Cathy Foil

Hi Iki, You are running into the basic problem with Fitted Mesh. Because the avatar in SL does not change shape using the same method as Fitted Mesh very tight fitting or mesh clothing that shows a lot of skin Fitted Mesh does not work that well for. It has to do with the fact that the SL avatar changes most of its shape by using Morphs while Fitted Mesh changes the shape of the Fitted Mesh clothing by changing the scales of the Collision Bones. For your particular mesh dress you made you need to do two things. Make the bottom of the skirt not so tight fitting and apply an alpha to hide all the skin that is supposed to be covered by the clothes. Here's a link to a recent post I made showing that if LL would just add sliders in the Editing Appearance menus that controlled just the Collision Bones the problems you are showing on your avatar here could be easily fixed. Here's a link if you like to read my post. I posted photos demonstrating that it would work because I made sliders for my viewer. http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Custom-Sliders-for-Fitted-Mesh-a-Solution/td-p/2495979 Hope that helps. Cathy

Yes! YouTube is a wonderful place to find loads of tutorials even for beginner. I like this guy he's great: http://www.youtube.com/user/cannedmushrooms He has some really great beginner video tutorials here: http://vimeo.com/johnska7/videos/page:1/sort:date They were made 5 or 6 years ago but the basics never really change. Hope that helps. Cathy

Your welcome Hellclad. I would set the "Fill Texture Seams" setting to more than just 3.0 in your "Texture Bake Set Override" to more than 3.0 if you are still getting black bleed lines showing up. What increasing the Fill Texture Seams setting does is increases the AO coloring past the edges of the UV boarders. I used to work in the printing industry and we could set the color of the ink to go past where the pages where to be cut this was called the bleed. This way when the pages where cut and trimmed the color went all the way to the edge of the page. It is the same idea for the Fill Texture Seam. The color or shading of the AO is bleed past the edges of the UV boarders where the UV pattern cuts the AO texture. Looking at your UV layout you can see near at the top of the UVs from the neck hole to the ends of the short sleeves the UVs are bunched up very close together. This makes it harder to Maya to create an accurate shading texture. It be a good idea to spread them out. Same goes for under the sleeves and arm pit area. You still need a good bleed on the shading by increasing the Fill Texture Seams setting. You can also bring the texture into Photoshop and manually clone the edges to increase the bleed. Even if you adjusted your UVs so that in Maya you didn't need any bleed they would still show up in SL because when you upload a texture to SL it gets converted into a different format and the process slightly blurs the image. Also as you pull back the camera in SL the viewer does something to either the texture by changing it's resolution or doesn't keep the UVs as accurate as when you are close up. I am not sure which. In any event if you have no bleed and pull away dark seams will show up on your mesh. They come from the black background where in your texture your shading stops. If you had a white back ground or green background your to your AO texture the seams that would show up would be those colors instead of black. You are almost there! A fast way to adjust your UVs is to select your mesh in object mode. THen open up your UV TExture Editor and then hold down your right mouse button till the option to select UVs came up. THen select all the UVs. THen click on the Polygons menu in the UV Texture Editor and go down to "Relax" and open up the options window. In the "Relax UVs Options" window put a check mark next to "Pin UV border" and under "Other Settings" select "World space" and set Maximum iterations: to 6 or more. Click apply a few times. You will get a much better even UV layout with less distortions. Let me know if that helps. Cathy

Try exporting the your mesh out as an OBJ. Then import it back into a new scene. Bake a new AO onto the imported OBJ see if that works.

Make sure you normals are facing outside. The darker areas look like they might be pointed inside. The lighter colored area on the right side of the shirt under the arm looks right. Turn on Backface Culling under Shading. That will show you right away if you have any faces that are facing the wrong direction.

