OptimoMaximo
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Posts posted by OptimoMaximo
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3 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:
Hey that's pretty cool. I could have a lotta fun with that. Don't pay mind to the haters. Art was always about pushing the envelope on what is possible by creating something new from new tools and allowing new forms of expression and empowering people to express their ideas and have fun creating. As long as you're having fun and creating, you're making art. Don't let others tell you otherwise
2 hours ago, PekeNL said:Oh man. An AI tool that makes it easier for people that are unable or don't have the time to learn the complex intricacies of 3D model texturing? This surely won't be gatekept. I can already hear the 'artist' crown fuming. Or is it secretly because it might potentially cause a loss or earning, which is the only reason artists don't like AI.
why not learning the craft instead?
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The art goes down the sink for the wannabe clowns to self proclaim "artist". What a bleakness.
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2 hours ago, Eoul Derryth said:
Yeah, I thought I recognized your name. At the time I bought your plugin, I was using Maya 2017 (I think) and I did a lot of talking to Cathy, trying to figure out why it wasn't working, only for her to discover my Maya version and tell me that it was made for 2014.
At that time we were not collaborating yet, but I'm sorry to hear it didn't do good for your purposes. I released MyAniMATE in 2017 and our collaboration started only in 2020, when I overhauled Mayastar with more features and rewriting existing ones from scratch. Cathy and I would love to see you joining our discord group and give Mayastar another try.
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On 3/11/2024 at 7:55 PM, Eoul Derryth said:
I don't use Avastar or Blender
I use Maya, not Blender
I do not have dev kits to other bodies, and I doubt they would be willing to give me one since I am, in effect, their competition. The gatekeeping exercised in their dev kits is distasteful to me.
The only plugin available for Maya is AniMATE, and it's not compatible with the version I use.
Pardon the language, but I'm really "raw dogging" it on this project
As I stated above, the gap seems consistent across the entire range of the Neck Thickness slider when editing shape, so I'm pretty sure I have the weights right. The skin was bound to the skeleton in a T-pose, as close to the original avatar as possible. Since my body is (and I can't stress enough) a DRASTIC departure from the default body, I did all I could to keep all existing animations compatible. Since I'm not making a head, I knew the neck would need to go with the SL standard, and tested extensively to see what and where the weights were on the neck using Black Dragon's pose utility.
Pretty sure I need to get hold of an example of this "sl neck" that has been referenced here and refered to all over the internet, but doesn't seem to have a downloadable example of available. Failing that, it's going to be a case of poking with a stick until I get it right.
Sorry, I assumed Blender since every post I see on the forum is about the use of that software.
I use Maya as well. I'm the developer of MyAniMATE (which is for animation) and collaborate in the dev of Mayastar (rigging mainly) with Cathy Foil.
in the Mayastar shape editor, make sure to select the "mesh" shape, not "default" when binding your mesh body. All the joints should then have a scale of 1 on all axis, whereas the "default" has varying scales on their Y axis. You can save the current weights to file either using Maya built in xml weights exporter or the one provided with Maya star, and replying them after your adjustments and new binding.
You should also make sure that your neck edge matches the default avatar that comes with Mayastar, as most of the head devs use that size for compatibility.
Lastly, if you go to the modeling tab, you'll find a tool to transfer the vertex normals from head neck edge and body neck edge, so that the seam will not be visible.
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My 2 cents on the issue:
First thing to check is if you weighted the body on the avatar in what avastar calls neutral pose. The default already IS a custom shape. In Blender it is not evident because it doesn't support bind poses, but the default shape already has some scaling applied. Set that to neutral and you'll see a difference in shape across all body. At that point remove the skinning, adjust the neck if needed, and bind the body again to neutral shape.
The second thing to check is what weights other devkit body meshes use on the neck and weight accordingly , exactly as found there. I would not assume the collision volume bone to be alone in that area, perhaps the mNeck joint has some influence. Also, I would not assume the Ruth and Roth to general examples to follow, check more bodies.
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What did you expect from LL? The switch to a system without tracking numbers alone should have had many eyebrows raised. No tracking number, and the sole existence of a ticket can be denied, no proof of it to be found anywhere to back up claims of otherwise.
