Astrid Kaufmat

I think that they have baked that texture for that dress rather than doing it in 2d templates. you got to see in the software of your choice how to bake different channels and get them in a psd file so you could mix them all together, eventually still be able to mod single channels in photoshop. yes it surely might have specular , ambient occlusion and diffuse map and probably also baked lights . That wrinkles effect as they said could come out from a normal or a displacement map applied to themesh when they baked the texture . Follow some baking training classes for your software.

What Obvious said is right and no you wouldn't find them even in the maya file either. the behaviour of belly bone, if you work with a gradient of distributuiin of weights,blending good the belly area with lower back, is not bad Those two bones rather than redundant are also (if used) more pain to blend properly the weight then between belly and lower back. I had your same doubts when first avastar avatar for blender were released and they had those bones too,while the wiki files have always missed them.

As they said you'd need extra features that SL rendering doesn't support as it is now, so morphs are still something off , same as for extra custom bones,that surely would solve many rigging and software compatibility iussues. A morph target or custom bones are a dreams for now, look how few SL gave us about fitted mesh, preferring the short easy solution ( liquid mesh to sliders). Although there are still a few things you may do, for istance for some mesh characters you could try to get advantage of custom animations and moving your weight on alternative bones. Such as a jaw going up and down according to nec movements or a tail rigged on neck or torso for istance so as the avimoves it moves as well, somehow giving you for now a bit of what extra bones should do. For morphing you could use an alternative solutuion like saving on your disk collada dae in different morph and once in world find a way to make them swap from one morph shape to another via script I belive though that it's realiable in rezz places without using RLV or also for no rezz places using RLV and putting those alternative morphs in one of its folders (maybe some more experienced scripters could suggest you another way). Another alternative for now to morphs would be the old animated textures on a sculptie prim,which some how fakes experessions.For istance those anime heads and their blink scripts( "less laggy" solution for now compared to that mesh swap one).

Hi Marinshe. There is a tutorial that you may want to watch to convert tris to quad in maya for meshes done in clo3d or in marvelous designer. It's easier than you could belive. I used tomake my tests that video and the new retopology tool from maya 2014 as shown in the link that you posted too http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Tris-to-Quads-using-Autodesk-Maya/m-p/2560238#M26454 However I just tried a few times marvelous designer. in my opinion it's good to get a quick scratch to work with to model your definitive dress, but not to upload the mesh as they come out from it. 1) cause as you're already asking to, it needs a good topology for next steps 2) cause the mesh as it comes from clo3d or marvelous designer has a very very huge number of polygons(justifable before normal maps but now surpassed meshes and laggy) In case you want to try an alternative way to build your retopology model from the scratch got in clo 3d or in marvelous designer, you could use zbrush it has in the last versions a few retopology tools not bad at all very quick too. The best practice now is to make your model modeling tecniques a very basic with the lowest number possible of polygons dress or in alternative to use marvelous designer but then use retopology and polygons reductions tools (like those in maya 2014) play a lot with normal map rather than using the displacement method that marvelous designer is based on.You do good looking for a retopology method, that's first start to also reduce properly polygons. This is what will make your clothes competitive compared to the old ones ( pre-normal map era) and low lag products as well. maya 2014 has nice improvements for the retopology tool as you can see from that video in the other post I linked here. maya 2015 has also other imporvements for building tools to speed up the workflow. About the sculpt programs that I prefer in Zbrush, it is the best in my opionion to sculpt in 3d on models and make your normal maps in 3d. As cheaper alternative to zbrush there is also 3dcoat or Vota (but not as good as zbrush). Still about retopology you could rebuild your mesh again also not using zbrush or maya , just use any other software that would allow you to draw polygons and use the snapping, snapping the new polygons that you make to faces and vertices. i this scenario for retopology ( even if bit longer and tricky) you could use blender too.

