Cathy Foil

By having us have to agree to the new TOS here on secondlife.com instead of when we log into the Second Life Grid Linden Lab is effectively holding all our accounts hostage! Without agreeing to the the TOS one can not access their account information to make any changes or sell off any remaining Linden Dollars or transfer an real US Dollars that may be in the account. This is unacceptable! The TOS is written for the use of the Second Life Grid not secondlife.com. There is no good reason residents should have to agree to the TOS to access secondlife.com People like Chosen Few and others who for legal reason can not agree to the TOS or simply disagree with the TOS and will not agree to the TOS can no longer even participate in the forums here. I know there are a lot of residents who have refused to agree with the TOS ever since LL made the changes giving them full rights to everything uploaded to SL. I know many like Chosen Few have stuck around and continued to participate in the forums here just waiting and hoping LL will come to their senses and revert the TOS back so what we create is ours and ours alone. Hopefully LL will see this new way of implementing the TOS and giving themselves full rights to our creations is a mistake and will correct it.

I been in SL since 2007 and in all these years I never had to agree to the TOS in order to log into secondlife.com. By forcing us to agree to the TOS to access secondlife.com this means wonderful people like Chosen Few and others who can not agree to the TOS because of legal obligations to their clients can no longer even participate in the Forums here. It also means for those who can not or will not agree to the TOS can not access their Linden Dollars in their accounts. This effectively means Linden Lab is holding accounts hostage because now you can't sell your Linden Dollars on the Exchange without first agreeing to the TOS. It also means Premium Members can't change their payment info or stop being a Premium Member or change any information without agreeing to the TOS. This means that those residents who are automatically being charged for Premium Member accounts by Credit Cards or Bank Accounts or PayPal Linden Lab will continue to be able to charge them almost indefinitely in some cases. So in order to stop being a Premium Member if residents, who either can not or will not agree to the TOS, will have to contact their banks or other institutions and make changes there so the payment information on file with Linden Labs will no longer be accurate thus stopping Linden Lab from being able to collect payment. Please Linden Lab I implore you go back to the having people agreeing to the TOS when they log into the Second Life Grid and not secondlife.com.

I had a few ideas for the MarketPlace. 1. Everything can be demo at Demo Islands in Skyboxes in SL. Only one person can be in a Skybox. Demos only last about 5 minutes before they automatically self delete. Each Demo Island may be made up of hundreds of SkyBoxes and you can not Teleport someone to your the Skybox you are using neither can you rez or build anything or run scripts. 2. Limit the number of times an item can be sold on the MarketPlace before it is automatically unlisted. This will get rid of the problem of people putting things up for sale and then leaving SL for good clogging up the MarketPlace with old outdated not supported items. To relist the item make it super simple just one or two clicks for the merchant on the MarketPlace. 3. After say six months to a year if an item on the MarketPlace has not been purchased at least once it is automatically unlisted. Again it could be relisted by the just a few clicks of the mouse by the merchant. This would again help get rid of a bunch of items that are just clogging up the search results.

Darkness Anubis wrote: I have said for years the best thing they could do to fix the Land issues and encourage more land ownership is to do away with the tier system entirely and go to a flat xCost/SqMeter system. Yes the amount it is set at means some would spend a bit more per meter and some a bit less. The beauty of the system is that people would be willing to pick up tht odd adjoining plot to their own because they can pay just for that rather than being bumped up to the next tier and paying WAY more a month. Example I own a 4096 so my tier level is US$25 a month If a 512 next to me opens up. I would love to have it but because of the tier system It would bump me up to $40 a month. Um no I will live without the 512. Now what if instead I was playing a flat rate. Say $.006 per meter (25/4096) then that 512 would only add $.006x512=$3.07 additional monthy to the $25 I am already paying. I would buy that 512. I also think premium in order to buy land needs to go. Anyone should be able to buy land. Many more people would happily own land if they didn't also need to have a premium act. BTW before free accounts existed there was a one time $9.95 act available and they COULD own land. It went away with the advent of free acts. Just my thoughts on what I would like to see with land in the future. You have some interesting ideas there Darkness. I have definitely been in the same position where some land become available for purchase next to my current land and I would have loved to have bought it but doing so would have bumped me up to the next level making it not worth it. I think the system you suggest would work much better than the current one does.

