what purposes it actually gets used for is obviously still undetermined, and due to the real-time nature of the platform there's definitely a lot of Omniverse modules that would be equally applicable to the creation of virtual worlds for entertainment purposes. I don't really know enough about Epics current efforts to comment on them but since their business is essentially providing a platform for those who create games and 3D environments it makes sense that they would be trying to corner the market as the platform to create virtual worlds on. As much as I would like to be optimistic about the idea of Second Life evolving into the metaverse, I'm just not sure LL has access to the amount of resources it would require for SL to advance to that stage. The implication here would seem to be not that the metaverse can't be a utopian wonderland but that in order to become one it shouldn't be created or populated by humans.... perhaps one day AI will advance to the stage where it creates a metaverse in order to escape it's human overlords. 🤣

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the horror of using over 100 unique textures on a single building.

I'm not sure how familiar you are with Nvidias Omniverse platform but if you haven't been keeping up with its development I'd recommend taking a look at some recent articles. I would say that Nvidia definitely qualify as a key player and having already invested heavily in development it seems unlikely that they would simply sell out to another company. Also, while their enterprise licensing is obviously still a paid for service, currently a lot of the tools they've developed for working with and creating content for use with Omniverse are free. I haven't heard much about Epic trying to develop infrastructure upon which to run interconnected platforms but both Unreal Engine and Unity (soon™) offer connectors enabling the software to integrate with Omniverse so I'm not sure if you're referring to Epics involvement in that project or if Epic are attempting to develop their own competing product while simultaneously supporting Nvidias. I'm not sure if dated graphics and lag are Second Lifes largest stumbling blocks when it comes to being a part of the metaverse, I personally suspect that the issue of interchangeability of content between SL and other platforms may be equally problematic although their plans to incorporate compatibility for more industry-standard formats is promising (at first glance the .gltf format may seem like a competitor to .USD but the current Universal Scene Description format has support for .gltf interoperability which means you can reference .gltf assets from within USD scenes so they are essentially compatible). As for whether the metaverse Neal Stephenson described in Snow Crash will ever be a reality, having read the book a few times I personally hope that's not where we end up, it wasn't exactly a utopian wonderland after all.

While I agree with the majority of your post I'm not sure the above statement is entirely accurate. It's true that the majority of companies seem to be investing in trying to create a single virtual world/platform that they claim will be "the metaverse" but there are some that seem to be more focussed on creating the infrastructure, tools and other foundational building blocks necessary to link multiple worlds/platforms together which is, as you pointed out, the real key to creating a metaverse.

LL creating a series of "best practices" tutorials which not only outline how to make use of the new features but also offer some guidance on optimization and resource usage would certainly be very welcome, however I'm still not sure how much impact it would have since most SL creators seem far less concerned with optimization or resource usage than they are with how to squeeze as many triangles into the highest LOD while maintaining a land impact of 1 so that they can sell more items. I sometimes wonder if part of SLs problem is that, since it doesn't really follow any industry standards, all the tutorial videos for making content in SL seem to be resident made and most do not contain any of the relevant information regarding resource usage and optimization that you would find in similar learning material aimed at creating content for real-time rendering use in general. I suppose that there's always the hope that with the introduction of a more industry-standard PBR materials system creators will turn to more generic learning material in order to utilize the new features rather than all following the same "How to PBR in SL" youtube tutorial. In general I think there are definitely some SL specific tips and tricks which a lot of residents and creators would benefit from learning but I think the majority of relevant information and techniques are more generic and apply equally to any online 3D platform, it's just you won't find most of them by searching for terms like "how to create X in Second Life".

Or perhaps its because the field of quantum physics has been around since the early 20th century (with records of far earlier experiments in the field dating back as far as the 17th and 18th century) while the term "metaverse" wasn't even coined until the late 1970s and a "metaverse platform" has yet to be launched.

Why would I direct my response to your opinion at the OP and not you?

Yes, and the OP borrowed the term from Neal Stephenson but I fail to see how any of that is relevant. I was addressing your assertion that one could play around in a metaverse and pointing out that, if you adhere to the current popular definition of the term, the metaverse technically doesn't even exist yet so gaining practical experience of one is impossible.