RipleyVonD

Drongle McMahon wrote: Certainly no more stupid than me. I wasn't at all sure till I retested it. Here's the (simplest) experiment. Bottom left is the Blender 3D view with the "high poly" mesh in edit mode, and the low poly (one quad) beneath it, looking from above in Y direction. Above that is the normal map baked from the high to low poly (UV map project from view (bounds) from directly above). Top right is the view of the two meshes rendered in Blender, from a similar view, with a single light above left of the camera. Bottom right is the low poly mesh with that map applied in SL, midnight, single local light in the visible sphere. This is all with no channel inversions or rotating anything. So I think that comfirms SL and Blender are the same. All the googled references I found said that Blender is (now) x+y+z+. So if that's right, I think that means SL is x+y+z+ too. I think I saw something saying that Blender object-space maps were x+y-z+, and there were suggestions that it should be changed to the same as the tangent space maps. So maybe that difference may be the source of some confusion. I don't find all this easy, so I just try to remember that it has to look like red light from the right and green light from the top. I assume that is x+y+, but I am ready to be corrected if it's wrong. ETA: This is something thar seriously needs to be put in the wiki if and when we are certain. In this image Dronge is correct, it can be confusing thinking about x, y, z. As Drongle said here a good way to spot if your Normal Map is baked out correctly is red form the right and green form the top.

canobu Almodovar wrote: I can think of as a funky-solution for this problem: 1. Making selection around the edge of the UV-end 2. Filled the border selected with a neutral color high The solution to UV seams is to use "Edge Padding". The color that was used to bleed out the UV Island colors in the above images is the base color that is supposed to fill the empty areas around UV Islands. Black or White, or other colors shouldn't be used as your background color. Baked out Normal Maps usually are baked out with Black in some cases but it needs to be changed to its correct background color. The appropriate backround color for a Normal map is: 128, 128, 255 / #8080ff This background color represents zero or no height. The technique used to in these images would of been more effective if the Solidify filter by the Flaming Pear plugin for Photoshop was used. I don't recommend creating "Edge Padding" this way. Baking edge padding from your Normal Map baking program does a more sophisticated and correct solution to edge padding. Edge Padding needs to be bled out pixel by pixel not by a uniform color, hence why the above technique is not a solution.

I appreciate the the links MIstaMoose but I am aware of Make Humans lenient license, Its the reason I thought of using a Make Human Avatar. The issue is I'm not aware of Linden Labs legal side. Is Linden Lab ok with taking a Make Human Avatar and creating Second Life compatible coordinates?

I was wondering how legal it is to upload a mesh Avatar with compatible Second Life UV Coordinates or UV Mapping. The mesh Avatar source would be a Make Human Avatar. Legal info would be very much appreciated, Thanks.

Your advice and input has been very helpful, Thanks Perrie, and Nalates, I almost didn't make this thread thinking it was too trivial but I learned some VERY important information. :smileyhappy: Updating calling cards while working is a terrible scenario, specially to a stickler for efficiency and performance that I am. I'll make sure to delete those, I'm so happy I learned about that. lol And hiding the library is really helpful against clutter, I was really peeved that the inventory window just insisted in dominating every portion of available space. At-least now the bottom half is reserved for me now. :smileyvery-happy: And also discovered I can open a second inventory window, that is so helpful. I was happy a few days ago when I accidentally stumbled on how to permanently set "Copy, Mod, Transfer" permissions on upload, makes setting permissions on multiples objects so much easier. lol

I sort of forgot to mention that I planned on using this technique only on current project folders. so I don't eventually end up with tons of awkwardly named folders. @Perrie Juran I also do that too, delete items and not drag back into the inventory. Hiding the library is a great tip! Awesome Thanks, I tried a couple of times to drag my project folder under the library folder numerous times but coudn't. I haven't had he need to open the library folder yet.

