Quarrel Kukulcan

Hm. That could be a vert with no weighting, or weighting to a bone that isn't exporting, or weighting to a bone that SL thinks is in its original position when you've actually moved it. You can get a better idea which vertex it is by turning on wireframe mode in SL. The hotkey is Ctrl-Shift-R in some browsers, including the basic one IIRC. Asymmetric errors like that can easily creep in if you make so much as one single edit while mirroring is on when you think it's off, or vice versa. This may or may not be what happened here, but it's something to watch out for regardless. Mirroring errors are harder to fix than to prevent IME.

Basically assume you will always need to tweak weights from the original auto-generated ones -- not just for SL but for any mesh you rig from scratch. The algorithm can only give you a decent starting point. It's particularly bad where there are several mesh pieces in close proximity, like the thighs and fingers. The face is extra bad -- if you auto-weight to the full complement of Bento face bones, you're going to have a soup of overlapping influences (like the eyebrows moving with the eyeballs) as well as weighting for bones you shouldn't rig to, like mSkull and mFaceRoot. You'll probably need to weight the whole head manually, save for maybe the neck blending. EDIT: Turn off the "Deform" checkmark on bones in Edit Mode before auto-weighing to stop them from get used. Also, SL is limited to 4 bone weights max per vertex. Blender can trim your weights down to that but if it generated more in the first place, you'll likely need to tweak again after stripping.

Images would really help. The normal map needs to go on the low-poly mesh, since that's the only mesh that will exist in SL. Like Arton said, make sure your UVs don't overlap. I don't think offsetting by 1 will make a difference since it'll only wrap around and still overlap. You may also have to experiment with your two mesh sizes or raycasting cage, at least in Blender. It doesn't always like if the two meshes clip through each other.

I've never bothered trying to get this to work. I just upload them separately later. It costs the same in $L -- and, actually, you can preview local textures on the model to tweak things without uploading multiple times, which is arguably better.

SL already packs roughness into the normal map alpha channel and skybox mirroring strength into the specular alpha channel.

Is this only a difference in swizzle or is it more complicated?

The smallest that gives you the quality you want. It's good that you tried 512x512, but if that or 512x1024 look blurry, then you'll have to either go higher, spread your UV map over more available space (if you're making your own mesh and you have room -- this isn't an option for store-bought full perm mesh), or settle for blurry. EDIT: A repeated seamless texture is another option if the texturable surface is aligned right.

Generally, smoother curves need more triangles. That's just the way it is, so you need some more. The issue with creating that extra density using a Subdivision modifier is that you'll affect the entire mesh. For the most efficient results you'll need to work in Edit Mode in just the problem areas, doing things like subdividing individual edges or adding edge loops.

It's really ambiguous what you mean by "6 UV Maps", so the answer is "it depends". Using fewer materials will lower Complexity a little (and actually make it faster to render in ways that Complexity doesn't take into consideration). Breaking your UV map into fewer islands won't matter. You can't actually import properly if your object has a different Blender UV map data structure for each material. SL doesn't support that.

Like Wulfie said, the biggest contributors to Rendering Complexity are mesh density (especially at the most-commonly-needed LOD) and alpha blending. Every level of subdividing quadruples your triangle count (so, really, try not to use it at all), and if you have at least one face using alpha blending, the complexity of the object will also quadruple. Using normal map textures, using specular map textures, and just plain using several and/or high-res textures also increase complexity, though not as much. https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Rendering_weight In Weight Paint mode, choose Weights -> Limit Total, and set the options to All Deform Groups (or All Groups if you don't have that) and a Limit of 4. It's odd you have this problem on shoes, though. SL feet have very few bones in them. FYI the left shoe should just be using mFootLeft and/or L_FOOT, mAnkleLeft, and maybe mKneeLeft and/or L_LOWER_LEG if it rides high enough.

How you build the face depends on how you want to rig it, which depends on how you want to animate it. The eyeballs are easiest. If you want your eyeballs to move, make them separate perfect spheres and mold the sockets around them. Put the heads of your eye bones in the exact center and weight each eyeball entirely to its own bone and not at all to anything else. Use mEyeLeft and mEyeRight if you want SL to animate your eyeballs for you (IIRC these bones are special and can't be overridden with manual animations). Use mFaceEyeAltLeft and mFaceEyeAltRight if you want full manual control (but you'll have to do all the animation yourself). If you don't want moveable eyeballs at all, just paint them into the face. The rest of the face can get real messy real fast depending on how much speech and expression capability you want. Look through the list of Bento face bones and make a plan. Realize you'll probably have to make all your face animations yourself -- face animations tend to not be compatible between different rigs. If you want the mouth to open at all, though, you do want an internal mouth cavity so things don't look weird. Something that's true in general about SL's animation system but particularly impactful for face rigging: SL animations should use only rotations whenever possible to avoid interfering with shape sliders. That means if you want a face that has eyebrows, cheeks or lips that move up and down, you don't want to use a tiny bone that slides up and down on the Z axis, but rather use the default-length Bento bones with the head set deeper into the face so it can tilt up and down a few degrees to produce a similar movement at the skin-level tail.

