dazhazit

Yeah I've pretty much given up moaning about the mesh. I've decided on creating plastic deck chairs, rigging them to Bento and selling them. Plastic chairs don't have shoulder muscles to deform and breasts that move with the upper arm:-) JIRA reminds me too much of programming days I'd rather forget. Half a dozen open issues sitting in your queue and being ignored because you're overworked, understaffed and don't have time to deal with them because you're busy dealing with the MDs priority requests to change the spelling of a word on a barely used menu. It needs the CEO to take note of and understand the issues not the poor little code monkeys who've been given a 1920s typewriter and are expected to spellcheck the Tempest. CEOs look at what the public says publicly on forums as they are always worried about company image. I don't really have much of a problem with the bones of bento as such. It's a step in the right direction but I personally would like to see some more bone defs on places like the ribs so that breathing can be properly simulated instead of moving the entire upper torso which if auto rigging is used will also prevent the sides from deforming with upper arm movement. But to do that we'd also have to have abdominal defs to tie down stomach movement which could actually help with deformation at the hips when the legs bend. Things like that would help whether the mesh is an Ogre, a Fairy or to move the gills of a Three legged, Twelve Toed Chameleon Swamp Scragg from the planet Buttpucker (We might as well ignore the toes as SL does but that extra leg might be a problem to animate:) The problem is of course how the bone defs are defined and presented as collision volumes to the Havok engine and how they are stored in the asset SQL database. Which AFAIK are enumerated 16 bit values that need headers changing and code recompiling at the server end. In other words actual work on the servers themselves by the lindens themselves as that code is not in the public domain like the viewer is. HTML5 on a media prim is a pure client modification and doesn't involve 200 pages of server change request documentation and 3 hour committee meetings with sysops reluctant to make any changes. So what we've been given is actually a massive advance in that respect as not many people knew about the more flexible NoSQL Document Databases back when the system was designed. So that said onwards and upwards with the Plastic chairs.

"Now i am a bit frustrated about this conversation" Frustrated yes this is an emotive subject that has been going on since I started SL at least. Everybody has their opinions and this subject is getting out of hand verging on messy flame war. I personally am mildly High Functioning Autistic and can't leave alone things that just look wrong to me. Such as the default base female AV which I've openly described elsewhere as a cold act of topological terrorism and the original designer needs waterboarding. That's all I'm concerned with and I'm not going to go into details or argue about it but what I want changed affects both animation and texturing. From the perspective of an Organic Soft Body modeller. Looking at the edge flow on Ruth is actually quite stressful. She is so profoundly wrong yet people seem to love her, say she's not so bad etc. and I fully understand that she has to be generically shaped to a certain degree. However I personally want to batter that misshapen head and the shoulder blades half way down her chest with a solid titanium vertex mallet. It appears somebody already has with what laughably passes for the hands. (Oh you mean they're not shoulder blades. Well the're certainly not where I've seen the clavicles on most girls I've been with:-). Pure texture clothing designers desperately need something better to design for without having to choose a particular custom mesh AV path and be stuck with it. That means a better default AV standard and UV mapping. Period. I've been out of SL for a while and am both dissapointed and discouraged that the situation hasn't changed in those years. Quite frankly the same things that put me off creation for it in the past. The problem is mainly that there are those who are established and sometimes quite snobbish, happily sitting where they are making money and those who are fresh, want to forge ahead and do something special and getting frustrated with the former who don't want to evolve in case it upsets their gravy train. I'm not talking about you here Gaia as despite being established you actually appear to be one of the latter and have some weight behind what you say. There's a lot that could be done with SL but it's not going to happen. The Lindens I'm afraid to say are the former. There will be no official mesh update. Animatable bones on non AVs is not going to happen. A more flexible open ended bone system is not going to happen because of the way they store them as numerically limited enumerated entities and I'm surprised to see that they've even gone as far as allowing a limited number to be added. LSL will remain a programming abomination for sometime to come. PBR?, Layered textures? I won't even go there. Second Life is stuck in the 1990s because of "Technical Debt", sloth and lack of investment in the future which is why it's being abandoned by its' users who've seen the sort of quality game engines are capable of. I came back looking for something fresh to move into to maybe make some profit and am questioning why now. I could put my money where my loud mouth is and actually do something about this but quite frankly would not make any money out of it and would be fighting too much Hysteresis. I'm close to not going to bother with this anymore unless something spectacular happens at the Linden end. Maybe one of the Lindens will pick up on this and actually show me how they're going to improve things with their new Flagship they're developing but I have a very strong feeling it's going to dissapoint me.