Just face it: the user is an annoyance that they have to pretend to listen to. Always been like that, the hopes of change about this is just delusional wishful thinking.
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7 hours ago, Timothy McGregor said:
As seen in attached image, I cannot set this object for sale. I cannot change next owner permission mask. There are usually several "duh" reasons for this, but this is a little odd.
The object is a single mesh piece that I created and uploaded. It has never changed hands/ownership. It has been out on a build platform, after having been uploaded and rezzed by me. Copies have been taken here and there, but the owner has never changed. It has never been transferred away from my avatar and back.
It has the default plywood texture applied to all faces, and has nothing in its inventory.
Yet the next owner perms mask (which I didn't set) of Copy/Modify/No Transfer are locked that way, and are applying to me, the original creator and only ever owner of the asset.
Am I being a complete fool or is there something going on with asset permissions? This is happening to me on multiple objects I've had out in a build I'm working on.
The original mesh pieces as originally uploaded are fine. It's just these pieces that have been out in-world. But that shouldn't matter. I have been the sole owner of these assets since they were born. They have never changed hands.
Anyone else experiencing this?
If the copies that were taken, as you state, are the result of a shift-drags copy done by an alt of yours with edit permissions, it's likely that what happened is that the alt has taken the shift-dragged item, which is the original, and left the actual copy on the platform, therefore applying next owner permissions masks to you.
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On 11/18/2023 at 10:37 PM, Qie Niangao said:
How hard is that job?
Not much. Just tedious and maybe long for the correct wording and correctness proofreading.
On 11/18/2023 at 10:37 PM, Qie Niangao said:and who/what is the "Doc team" these days?
The users. This spares LL the effort and a few coins.
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On 2/25/2024 at 7:51 PM, Rowan Amore said:
I have earrings that swing. They aren't flexi or animesh so maybe a script or animation? I know my Swallow mesh ears also have a swinging animation.
That's driven by an animation over the earrings attachment points, with the mesh being rigged to them. A chain would need way more effort.
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26 minutes ago, kaahupahau said:
Hmm... I took, from Outworldz, the animation "dippose-female.bvh".
All I had to do was upload it - and that one uploaded with no problems unlike the animstreet-files. It is only 59kbyte in size, which may well have been the reason for its success. But I had to do nothing else, the file is usable straight away in world. The outworldz animations I got for testing are all small in size, but they include even dance moves, and so far all I uploaded worked out of the box.
No aligning needed or anything...
Are we sure we're talking about the same method of animations? I'm not talking about motion capture raw files, I am talking of .bvh files , which are already aligned to a human skeletal system.
It looks like you need some reference info...
Bvh file format IS raw motion data. Whether it was captured or not is another bag.
Bvh files do not imply "a human skeletal system", you can really dump any hierarchy to it. There is no fixed or standardized naming convention, anyone can output any skeleton really. There is also no obligation whatsoever in regard of world orientation, joint orientation and rotation order. If you take a SL Bvh animation and compare it to any random Bvh file non SL specific, you'll notice soooo many discrepancies between them.
There is one factor that may prevent an animation to upload, and that's its final size once converted into the native file format SL uses, the anim format. The limit is 250kb size OR 60 seconds length, which ever is being hit first.
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1 hour ago, Flea Yatsenko said:
I would take SP over ZBrush because SP makes it a lot easier to handle PBR and GLTF and ZBrush, while superior to Blender in sculpting, only kind of repeats Blender's functionality. Better to ditch ZBrush, learn to sculpt in blender, and use substance painter. AFAIK Blender's GLTF support isn't nearly as good as SP's.
Still not explaining what's the point of comparing two softwares, painter and zbrush, which fields of use are completely unrelated to each other's.
Anyway, good luck with Blender trying to cope with the polygon numbers that zbrush can handle without breaking a sweat.
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On 2/13/2024 at 12:08 PM, Jenny Ashland said:
Because of the new PBR system in SL I would recommend using Adobe Substance Painter instead of zbrush. It has a direct export for SL settings, it can make the UV maps for you, and it is a lot easier to learn.
