Thecla

They all matter, and it's a bit akin to 3D chess. Even Spock would struggle. When I finally screw up the courage to change my head or skin every few years, I gather all the head demos, as many skin demos as I reasonably can, and spend what seems an eternity trying all the combinations...and editing my shape almost for all of them. It takes hours, and there are plenty of surprises along the way in terms of what I thought a given skin would like like and how I can get it to look. I will agree and that head and skin are the primary drivers of how you look, but shape can play a significant role in how your eyes, nose, and mouth look with a given head and skin, not to mention the large head shape sliders. Relatedly, shape crafting is something you should really spend some time on because the relationship between the sliders for different attributes is not always intuitive and the results can be surprising. The more you play with them the more you'll realize "Oh to get this look, I need to change this slider too."

Well, it was not that complicated at all, as it turns out. First, there are plenty of YT tutorials that show how to take a high poly model and reduce it to low poly, and produce a normal map from the high poly version. They are all virtually the same, but for some reason I thought the UV mapping of both needed to line up. As mentioned above, they do not. The high poly, textured model is literally projected onto the low poly version from a cage that does not give a fig if the high poly version has a UV map. A quick chunked step by step summary: 1. Take your high poly model, duplicate it, and leave it IN PLACE by hitting esc. Name the first high poly and the second low poly. Hide the high poly one. Select the low poly iteration and remesh it using voxels. Move the slider until you have something visually the same shape, but simplified, to the high poly version. Hit apply. 2. UV map this new low poly model. Then go to shading and create a new image texture node, select "new" for image, and name it "blah blah normal", and then add a new normal map node after that. Plug the image texture node into the normal map node, and the normal map node into the normal input in the BSDF node. Then highlight the original image texture node you created. Somewhat counterintuitively, this is the image that WILL be created when you bake. 3. Go to render. Choose cycles render, scroll down to Bake, and pulldown to bake type "Normal". Check "Selected to active" and in it's settings set cage extrusion to anywhere from .02 to .5 depending on how big your model is. This is the surrounding "cage that will project the normals from the high poly version to your low poly version. The number depends on how large and complex your model is in 3D space. Another option is to duplicate your low poly model, enlarge it slightly still in place so that your original low poly model is completely encased with in it, and set that as the target for your cage. 4. Push the Bake button. Download your new normal texture for your low poly model. There are numerous different workflows for this, but this is the one that I found most straightforward. You can bake other map, like ambient occlusion the same way, but they will require different workflow, to a degree. For example, for a good ambient occlusion texture you'll be best served creating a ground plane and a new light that you can adjust. All of that, to get the right AO lighting, will depend on what you're lighting, where it's going to be in SL, etc. You can bake the AO with the diffuse texture as well, but that requires getting familiar with shading nodes and what goes before or after what and plugs into what. I will say that learning this stuff in a way that helps you to "get it" requires working on your own actual projects and being willing to experiment. In my experience actual modeling in Blender is fairly straightforward, or at least it's easy to learn how to do certain things in hard modeling or sculpting or whatever, based on YT videos, and the real challenge is learning the in and outs of topology and what is good and what is bad and avoiding approaches that create broken mesh when uploaded into SL, and that make the mesh efficient. Texturing is the hard part in Blender. It's not intuitive at all, and texture nodes and how they relate and interact is pretty daunting. But it's one of those things that if you just jump in and keep plugging away you hit a various points where you say "ah. ok. got it. now I understand". Those are big reliefs when they happen.

Ok thanks to both of you. Yes I read about the cage thing and was not quite sure on what it did (possibly because of an erroneous/conflicting explanation in one video). Also using Shrinkwrap to better conform the low poly model to the high poly one after duplication. I think these together will give me a good result. I'll start experimenting!