"Nipple area. Try to slider or deform your way out of THIS mess" *Snigger* Thank you for saying what I've been trying to. For a recent skin project on Freelancer.com for SL I tried making a decent AO lighting map for just those areas. They said naked on the brief so I wanted to do something special with fully procedural skin generation :-) I had the great idea of SubDivision Surface and sculpting on her junk but had to take the poly count up to 7Million just to put in the barest approximation of femininity as there is just not the topology to subdivide. However the end result was fuzzy because of lack of resolution on the UV map which is also pinched around the groin where the lindens tried to square up the legs without isolating that area of the map as a separate island. So I can understand your bikini woes. I walked away from the project anyway as I had too many misgivings about it and use my procedural texturing for myself ;-) Having a long term illness doesn't help. I guess the reason that this will not change is "Technical Debt" which in the programming industry refers to something that has had so much effort put into it previously and become so complex a situation that changing it is no longer considered a viable option. Or to use a quote from Murphys second law of dynamics "If it works don't bugger about with it" mentality. Which let's face it is pretty much the entire history of Linden Labs who are just happy to make money from a 'Tried and Trusted' Platform. I think the Lindens are currently concentrating on their new flagship 'Sansara' (SL2 maybe but I think it will be a great dissapointment considering the hype) so the amount of resources assigned to the current SL is less than it could be and most of the effort towards changing anything at all is coming from dissatisfied users of which I'm actually only a newly returned one and pissed off already. It's actually quite trivial to change the meshes in the viewer source code and the texture maps come from a UUID on an asset server and shouldn't care what resolution they have as long as they stick to a power of 2 in size as OpenGL doesn't really like anything other than a square bitmap. The project brief above was for 2K maps and as I said fuzzy where it counts.

Thanks for the promising info Gaia. "Manuel told me that he will take care of the polygon count. So i believe we will eventually see low poly mesh versions in the future." Yes agreed it's still relatively new and a work in progress and being an Otaku kind of like his anime base meshes which may come in useful to me soon. But maybe you can bend his ear a little as you have a little more influence. I looked at adding some extra topology to the base meshes for my own perverted purposes but was kind of daunted by the list of json files used to hold the linear displacements needing to be recompiled which in fact shows a major limitation on morphs/shape keys in general in that they can only be used on a matching mesh in which the order of vertices are the same. Though I haven;t tried his clothing proxies yet and it could be possible to actually have a complete AV on the proxy. There are scripts out there that can interpolate but only if the receiving mesh is a close match in shape and position. The other thing of course is that they are linear displacements meaning that for instance using the hand fist shape key will have the fingers quite happily squishing up as the vertexes go in a straight line through each other until reaching their destination. A fat belly and buttocks should curve downwards as the mass increases which needs two sliders at the moment. So I may be repeating something someone has said previously as I haven't read the whole thread and come in late. I'm a loud mouthed pillock anyway. It is said that more bones isn't the answer but maybe for the AVA meshes and even Bento for initial shaping at least a whole lot more helper bones can be used instead which can be auto rigged to an arbitrary shape and simply curve driven. The weights discarded after baking the shape obviously because of the 4 weight limit per vertex.

Your AVA meshes project is of interest to me. I gave up trying to create anything useful for SL about 4 years ago as I was put off by Ruth (Obviously) and the lack of animation support but didn't give up on character creation and have an embarrassing array of attempts at human topology on my hard disk to prove it :-) So I guess I may have learnt a thing or three about edge flow and weight painting and might throw in with this. But you're right, it's unpaid and the major grunt work will actually be setting up the morphs which I always manage to destroy when I change a bit of topology I don't like. If a solution similar to the way it's done in Adobe Fuse CC can be found things would go a lot better. I myself need to afford to repair the leak that leaves a puddle in the passenger side footwell of my ancient Renault and maybe eat. So I'll see how I go with making something special. I've seen a workflow from Manuel Bastioni Labs into Avastar which is open source character creation for blender but there are issues with UV compatibility, high polygon counts and hard to get along with customisation UI. Plus of course everyone has their own opinion about what a default ethnic face looks like and I see very little difference between Asian and Northwest European in it. Not that I'm belittling it as he's obviously put in a lot of work for little comeback and I applaud him for doing something I've played around with doing for a number of years but never actually got around to.

