Quarrel Kukulcan

Due to rigged mesh following different LOD display rules and not downstepping, or due to rig-weighted meshes costing more than static ones? Because I've run around with my LOD display factor deliberately set to, like, 0.001 so everything shows at the lowest LOD and I see only a small performance increase -- much smaller than, say, turning advanced lighting off.

I didn't make the videos.

Allow me to toot my own horn:

That option is not in the Blender export, it's in the SL import -- in your very own screenshot, in fact.

How big is this in meters? Do you have any modifiers on, like subdivision surface? What is that egg thing? Is it exporting as well? What do things look like when you turn on wireframe view for everything you're exporting?

You can also use Blender's weight clean function. It's in every version back to at least 2.79. Select your object. Go to Weight Paint mode. Click "Weights" menu -> "Clean". Before you make any other edits, change the live options from Active Group to All Groups. You will also need to change the limit from 0.0 to some very small number, like 0.0001, if the problem is being caused by super-tiny-but-nonzero garbage values like 0.000000938 mixed in with your intentional weights.

Playing an animation when attached requires a simple script, plus the animation itself, in the contents of the object. Something like this: // Set these to your custom values. string cMyAnimName = "whatever your animation is named"; default { attach(key id) { if (id == NULL_KEY) { // detached llStopAnimation(cMyAnimName); } else if (llGetAttached() == ATTACH_LHAND) { llRequestPermissions(id, PERMISSION_TRIGGER_ANIMATION); } } run_time_permissions(integer perm) { if (perm & PERMISSION_TRIGGER_ANIMATION) { llStartAnimation(cMyAnimName); } } } As for the animation, you'll either have to create and import it yourself or get someone else to do it. That's going to require either a compatible 3D modeling program such as Maya or Blender or a dedicated Second Life animation tool like QAvimator. Making 3D animations is a very broad topic, and I don't know any good entry-level introductions to off the top of my head. Update: For the very basics on how rig-based animations work in Blender, which is free, check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAiTYaiZmY0 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlT9rYcIRzU. The SL base skeleton (Bento version) you need to work from can be downloaded from http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Project_Bento_Testing. Once you're done, export your animation in BVH format. Then there's the upload process which has its own parameters like easing and looping and doesn't seem to have an official tutorial video less than a decade old. You do want to get an Aditi test server account so you don't waste Lindens uploading to live until you have something you know works. So, yeah. Complicated.

You can end up with artifacts like this Photoshopped example:

FYI, you don't want to run your UV vertices all the way to the edge like this. Leave a small margin if you want to avoid bleedover. SL always wraps textures at the edges, so a UV vertex with a coordinate all the way at 0 or 1 doesn't mean "use the pixel at that edge", it means "use a 50/50 blend of that pixel and the one on the opposite side" (because that vertex actually lies on the border between those two pixels). Fitted Mesh refers to the extra bones LL added to the basic skeleton to allow mesh bodies & clothing to respond to more body shape sliders. If you rig something to just basic & Bento deform bones, your mesh object will only respond to some sliders and may not match the shape of the wearer's other objects. (The list is at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Project_Bento_Skeleton_Guide#Controls_supported_via_Fitted_Mesh). Fitted Mesh rigging requires a special source rig with extra data or a dedicated tool like Avastar.

Another wild guess: Did you upload multiple versions of the texture with the same name? If so, try deleting all the older ones, then going to the Trash and purging them too. It's really strange that the object looks correct to other residents but wrong to you. That definitely points to some kind of client caching issue (even though you said you cleared it).

None of SL's other bones need a custom bind pose (whatever that is) -- including the ones that were added to support the same kind of shape deforming to the head that Fitted Mesh bones provide the body. Clearly, LL didn't have to implement this feature in a way that required more complicated software to handle...yes? No?

I never got the impression Rigify was intended to make armatures specifically for SL. They'll look similar, sure, but that is only because they're both basic human rigs. SL has exact specifications that must be met when uploading content; you shouldn't expect things that were not designed to that same exact spec to work. Avastar has a monopoly because it was the first add-on made for a popular free 3D modeling tool that smoothed over the difficulty handling Fitted Mesh bones. (It also handles animation exporting in a straightfoward and better way, which is a separate but also important bonus.) Linden Lab implemented Fitted Mesh in a terrible way; making clothes and bodies with plain Blender that use that feature is hard. To this day there is no officially-provided base skeleton that contains both Fitted Mesh bones and Bento bones (which are different!) and that works with vanilla Blender.