Hi Hellclad, Your settings look OK though here is a link to step by step instructions on how to bake AO in Maya. http://www.game-artist.net/forums/spotlight-articles/1317-tutorial-ambient-occlusion-maya-alchemist101.html It is for an older version of Maya but I am sure things haven't changed that much. Judging by the photo you posted it looks like you may have some overlapping UVs or UVs that are not inside the UV range. Hope that helps. Cathy

Astrid Kaufmat wrote: gotta find a demo and test it. thanks. my big headbreraking iussue now is getting the top of bikini working or tube dresses working 100% with fitted mesh it always seems to be soething going wrong. For closed outfit the subtle fil rouge functionality/errors gets really thin, the result would be so far acceptable, after all also said on wiki alpha would still be required . Yea bikini and tight tube dresses that show a lot of cleavage of the breasts are never going to work well with Fitted Mesh the way it is now. The problem is just that the avatar mesh just doesn't change shape using the same method of bone scaling like Fitted Mesh does. The avatar for the most part uses morphs to change shape. Take the breast morph for example. LL took Ruth and in Maya duplicated the Ruth mesh so there were two of them on screen. Then they reshaped her breasts, not by scaling any bone or just picking the vertices of the breast and scaling them up, but by resculpting the breast shapes using the tools in Maya. Once they where happy with the new shape they then selected the duplicate mesh, with the large breast, and held the shift key and selected the original Ruth mesh and created a Blend Shape. This created a Blend Shape slider that works just like the sliders in SL. When the slider is set to zero you have the default Ruth shape. Then as you move the slider to 1.00 position the vertices of the Ruth mesh breasts move into the new shape LL made with the duplicate Ruth mesh. A slider position of 0.5 the vertices of the breast are moved half way between the default Ruth shape and the duplicated Ruth shape with bigger breasts. Fitted Mesh method of changing shape just changes the scale of the collision bones. Vertices of clothing mesh weighted to a particular bone just get scaled up or down as you move the sliders in SL but since the avatar mesh doesn't change shape in the same way Fitted Mesh does not really follow the true shape of the avatar mesh. Now LL could let the residents compensate for a lot of this by letting us have custom collision bone sliders. Take a look at my post http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Custom-Sliders-for-Fitted-Mesh-a-Solution/td-p/2495979 and please comment on it. See when you change the sliders in SL now the current sliders do two things at once. Change the morph slider values but also the slider for the scaling of the collision bones. Custom Collision Bone sliders would just affect collision bones not the Morph sliders. Hope that helps clarify a few things. Cathy

Cool! Thanks for the info Astrid! My version of Maya is too old for ngskintools but the abWeightLifter I will definitely use. Thank you so much! Cathy

YW Aurelia! Just out of curiosity would you be willing to take your now single material mesh and add a completely new material to those same faces that were giving you errors? Perhaps there was just something wonky about that pink material. Some setting that had gone funny. I would try just a plain default lambert. If you don't feel like messing with it anymore I totally understand.

@ Nirmanakaya I have a few suggestions. In Maya when you use Copy Weights tool before you copy the weights open up the Copy Weights Options window and turn off the copy Smooth Bind option and see if that gives you a better result. You might also want to just export out of Maya the avatar mesh itself that LL rigged and weighted to the Collision Bones as a DAE file and then upload it to SL and wear it. Then you can see just how well the avatar shape follows the real avatar's shape. Another suggestion would be to Smooth Bind to the Normal skeleton bones and not the Collision Bones first. Then adjust the weights to your liking. Then save the weights to a file. Open up the saved weights file in a word processor and replace the normal skeleton's "m" names with the Collision Bones names and save it. Then replace the weights of your mesh with the new weights you just created. This should work for the Arms, Legs, Neck and Head because for those areas for each "m" or normal bone there is a corresponding Collision Bone. So mHipLeft = L_UPPER_LEG and so on. Problem is in the pelvis area and chest area. There are more Collision Bones than Normal Bones but at least is should be a start. Now I am on an older version of Maya. I am on Maya 8.0. Saving the weights is limited so I use a free Plug-in named Comet to do this with. A newer plug-in I just found is Dora. It is compatible with more Maya versions than Comet. Dora is compatible from Maya 7 through Maya 2012 though I don't know why it would be compatible with 2013 or 2014. Maybe the creator just hasn't updated the listing on Creative Crash. Anyway Dora has a built in bone name changer which is probably easier to use than editing in a world processor. Here's the link to it. http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/script/dora-skinweight-import-export Hope the helps. Cathy