The only suggestion I could give you as maya user is to use this link http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Rigging_Fitted_Mesh In the zip folder you'll find maya file, collada dae file, fbx You may try to see if the fbx is working also for 3ds max an alternative method (which I use when I want to see compatibility of softwares exporter with SL ) would be use the dae skeleton imported in 3ds max to redraw manyually the skeleton having the SL dae as base; so you can properly scale and orient bones as it is there on wiki. Weights of those avatar on wiki are another talk thei're roughly made but as long as you have got the skeleton that's already a good start. Blender has a tricky way to exchange fbx with other programs that's due to copyrights over the fbx extensions, it is like this now and it will always be like this due to gpl , you may try one of those third part exporters for it .That's where companies that make expensive softwares make money, don't hope that they would lose some of their rights over the fbx , it is like the exe for Redmond for istance the fbx from that folder wouldn't be properly loaded in blender ,viceversa the blend file converted intofbx is troublesome in maya with some bones oddly scaled and out of place The dae collada from blender file works somehow if you change joint display scale(in maya). Abiout 3dsmax, if that could help you, I saw few posts ago some from Chip Midnight , he's working with max too to figure out this fitted mesh thing, maybe try to send him a PM .

Hi,time. What version of maya? With earlier versions than 2014 you might need to use the fbx converter plugin , saving your model first as fbx then going to collada dae 1.4 the one that SL likes. This is not a must, but with some models if too complex or if with many materials textures it 's recomended to avoid errors. Was your mesh rigged or standard mesh? If riggged there might be some iussue with some weights associated to some bones try to see the log see where is the error. If you haven't used the fbx converter ths can be useful you find it here or from that link in the autodesk channel of youtube.

Gonna vote.Thanks for the precious info, Cathy

It might well be so that this is a common way how Maya users indirectly use Blender since a long time :matte-motes-evil: (but that is a wild guess realy, just kidding) :matte-motes-tongue: As I always said learning mesh is like learning advanced math. A way like when you apply it to studies physical phenomoenous .The more math you know the less you need to make longer calculations and you fill less papers, getting the solution with less job. One of my professors once said I don't mind the way you would find a solution , if there is a perfect formula invent it as long as it's right and gives the right result. Personally I didn't come from blender experiences but, as long as I can see,t there is better chance to sell out of SL if your models have more extensions I like to know a bit of anything that could give me more chances.This because sftware makers keep their rights over the xtensions and want to make a sort of cartel to focrce us to use their own stuff and or buy it. The good thing of blender is that like GIMP it's free, but still few used few spread . Agreed that ,as Medhue said , it has got better from the first scary versions, but it's still not mature program.Its UI has not built for intuition and easy use. The more the UI leads to intuition the easier is the workflow and the easier you can skip from a program to another ( according to what I said the more math you know the less you 'd work) Take for istance another cheapo software like AC3d also used for sl sculpties it has an interface that is very very user friendly easy to guess a way like Rhino 3d if yo ever tried them. What is indiscutible and very apreciable is the work that you and Cathy and other releasers of plugins do allowing us to understand better the logic behind.After all i talk to defend you releasers, when like it happened above, someone said that we should stop the addons marketing. like God did, I belive that there must be Free Will (liberum arbitrium).Not all like to work in a format , some might still like to do things manually or using their own familiar tools, some like to user formats( like now society and Television wants to try to tame us in that way,making us live in an eternal format). Till now I see no winners no losers in this race to the fitted mesh discovering we're all victims of lack of disclosure and lack of listening to us from linden I am glad to learn that the avatar in the video might be avastar one.At least you contribuite to release a free version of it too And thanks God there are people like you and Cathy, Medhue and others who would share the knowledge, giving us one more way to reach the result