Looking at the system/BoM UV map and wonky foot sliders, I can't imagine it was anything but a nightmare.

Short version: If you rig your clothes with the exact same weights as the body underneath, they'll conform to the shape. For this, you'll need the body's dev kit (which provides a modeling dummy you can copy weights from) and whatever add-on tools the dev used to make that kit. And they generally have to use add-on tools because of the weird way Linden Lab chose to add Fitted Mesh bones to the skeleton, which you have to support if you want bodies and clothes that respond to all SL's body shape sliders.

The center parts of the wood slats are flat. Also, do and/or should the normal map bake be affected by whether the hi-poly and/or low-poly model are flagged as flat shaded or smooth shaded? And does it vary by program?

Make sure Advanced Lighting is on. Other than that, I have no idea.

To clarify: you're saying region B looks darker to you than region A? Because it doesn't to me. If anything, the bottom looks slightly lighter, but that's not an illusion -- my LCD monitor changes brightness when viewed from different vertical angles.

Um...no?

I made the following two images in GIMP, set the left one as the bumpiness image in SL and the right one as the specular image. I was only testing how chrome-ish I could get the flat top, though. The model would probably look even better overall if you made both images have the alpha mask of the one on the right. That way you won't have little sparklies along all the edges. Those two alpha channels mean different things -- dark on the left alpha means local light reflections get spread out, while dark on the right alpha means weak skybox mirroring -- but rough areas on your model would behave in both those ways, so it makes sense they'd have identical (or at least very similar) masking. Also, you should start with both Glossiness and Environment numerical values at 255 and your manual specular tint to pure white, then manually tweak them down after you've assigned your textures to see if you can make things look better. It's hard to know ahead of time exactly how bright or dark your shades of gray should be in all your textures to get the best reflection strength. These settings combine with your textures in much the same way as the face tint combines with your diffuse texture. Generally you don't want to plan on using both, especially since they can only adjust things in one direction, but since specular values are so much less intuitive, it's useful to experiment this way.

You can't get full mirrors. The closest SL can do is a high environment map value, which looks chromey/metallic/very reflective glassy. I think you already made a texture where the RGB is your very first specular map in this thread (3a2L1.png) and the alpha channel is your muted version (3a4bh.png). That should have worked as long as you set your Environment to 255. I just tried it myself and it looked pretty good.

Emphasis added, because that's an important and unintuitive point. The Glossiness number and values in the normal map alpha channel control how sharp the specular reflections are, not how strong they are. It's basically smoothness. When these values are low, you still get a lot of specular brightening but it's fuzzy, and it's less bright at any given point but only because it's also spread over a wider area. If you want sharp but weak reflections, you actually want to tone down the specular map color/tint from white to a darker gray.

Local lights are the only things that the specular map reflects in SL.

If you're okay with just nook-and-cranny AO shadows -- no baked speculars or fully cast shadows on your diffuse texture -- you don't need lighting. A pure AO bake doesn't need it, and if you do a separate, pure "Color" diffuse bake (or you created your diffuse in SL-useable form to begin with and don't need a bake to generate it), that won't need lighting either. Blender simply passes the material color straight through without calculating lighting. For whatever reason, Blender needs to apply direct or indirect light (or both) when doing any combined bake, including diffuse + AO.

Like @arton Rotarusays, SL and Blender plug shininess data into different places. (And SL doesn't even split things in a way that makes sense, to be honest.) In SL, "Glossiness" is the strength, sharpness and tint of reflections from light sources only (including the sun and moon directly). It's closest to what Blender's Cycles renderer gives you for free by just giving a surface a low-roughness material, except Blender reflects every object. SL is too simple. You'll only see the SL equivalent of Blender's lamps in these reflections, not people or furniture or the walls. "Environment" is the strength of a reflection of a fake field, sky & horizon skybox. It's meant to make up for the unrealistic simplicity of the glossiness portion above and give the object more realistic-looking reflections. You'll have to look up how to set up an HDRI background scene in Blender to get the same effect. (I think it's easier, or at least closer to the default, in the Eevee renderer.) I don't want to repeat anything else that's already on pages you've been linked to, but I will add one more I found helpful: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2016/06/specular-maps-in-second-life-tutorial.html

It was just the HUD. SL lets bones rotate everywhere.