OptimoMaximo
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Posts posted by OptimoMaximo
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2 hours ago, Beq Janus said:
unless the platform enforces modify capability on materials we will end up with double sided materials being the norm "just in case
Well, just leave that checkbox out of the permission system and the problem is non existent.
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1 hour ago, Beq Janus said:
The PBR solution is wed to the rather braindead GLTF standard view that the "faced-ness" of an object is an attribute of the material and not of the mesh itself
This comes from the assumption that such materials are to be used for foliage with translucency. The same happens within UnrealEngine as well as Unity or Godot. I'm not sure, but it should have to do with how translucency changes its method to calculate transitioning light when double sided is set to true.
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1 hour ago, anitabush said:
Do you have any recommendations?
Well, not really first hand recommendations... I don't even touch Blender anymore for the last 10 years or so, and when I was learning it (2004-2005) the manual I bought was called Blender for Dummies, which I believe is no more... But I'm sure that a look up on Amazon would turn something interesting up
This one, for example...
Blender 3D By Example: A project-based guide to learning the latest Blender 3D, EEVEE rendering engine, and Grease Pencil, 2nd Edition https://amzn.eu/d/9c2ddh0
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5 hours ago, anitabush said:
Thank you for the replies. I do see what you mean and I suppose fully in depth guides would be unrealistic. It would just be lovely to have some tutorials from linden going through their workflow for some different items using different tricks and techniques. I’m a few years into learning blender via the university of youtube, a month into substance painter (adobe make some lovely tutorials for beginners) and a sporadic year or so learning how to get that stuff into SL. I’ve made a couple of reasonable things recently and lots of terrible ones before that but I’m getting there slowly.
If you're learning only through YouTube, you're going slower than you could. My evergreen suggestion is to invest on a manual, best if physical print (well that's my taste 😁) , to read, study and try the featured classes. Doesn't matter if things in those classes aren't SL related or relatable, do them anyway. Build your acquaintance and confidence with your software! I guarantee you'll make a quality jump.
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55 minutes ago, Rick Daylight said:
Hmm... have you never accidentally nudged your mouse and had a folder moved, and wondered where it went? I have. Wish I was perfect.
Ctrl-X/Ctrl-V takes extra steps compared to drag and drop. Potentially quite a few extra clicks if you have to open a long folder tree, which drag and drop will do on hover. Drag and drop exists because it is more convenient and quicker. Which is, of course, part of the problem when it goes into 200mph mode.
I guess that the additional inventory floater was introduced for this reason: one displays the content you want to move, the other one displays the destination folder, drag and drop with a sideways movement and no scrolling issues...
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Hope that PBR project gets released sooner than later. One of the options available is to mark a material as double-sided 😉
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1 hour ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:
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.
This^^^^^^
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3 hours ago, anitabush said:
Stuff like this is why we need some kind of in depth guide. As someone new to second life creation I had never heard of this before. Im desperately trying to learn and make efficient models but there’s so many techniques, tips and tricks spread across dozens of threads and websites that it’s really hard to find them.
So thank you for this, I’ve done some reading on vertex normals and the data transfer modifier in blender thanks to your comment and I will be doing some experimenting later.
Glad to have given you a track to learn something new and possibly useful in the future! 🤗
And I understand your feelings when you say that it would be beneficial to have an in depth guide. But believe me, a guide like that would be an Egyptian pyramid stone block sized book. Unfortunately, 3D modeling and all the related matters (rigging, animation, etc) currently are university courses matters: require study, practice (lots and lots), trials and errors, features digging... And more.
The very moment that LL introduced Mesh content into the platform, they made content creation require a (at least semi-) professional grade skill set.
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1 hour ago, 2Tessa said:
So if we want to enjoy smooth SL we just need to buy a dedicated PC with an high performance graphic card (NVIDIA 😎).