Welcome and good luck with your experiment

The more polygons the more performant gpu would be needed. LI is not important for worn mesh but high number of polygons yes and it has huge impact on your Rendering. Take one of those standard models that quite often come with software start subdividing it a lot a lot of times At one point your Fan will be doing WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Take a concert or a public event put a lot of avatars with mesh made with old way they were started being made using displacement method on high poly rather than the actual normal maps some PC would overheat to shout down too. In some softwares I used to make pics for some websites you could emulate a big number of objects with virtual caching methods, but this is not for SL. make a street and try to render that street with a lot of very detailed lights along it repeated more and more and more times.Sadly SL doesn't work that way all the polygons are and stay there. In the post you mentioned a guy said something that is a good guide and more and less what I've been doing too. I extracted some game models just to study the geometries and stuff (you can do it as long as it is stays on your own pc and you don't send them around violating copyrights). From a famous most recent epic game that also allows mods you wouldn't imagine how ugly the mesh looks like without the normals. Some warrior skirts use alpha channel together with normal and rather than being like striped skirts (kilts ) like those ancient Roman ones they are more similar to SL skirt mesh . Normal maps if properly applied would lead you to make your mesh much more stylized than they've been done till now at least for SL. I know that some people would say that normal maps are something that nobody would see but that's relative to your pc. Just today after all I did some check to my pc after that a silly guy decided to grief I got the chance to make some benchmarks on my stuff. The GPU was overheating I took it off,there was not much dust but the gpu after over 7 years of noble service it needed some maintenance I changed the thermal grease and the temperature was half than before.Before 110 °C (good to boil eggs) ,after my magic touch it's stable now around 60-70 °C An old pc without maintenance that should be done least every each 2 years for over used one could be put on kneels by bad mesh or silly griefers.

I see what you want to do .That would be big help especially with fitted mesh considering that it's where one gets much more bored than before. it can be done with the copy skin weight tool, but there is also a plugin that promises to help you with copy weight in case the vertices matching is not perfect see here P.D this should make you happy it's working also with maya 8.x I think that your method could be applied to blender too,so if you figure out how to do this you could probably save many butts here in SL. Watch this video where they use something similar and the blender transfer weight tool The maker of that video doesn't say where she took the avatar from, in descriptions It's written files will come later, but no new update about.Maybe contact her that avatar could be of any help

Thanks, Gaia. That's good to know:matte-motes-grin: at least a one more hint to work with in our reverse engineering process to find out what it has been used. Hence as you said we are blind folded. Got a few questions,maybe they could help us all to figure out what way to follow. I would love to know also what they've been using most during tests? just asking cause knowing tools would help better to figure out by the reverse engineering process. all the testers worked only with blender? Did it work by then the exporter or what exporter have they been using? I read the recent fixes in 2.7 version about the erros that it gave with the fitted mesh So I wonder if other softwares might have any iussue with exporter too. if so what exporter they used? Since it was started talking about this new project, just in case I needed to use it in a future due to some script that I thought they might have been using, I started getting my hands dirty more into blender, but I fel bored with it and its UI.

on wiki there was one with good topology used by almost the clothes made on theplate makers that was named secondlife optimized avatar. It would be easier to rig for having it in your 3d program but then with your own map and I understand It wouldbe useless if your purpose (if I get it right ) is to test your clothes after rigged on an avatar with the same weight. In sl program folder you don't have avatars but I wonder if from the offline opengrid it could be done something and if it's with the same weight as for SL. @Coby the problem with addons is not the addons themself and the hard way to keep track of them. The real problem with rigging with new fitted mesh is that all the plugins came a year or more later than the method. It was introduced first the liquid mesh then it was accepted as standard but with a big lack of disclosure about it. The real question would be what have used those who rigged liquids/fitted mesh before plugins were launched?Why it has not been specified and LL hasn't released very very detailed infos about programs used if any scripts or stuff either, even if that has been chosen as the optimum? so we all are left alone testing. All the addons-plugins makers are doing an apreciable work to get an easy way to rig properly with fitted mesh but still.

If that's not just a viewer glitch ( try maybe with different ones) This could be still due to the alpha textures, you may try to tweak it out playing with mask functions when you edit it in SL. or make the texture whee is the full alpha sort of opaque using a gradient rather than alpha channel to obtain the same effects more and less.