Sounds like you did everything right to me. In SL try wearing Ruth's shape and see if you get the same result when walking. There is a couple of things that could be happening. One I take it you are copying the weights from the avatar LL provided that is weighted to the collision bones. If that avatar's weights are off then your skirt weights will be off as well. Two your avatar mesh in SL weighted to different bones with, as you mentioned, joints that are different positions. I am not sure but something tells me that vertices might move differently because of the offset position of the collision bones. (UPDATE: Just did a test in Maya. I copied the weights of the female avatar mesh that was provided by LL weighted to just the collision bones. Then detached the skin and moved the L_UPPER_LEG joint way away from the avatar even rotated it. THen I smooth bound the mesh back to the skeleton and replaced the weights with the weights I just saved. When I rotated the mHipLeft joint the leg bent totally the same. So it doesn't matter that the collision bones joints are offset.) Note it does make adjusting the weights after Smooth Bind harder since Smooth Bind uses distance from the joint to determine the initial weights. Lastly it could simply be that because the real avatar mesh changes shape mostly by a totally different method using Morphs than Fitted Mesh which change shape by changing the scales of the collision bones. So when you walk, the result of the difference between the two methods becomes more apparent. The skirt vertices just don't follow exactly the relative positions of the avatar mesh as you move your avatar shape away from Ruth's shape. Here's a link to a topic I started for a solution that goes can fix a lot of these types of issues: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Custom-Sliders-for-Fitted-Mesh-a-Solution/td-p/2495979 Hope that helps and if you like the custom slider solution please comment on my post there. We need to get LL's attention on it. Cathy

Aurelia Chauveau wrote: Hi Cathy, Yes it is all rigged the same as the nearest blue areas... that's why I'm having trouble figuring out why they are going haywire. I was wondering if it did have something to do with them having 2 different materials at all. What happens if you replace the pink material with the blue so it is all the same? Don't change the weights or anything.

Looks like the weighting of the pink areas are messed up. Make sue they are weighted the same as the nearest blue area.

Perrie Juran wrote: Cathy Foil wrote: InWorldz however using the original Mesh Deformer custom mesh avatars faces do move and have all the same expressions as the underlining default avatar because of the way it works. I know I have tested it. If your name is Rhys Goode in InWorldz I will send you my custom mesh test head so you can see for yourself. It is a completely different mesh head than the default avatar. I made it with a program named Makehuman. For those of us who don't do IW could you post a video? OK here you go Perrie. Hope you enjoy it. Sorry no sound. Didn't have time to edit it.