And the smooth experience is not granted even in such case 😁
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1 hour ago, ChinRey said:
Normals are particularly troublesome here. When I made my own lowest LOD model for the column, the challenge wasn't to get the tri coutn low enough - that was dead easy. The problem was to avoid the top of the column to suddenly light up like a beacon or suddenly go all dark. Those effects are really, really noticeable even at that small scale and very visually annoying.
That's what a vertex normal transfer is for...
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I remember having done some experimenting in such direction, long time ago, and i seem to recall that putting all objects as children of the item you want to be root directly in your program before exporting to collards actually maintained the root consistently once uploaded.
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On 12/23/2022 at 6:23 PM, animats said:
Something I've suggested before - an in-world clothing customizer. Someone in the clothing biz could do this.
Start with one of those web sites for making T-shirts. There are lots of those - Canva, Pixart, etc. Display a web page with the T-shirt designer in an in-world kiosk. The user uses the templates, text generator, and tools there to make the T-shirt they want. When they have what they want, they pay the kiosk, at least L$10 to cover the upload fee. The kiosk then contacts an external server, fetches the new artwork, rearranges it to fit an SL T-shirt template, and passes that to an SL bot which uploads the image, sticks it on a T-shirt blank, and delivers the new T-shirt to the user in world, ready to wear.
Plus you can offer the user the option to order a physical copy of the T-shirt for RL wear.
Sorry, Animats, but how is your comment related to this topic?
The OP was talking about modifying an existing mesh piece of clothing
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On 12/3/2022 at 9:28 PM, Gabriele Graves said:
There are no technical reasons preventing LL from implementing a simple mesh editor into SL. So yes, it is possible. How likely though, that's a whole different thing.
There are, instead, technical reason for this feature to not be feasible, although it is not a matter of mesh per se, but rather how the assets are being stored and distributed.
So, first off, the file format is not text based, it's binary and it's based on a 3d cubic grid to encode the vertex positions. This part is not impossible, but its quite difficult to implement right, especially for the vertex normals part. The other part that makes it difficult is the fact that being binary and having a fixed max size, an edited version would require a separate, new, asset saved. Which leads to the next problem.
The asset is being stored centrally, and every copy is an instance of the original. The copy gets a new uuid as a "top layer" piece of data, but internally it still is the originally uploaded asset, with its own uuid assigned at the time of upload. This means that any change on, say, your copy, actually should affect everyone who got the same asset (the reason why it would need a new copy being stored as a new asset), and a shared layer of edits under someone's name isn't possible, since the file size limit is 8 megabytes. Imagine one or more layers of edits per person on an asset, for example, like the maitreya body...
It apparently is just your copy in your inventory, but it actually isn't.
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32 minutes ago, AcidBingo said:
Yeah, but to be clear this crashing behavior was only on the LL viewer, so I don't think it's an FS problem. FS was borking my LOD meshes and I d/l'd the LL viewer as a final Hail Mary to see if it changed anything (🎉). Doesn't explain to me why the results between LL's importer and FS were so drastically different though, so it might be a good idea to bring them in anyway? From what I've gleaned from the forums there's a difference in the FS viewer and thus the importer when compared to the LL version; at least as far as I've been able to understand things.
As for the LL viewer the LOD's imported along with the mesh right at the start of the operation (no collider included in my files since i just wanted to use the bounding box anyway). The results I got with this crashing behavior were inconsistent, too. When I first started loading the model into the uploader there it crashed to desktop pretty much every time. Then there were one or two times where this behavior didn't occur and everything behaved itself. Made some changes and tested the upload again, added cube (Bounding Box); crash city!
As an aside, thanks for your help in this, and for following up. It's much appreciated!
oh certainly Beq will have some insights to share in regards of the mesh uploader in general, so i guess it is good to try and pull her in
I'm sorry that my suggestions did not work for you though. That looked a lot like the problems i was having when i decided to create an automated lod generator for skinned meshes. The problematic part was the exact match of influences listed in the skinCluster, which was the heavy lifting task of making it work without LoDs being distorted (if not exploded sometimes). That solved my problem at the time, was just hoping you were stumbling upon that same behavior. It's good to see that someone is trying to do things the proper way
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17 hours ago, AcidBingo said:
BWAHAHAHAHA!!!