I really think LL needs to reconsider implementing the Mesh Deformer. All the work for it is done and paid for. It works completely different than Fitted Mesh so no reason they can't work side by side. It makes custom mesh avatars work with all the Editing Appearance sliders. With a few more options added Mesh Deformer 2.0 could be a game changer. Here is a quick mesh head I made demonstrating how the mesh deformer allows the mesh head to be adjusted with all the Editing Appearance sliders. This does not just work for custom mesh heads but all body parts or full custom mesh bodies. The mesh deformer also automatically works with avatar physics and all animations and animation overrides. Just rig your custom mesh body or body part to the normal skeleton bones and adjust the weights as we been doing for years. In the mesh upload window select a few extra options and then upload you mesh. That's it!

Yes please post a few pictures of the houses and be sure to take some in wire frame mode as well. Press Ctrl + Shift + R to switch to wire frame mode.

Good question Vulpes! I been trying to figure this one out myself for weeks now and well be eagerly reading all the replies you get. The way I have been doing it so far is mainly using 3D Coat two different types of methods for creating cloth folds. One way was mentioned already by others. That is to sculpt folds on a higher resolution mesh and then bake them onto a lower version which is the one that will be uploaded to SL. The second way in 3D Coat is to paint directly onto the low resolution or low poly model the normal map. In 3D Coat you can paint directly onto the model normal maps, diffuse and specular maps either one at a time or two of the three or all three at the same time. The paint tools are very much like the basic Photoshop tools. I had assumed ZBrush could do the same thing but maybe it can't. 3D Coat is $69.99 on Steam right now. I bought it when it was $99 and still feel like I got a bargain. I couldn't be happier with it. There are some limitations to the Steam version of 3D Coat. Largest Diffuse, Normal and Specular maps that can be created is 2048 x 2048 but that is plenty for SL needs and you are limited to texture map 7 layers. Nice thing about painting the normal map directly onto the model is you see exactly what it will look like in SL especially if you just paint your normal map in 3D Coat as 1024 x 1024 or lower to start with depending on the size of normal map you like to use. I am not that great at sculpting yet so far painting directly on the model has been the fastest way for me but that could change. Hope that helps. Cathy

I understand your frustration over not getting a concrete answer to your original post. I am so sorry I wasn't able to provide you one with my reply. Unfortunately at this time no one can not even probably LL since everything is still so early in the development stages. I agree with you that land costs and tiers in SL are way too high and I am sure LL could lower them to a more reasonable level if they wished to. Unfortunately I doubt they will anytime soon. As far as your observations that people love to snark, complain, condescending, rude and unwelcoming unfortunately that is just par for the course for having a open discussion where everyone is invited to participate. I know it is jarring at first but I have learned to develop a little bit thicker skin when participating in these types of forums. Threads often wander far from the original topic of the original post. It is just the nature of the beast. One small comment made by one person, while related to the original post, sparks an idea or comment from another but in turn is even farther away from the original post and so on. If a thread goes too far off topic LL moderators are supposed to step in. Say like if we started talking solely about the World Cup. In this thread however I don't think we strayed too far so the moderators didn't feel the need to step in. Your probably never going to read this or respond and may never participate in the forums again and that will be sad. I wish you luck Tamar. Despite what you may feel I am glad you started this thread.

As mentioned by the OP the prohibitory high land tiers could be considered an economic problem. Another one could be how full permissions system has been set up and economic havoc it plays in the MarketPlace economy. Which results in price undercutting and severe dilutions of markets. Which while yes in the short term lowers prices for consumers but in the long run means less diversity of original content creation since those content creators who make their own items get pushed out because it becomes not economically viable to spend hours, days, weeks or months to create a new item from scratch when hundreds and hundreds of people are just buying full perm items flooding the market with so many items the chances of a customer even finding the original content creators items become slim. I am not saying that Full Perm in and of itself is evil or bad just the way LL has set it up and the rules that govern it have had negative consequences. Full Perm done in a different way under difference rules can actually increase creativity and not cause undercutting or hurt markets. IMVU is a good example of how this can be achieved. Not that I am saying IMVU is better than SL overall. It is not. Just that in this area they surpasses SL in my opinion.