Hello all. I've been watching a few videos on YT and attempting to take a high poly model and make a low poly version with the baked textures (diffuse and normals) from the high poly version. That said, the model I'm working on is texture painted by hand, from photographs after being UV unwrapped. When I decimate or remesh the model down to a reasonably simple mesh, and unwrap it, the UV map is different than that of the high poly model. Clearly I've got the workflow wrong. How do you get baked textures from high poly models to map correctly to the low poly model? I'm using Blender and this is the model I'm working on, just the meat. This is the low poly model with no baking, just texture painting. I redid the model higher poly for my current effort:

Well even the four sandboxes available to premium members are empty 99% of the time, which boggles me because each one is four empty sims. I think some sort of new group in SL specifically for social building would be a lovely idea, and find a sandbox available to everyone. There are plenty of them out there.

Builder's Brewery is great. I've not been to many classes or the sim, but the group chat is a great learning space as people are always asking questions and getting answers and advice. I've solved a few questions I had there myself. Also, the mesh and texturing sub-forums on these forums are great for that too. I've been building on and off ever since I started in SL back in 2006. And I have to say I miss the early days where all you could do was build in world with prims because back then building WAS a social activity in and of itself. You'd hang out on someone's build platform, chat and torture prims...for hours. Friends would come and go. It was awesome. When mesh came along I stopped building entirely as I was just not interested in spending hours off in some 3D program. I was not in SL much for a few years, but now that I've been back pretty regularly I dove into Blender and once you "grok" the basic workflow, it gets much easier. I love what mesh can do, but I still miss hanging out and building in world. A table I made in Blender and textured in Substance: I've stopped using Substance and am learning texturing in Blender. This is my first attempt at food (specific use case for my sim lol)...next step is to bake normals into it with a high poly model and slap that on a low poly version with some shadowing. Learning that today (hopefully lol):

If what you're talking about is the viewer *crashing* on login (and in my case, getting a BugSplat notification), vs. your credentials not working or some login failure, yes that is a region issue and it seems to come and go on some regions. I own a sim and I had this problem for a few weeks, to the point where I needed to set home elsewhere during that period. One thing that oddly seems to work 95% of the time is in prefs unchecking "View display names". I came across this doing a extensive search on "crashing on login" to SL. After you login you can recheck it.

If you need help with learning about the birds and the bees, a mentor is the last place to look for help. Honestly, I think arguing about whether SL is this or that, whether it is or is not a dating app, etc, pretty much completely misses the point of what SL; what you make of it, regardless of what the "primary use case" of the platform is. I have friends in SL who refer to it as "a sex game". Literally. And that is about 90% of what they do (the other 10% is evidently spent shopping for latex and lingerie). To them that is what it is, they have no interest in doing anything here other than hooking up. I know a fair number of content creators, some who support themselves through their SL business and many more who don't, who do it because they love it. Are you going to find those folks at Bukkake Bliss (remember that place? lol). Newp. I knew a few people who spend almost all their time making performances of one sort or another, or building sims, or organizing events. I know a few architects who love SL and even use it professionally. Heck, I know one person who spends all her time on a horse. I recall hearing years ago that Philip Rosedale left LL in part because he felt that it had devolved into a den of iniquity. True or not, I think that fact/rumor points to a perception about the platform that it's about sex. And any casual foray into SL will not counter that perception. Search in the places tab for virtually anything, sort by traffic, and dollars to donuts, 90% of the top 15 hits will be sex related lol. But get off the beaten path and you'll find hundreds of sims and tens of thousands of users who have other interests.

I only play the occasional video game, and being a hard sci-fi nut, I've been excited about Starfield coming out for a couple of years. Imagine my dismay...honestly more like outright disgust, on playing the game and looking at characters that looked like a throw back to 2006 SL. I was appalled. Some games are obviously better, but the best of SL holds it's own for the most part. In many respects, within the limitations of the rendering engine, SL looks amazing, thanks wholly to content creators and sim builders who are committed to squeezing the best possible visuals out of what is possible. Obviously that's a pretty select few, and 98% of SL looks like trash because it's FILLED with trash. Go look at SL destination groups on Flickr and you'll see some extraordinary creations that wring what they can out of the existing technology. Yeah I dream of Unreal Engine but that ain't gonna happen anytime soon.

