Cackle Amore

Well, nothing really terribly drastic you gotta learn, it's the new, now being able to use the old, IE, skin, eyes, hair, clothing layers, tattoo layers ,alpha layers, etc. So, a lot of stuff you might have as a dozen different overlaying mesh, can now all be worn as layerables like we used to do before mesh bodies took over. So much less reliance on onion layers. Not to say there still aren't some uses for the onions, but ya, just won't need em as much anymore.

I think it's more so that, while the quality and such has certainly improved with mesh, at least back when the main part of clothes was just a clothing texture layer and we all used the same body, you didn't have to worry about this size or that size, or needing Body A or B, it just all worked relatively seamlessly across the whole grid.

I mean.. it's working off the old system, so not that terribly surprising it's got no materials when there's no built in materials for skin to begin with. But you can still apply those materials on the attachment itself. And obviously still some perfectly valid uses the 'onion layers' can fill, but for a lot of the more basic foundation stuff, that can all be taken care of by BoM now, from the skin itself, to the many uses of tattoo layers from skin blemishes and features, make up, etc. As for Alpha layers, those can easily coexist with alpha huds, it can help cover the smaller nooks and such alpha huds don't cover, while alpha huds themselves can probably be trimed down in size over time to just covering more basic larger sections of bodies with alpha layers doing the more advanced detailing cutouts tailored to what ever clothing item they get made with. I will agree though, having all those skins and other such things being able to be condensed into a simple hud has been pretty nice, maybe that might still be possible as I recall seeing scripting support for BoM floating about, not really something I've tried out myself as I lack the skills for that sort of thing, but I guess we'll have to see what people do with that.

Luckly, the BoM stuff can be used with non standard forms, though you'll of course need stuff tailored made for it. Ideally, if you've got 3 or less textures for the body, you can hook it up into the skin layer. You can also make use of the eyes and hair as well for their counter parts, and the new universal layer will let you add tattoos to those other spots. As for Animesh, My assumption is probably not, atleast not at the moment. The BoM thing only worked on attachments when I was last trying it out. Couldn't even toggle it on an object if it's just rezzed on the ground. But who knows, maybe someday, I imagine they wanted to finally get it pushed out in a stable form so peeps can finally start to use it. ------- Hopefully the TPV's won't take too long

You should think of it as a good thing. You won't need appliers anymore for your base skin and such. Skin, tattoo layers, even alpha layers can shine once more! Can even have like basic undergarments as clothing layers again.

Right click on the product page, and pick inspect You'll see this pop up Then just press ctrl+f and a search box will show up in it, type in "keyword" and it'll take ya directly to em.

Kind of like what @Fritigern Gothly did, worse case, you just acquire a 'permanent' neck based accessory to hide the seam Here's a random doodle of some ideas off the top of my head

I bet @Penny Patton will like the sounds of the recent topics if she missed it.

Before you get to rigging, I'd recommend learning about retopology. Atm it looks like your mane thing was made via scuplting, So it's polygons are probably a chaotic mess, and it'll make it a a pain to properly weight. To explain what Retopoly is, basically, you just rebuild a lower poly mesh around the high poly scuplt. Often times, the high poly sculpt will be used to make a bump map to stick on the lowpoly to retain the extra details. This video should give you a rough idea of how to do it, though I think the fellow in the vid might have some plugins that might throw ya off.

Well, just try to have your lower LOD's seams match up as best ya can, then just kind of match up the UV as best ya can. Don't worry about it being a bit of a mess, you won't be close enough to see the LOD's anyways when they're working as intended. One thing you can do is select the full model, then the LOD, and when your in the UV window, click on view and toggle on the option to like "draw other" or something like that there, it'll show you the UV of the other selected object as a sort of faint backdrop.

Ya sadly glitchy transparency has been something that's plagued video games for quite some time. That's why you're more likely to see things use mask instead.

Well, I'm sure the tool would be nifty, but it does seems a good lot of us are blender users here 😅

Ya, you can make how ever many looks you want on a single account, of various genders, races, species, etc

To be fair, plenty of uses for having something like hair linked to a basic cube as the root. Like if it's made of unrigged pieces, it's easier to position if it's root is a simple cube, and if it's rigged, well surely we've all had issues at one point or another trying to right click on a model and just ending up selecting everything else but the model. Having a simple plain prim cube is much easier to aim for since it won't be as effected by that same issue.