I think I remember reading someplace that Ebbe Linden said they want to restructure how the costs are distributed to bring down land costs. I think he mentioned some form of tax. I assume he meant a tax on items sold in the MarketPlace. Right now LL takes a cut from the content creators share so that is basically taxing content creators. Sounds like LL would have the buyers pay the tax perhaps. On a side note while I know it is easier to refer to this new virtual world LL is planning to build as SL 2.0 but Ebbe has made it quite clear that this is not SL 2.0 but is completely separate with it's own identity. One of the biggest reasons for this is probably because it will have very different set of rules and limitations put upon it than SL currently does. Much of the lag issues and economic problems seen in SL could have been avoided had LL made different managerial decisions. It only makes sense that LL would want to learn from these mistakes and thus set different rules and limitations for the new virtual world. By not naming this new world SL 2.0 people should not have the expectations that it will automatically follow the same rules and limitations that SL is governed by. It is a different product that is simply made by the same company.

Most likely you will have to retopologize your scanned mesh to get the Land Impact, commonly referred to as LI, down to a reasonable level. Land Impact is the amount of prims that are assigned to your mesh. Each piece of land in SL is only allowed so many prims. If your scanned mesh has too many vertices the LI will be too high and not that many people will buy it or your parents won't be able to rez that many of them on their own piece of land. You can retopologize manually in quite a few programs but ZBrush I hear is the easiest. Since you bring up the topic of rights to the files you should know anything you upload to Second Life you automatically give Linen Lab full rights to your creation. It is in the TOS. Many people are upset since LL put this in the TOS about a year ago.

Mony Lindman wrote: FYI this is what the CEO of SL already answered about teleporting between SL1 and SL2: Mony Lindman wrote: Ebbe Linden wrote: You will certainly be able keep your identity, social network and L$ and you can hop back and forth and decide for yourself where it makes sense to spend your time and energy. How do you mean this "hop back and forth" move ? In the same viewer ? Teleporting ? Loging off and loging in with another viewer ? Sorry, different viewers you would have to run side by side. ------------------ And if this is not enough , just imagine that you want to play Nintendo games on Play Station.. FYI: you cant! Its the same problm. SL and all the other grids in Open Sim are all "Nintendo games" and they are compatible with each other and use the same "engine". SL 2 is a .. "Play Station game" .. a completelly different engine , not compatible with SL 1 or the other grids in Open Sim. If you quoted Ebbe correctly Mony nothing he said would preclude the possibility of teleporting from SL to the new world. Because of your "artistic brain", your words not mine, I will spell out one simple way LL could achieve teleporting from SL to the new grid. In the SL viewer code new code would be added so when you click to teleport to the new virtual world it automatically logs you into the new world and teleports you to your chosen destination. If this new world uses a viewer and is not browser based the code for it could either be separate for the SL viewer code or contained in the SL viewer code itself. Once at your desination the UI would be that of the new world's not of SL viewer UI. During this log in process to the new grid information such as what your avatar was wearing and appearance setting could be gathered. We can already gather our avatars appearance settings as an XML file and generate a fixed avatar mesh which could automatically be uploaded to the new grid and all textures applied to it. It would also be possible to IM back and forth between both SL and the new world. None of this is beyond the abilities of LL's employees and if I can easily think of a way to do it I am sure they can come up with a much more elegant solutions. FYI SL and the new virtual world LL is panning on making are not Nintendo or Play Station. And FYI had during the development process of PLay Station the technicians could have made Nintendo games play on it if they had wanted to. I am sure they didn't because that's not what they wanted the Play Station to do. All I have suggested is being able to teleport from SL to the new world and that your avatar would appear the same in the new world as it did in SL. This is not rocket science. It is just figuring out how to get your shape and textures and worn items or copies of said items from SL to the new world in an automated process. As I have sat here I have thought of a second way all this could be accomplished. Think of it in terms of a hologram or green screen effect. You log into SL and decide to teleport to the new world. Once you have automatically been logged into the new world while still being logged into SL the SL servers transmit your SL avatar's image to the new world and super imposes it on top of the new world's avatar. Kind of like wearing a hologram over your avatar. Everyone around you would see your SL avatar as it appears in SL but none of the assets have actually been transferred over to the new world and since you are still logged into SL all your communications and AO and scripts would still work but won't produce any lag in the new world. Where would your avatar go in SL once you teleport to the new world? Perhaps there will be a series of LL sims where your avatar will simply be in empty space. It actually wouldn't move but the animations would move the avatars limbs and the avatar in the new world would move. In fact the real avatar in the new world would be invisible and could even be very low poly. This splitting up of the avatar appearance and the new worlds sim contents on two separate servers would actually reduce the lag further for the new world.