I am stunned this worked. SL isn't supposed to allow any armatures except its own standard one. You should have gotten errors about unknown joints or bad bone names. I was going to do a whole write-up about the complexities of Fitted Mesh bones, but the angel_2017 armature doesn't use them. Lucky! The physics shape only matters for objects rezzed on the ground. SL puts a standard, pre-programmed collision box around all avatars and ignores the physics shapes of everything attached to them (even entire bodies). So any mesh, rigged or unrigged, that's meant to be worn should use as simple a physics shape as possible to maximize transfer speed. That's generally just a cube. You can export a single cube as its own .dae file in some common directory and keep using that, or, for Firestorm, there's even a preset cube option in the physics pulldown.

Is this a "no spoilers" thread where you want to figure out everything on your own, or is advice ok?

Please tell me you have an account on the Aditi test server. 😄

Rigged mesh is limited to 4 weights per vertex and 110 total different bones used. That means you can't have a weighting for every basic, Bento and Fitted Mesh bone in a single object because there are over 150 bones available when you put them all together. Cleaning 0 weights, limiting vertex weights to 4 bones and normalizing weights are all things Blender can do for you (and the first and last are good practice in general). Having non-0 weighting on more than 110 bones is something you just have to watch for. I don't think there's an easy automated way in Blender to avoid it.

This is a longshot: do you have any verts weighted to more than 4 bones? The SL animation engine is limited that way, so if you export & import something with more than 4 weights on some verts, some bone influences will be erased when the overloaded verts are stripped down to 4 weights.

So it's been stupid forever then. 😠

I uploaded a custom mesh, set its permissions to "Next Owner: Mod/Copy/NoTrans" in my inventory, and gave a friend a copy. They couldn't modify it. I then rezzed a copy in a sandbox and noticed it still had the old permissions (despite the original in my inventory showing the new ones), so I changed the rezzed copy's permissions to "Next Owner: Mod/Copy/NoTrans" the exact same way, picked it up, and shared it. That one came across with the correct permissions. Is this normal? Has SL always been borked like this and I just never noticed?

For bodies that support Bakes on Mesh using Second Life's standard UV mapping, the templates from the late Robin Wood are still useful. https://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLPages/AVUVTemplates.html Maitreya seems to have some slight tweaks to the hands and feet, as well as a special neck-blending object for more seamless connections to some Bento heads. Templates for those are linked through https://sl-maitreya.blogspot.com/p/maitreya-mesh-body-developer-kits.html . It won't cost you any Lindens to test textures if you use SL's local textures feature. You'll have to upload for real if you want other residents to see it, though, and that's a flat $10L per image file. All images will be shrunk to a maximum size of 1,024 x 1,024 pixels and JPEG-2000 compressed no matter what size or format you upload, so use PNG or TGA so you only get one level of compression artifacts instead of two. [EDIT: I'm assuming you know the basics of assigning textures to objects with SL's standard building/editing tools.]

The lower LODs should fit the main object's bounding box because SL will rescale them to match if they don't, and that can throw your alignment off. Physics frame too.

You need to do everything in one single UV map data object in Blender because SL is limited to one map per object, but it's okay to overlap the UV layouts of different materials if they use different textures, like the leaves and trunk in this super-simple example.

You're not going to like the answer: only use rotations. Yes, this severely limits your ability to deform things the way you want to, but that's just how it is. SL's shape sliders work via translations & scaling, and its wobble physics work via translations only. SL doesn't know how to combine these systems' translations with translations in animations, so one will always override the other.

Doing a rigged piercing can only be done accurately if you have the dev kit for that mesh body, otherwise you can't tell exactly where the object should be placed relative to the bones & body and you can't tell what bone weights to give it. And every dev kit I know of that's available for Blender was made with the Avastar add-on and won't work right without it... At least, not without Deep Expert Magic[TM]. I can walk you through how I'd try to make it work, but you'll still need the dev kit.

Check out this past post for some links to manual LOD creation. Billboarding is covered in link #2. The important thing to realize is that every mesh object you upload will have 4 LODs and 1 physics frame. It just will. Every single mesh has all 5 pieces of data, and if you don't make them, SL will make them for you. (Honestly, I'm surprised you've gotten physics to work right if you're making houses and not making your own custom wall/floor collision elements.) Your LODs are collapsing because you're trying to make them very simple and because you're letting SL make them. SL is bad at making LODs. If you don't want them to be awful, making your own is the only other way to avoid enormous LI ratings.

All images are shrunk to a maximum size of 1,024 x 1,024 during upload. Changing debug settings only permits the client to allow larger source images into the auto-shrinker.