Oh wow that is alot of stuff. :smileyvery-happy: I'm so green and I felt stressed out that day. lol I can imagine by the time my inventory gets that huge, hopefully my mind is better adapted. That is a very elaborate description of your inventory, a bit overwhelming. I recently thought opening a second inventory window and pinning certain folders sounds like it could be beneficial to content creators. Or maybe dragging out a folder to create another inventory window and pinning the folder contents sound like a really helpful idea. It works though, once you find your rhythm. I'm still reading your post trying to understand all of it. Thats alot of helpfull info, Thanks.

A mod has been notified, Thanks.

Seems that slipped my mind, hopefuly a mod can fix it. I looked for options to move it but didn't see how.

Being that I'm new I still use, and am comfortable with the LL official viewer. But today I started to feel really burned out because I had created so many folders, and sub folders my mind was having a hard time differentiating between the different files. I was finding it difficult to find the folder I was focused on when I took a model back into my inventory and it didn't end-up where I wanted, and it got worse when working with dozens of models at the same time. There didn't seem to be support for colored folders so I had to comeup with something quick. So I finally came up with this simple solution. It is working wonders for my stress levels. lol I know everyone is different, I imagine some might breeze through the folders but not me. So I put a capital "Z" in my master projects folder to always keep it at the bottom of My Inventory folder, then I added underscore dashes forming a line. I added less underscored lines for sub folders. If your like me you can see how it creates a little bit of order and element for the eyes to seperate. And of course before you upload to your Marketplace you can fix the folder names before you upload. I hope this helps someone else having the same issue. Three Levels: Z___________________MASTER FOLDER ____________SUB FOLDER MAIN FOLDER

Here's a quick update of the final version of this Castle. Its the same image found on my store.

Astrid Kaufmat wrote: Translating Tools are dumb( they are computers). A computrer is powerful but limited, mankind has a lot less power but no limits. As consequence the only good way to get proper multilanguage descriptions for your products would be finding friends who speak quite fluent those other languages to write notecards for you,hence translators in many cases translate words but not concepts. Anyway if this post was in general section, maybe some linden/s could see it easier and help better, if something could be done. Yeah! Thats true, I was actually hoping someone would steer me away from that Idea, I didn't trust the software all that much. I can't see myself asking friends for translating my product pages, it seems so tedious and I tend to not like the idea of being a bothersome person. @Perrie Juran I spent a good ten minutes trying to figure out what Frank Zappas quote meant. lol I guess today is one of my slower days. :smileyvery-happy:

I sort of had the feeling it might be a bad idea because I just don't really know what the translation really sounds like. I imagine professional movie studios or book publishers that translate their work actually have the funds and hire trustworthy professional translators for their work. It sounded like it would get a little exhausting after a while just for the effort to be not really worth it, I thought I would at least ask and see. Having a Google Translate widget on an external page sounds like a good idea, I might try that one day. Thanks Sassy. :smileyhappy: P.S. The new spellcheck is awesome thanks LL. :smileyvery-happy:

Has anyone worked with translating their product page listing to other languages? I noticed some SL residents posting very well translated messages from other countries, there are alot of free services to use but I don't trust them very much. I thought maybe someone could recommend a good service or page to use. Thanks.

Project Gooseberry is a fantastic undertaking, I can't wait to see the full lengh movie. I love this software, and I predict that Blender will grow to be an even more mature and capable program, so much so that the larger studios will need to reconsider their pricing model. Epic just recently shookup the indie developer scene with their amazing Unreal Engine 4 and generous subscription pricing. I think Blender will soon start to cause a similar ripple among inflated pricing the larger studios ask for their animation packages. Just a thought.

Drongle McMahon wrote: "you cant use lossy compression on them" If they are bigger than 128x128, you have no choice, they are always lossy (irrespective of what the checkbox says). I actualy meant in your image editing program, saving Normal Maps to jpegs with too much compression is not good. PNG compresion is safe for storage on your harddrive but its best to upload your images as TGA so that your image is uploaded at its best quality before its uploaded and optimized (yes compressed). Yes Normal Maps do get compressed in rendering engines, they use their own special alghorithms, but when working with Normal Maps if you save them to lossy compression thats how it gets uploaded to Second Life so when you upload and SL applies its own compression it won't give you a good result.