Look Hun it is obvious that you have never tried to port something from SL to say InWorldz. If you had you would know that they are not 100% compatible nor 100% the same platform. While yes based on a lot of the same code there are differences between the code for SL and all other Open Sims and I am sure that difference is just going to get bigger and bigger Dearie. So it could be argued that SL and all other Open Sims are not truly the same platform. Just proclaiming something is a different platform hence making teleporting from one platform to another platform is impossible doesn't make it so. It boarders on idiotic. And unlike you I won't be so rude to suggest you shouldn't talk no matter how little or how great I think you might be educated on the subject.

Mony Lindman wrote: Cathy Foil wrote: Imagin Illyar wrote: Ebbe has already said that moving from one world to another would require logging in to a different viewer. This makes sense. The new virtual world is not just an add-on or an upgrade to SL, it really is a completely different new virtual world. It will have "radically improved" avatars. He's also said that nothing from our inventories will be able to be used as is. Items that will be able to go to the new world will have to be reuploaded by the creator after making tweaks for compatibility. It really will be like starting over when we get there, we will be able to keep our names and friend's list but we will have to create a new avatar and use starter clothing and accessories until we buy new ones. I can't wait to see it With all respect to Ebbe he may not be aware that years ago LL did successful experiments with teleporting from one grid to another. These experiments were not made with just teleporting from grids LL solely owned but to other grids owned by other companies and obviously those grids would not be considered an add-on or upgrade to SL but completely separate from SL. Kinda like flying from one country to another on in RL. Yes for those who want to spend a good amount of time in the new world would eventually want to use the radically improved avatars available there. You also have to remember lllyar that plans for the new world are still in the early stages and I am sure nothing is set in stone. My hope is that Ebbe is using the discussions here to gather good information and suggestions about how best to make the new world. Mony Lidman wrote: The experiments you mention were between different but COMPATIBLE grids that use the same platform, like for instance SL , Inworldz , Avination and others within the OS Grid (Open Sim). Cathy's Reply: If my memory serves me correct the intended goal of the experiment was to allow people to teleport between grids whether owned by LL or not. Mony Lidman wrote: And even so it did not really work. An avatar did manage to teleport from one grid to another but without inventory , money balance or identity. Cathy's Reply: This is irrelevant. Just because inventory or money balance didn't make it when teleporting in these early experiments doesn't mean that with further development that it couldn't. Mony Lidman wrote: Teleporting betwen SL and the new generation of SL will be impossible because these are 2 totally different platforms. Cathy's Reply: This is not true. The new world would certainly use mesh and textures and skeletons so there is no reason why code for teleporting your avatar as it is in SL to the new world couldn't work. Mony Lidman wrote: However, i think about something else since this "announcement" has been made that puts the life of the old SL in danger.. Cathy's Response: I disagree. If we can teleport from SL to the new virtual world it would help keep SL alive. Sooner or later some company will come out with a virtual world that far surpasses SL and the population of SL will drop either quickly or slowly but eventually SL will no longer be viable economically for LL to keep running. That is the real danger. Mony Lidman wrote: What if all the teckies would put their brains at work together and find a solution to the problem of teleporting WITHIN the Open Sim! With inventory, money ballance and identity.. It cant be that much of a rocket science.. Then the old Second Life woud be part of an even larger community , where people can move betwen different grids, with different (but convertible) currencies, with different prices for land and services , and would always have their inventory wherever they go so what they buy in one of these grids can be used in any other and what they sell in one of these grids can be sold in any other too.. maybe with a lower price if the land for a shop there is cheaper.. I can even imagine currency trading between the grids.. And I can also imagine "adult only" grids as well as underage only grids.. Since all these grids use the same platform and the same viewers there should be no such problems with porting inventories as we have between SL1 and SL2. And more grids appear all the time and even more will be created when teleporting will be possible and we can even host such a grid on our computer.. that is already possible. Only the teleporting problem must be solved.. In fact this would be really like the REAL WORLD where there are also different countries with diffrent rules, different currencies, different salaries, different prices.. And this world would grow and in this world , Second Life would rule Hey, Oz Linden .. seriously .. what do you think about this maybe only chance to save the old SL? Cathy's response: Isn't that exactly what the teleporting experiments were about that I already mentioned? It is obvious that LL decided it would not be in their best interest to allow SL residents to teleport to grids that LL did not own. Don't get me wrong it would be cool and maybe the best thing for virtual worlds and residents if we could teleport to other grids not owned solely by LL.