I'm very happy with my Legacy body because of how responsive it is to the sliders. You can squeeze an astonishingly wide range of shapes out of it. Also, if you switched from Lara you'll pretty quickly discover that it has more natural contours and is far less likely to distort during animations. Kiss shoulders that look like pipes coming out of the wall goodbye lol. However, I don't spend much time naked in SL so really the biggest concern for me is breadth of clothing, and with the deformers that came with the body much of my old Lara clothing is still usable. I really don't understand Maitreya releasing a new body without deformers that allow it to wear clothes from the original Lara body. That would grease the adoption curve. I picked mine up because it was free to existing Lara owners but I've not even unpacked it yet, and won't until I hear someone singing it's praises. Most of my friends are "Meh. It's ok."

SL is what you make of it, and that includes the people you spend time around and what your own personality makeup is. Drama and toxicity has two components: the people you socialize with, and how you yourself respond to uncivil/juvenile/crazy behavior. I've been in SL for almost 20 years, on and off, and have played plenty of multi-player games, also on and off. I have a great time in SL. I have great friends who are wity, mature, and creative, and enough of them that I never find myself going out "to meet people" that I'm not meeting through friends. I also am not easily provoked by idiocy or unkindness or downright pathological behavior. No one can hurt you in SL unless you let them. I'm kind and generous with everyone I meet in SL, and if they are not, well, I don't have to talk with them or spend time around them, lol. All that said, I think it's pretty obvious to anyone who's spent a decent amount of time in SL that there is a percentage of the population that tries SL because they think socializing will be easier than it is in RL, only to struggle because it's not. Many of those people lash out when they get frustrated or don't get what they want. Fortunately they are generally easy to spot and avoid. If you run around to the big dance clubs, or meat markets, you're mixing in the general population and your mileage is going to vary widely. Find venues, smaller communities, and activities that lead you to your tribe.

The textures in EEP files are just a few and limited to 1024sq. Moving clouds in SL are procedural and use one small texture so they are not an issue. I don't believe haze has an impact...I use it extensively on my sim and have never noticed a performance change. Lights, specifically projector lights, definitely have an impact on your viewer performance, particularly if you have shadows enabled.

An experience running on your parcel can change their EEP. My sim uses extensive use of an experience to provide teleportation and EEP changes. In fact, when a user enters they are informed they have to accept the experience in order travel throughout the sim. A sign that sends them a re-invite is there in case they clicked decline or missed it.

This may have been mentioned already, but with respect to events, what really pisses me off is A) I see something I want that someone is wearing or it's rezzed somewhere. B) I go the store, do an area search. It's not there. OK, it's likely it's an event. C) I do to the store's entrance and there is a huge wall of logos of all the events they participate in, but no placards showing what products they have at what events. WTH. Just strikes me as dumb, particularly when plenty of other stores have a placard and even a landmark for you when you click on it.

Ok so it's just a config change. That's too bad. I was hoping you'd get a higher memory allocation since you're paying an ongoing fee. Assuming an efficiently built sim where textures are appropriately sized, running scripts are minimized, prims/mesh are grouped to reduce LI, etc, it stands to reason that if you charge someone a monthly fee for the ability to add 50% more LI, you give them equivalent performance to a standard sim. Otherwise you're kind of just charging them for the opportunity to &$%@ themselves and their visitors.

What is a "land impact upgrade" exactly? Is it any different than what I posited in my original post?

I'm contemplating upgrading my private region from 20k prims to 30k. Does doing so include any changes that increase performance, or do they simply make a config change for your region that allows 10k more prims? That seems like a bit of a rip off if that is the case, particularly since your sim performance is likely to go down if you up your prims (and likely scripts) by 50%. Anyone know more details about this option?