And what would the criteria be for such shift in the choice between these two softwares? Substance Painter is a texturing program and ZBrush is meant for sculpting (can also texture, yes, but its main use is sculpting)
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On 2/13/2024 at 11:17 PM, Sid Nagy said:
RTFM is so the 80s.
No, it's common sense. Being in the year 3000 or in the 900 bc doesn't make any difference. It's a matter of being able to use the brain.
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Oh and another detail that is important: during the registration process to aquire the pioneer license NO CREDIT CARD info was ever asked. So, no end of the year surprises, just renew it manually.
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1 hour ago, Janet Voxel said:
Thank you for at least understanding what I was asking a little bit. The way I see it, you could possibly be getting it for a year for free, but after that anything goes. We could revisit this in a year, but it’s not that serious to me. I won’t be getting it. The responses I got were completely uncalled for. I can already see that nobody that responded actually has this software or has even used it yet.
It wasn’t about whether I make 100k or not either. It was more about: if I incorporate this into my workflow will I end up paying a subscription fee a year from now? Which was not answered, because nobody on here could possibly answer that.
The thing is, in that year the licensing agreement states they will harvest and sell your data.
So in short you could possibly really be getting what is effectively a year trial and your data harvested in the process.
Yay?
I've got it and as I said, the terms of service as currently stated when acquiring the "pioneer license" state that it has to be renewed yearly, because of the possible revenue changes that may have occurred in the meantime. Also, this was discussed on their LinkedIn page's comments and they stated they will address this point in the near future to make it more clear. But as the current state of facts and statements, this licensing scheme is there to stay.
In any case, if you have to adopt it, remember that instamat does in one software what Substance has split in separate softwares: Designer, Painter and Alchemist (which has been renamed but to be honest I can't recall the new name).
Plus, instamat can manipulate meshes and make LoDs using algorithms from INSTALOD, their dedicated LoDs software. At the same subscription price as Substance.
I'm definitely switching to it, just the nPassGraph feature alone makes it worth it to me.
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6 hours ago, PheebyKatz said:
I can see wondering if there's a gotcha on that billing page
There is no gotcha with the current licensing terms. It's a business model started by Epic and that many follow now, with a "pay us when you succeed" kind of mentality. I mean look at what happened with the latest move from Unity last September. And many are just going to move on anyway, regardless of the latest adjustments they made to the policy (which still is in place, starting 2024 and from the next release Unity6, BTW).
Besides that, since they're battling a giant like Adobe on their most recent acquisition Substance Suite, they have to fight for adoption in the industry. So the most users they can collect, also among students, the higher the chance that at some point studios are going to hire some of their users.
If Autodesk did that with Maya and 3dsMax, today Blender either would not even exist or would have died off long ago.
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22 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:
It is actually possible, it's just not well known, and not for the feint of heart.
SecondLife has a seldom used animation constraints system.
What this means is that you can actually constrain one hand to the other, so that regardless of your shape it will follow the other hand. Many of SL's original animations were made using the constraint system.
Unfortunately, popular tools like Avastar don't seem to support the secondlife constraint system, instead solely using Forward Kinematics. People have come to understand that you simply can't do IK stuff in SL, which isn't true, it's just not very easy or well documented.
I did at one point create a tool that lets you manually edit .anim files and add constraints. I don't know of any dedicated tools for producing full animations from scratch that support this system sadly.
I'd be interested to know exactly how the constraint offset is being calculated. Go heavy handed with vector/quaternion/matrix math if needed, I'm well versed with them. I never had the time to figure it out since the docs do not detail that (or I haven't found the relevant info).
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5 hours ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:
Third: There is probably a limit on hip translation distance. I believe for Animesh objects, it's 5m. Non-animesh is larger but I don't know for sure what it is.
It's the same for both, animesh inherited that limit from the animation format* for avatars because, well, it is an avatar.
Anyway, the limit is +/-5 meters in parent space, which for the mPekvis equals to that 5 meters from the avatar box.
* to be precise, that is a clamping actually enforced within the anim format data serialization. I believe there is no enforcement other than that, when the animation is de serialized and played back in the viewer, but I may be mistaken since I've never dug into the viewer code (not that I'm interested anyway). I believe that if a technical requirement like this can be circumvented , it really should not be.