Coby Foden wrote: Niecia Davi wrote: - How do I find my keyboard when wearing the Oculus? - Do I have at least an option to view/check my avie from 3rd person perspective? • Even proficient touch typist say that it is awkward and difficult to use the keyboard when totally blindfolded - what Oculus exactly is. My view is that nobody will use Oculus continuously for hours and hours totally disconnected from the real world. Oculus could be awesome for short periods of time though. • It will not be compulsory to use Oculus, the world will function perfectly on our normal screens. Personally I think the CastAR system would be more usable for long term use than the Oculus Rift. It is light weight and you don't have any problems seeing your keyboard or mouse. For those who haven't heard of CastAR it uses a pair glasses that have passive polarization filters that eliminate cross talk and have small projectors mounted above each eye that project images that reflect off the same kind of surface used for safety strips on clothes and road signs. This surface reflects back to the projector so each eye sees a different image. The glasses also have clip ons that projects the image directly into eyes if you want full immersion like the Oculus Rift. If you decide to use the CastAR without the using the clip ons then the only limit is how much of the reflective cloth material you use around you. You could cover all the walls in your room like wallpaper and thus the walls of your room would melt away and you would be inside SL. Of course you would still see yourself and the furniture. You could even have more than one person in RL in the room with you each wearing their own pair of the CastAR glasses and each see a different perspective just like if you were there in SL. Best thing about CastAR is there is no nausea from wearing them unlike what many have reported when wearing the Oculus Rift. Don't get me wrong the Oculus Rift is awesome but I think I rather go for the CastAR especially since it looks like it will be about half the price and still give me the option of wearing the clip ons and going full immersion.

Imagin Illyar wrote: Ebbe has already said that moving from one world to another would require logging in to a different viewer. This makes sense. The new virtual world is not just an add-on or an upgrade to SL, it really is a completely different new virtual world. It will have "radically improved" avatars. He's also said that nothing from our inventories will be able to be used as is. Items that will be able to go to the new world will have to be reuploaded by the creator after making tweaks for compatibility. It really will be like starting over when we get there, we will be able to keep our names and friend's list but we will have to create a new avatar and use starter clothing and accessories until we buy new ones. I can't wait to see it With all respect to Ebbe he may not be aware that years ago LL did successful experiments with teleporting from one grid to another. These experiments were not made with just teleporting from grids LL solely owned but to other grids owned by other companies and obviously those grids would not be considered an add-on or upgrade to SL but completely separate from SL. Kinda like flying from one country to another one in RL. Yes for those who want to spend a good amount of time in the new world would eventually want to use the radically improved avatars available there. You also have to remember lllyar that plans for the new world are still in the early stages and I am sure nothing is set in stone. My hope is that Ebbe is using the discussions here to gather good information and suggestions about how best to make the new world.

arton Rotaru wrote: Cathy Foil wrote: LL's top priorities should be porting over people SL avatar appearance and keeping lag to a minimum. This is in contradiction already. :matte-motes-tongue: Not necessarily since the new world is using new code. New code can automatically detect scripts that don't need to be running 24/7 or automatically high rez textures at a lower resolution or even perhaps delete automatically vertices that are not visible. All this would dramatically cut down on lag produced by the avatars.

Personally I think the only SL content LL should port over to the new world are is anything your avatar is currently wearing in SL and have it so if you drop a worn item in the new world it doesn't rez on the ground. See if we could log into SL and then teleport to the new world and have our avatars look the same it would be like teleporting from one island in SL to another island but one that just has different set of rules but also one that has way better graphics and physics performance with little or no lag. Then as people start to spend more and more time in the new world they will gradually start to rent or buy land there and start to buy items just for the new world. By doing this LL would leverage the existing servers since what you are wearing from SL is stored on the old SL servers. At first the new world would be rather small and things to do and see few. But as time went on and things developed there more and more residents would spend more and more time there and its economy would grow. This may take several years giving content creators plenty of time to adjust to the new opportunities the new world offers. This would also mean anytime you felt like visiting places in SL and any old content you have is easily accessible just by teleporting to any location in SL. Teleporting from one grid to another has already been done years ago by LL. LL's top priorities should be porting over people SL avatar appearance and keeping lag to a minimum.