Drongle McMahon wrote: "Also while the detail may be non-uniform on the mesh it doesn't have to be on the UV map." Yes. In fact that's the thing that really renders (sorry!) my questions a bit moot. In reality, I suppose, you simply don't do only the same the same thing with a normal map that you would otherwise do with geometry. In the actual crate, the normal map had woodgrain and pitted rust as well as the bolt heads. Those would have been beyond impractical with geometry. It would be nice to have numbers to back up the argument for normal maps, and to make some decisions, but I guess I'll have to do without. Right or wrong, I have a fairly developed sense of "that's too much geometry", but no such clear " That's too much normal map", and texture download delay is the major annoyance of SL, at least on my slow connection. You can use your sense on whats too much texture and carry that over to Normal Maps and thats all you really need. Normal maps are just textures. Except you cant use lossy compression on them, or you get bad artifacts. Im not an expert on LL's optimization alghoritm during upload of textures, but Normal Maps don't use every color of the rainbow so I imagine they get optimzed smaller than a diffuse texture for download size. The same goes for Specular maps, they are only grey scale so should be optimized even more so. Normal Maps were created to relive stress on computer hardware not incur anymore. PC hardware manufacturers have adapted there drivers and hardware over the course of ten years for the use of Normal Maps. Even the lowest end hardware SL residents might have should be able to use "Materials" without a problem.

Since were on the subject in this thread (which I almost created myself). Does anyone have any info if "Animated Mesh" with custom bones is on the roadmap? Or Is it being considered?

I'm happy I was able to help.:smileyhappy: But I can't seem to understand what the word flounce means. Oh right, thanks image search. lol It is best to learn asking for help, there are alot of tricks and solutions that make 3d modeling easier.

It is.

There's notihing wrong in being too much of a perfectionist. Being an artist myself I love that personality trait. I would make two copies of your dress. Rig one dress while its single sided, then copy the weights of your single sided dress over to your double sided dress. Vertices on both sides should be weighted, tweak and double check weighting. I've seen Gaia has a video showing how to copy weights from one mesh to another.

Right, for NPCs, that would be awesome. I can image walking into a store and an NPC greeting me and pointin me to the section for newly added products or something. Like I said before it would bring life to so many aspects of Second Life.

I can do without Blendshapes myself. But custom skeletons / armatures would have Second Life feel like a more complete building platform. This would attract alot, and I mean ALOT of talented and experienced people, and motivate them to build for Second Life. Also the life that it would give sims and objects would be breathtaking. If custom skeletons are ever implemented the first thing I would create is a stream of water and rocks animated realisticly with "Materials" Normal Mapping and some fish trying to jump up stream. lol

I have wished for Blendshapes for the longest time. And custom skeleton / armatures.

I imagine some can argue that Computer Hardware gets faster, cheaper, and more capable every year, that soon using tens of thousands of triangles on a mesh won't be a problem. That may have been true at some point but now people are moving on to Tablets and portable devices and the computer industry is suffering because of it. A counter argument I would expect at this point is "Well the Nvidia Tegra K1 should take care of that problem." This mobile processor from Nvidia called the Tegra K1 is capable of rendering PC quality graphics on a mobile device, I didn't for the life of me think we would be this close to having capable hardware of this quality on mobile devices this soon. The problem with this hardware is that it still relies on portable power supply solutions. A mobile device dosent have the privilige of a huge power supply that you see in PC's to render lots of triangles on screen. A portable device will be able to render PC quality graphics for a several hours before its battery runs out. Sound building practices started years ago in an effort to relieve the burden that the GPU has when rendering too many triangles. Normal Maps aren't just a nice graphical feature introduced by Linden Lab, they have been around for Ten Years and they are the Holy Grail of building resposibly. Now that people are moving onto less capable portable devices resposible building is just as important as it has always been. If Second Life residents ever hope to see SL on a mobile platform for free, and not limited in graphics, people need to consider building responsibly with mobile devices in mind.