Rhys Goode wrote: The main problem with the fitted mesh/collision bones scheme is that meshes do not deform the same way as the SL avatar. Now, one way to do this is to replace the SL avatar mesh with the rigged mesh mesh, and blank out the SL avatar mesh with an alpha mask. That is what the lady in the turtle neck was doing, bouncing around in the linden feel good flick. If I had a way of *legal* using an avatar's skin, applying it to a mesh, rather than just the SL avatar.... Not so easy, but doable, making a mesh avatar with the same texture faces as an SL avatar. If you happen to have your own .tga files for the skin, then it is easy to make mesh clothes that "fit" arbitarty slider positions. Just mask out the SL shape, and bring on your own, and weight the clothes to follow the skin. Starlite is nice, but being able to use the same textures that go into a proprietary skin on a mesh avatar (conforming to the same UV map) does not seem like that big a deal in the IP department. But I do not know if the technolgy would allow it. I know very little about the dark arts of copybotting, and it is sufficiently unacceptable, that I have not delved there myse. However friends tell me it is not impossible, with a bit of trial and error, to get the UUID of the particular textures..in question. My question... is there a way to do this without trampling all over someones copywight rights? Or a way for a copyright holder to sanction such use? It would make living with "fitted" mesh, a lot more palatable. Is there Rhys you bring up some good point and good ideas. Yes a custom avatar rigged as Fitted Mesh would help though only if the custom avatar mesh was weighted the same as the mesh clothing. Meaning that the vertices of the custom mesh avatar and the vertices of the mesh clothing nearest to each other were weighted the same to the same collision bones then they would deform exactly the same. In theory this would solve the problem but there are a couple of issues. One the chances of the custom avatar mesh vertices and the mesh clothing having identical or near identical weights is remote though they probably don't have to be that close to get a decent result. Problem number two the custom avatar mesh, even if it is the default avatar mesh weighted to the collision bones making it Fitted Mesh, won't be the same shape as the real avatar mesh it is covering. For some people it may be close enough for others I am sure how are attached to their shape it may not be. Finally the last and perhaps biggest problem. The custom avatar meshes face would be expressionless. The eyes would not blink the mouth would not open or close or smile or anything. I know I tried it and it is creepy. Now if LL made it possible for such a mesh to access the Morphs that would be good and solve that problem. It could also solve the skin problem at the same time because such a mesh would have all the same texture layers as the default avatar weighted to the normal bones we have now. It is also possible for LL to write new code that would allow totally new custom avatar mesh we make to be textured automatically by what ever skin and other textures your default avatar was wearing. It would basically take all the textures your default avatar mesh was wearing and collapses them into three textures. One of the head, one for the torso and on for the legs. Only problem would be again the avatar's face would be expression less because we can't upload Morphs. InWorldz however using the original Mesh Deformer custom mesh avatars faces do move and have all the same expressions as the underlining default avatar because of the way it works. I know I have tested it. If your name is Rhys Goode in InWorldz I will send you my custom mesh test head so you can see for yourself. It is a completely different mesh head than the default avatar. I made it with a program named Makehuman.

Sassy Romano wrote: What this won't address is layering but could do if there was a way to save the offset of the bones from standard. In other words, just as we save an alpha, save a "bone slider" layer to be worn with the mesh. Won't happen, too damn useful. Unless there is a way to save the new XYZ coordinates of the deformed mesh all mesh worn if they have weighted to the same bones will be deformed in the same way. It would be great if we could tweak the shape of the mesh with the custom sliders press a button to set that as the pertinent shape and then reset the custom sliders to the default position.

Innula Zenovka wrote: It certainly looks amazing. What does it look like, though, to others? Have you been able to check that the resizing is visible to everyone? Others don't see the changes unless they have the same changes to their XML file. (CORRECTION 2/18/2014) I did a test yesterday and it turns out I was wrong. Even if two residents are using the altered XML file they don't see the changes the other did with the custom sliders. The only way custom Collision Bone sliders will work for everyone is if LL adopts them. I sure hope they surprises a lot of people and do so.

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: Would you have to use these sliders to custom fit each fitted mesh article of clothing or can they be set once and it works for all fitted mesh clothing? Why wait years on the Lindens? If this is as easy as altering a file in the viewer, why not provide the mod for that file and directions on how to use them so that people can replace the ones in their viewers, either as a download or a cut and paste in notecard or in the forum? At least post the link to the post you looked at, so that those of us who wish to can set them up ourselves. All the original avatar body shape changing sliders still affect the Fitted Mesh as before so if you are happy with how your Fitted Mesh looked you won't need to touch the custom sliders. It would not be a set it once and forget it. Once you put on another mesh you may have to set the custom sliders back to their original setting or adjust them differently for the current mesh you have changed to. It would be a good idea to save a backup of your shape before you change the custom sliders because once you change them and save them the next Fitted Mesh clothing you wear may need completely different settings so you want to be able to go back to the default settings for the custom sliders. I won't want to provide an altered file or notecard with the changes I made available to all because it would break the shared experience rule. THis is something that has to be officially adopted by LL and made standard across all viewers. Amethyst got the correct link to the post I had referred to.