Theoretically yes. But it all depends what you want to do. Are the two dresses the exact copy just scaled? Exporting the weight map and apply it again to another dress would work perfectly if they have the exact same geometry and number of vertices but just different sizes. Anyway exporting weight map is useful when whole weight map for the whole vertices in your dress. Rather than that transferring weights even with that new tools that blender has got too you might then still be forced to tweak the weight manually. If your iussue is to fix just a wild bunch of vertices I'd go for reassigning them to proper bones and maybe weight paint a bit if needed.

Hi,It's hard to say from your description what you've done wrong, Vlinder. With maya 2011 I can guess if you tweaked too much the material applied or the texture on a complex structure you still need the fbx converter before you upload it.The only version that for now isn't giving me that iussue is maya 2014. This is a free standalone converter.See on that page the one that is for your version and use it. Save your model as fbx then through that converter make it dae collada. http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/item?siteID=123112&id=19911599 using that fbx converter is an option that becomes a must with version of maya earlier than 2014 especially if too complex models or with too many materials or textures. on other simplier models with one material you would try toupload and have no errors even without that converter. maya 2014 is at least for what I've seen till now and what I can read too free from this problem you wouldn't need any converter. if it's not rigged you may try to save it first as obj then make that obj a collada dae,using if needed also an open collada exporter. but that fbx converter would fix the iussue if it was the one I guess. I hope that this helps. Tweak could mean a lot of things you might have done to the mesh.That error anyway comes out also for many many possible causes. you should check the log file to know what is going wrong. Here you may find a little list of possible causes http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Troubleshooting In some cases it's not easy to guess, but that error, even when you did all the things right, could occur with any other software as well. For istance if you try to upload some mesh as group not linked and one of them is smallest or for some odd smallest triangles

Dora Gustafson wrote: How would one qualify to be a builder and not an ordinary resident? Who should implement the new set of rules needed for this distinction and who should administrate it? Got to agree with Dora about that!!! @Bash Plus SL motto was your world your imagination (anything starts with a cube), so any resident is a potential builder. if that's true then it's a syllogism It's like to say : secondlife residents can build you live in secondlife Then you're a potential builder. ops I clicked build button and rezzed a cube... that's building right? it's like when they made the first wheel or it is not? It's something not equal, not right either.You can't make others pay more just for lack of knowledge. It would also be the definately hit to kill SL and its spirit , making something that would give advantages only to corporations and big companies that could bring their offices here. So a common resident would not only pay more but also have less rights than them. It'd be like building a cast a pyramidal society. What would be who is not good to build to RP and anything else but chat? an outcast?

Autoweighting doesn't mean that it would be a macic wand,sadly, Antumbra. When you use it there might still be some vertices that have got some odd assiciation for weights, that's where you'd have to manualy check and fix your dress. By odd associations I mean for istance some group of vertices on your breast area could be associated to pelvis or to other bones.It happens even in those rich programs like maya if you use autorig you can figure if it wouldn't happen in blender too. To learn these things I'd suggest you to make a simple cube, scale it , extrude one face a few times till you make a sort of finger shape very very basic no matter if it'll look like cubic. Then make 3 or 4 bones and start learning from there how to associate group of vertices to bones. You can practicing this learning it from the simple rigging examples in blender books that you find in blender wiki http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Books or check the rigging guides on blendercookies. http://cgcookie.com/blender/category/tutorials/rigging-tutorials/ http://cgcookie.com/blender/2011/12/12/blender-introduction-to-character-rigging/ As Sassy said , it's a work in progress. From the pic that you uploaded I don't see in the skeleton structure the collision bones least for breast so I guess you're practicing with standard size.I found some other video that could help you if you like that automatic tools ( though a good job would always get you to do some manual tweaks).When you've enough clear ideas about that thing you may also check an alternative way withnew blender tools showed in this video P.D as they said there is also something wrong with the avatar(not that it's rearly needed to rig you use it just as referal with standard size but visit the avastar blog to get least the free version of that avatar Personally I didn't like blender first time when I started my mesh adventure I started with maya still love it better ( though it's not free ). you could have a lil peek of its tools for rigging here It's another planet though