So on a whim I decided to check something, and that something has born fruit. SUCH FRUITS!
All this time I've been trying my upload on the FS viewer. Switched to SL native viewer, and the LODs work FINE, swimmingly in fact... the import window on the other hand, not so much apparently. The SL native viewer crashes every time I try to calculate costs, Lol.
Edit:
SL viewer only seems to crash when I add a bounding box as my collider first. Without that it calculates the cost "fine?"
That's good to hear!
However, did you try to add the collision shape AFTER you've set the custom LoDs??
If you did and still crashes, maybe paging @Beq Janus might give us some insights on the FS's inner workings...
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Yeah, most creators don't give a crap about optimization, especially when it comes to organic models. Avatar pieces (body, head, hands and feet) and clothing have massive polycounts most of the times, because that's what "the market wants": the average user wants a render mesh, where if the most minute detail is geometrically detailed, the better the creator (🤮) and the more money they throw at them. Same goes for clothing. Then those same users cry because SL is laggy and LL should do something about it.
If your high lod model sports up to 90K triangles ALL INCLUDED, I'd say it would be ok. Of course the fewer triangles the better, but considering what infernal poly-monsters go around the grid, that polycount should be fair enough.
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12 minutes ago, AcidBingo said:
Thanks for the reply!
So as per your suggestion I went through and checked the bone influences in both Blender and the uploader. Unfortunately, all the LOD's have the same influence count (21). That's from using the uploader and the Avastar Mesh Inspector. If necessary I can go check the weights individually, but then it'll be a LOT longer before I reply again
Alright, so let's try this: take one of the lods and run the cleanup. See if any influence disappears. (in my software it is called "remove unused influences")
If you generated the lod from the original, some weights might have been shifted to the remaining neighboring vertices, breaking the 4 influences rules and making it get more than that, and therefore upon upload the distortions would be given by the uploaded pruning of the excess influences.
As a workflow suggestion, it's recommendable to clear the skinning from each lod, binding again and copy the weights from the original skinned model, always making sure that the influences number are the same
Sorry for not being able to help with more specific wording, tools and procedures, I'm not a Blender user
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18 hours ago, AcidBingo said:
Greetings SL people! Newbie user here with what I'm hoping is a Newbie problem!
I'm trying to make a mesh avatar for use in SL using Avastar 3.1 and Blender 3.2. Everything seems to work OK up until I reach the point of adding custom LOD's to the model via the uploader. The high quality mesh works fine, however, all of the LODs are deformed in one way or another. There's not even a great deal of consistency in how the LOD is going to Cronenberg out when compared to the others. One thing I have noticed is each LOD mesh works if used as the high quality version and seems to animate properly in the uploader window, just not as an LOD of another mesh. Uploader does not spit out any discernible errors in either mode as far as I can tell.
High Quality Version in Uploader
It should be noted that Cronenberg levels are vastly improved from what they used to be, and while *almost* imperceptible on a couple levels, it's still more than I can abide. I desire perfection... or at least close as I can get to it.
All meshes' transforms are zeroed. World units are Metric with 1 as my base unit. Mesh was built directly around the Avastar character with appearance settings set to 'male.' Applied rest pose prior to skinning (this seems to have improved results a bit). Each skin was weight copied from the Avastar character (head, upperbody, lowerbody) then weight painted to fit my character's mesh at each LOD level, and each LOD is weighted to the basic 21 bones. No zero weights, skin weights do not exceed 4 per vert. Using joint offsets in uploader window improves the pose slightly, but does not seem to have any effect on the LODs bugging out. Mesh is comprised of 3... "faces?" (sorry still acclimating to the SL lingo!) I.E. there's three materials on each LOD. Each mesh was originally three parts (head, upperbody, lowerbody) which were joined together, as exporting them separated yielded even more Cronenbergian results than what I've shown here 🤮 Uh, I tried hard-applying bounding box limits on each LOD, didn't seem to have any effect, positive or otherwise.