ObviousAltIsObvious wrote: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/FITMESH-19 You know I had completely forgotten about FITMESH-19. I think I even voted for it. So more credit where credit is due. RedPoly Inventor first suggested custom sliders for the collision bones and Medhue helped me see their true potential and need. In any event word has got to spread and support rallied for these sliders. Otherwise I believe Fitted Mesh will be a big disappointment.

First off I have to give credit where credit is due. Medhue Simoni posted a brilliant idea that can solve many of Fitted Meshes problem. His idea was that Fitted Mesh clothing should have their own sliders in the Editing Appearance menu for fine tune adjustment of your Fitted Mesh clothing. I read this and realized just how brilliant of a solution this was and remembered a post long ago by Heb Dexler who posted early in the open Mesh Beta testing about some custom sliders he had made for a pair of mesh boots he made. I found the post opened up my avatar_lad.xml file an proceeded to create new custom sliders that only affected the collision bones to see if indeed Medhue's idea would work. IT DOES!!! :smileyvery-happy: I made several custom sliders. I made an overall size slider that made my Fitted Mesh get bigger or smaller. I made CHEST bone sliders that separately scaled in X, Y & Z as well as one that scaled all three together. I made sliders for the R_UPPER_LEG that scaled all three axis and sliders for offsetting in X and Y. Below are photos I took using Singularly viewer on the Beta Test grid. It doesn't really matter which viewer since they all basically use the same avatar_lad.xml file. Adding custom sliders for all 26 collision bones with the ability to scale XYZ separately and together as well a being able to offset in XYZ would not break any existing content and would just be a few days work. It would work in all viewers new and old. The dress in the photos is by Tyr Rozenblum. She was helping me test my Maya plug-in I made. I rigged and adjusted the weights fairly roughly. The dress was only rigged to the original collision bones since it was before Fitted Mesh was announced and the new bones added. Above is the mesh dress before using any of the custom Collision Bone sliders I made. Obviously I am not wearing an alpha. Above is the chest area in wireframe before adjusting the custom slider. Above after adjusting the Y axis scale. Above after adjusting the chest but before increasing scale of all the collision bones at once. Above after increasing the overall size of the dress. Above before changing the leg muscular setting. Above after making legs less muscular. Notice the bottom of dress being deformed into the legs themselves. This is a common problem with short dresses, skirts and shorts. Above is after I adjust the scale and Y offset of the R_UPPER_LEG collision bone. Notice how the other side of the skirt is not affected. That is because I did not adjust the L_UPPER_LEG collision bone. There you go proof that custom sliders for all the collision bones can and does work to solve many of the problems with Fitted Mesh.

Medhue Simoni wrote: SolasNaGealai wrote: Hello medhue, thanks for the great video! I to love the way Inworldz's deformer works, i spent hours in maya rigging to the new SL bones and after about 2 tries it still needs more work. Tell me, do you know if it's best (when in SL ) if the "person" wears the default avi shape, puts on the fitted mesh, then change to the shape they want or should the fitted mesh adjust instantly to any shape when it is warn? You should be able to wear the Fitted Mesh without changing your shape at all, and (supposedly) it should form to you. Fitted Mesh is based on those shape morphs and you shouldn't need to reset your avatar for them to work. Medhue is correct in that there is no need to wear the default avi shape Ruth first when putting on Fitted Mesh. However Fitted Mesh does not use the Morphs at all to achieve its shape. The Collision Bones Fitted Mesh is weighted to just changes their scales to roughly match your avatars shape. There is an invisible avatar mesh everyone in SL is wearing named the "Collision Skeleton". It is a very crude simple boxy mesh that is used to calculate when an object collides with your avatar. The Collision Skeleton mesh was made this way to keep down lag and because it was a lot simpler to calculate collisions from it than the more complex avatar mesh. The Collision Skeleton mesh is actually made up of individual Octahedrons. Each Octahedron is weighted to a single collision bone. When you change your shape in SL with the sliders they do two things. They use Morphs to change your avatars mesh shape but they also change the scales of the Collision Bones which in turn change the size of the Octahedrons in the Collision Skeleton mesh to roughly match your avatars meshes new shape. So any vertices of a mesh rigged and weighted to the Collision Bones get scaled up or down as you change your shape in SL with the sliders. More Collision Bones had to be added because the original Collision Skeleton didn't have Octahedrons for the breast or male package area. LL wasn't concerned with objects colliding in those areas I guess. So you can now see why Fitted Mesh is a challenge. Content creators have to rig and adjust the weights of vertices to bones that change their scale to get their mesh to follow the size and shape of the avatar mesh that doesn't change it shape in the same way. Hence why looser fitting clothes is easier because there is more room for error and why clothes that cover more of the avatar because the avatar is hidden with alphas. Tight and or skimpy clothes that show a lot of avatar skin there is way less room for error. If LL would add individual sliders just for the Collision Bones that would allow us to be able to adjust the scales in X, Y & Z independently. That would help make Fitted Mesh fit a whole lot better. Hope that helps. Cathy