Hi, Ayumi. The second iussue is probably could be matter of your exporter options:try to use the same meter units you used for building in your exporter options. (Only in case you don't need extreme precision and in case you can easy handle it, you could resize it in world using the white handles to scale it while yo edit) The other sounds like a physic shape thing.To walk through a mesh it should be set prim not convex hull. if you uploaded your mesh together with its physic you then have the option to set it as prim. About the weight remember that it could depend on what you used as physic shape. The uploader shows you the convex hull weight different from prim.Upload and see , this is why opengrid or betagrid comes handy. you could also use a decomposed shape using the analize button in your uploader and its options.remember in that case also to use solid which is for shapes like buildings. Another alternative would be to make yourwalls physics with inworld prims setting the mesh physic shape to none and use linked prims as shape. I leave you also some links that you could find useful just in case http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Decomposing_a_mesh_for_physics_shape http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Physics_Optimization http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Making_Mesh_Physics

The fact that only one face is seen in SL is due to normals and their directions. On polygons only one face will always be visible that is the one where your normal/s is/are. If you really need for your model to be visible from both side if it's one piece polygon just select all the faces then do the extrude This will give you a double faced model. in other cases the solution to have a double sided model is using a planimetric map of it based on the project made by using spline from maya or from illustrator adobe then imported into maya( I use this second solutions on structures like houses for istance).make the shape duplicate it join the splines and then keep working with tools. I rarely use boole functions after that cause I don't like much the mess they do. A knife will be your friend for holes. About your wish to model 3d character I found in my folder one of the guides I read time ago. It's for maya but if you follow the ratio behind it you can apply it to any software see here Learning to rig clothes developed for characters made in that way you will also understand why all the solutions found till now for SL clothes are not sufficient at all.The only nice idea that almost fits more and less the workflow for game characters was standard sizes.Hence the need of some sliders.

By mesh do you mean mesh rigged clothes under the lolas? I guess. if yes, then yeah that's the reason what also with not mesh there were and are lovers and not lovers. With a mesh dress you'd need to make your boobs 0 size then of course wear over your dress your lolas with the applier that would have been done as roughly cut off part from the front UV map of your dress. Lolas by this way would cover the breast part of your mesh clothes as it happened with SL standard layer clothes. To do this then makers have also to be careful to give their dress a good UV map cut more and less similar to what you already saw in SL templates. This cause if it happens that you're too lazy to make a custom cut off from your texture, you could use the same texture already applied to your dress and just use the U and V coordinates in the script to make it fit (this is an option that at least worked with old SL clothes templates and with proper skinning could still work with mesh).A thing this that sure worked with old layer clothes.To be still working somehow with mesh UV template you should be sneaky enough to put the front part of your dress UV in a position and orientation good enough to allow editing the script and cover well the prim applier . After all what their applier plugin does is just applying a texture with the specified U and V values for coordinates that you wrote in the notecard that the script is reading. Maybe a problem could be if the dress is rigged on collision breast bones and then it's itself jiggling (that jiggling part even if 0 who knows with some sizes could be an iussue). I think also that now they're making liquid rigged breast implants btw I can't remember if from lolas or other brand but I see them around. @Jung what they said it's right it's not at all a must, but you would reach a bigger public if you give more options. lolas btw had appliers templates shared with other implants makers from implant nations so if you ever did do an applier for those yo'd reach people who buy appliers not only for lolas but also for other implant makers.