No doubles, uh, also noticed that the uploader window doesn't reflect my weighted normals, which is... fine, I guess. Uh, let's see here, calculated upload cost with custom LODs is twice or more what it would be if I let the PotatofierTM (I.E. the auto LOD generator) do its thang. Hoping that'll resolve itself a little once the other issues are taken care of. If not then it's just another hurdle to jump in the future.
Again, I'm really hoping this is a newb-newb issue, like a setting or something and not something more dire. I've tried reading as much as a could about making meshes for SL, and have a game art background to draw from on the content creation side. Unfortunately, while I'm Godzilla when it comes to Blender, SP, and the like, I'm a complete Bambi on the SL/Avastar side. It'll be cute when I learn to walk right. That said, a lot of the info I've been able to locate, either from Avastar's knowledge base, videos on YouTube, this forum, etc., are often outdated or deprecated (often I can only tell what version the tutorial/post is for by what Blender version they're using), sometimes contradictory, vague on certain details, or a combo of all 3. I understand that from a dev's standpoint that's a lot of stuff to juggle and keep updated and boy howdy am I appreciative, but it's more than a little frustrating from a new user standpoint if I'm being honest about it. I'm not sure which sources to trust on what tasks, and I'm even less sure as to what Avastar takes care of under the hood/vs what it expects me to do on my own; some tutorials I've watched had settings that aren't exposed to the user anymore (I'm guessing these fall under the 'sanity checks' label), and therefore I'm not sure what I'm supposed to set or let Avastar take the wheel on for certain stuff. Blah.
Anyway, any and all help is... er, helpful?
Thanks in advance!
It's most likely a matter of missing joints influences. I'll try to explain
Your high lod has a certain number of vertices, which have been weighted to joints and are respecting all the rules you listed. So far so good.
However, when you make lods, you reduce the number of vertices, and therefore it may happen that certain joints influences get thrown out entirely, or its weights get pruned off to zero because there aren't enough vertices to hold that value onto and get cleaned off by some tool that make the 4 influences per vertex rule.
Try this and see if it solves your issue: compare the influences number between the high lod and the others. Should you find a missing influence, add it back manually, at zero weights, and do not perform clean ups after that. Each lod should always have the same list of joints in its skin definition, and if the geometry that used to hold its weights is gone, just leave all those weights at zero. As long as it de forms right, the excess influences guarantee that the mesh still has a skinning that is a subset of the original high lod's skin
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2 hours ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:
Does this new PBR support come with any changes to the rendering engine or is this simply an alternate arrangement of data channels?
i.e. Will you be able to use both emission and translucency on a single face? Will the metallic channel produce the same appearance as it does in PBR renderers or will it just be an alias to SL's environment channel?
I tried it, and it renders like in substance designer and painter.
1 hour ago, animats said:OK. Is there something that says what's in which channel of what? How are metallic and roughness packed? Is ambient occlusion in there, too?
The gltf specs say it. The packing is ORM, occlusion roughness metallic. Since these maps are supposed to be 8bit single channel grayscale images, they can be packed into an 8 bit rgb image. Check out the project viewer release notes page (I'm on my phone right now, can't find the link on this device)
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Hi everyone,
i started this thread to share with you all, for free, some resources that i think might be useful to some of you.
I've prepared a zipped .7z file that contains:
- a substance designer node
- two substance painter presets (normal and UDIM)
- an exe file (Windows only)
These resources automatically pack AO, Roughness and Metallic maps exactly as the ongoing PBR project wants them to be encoded.