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14 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:
It's LL's fault, not yours or mine; and I did tell them but they did not listen...
Oh, what an unexpected news...
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No, animation does not affect the character box in world regardless of the tool used.
What you have to do, is to make a script to move the avatar in world while playing back the animation, which has to be designed without forward motion (in place). As an end result of the two actions in the script (physical movement in world paired with the animation) would give you the final result you're after.
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On 1/6/2024 at 7:00 PM, FridayAfternoon said:
Thank you, so what I gather from this then is that decimation doesn’t really do you any good if you are relying on f curves to control joint positions on keep in between frames correct, and that would be true for either format?
so, as far as optimizing a .anim animation would the best workflow be to first bake the animation, then set all the keyframes to vector, then decimate?
And, as far as anim format, when you upload to SL are there further optimizations or do those all happen simply by saving to that file type and SL just takes the file as is?
and if this last is the case, then the optimizing that a tool like avastar is doing ( can’t remember but I think it’s called compression) is just tweaking the way the anim format does its optimization?
it would be nice to know what that final result is in terms of keyframed data, in a blender action I mean as opposed to a text file, and to be able to tweak it, but when I have tried to import into blender it bakes it ( I think, but maybe that was a BVH file I imported).
regardless, thanks for taking the time to reply.
Decimating isn't going to give you any advantage in terms of optimization.
What avatars compression is likely doing, instead, is analyse the animation curves to determine, for each joint, where a significant rotation / position change, compared to previous frame(s) is happening, and marking that set of frames as good to sample. Of course, this process can reduce the motion fidelity by not writing down too subtle movements based on a given threshold.
What you can do to optimize your animations is not a series of actions on the animation curves nor anything similar. In that context, there is nothing you can do to drive the compression behavior. However, what you CAN do is to play with the fps setting in conjunction with retiming your animation accordingly. The lower the fps, the fewer frames there will be to describe the same motion at the same speed of execution. This way, you'd give the compression system less data to chew and make decisions upon, ensuring that the compression would still do its job, but you would have started that process with the minimum number of frames that still describe the motion well and, therefore, end up with a considerably smaller file size.
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18 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:
Oh? You were serious?
I thought you were giving them the benefit of the doubt. I would define "minimum" as LL's absolute maximum, pretty sure they are aiming lower than that.
No benefit of doubt to LL, Niran. All they do is always blatantly pulled in from the minimum acceptance criteria since time immemorial. If you should do X, they call it good to go at X-100 and then "we'll keep further development for a later time / project" which translates into "we're done with this, IF we come back to it, it will be in a decade... perhaps.."
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4 hours ago, Quartz Mole said:
Some disagreements seem to be getting a bit personal. These, if they must be conducted at all, should be conducted in personal messages, not in the forum.
Disagreement is always personal. One person disagrees with another, that's how it goes. On the other hand, the expectation of any debate to be agreeable, all smiles and pats on the shoulders is quite delusional. If that's the case, let's shut down any existing forum and get it over with.
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20 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:
I do not have access to the server so i can't tell but i can guarantee you it is super easy to add another message, i've told LL so many times "just add a simple message" for us to use but they always refuse because its "so much work" and "so complicated" and not "easy", i call bs.
Yep I guessed that much. With LL it's always a race towards the minimum
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Stable Projectorz - A New Locally Running AI Tool For Texturing Mesh
in Mesh
Posted · Edited by OptimoMaximo
Kinda unrelated point. There's still skills to be learned, the difference sits in the media. Next one
This is just stupid. It's not a matter of media used, it's a matter of skills to be learned. Things change for sure, but from a work of skills to asking in writing what you want and get a machine assemble it for you, it's not even remotely comparable. Next one
Skills learning is ALL a matter of will and time spent to learn them. Of course the artists are pissed off about it. First of all the models STEAL others work with no credit nor compensation. Secondly, an artist should see the visibility of their skills buried in an ocean of other wannabe artists, that ruin the work market for them who put passion, time, money and sweat to get good and be chill and happy about it. Very fair.
Now go ahead and jump all over me with your moot remarks. The matter of fact is these tools will lower the bar of quality and innovation just to have some lazy people be able to call themselves "artists". Clowns, that's what they are.