Which program are you using? If you are using Blender Avastar is a good option in that it already had the collision bones LL added to the skeleton and I hear many wonderful tools for rigging and weighting. If you are using Maya I made a plug-in, Maya MB files with templates and detailed step by step instructions on how to rig for Fitted Mesh and the older version Liquid Mesh. You actually catch a glimpse of it in the video Torley made. If you are not using either here is some general advice. You can get the skeleton here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Rigging_Fitted_Mesh Download the ZIP file it contains the skeleton in several formats. The skeletons are missing the new Handle collision bones for some reason. At least they were missing a few days ago. THe handle bones are for the love handles of the avatar. You can still use the skeleton if you are not concerned with that area. You rig your mesh to all the bones in the skeleton. THe old bones as well as the new bones first. Then you adjust the weights of the vertices so they are only influenced by the Collision Bones. YOu have to rig it to all the bones first otherwise the DAE file won't contain all the bones and will fail to upload. The Collision Bones are not in the same places as the original bones. They are offset from the originals. This makes adjusting the weights harder because most programs when you first rig your mesh automatically weight the closet vertices to the joint at 100%. The upper arm collision bones are the equivalent of the shoulder bones in the normal skeleton are in the middle of the biceps so the vertices in that area will be weighted near 100% while up at the shoulder they will not be. So basically if you are used to rigging to the original skeleton when you are rigging to the new one you will get initially much different results making it a bit harder. Oh almost forgot with Fitted Mesh you create your mesh clothes to fit Ruth. The Zip file comes with not only the skeleton but also Ruth and the male default avatar already rigged and weighted to the Collision bones I believe. I hope that helps. Cathy

My hope is that LL hears from enough residents to realize they need to put some more development time into the Fitted Mesh system. I was quite active in testing Fitted Mesh and reporting in the Jira's. I am very familiar with the limitations and drawbacks of Fitted Mesh as well as its positive qualities and advantages. Fitted Mesh is really good for looser fitting clothing or tight fitting clothing that covers most of the avatar's skin. Fitted Mesh is not very good for skimpy or tight fitting clothing that shows a lot of skin. There have been some wonderful suggestions here that could be implemented that would drastically improve Fitted Mesh. I really like the idea of adding a section in the Editing Appearance menu of having sliders just for the Collision Bones. I would suggest one slider for each collision bone and three buttons to control which axis the slider was affecting. A fourth button would set the slider so it scaled all three axis equally. There definitely needs to be a male groin joint. It never occurred to me nor did anyone else mention the need for one during testing. Now it seems so obvious how did we all overlook it.

Your Welcome Nessima! I am so happy you were able to get it to work! :smileyvery-happy:

Oh I am so sorry I don't know where I got the idea that your head was for InWorldz. :smileyembarrassed: I must have jumbled your post and someone else's up in my head. I wish I could help you more but I don't know Blender or Zbrush I only know Maya. There are a ton of tutorials on YouTube for both Blender and Zbrush. I am pretty sure there is a tutorial on the Avastar website for how to rig and adjust weighting. Here's Avatar's website: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/avastar/ I am sure there are a lot of regulars on the forum that use Avastar or Zbrush that can help you a lot better than I can. I hope that helps. Cathy