The executable file is a program i wrote for fun, and it's quite straightforward to use. It's meant for those of you gals/guys who do not use one of the Substance softwares, and want a mean to pack these textures automatically from the single images
(alternative softwares to Substance software listed here: https://all3dp.com/2/best-substance-painter-alternatives/)
here is the link to download it
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-ProK7mUJSxKXuhO9XkIGGDrsSWiaVcP/view?usp=share_link
Hope you enjoy!
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On 11/28/2022 at 7:46 PM, Charlotte Bartlett said:
Thanks on the SP part, I had played with that yesterday. Results are fairly ok, but still finding the values slightly off on the rendering in SL in comparison
That's a common issue with painter. Results are off, usually, because the shader roughness sampling is quite low by default. Open the shader settings and crank up the roughness samples and you'll immediately see the difference in painter itself
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17 hours ago, Aquila Kytori said:
To upload the the texture image along with the model you need to check the Include textures option in the mesh uploader.
Mesh Uploader > Upload Options > Include textures. see images below.
I had always thought that it was necessary, when exporting to Collada , to have the Textures Options > Copy ("Copy textures to same folder where the .dae file is exported.") option enabled so that when opening in the Mesh uploader, the uploader could look in the same folder containing the model.dae and find the texture image that is referenced in the Collada file.
But apparently that is not necessary ?
Uploading a cube with a grid image texture assigned to it :
As an experiment I painted on the grid image texture in Blender and repeated the export. Note that the modified image texture was not saved before exporting the Cube :
Looking inside the Collada file of the of the first Cube it seems to indicate that the image texture is to be searched for from its original location on my hard drive :
but with the modified image texture it seems to be referencing the Blender file ? :
And with the Texture Options > Copy option checked it is again referencing the Blender file ?
Deleting the resultant Image texture .jpg from the folder containing the Cube.dae still results in a succesfull upload of cube + image texture !
Any ways , that was just me doing some experimenting ................. As a general rule, enable Texture Options > Copy, when you want to have your textures exported along with the model.
I can't think of any advantage of uploading the image texture along with the model and as Quarrel has already mentioned the best is, while still testing and modifying your image texture, to upload your image texture using the Local Textures option so that every time you modify your texture and "save" it in Gimp or PS or while Painting inside off Blender, you can instantly see the changes on your rezzed model inworld without having to continually re-upload it after every modification.
A rigged mesh doesn't bring its textures automatically during upload, it's a long standing bug that was never fixed. One can try all combinations of options during export, and although the texture files can be correctly referenced, the uploaded won't take them. At all. Never, no matter what.
I'd be glad to be proven wrong though, but it never worked and so I quit trying long time ago.
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Just now, animats said:
I know they're different. The point I'm making is that the first thing people seem to do with good materials is make shiny things. Not subtle things.
Oh alright... Well, I don't think it could be avoided. Let them play with the materials until they will realize someone else is doing a better job with that, and start making progress from there.
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On 11/20/2022 at 5:56 PM, animats said:
clearcoat metallic effects
Clearcoat and metallic are two different things, Clearcoat specifically isn't part of the base PBR shader, can be found in Arnold, vray and similar offline renderers as well as in Unreal Engine's. Clearcoat is a dielectric (non-metallic) roughness layer, used especially (if not almost exclusively) in automotive renders.
The reality is that a completely smoothly polished and shiny metal really is rare to find, that's true. Also, some metal grunge makes a very cool effect, also on object that shouldn't really be like that (think of a warrior's sword: should be maintained correctly and show no grunginess that may lead to metal weaknesses, but a grungy sword is just much cooler to look at, in comparison to a perfectly polished one)
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Another pet peeve - no inside faces on clothing
in Mesh
Posted
And this is addressed to @Beq Januso
A property like this makes more sense in a shader rather than a shape. The shader can simulate something at render time, which is lighter weight than generating the back faces from a geometry node: the former simulates on screen starting from the actual geometry, the latter should actively duplicate and flip the target geometry.
Plus, what Arton noted