Make sure the permissions are set when it's still rezzed on the ground then pick it up. Basically, if you only change the permissions while in your inventory, it doesn't fully apply, and is more or less just temporary perms. Alternatively, if your on firestorm [I don't know if other viewers have this option] You can set the default permissions to be full perm for anything you upload onto your build account. [Those options are in preferences>firestorm>build1 for me.] An easy way you can tell is in here Look at the N, that shows the current permissions on it And if I was to check the box for Transfer, it'll now have a little * next to it But when I rez it, and pick it back up into my inventory, the * goes away Now, I do admit, I don't entirely know what some of the letters and such is short for, but basically, if you still see the *, it means the permissions haven't been fully applied.

There's also the size of the model in the mix as well, if it's massive when you spawn it in SL, you might want to downscale it back in blender.

That's possibly a reason, I think Penny also had made some blog posts bout that. It's kind of a bit high up behind us by default, and so people probably just built to accommodate that without much thought, and similarly, old default avatars were a bit oversized and it just kind of stuck that way.

You'd have to manually derender me even at the lowest 😉

Also, something I tend to do, if I'm a bit pinched for space on the UV, I'll shrink down sections for the less important parts

I got my own avatar I been working on split into two main parts Outside of SL I'd normally try and stick em both together on one, but with the modding and splicing together nature of SL, I feel some splitting apart doesn't hurt so they can be used standalone from one another. [P.S, the head UV is smaller than the body, just a bit sized up to squeeze in together]

@NeevaBecketEmagan Be sure you got your UV's set up that it can fit into three slots max if ya want to hook it up into the skin layer with BoM, assuming you got a custom UV.

I never called it my original image, it was just simply among the first examples I could fine of a character model paired with it's wireframe for the point I was trying to make, and my opinion has been very consistent, nothin 'suspect' bout it. We don't need to slap 10 layers of subdivide on a model to make it look or animate good, you can easily achieve that with less from cartoony to realism. Having a million polygons in your ass isn't going to stop it from caving in when your avatar is doing the splits, because we simply lack the extra bones to fluidly animate the body to such an extent. All we can do is do the best we can with weight painting and well made flow of topology, but even then, you might be able to get those hot demon vampire buns to have the best lookin patootie in the bloodlines kingdom when sitting down, but that doesn't mean it'll look good when it's twisted and bent in other directions. That's an unfortunate downside when it comes to making bodies and limbs, while it's good to try and account for any possible angle, twist, etc your model might be put through, you can't get it all. And slapping on more and more and more and more and more polygons is a lazy band-aid solution. When it comes down to it, the face is often the only part that can be reasonably more higher poly since it needs to be able to animate. but the whole body doesn't need as much except for mostly around the joints to help them from caving in on each other when the limbs bend about, but beyond that you can easily cut down on excess topology around the rest of the body with little notice. And course, I'm not saying it has to look like it was fresh out of a PS2 game, just be smart about it.

Quite certain games with character customization are often made in similar ways we do them on SL[And often better]. And they aren't made with 'known' outfits at the time, maybe one outfit that's part of the initial character design at best and then the rest come after, working around the model, much like we do in SL, people make clothes to work with the model, not the other way around. They also will sometimes have the bodies sliced up into chunks, so they can more easily be hidden away under the clothes eventually made for it. Sometimes they got parts of the body attached to the outfit if it's not fully tailored to a specific cutoff point, so they can have it more selectively sliced out under neath and just plug it back in with the rest. We don't need more polygons, there's already too many of em, more polygons doesn't mean it's gonna look better or work better, it won't matter how many millions of polygons your ass has, it'll still cave in when sitting because we only got like three or four bones down there to use. Movies and the like can get away with that because they have animation rigs with possibly hundreds of bones to account for all those sort of different ways the body moves and bends in motion, and massive rendering farms to calculate ever frame of those butts, but we only got the basics to work with. I always try to account for every possible twist and bending the rig can do when weight painting, but there's only so much we can account for in the end. And the same goes for LL, they can only cover for such much if there's a large chunk of content makers who just refuse to help improve the game.

In an odd way, I feel like this kind of makes for an interesting counter point to calls against necroing threads. I made that above comment in the middle of the night in jest after it was linked in the other thread about necroing, and it's still sitting at the top of this particular thread category. These forums are kind of slow moving, so, a thread or two being risen from the grave from time to time is really impacting much when ya think about it.

I guess that depends on what side of SL you're on when it comes down to it. I will admit I do have a bit more favor towards toonier/stylized. I would love if there was more selection for human avatars that have a style closer to what you'd see in games like Overwatch and Wildstar. But alas, there's a bit of a gap in the market for human stuff like that. It's anime on one side, and realisticish humans on the other