It is a known bug caused by the code LL added for Fitted Mesh. It affects Fitted Mesh and regular mesh. It only usually affects certain brands of graphics cards. ATI graphics cards being the one type this bug happens most often. If you are using a third party viewer it could be that they just haven't updated their code yet or if you are using LL's most current viewer it could be that some of the code got reverted back to an earlier version when they did their last update. This happened once before a few months ago so it could be that it has happened again. If you are using LL's default viewer make sure you are using the most up to date version. Usually turning on Advanced Lighting Mode in your graphics preferences in your viewer fixes the problem. I hope that helps. Cathy

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: SL is not IMVU. SL operates on a free market system. Anyone can sell for any price they choose. Personally I wouldn't want SL be like IMVU in this regard. This is what happens in a free market where supply and demand dictate what sells at what price point. If you want to avoid this, then learn to create you own original mesh so you don't have competition from other merchants for that particular item. Yes I am quite aware that SL is not IMVU. IMVU is also a free market just that some of the rules are different and pricing is set in a different way. You may say that IMVU is not a completely free market but then again neither is SL's MarketPlace. LL has some rules which make it not a completely free market like not being allowed to sell in world for less than you sell an item on the MarketPlace. In SL the free market does not quite work the same as in the real world. In SL supply is unlimited and costs nothing once an item is created an unlimited number of copies can be sold. I do create my own items from scratch. This does not stop others from creating similar products and selling them with full permission. I was the first person in SL to create a prim foot from sculpties and put it in a sculptie high heel shoe about six months before Stiletto Moody came out with their first pair. A few month later someone came out with a full perm version and within 6 to 8 months there were hundreds of shoes selling on the MarketPlace from the full perm version. I watched how the first ones sold for a fairly high price but as more and more people started selling basically the same shoe with just a few modifications, such as color changes, the price just kept plummeting. With the influx of so many shoes watering down the market I saw my sales vanish. Yes this is a free market and you can't copyright an idea. I was not able to copyright the idea of using a prim foot inside a high heel shoe nor is it considered intellectual property. But I have seen and experienced what full perm items can do to a market and I understand how LL has set up SL and how full perm items don't necessarily encourage creativity and how having no way to set a minimum price items created from full perm items ends up pushing those content creators who do create their own items out of business and out of SL. The way IMVU does it is full perm items are basically sold for very little and when resold the minimum price is the same as the initial price of the full perm item. The original content creator gets the same amount for every item that is sold. So lets take a pair of full perm shoes that sells for L$ 300. Someone buys the shoes and then adds their own creative touch to the shoe. They then sell the shoes for L$ 400. For every pair that is sold the original content creator gets L$ 300 and the person who bought the original full perm shoe gets L$ 100. The more work or creativity the buyer of the full perm shoe puts into the shoe the more they will be able to sell it for on the market place. This encourages creativity. This keeps the price stable and stops undercutting. This protects the original content creator an assures them that they will always get their fair share. Full perm prices are low which means those who like to buy full perm items and add their own touches don't have to pay an arm and a leg. This also means that original content creators who don't want to sell their items with full perm can and not have to worry about under cutting from others who but little or no added extra work or value into full perm items they bought. You and I Amethyst will just have to agree to disagree with which system is better in this regard. I believe IMVU does it better and you believe SL does.