I wander around as a cigar smoking fox myself but have never had problems like that with my mesh paws. Is this a full mesh AV or are the paws attachments. If it's full then this looks to be an issue that only the original mesh creator can fix and I think it's to do with the defined position of the root bone when the mesh was uploaded. It's been a couple of years since I did some experimenting with this and have in fact only recently returned to SL. However when I was playing around with avatar uploading on Aditi in the past I always had to make sure that the zero position of the mesh was centered on the pelvis or end up with all sorts of odd behaviour to do mainly with mesh jumping when switching Levels of detail although the viewer tried its' best to actually put the mesh in the right position. Things have changed with the viewer since then though and I'm only just getting back into it.

Sorry I got worked up about Arsodesk I didn't even take care of your question about hair. Hair is not a problem in Blender. The simplest way is to use the particle emission hair built in and actually comb it. Then convert it to splines which you can extrude. I've seen some interesting addons to do it but you can end up with a lot of polygons.

I'm not holding my breath for Sansar being anything spectacular soon and probably at the same stage as the HiFidelity project (https://highfidelity.io/) started by the original SL founder. I personally would recommend using blender but don't try and get a RL job as a specialist in it as there is a lot of snobbery amongst companies. Just because it's free does not mean it's not professional software and just for beginners and amateurs. I've heard many in the industry say it's actually more usable and more powerful than Maya and 3DS MAX etc... I'll let this guy give his opinion as he can do it better than me. Don't tie yourself into products from the evil, greedy, money grabbing Autodesk empire. Their title of industry standard is undeserved and most of their software was written by other companies which they've bought out/consumed. Which is why updates simply add more bulk to it with junk content you're unlikely to use rather than actually fix anything. Most of their software has what is called in the programming industry 'Massive Technical Debt'. Sketchup is next on their list to be bought out I'm sure. Google wouldn't sell it to them but ended up selling it to Trimble communications who have a little bit of a relationship with Autodesk. Sorry did I come on really strong as a Blender evangelist there? :-)

Erm... Being a borderline pervert. Can I second this. I have the skills at meshing rigging etc. and am looking at coming back to SL creation but am scratching my head over the subject of what 20% of people do in SL which involves animation of erm... how can I say this... Extra bits which at the moment comprise of a rather messy and convoluted system of swapping fitted attachments and textures AFAIK. I'd like to bake the extra topology in mesh avatars and be able to do some interesting things with it. I've discovered I have a little skill at modelling them and wouldn't mind making some money doing so. I already have a workflow in mind. Oh and why is the default avatar still Ruth? Ruth is what put me off SL creation in the first place. At least the example I've got has toes now (Thanks Gaia) but I tried recently to SubSurf for sculpting so as to create a normals and AO Map and ended up scraping down more than 50 pinch marks that looked like warts before I could even think about trying to put surface details on. Something has to be done about those triangles that defy logic and the laws of edge flow. A professionally created humanoid mesh in this decade is usually judged on it's quality by how few triangles it has. (Those I create myself have 0 triangles;-) Though I'm evaluating custom fuse content creation at the moment which has some sensibly placed triangles. It is possible to do). Another reason for me to take the mesh AV creation route rather than just do skins. I just can't stand staring at it despite Gaia Clarys' nice skin and T-shirt. I know someone will throw around the words 'backwards compatibility issues' but if you are updating the viewer defaults then surely something can be done about an ancient base mesh that quite frankly was done by a drunk teenager who had no real knowledge of female anatomy. (Unless it was modelled on his girlfriend/wife in which case he has my deepest condolances). I haven't even actually started on how many things are wrong with this mesh. (Apart from the toes which someone seems to have thrown some quads at but the junctions should be poles not tris). Anyway rant mode off as no one is going to do much about it soon if past SL history is anything to go by.

I love you. I've just spent two weeks learning how to do this manually. (Learning blender at the same time). This was real easy to use! Does this mean that the morph groups for breast physics etc will actually work now? The current collada export function in blender doesn't support them. I'm going to play. Oh joy. No more mangled avatars yay! Did I say I love you?