Hi,Stand. lists are good as long as you're using them to get the ratio out from some confusing tutorial. Schematisms though would have been somehow more useful with sculpties,where your chances are limited to few tools in the program of your choice. With mesh it's more like the more you know the better you do, as long as to get the same result you will find that there is always more than one way, the ratio would be choosing the shorter one and the most rational possible to get a good product. As long as we know each person in this world has own times to learn, some need a month to learn a book others would digest it in a year others would do it in a week, what matters is the level of skills you've got and how you apply them. Be strong, self confident, learn to listen to your intuition rather than to rumors, don't get discouraged probably in a month or two of hard work you would know much more than anybody else , but it's all relative to you to the time you dedicate to learning and testing. To be short and hit the target with some good book for blender and there are a few free on its wiki , following the examples then getting a knowledge about inworld mesh for SL in a relative long or short time you can start doing your first meshes. Where schematisms fail is that not always the pattern is appliable to what you want to get. in your scheme for istance you make normals after the textures . For some projects this is a good way for others no for istance imagine that you're using to make your mesh a normal map automatic generator program ( there are a few) you could get there. You will also find out that this scheme has to be reversed for other meshes where you could just use also the normal and displacement maps applied to the mesh to manually paint your diffuse map and your specular.This to give your textures and your model more realistic textures. Same for character building you could see that there is more than one shcool to follow. Some love to build the whole body and the dress over it. Some other methods use a fractional way of building for istance you make the head and neck to sink in the shirt neck hole the arms as parts on their own to sink in the shirt manches and so on. If you want to get into character designing start learning for istance how to make a model with referal images and/or how to draw your own images using the ancient Polykleitos' canon to give a character rational proportions ( useful to design your referals) Start also from something simple for human bodies like toons character like anime style. You'll see that the most time consuming parts for a character are head and then hands /feet Where schematisms would for sure help is in organizing the learning path , that's why more than tutorials more than a tutor (for those used to be self learning and autonomous) it's important to get a good book.More than scheme in learning process te keyword will be method (how you organize all the tasks and all the goals to reach). I know in some countries they love to apply protocol methods to anything: ie you get hurt you go to hospital and the doc, rather than be like Gregory House the real way of being, would be a burocrat and follow a generic protocol butt protector that not always would save the patient. In learning try to be like Rousseau said inhis book "Emile ou de l' education" be natural away from deviant schemes that society could impose us. anyway good luck

Agreed blender has a lot of tools. As many other programs It also has modifiers that are an important chapter that would allow you to do the clothes using the same workflow that you actually follow in marvelous designer This would let them get clothes as easy as in marvelous designer but still with a nice topology few magic touches with sblender edit sculpt tools after this and the dress is ready

Repeat the textures would be what would save you, as Drongle said. Though rather then repeating them in world I prefer to do sojme quick tweaks in photoshop. Save your different layers first as single (not merged) layers in the same psd document ( i.e diffuse, ambient occlusion light and shadows) as psd Once in photoshop you can work just with the diffuse map layer (the one where is the base of your texture color) and lock or just ignore the other layers if you saved also ambient occlusions or light maps. Use a seamless pattern and apply it from the layer palette by double clicking on the diffuse map layer and apply the pattern from the layer style window. Why would you do this? Because in your 3d program you'd apply your texture as psd to your materials. once on your mesh you can see the actual scale of youe pattern/texture just in 3d program. In case they're too big or too small you just go in photoshop and using the sliders in layer style window, you can change the size of your pattern, makig it also scale on your model. Then save your psd document, refresh or update the texture again in your 3d program and see how things go. Once done you'd get in wrld a texture with all the channels merged and with its perfect scale no more need editng m but apply it to your mesh.

They already gave yo the right hints. Retopology and UV map ( also known as skinning or unwrapping in google). For blender there are a few tips that you may get from this tutorial made by Medhue http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/How-to-UV-Unwrap-in-Blender/td-p/2499803 Also if you want to get a quick knowledge of what is UW mapping in blender you could check in this free book for blender page 75 Those examples would explain you how to deal with triangulated mesh, but it's always always better to have a good topology (for both Uvmapping and rigging) In case you'd decide to not retopology your mesh as long as you could deal with the unwrapping then the easy way to texture such kind of mesh would be to use seamless textures to make a pattern to apply later in photoshop over the uv map area and maybe later using tools to adjust eventual troublesome areas.