Hi Ripley! Every time I see one of your posts I can't help but notice your avatar appears to be from IMVU. If it is then your stance on SL's permissions system and the changes you like to see makes sense. I got a few things up for sale in IMVU and I too wish SL could have a royalty and permission system like IMVU. IMVU system encourages creativity and at the same time protects the original content creator and keeps someone from buying full permission items and then undercutting prices. Which I have seen happen numerous times in SL on the MarketPlace. Here's is what I have seen happen time and time again. Content Creator (A) creates a new product which starts to sell well at a pretty profitable price. Content Creator (B) creates a similar product which is about 50 to 70% as good as (A's) and sells it Full Permission for ten times the price. Lot's of people by the full perm item and put very little effort or creativity into the product and sell it for substantially less than (A's) original product. More and more people buy the full perm item and the price keeps dropping as they all undercut each other. Content Creator (A) sales go in the toilet as the market is now flooded. Thus begins the cycle of undercutting and devaluing of content not sold as Full Perm. The ironic thing is eventually Full Perm items, who's initial price of ten times was only viable because (A's) content was selling well at a decent price, have to lower their prices because now everything is being undercut devaluing (A's) product. The way IMVU is set up it keeps this from happening. Now don't get me wrong IMVU over all sucks compared to SL but they do do a good number of things I wish SL would consider adopting.

From what I understand Snow Rabbit's mesh heads are not without their own problems. I believe Snow's heads use a series of mesh layers stacked on top of each other for the mouth. The the bottom layer is probably with the mouth opened to it's maximum. The middle layer is probably with the mouth half closed and the top most layer with the mouth fully closed. Each one of these layers would be its own materiel so with a script you can change the alpha setting to slowly have it fade to 100% invisible revealing the layer beneath and then the next lower layer would then also start to go to 100% alpha and so on till the mouth was fully open. The problem with stacking alpha textures and materials in such a way is you can get some strange flickering which ruins the effect. One way to combat this is to have all the textures of the head be set on Full Bright and or wear a bright face light. This is fine during daytime but at night it is less than ideal. From the few videos I watched the expressions are rather random and probably don't respond to typing or if you use your voice. I do think Rabbit's mesh heads are very beautiful and are probably my favorites esthetically though a bit too child like for my personal preference to wear as an avatar.

You are kinda seeking the Holly Grail of mesh heads unfortunately. Lots of people have been trying all using multiple mesh or multiple materials using alphas and textures to hide or show different parts of the face with some small success. But as far as what you are looking for no one as far as I know has succeeded. Only way I can think of trying to come close would be to have a mesh head that has no mouth and use animated textures to give the illusion of the mouth opening and closing. Of course from the side the missing mouth geometry would be noticeable. As far as the eyes blinking that could either also be done with the animated texture or just have the head alpha that makes most of your real avatar's head invisible but not make the eye area of the head invisible so the skin textures around the real avatar's head is visible. It is really a shame that LL rejected the Mesh Deformer. Hopefully the new CEO will realize how beneficial to SL it would be to have the Mesh Deformer. It can work right along side Fitted Mesh because they work completely different from each other so there is no reason SL can't have both. Anyway here is a video I made some months back showing a quick mesh head I made that uses the Mesh Deformer. You will notice that the eyes blink and all the Editing Appearance sliders work on the head as well. You won't really see any facial expressions though I know they work because I seen them work and because if the Editing Appearance sliders work that means when the real avatars face moves making an expression the custom mesh head face would also move. Hope that helps. Cathy

Hi everyone, I got up the second video where I show you how to extrude the mesh edges and create UVs that are pretty much the same as the UVs are in Marvelous Designer plus I show you the power of Subdiv Proxy. I got the audio volume up higher on this one. :) Love to get some feed back on the video! I really hope it helps someone. :D Cathy

I am glad you got it worked out. Yea you wouldn't think simply importing the skeleton would mess it up like that. I guess the reason for Maya renaming the bones when you import it is so if you import more than one skeleton into a scene they won't have the same names which could cause problems perhaps. If my memory for quadrupeds is correct you don't need to have the skeleton in the T Pose for export you just in the upload window don't select "Include Joint Positions". But I could be wrong. I think this might work if it needs to be in T Pose. OK say you created a horse mesh. Obviously it be a lot easier to create a horse mesh in its natural standing position on all fours. What I would do to get it into the T Pose is in Maya move advance to say frame 2 or 3. Then rotate the skeleton joints first and then move them into position where the joint fit inside the horse mesh and create a key frame and then do Smooth Bind. I think you can export as a DAE file from there but if you can't just click frame one and the skeleton should move back into the T Pose and your horse mesh should move along with it so it is also in the T Pose. I played with this a few years ago and I think that was how I got it to work. Let us know how your mesh turns out and how you got it to work. Cathy