Well you can set up an experience on your parcel which will switch visitors to the EEP of your choice (provided they accept the experience invite) and perhaps you can put a sign saying "best viewed with advanced lighting and shared lighting". Several sims where environment is important route visitors to a landing point in a skybox and include an "automatic" teleporter to the main content that can only be accessed by accepting the experience. I'm gonna bet that if you search on places for "manga" you'll likely find a few stylized sims.

An update. Aquila and Zalificent you have changed my life, lol. Went back easily identified the offending prim and modified it to suit my needs. And I had no idea that objects set to convex hull have that physics property. Super useful to know! And the backdrop worked beautifully out of the box, it was my meddling that caused problems. Also Rafael (I think that is his name, I'm not positive) of MINIMAL has been super responsive and helpful in the past when I have asked him questions. While his scenes/backdrops are optimized for what they were intended for and not disassembly or "parting out", he has no issues with that and will gladly share information to help you with that. And now I'm better equipped to make the best of everything I mod. Thank you so much

OMG thank you SOOO much for all this information. This is invaluable. It never occurred to me to check the physics of the prims after unlinking one of them. It was not the root prim, and I thought nothing else could have changed. I am truly grateful for the time you took to respond.

So occasionally I will buy a finished skybox or scene or backdrop and either modify it or break it up to use it in other builds for my sim. On several occasions removing a *seemingly* unrelated piece will change the physics model. For example, a backdrop that has a doorway...I unlink and remove some walls or other piece next to the doorway...or even some distance from it, and I'm no longer able to pass through the doorway. And the removed pieces are not invisible non-phantom mesh parts, such as for walls and stair cases. What is happening here? It's more that I want to understand the principles and practical aspect than finding a solution, although perhaps a better conception of what is going on will allow me to find workarounds. Here is a specific case, an elevator backdrop from MINIMAL. I removed the two side panels on the iteration on the left, and the result no longer lets me pass through the door (fyi the upper floor exterior wall is simply set to transparent, nothing else was removed).

I've never used a bought shape, only ever used my own. There are a number of good reasons to get comfortable making your own shapes, the primary one being to modify it on the fly to accommodate various bits of clothing and outfits. I change my shape very often when changing outfits to better match the style of what I'm wearing. A few tips: 1. I used to teach figure drawing so I have a pretty good sense of "standard" human proportions. But I think a lot of people have no sense of this at all. For those, a Google search on "basic human proportions" will yield a bunch of helpful resources. There are all kinds of easy rules that you can follow to help you, such as "eyes are generally one eye-width apart". Of course all rules are made to be broken and departures from them are what make us look unique, but they provide a good starting place. 2. Play with the sliders. All of them. A lot. The relationships between the various sliders and the impact they have on your shape is not always obvious and can only be discovered through exploration. The more familiar you become with how one slider affects the results of another, the better equipped you'll be to get the shape you're looking for. 3. Pan around your avatar as you edit your shape. This is particularly true for your head. What looks good from one angle may not look so great from another, such as with cheeks, nose, and mouth. 4. Different heads and bodies respond to the sliders in different ways. What worked on one body or head may deliver surprising results with another. 5. This should go without saying but different skins can have a dramatic impact on how you want to shape your face. In some respects, shopping for a new head/skin combo is like three dimensional chess: every head/skin/shape combination is different.

Thanks Wulfie. I guess I need to play with it a little more actively as my example, which was just a smooth sphere, did not show any of the variation in the colored specular texture I used. That texture may not have been dark enough either. Thanks a bunch!

It's the Axolotl - Vanter Dress. I get that the shinniness texture is usually grey scale. But this dress, and some others that I have seen...the COLOR of the reflection changes, or is at least a gradient of color and not just value. SL only gives you a color picker if you want a reflected color. How do you get a gradient of color? Is this some alpha channel thing?

Can anyone fill me in on how to create the "oily" shinniness reflection which shows a gradient of color, apparently based on angle of viewing or light striking the surface? I can't really see if this changes based on angle but the effect is convincing all the same. I tried putting a rainbow-ish texture in the shinniness texture box and fiddling with levels, but no joy.