Rhys Goode

Antumbra wrote: She said that looking under peoples dresses was allowed. I don't know... I think thats kinda weird.... I mean I wouldn't go around looking under peoples dresses..... I don't think many people do lol giggles, you would be surprised...

I am a cache clearing junkie. When SL messes up, and a relog will not fix it, I log out, manually remove the cache folder, and log back into a nice quiet linden sim, and wait for my inventory to rebuild. Why do I do such a thing? Is a magical cure all? Of course not, but for me it clears about 90% of my issues. I don't have many issues, but when I do, it is pretty clearly related to my ISP. And info gets mangled. And cache gets corrupted. (The other 10% are when my settings.xml file gets randomly trashed, same ISP issue). And it is worth noting at this point that a whole lot of people have connection related problems. Now if your connection is good enough that it never garbles a packet, it may seem like superstition, clearing the cache as a first reaction. But if you have a connection like mine, it makes a lot of sense.

I'll gather the info you request, ands send to as quickly as I can, Gaia. It will be at least a day, I have limited net access this week. But the words "not reversible" are what struck me in your original response. For me, that closed the issue. "The Collada Exporter prepares the Data to be used with SL. It especially removes bones which are not recognized by the SL uploader, it triangulates the mesh, applies scale and rotation, and takes care about a few more details. Most of these preparations are not reversible, hence trying to import a collada file will result in an incomplete rig. well at least the rig is no longer an Avastar Rig.

Sure Gaia, here is a screenshot. The object in question is a set of nipple piercings. The are rigged to LEFT_PEC, and RIGHT_PEC, and do a halfway decent job of following avatar physics. But when I read the dae file back into blender, the bones are twisted and bent as shown, and all the weight is on mNeck and mCollarLeft, which did not even have vertex groups in the original .blend file.

Thanks for the clear explanation, Gaia. And I did not mean the mesh is distorted, rather that the skeleton (such as it is) is distorted. I am making some custom rigged pieces, and it would have been nice to go back easily from just the dae file. A bit less cumberson than keeping custom blend files. But storage space is cheap, I just have to organize my workflow properly.

I've been using Blender with the Avastar plug in to make some rigged mesh clothing, producing dae files that load just fine into SL. But if I try to import one of them back into Blender, the skeleton seems to get all scrambled and bent. And the weights seem to be assigned to the wrong bones. If I want to make any minor tweaks to my mesh, I have to detach the mesh, zap the vertex groups and shape keys, and re-do the rigging. Is there some simple way to import a rigged dae file into blender, and end up with a useable amature?

4 months? For me it has been spotty as long as I can remember. Someitmes it works, sometimes not, for me it's always been a crapshoot.

As a practical matter, *HOW* would one use the SL UV map on a different avatar mesh? The only thing I can think of is to start with whatever UV map the MakeHuman happens to have, and then spend a couple of weeks editing the UV map, almost surface by surface. Is there some "easy" way to take the UV map from one mesh and apply to a different mesh?

It is within the realm of technology to capture the uuids of the textures used for the different texture surfaces of the SL avatar, and then apply them to a mesh that has been constructed to have a compatible UV map. The same is true for the textures of system clothes. I have seen the technolgy demoed. But doing so breaks all kinds of copyright rules, so other than technology demo, I know of no case where it has been or will be developed into a usable sysetm.

Sims come and go on the beta grid, with no apparent rhyme or reason. I am currently set to log into Sandbox Wanderton, I've been using it since the previous sandbox I was using disappeared one day, a few months ago. The adjacent sim, PathTest is also accessable, with building permisions enabled.

For me, usiing FS 4.61.(40478), or LL viewer 3.7.0 (286015), ALS and normal/spec map turns on and off with ALS, just as expected.

The "standard sizes" were never all that standardized, the addressed a limited number of paramteres, but left a lot of important ones free. So no two sets of standard sized are exactly the same. Here is the first set I found when I searched on MP. https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Standard-Sizing-Package-Updated-Male-Female/2894727 If you go to that page, it has an explanation, and a list of the actual numbers used.

In my experience, wifi hookups vary widely in quality from router to router. I have two in my home, the wifi modem from my ISP is unusable for SL, so I have my own router hard wired to the ISP's and get flawless wifi. When I am on the road, sometimes wifi works, more often it has issues. Including orange clouds. The main diagnostic that works for me is packet loss, you can see how you are doing in SL from the help>about menu. That makes a nice report, the last line is packet loss. Anything over about 1% will produce noticable lag. Orange clouds when the packet loss is in the 5 - 10 % range. If you are stuck with such a connection, you may see some improvement if you dial your maximum bandwidth down below 500kbps, set graphics to low, and a use small draw distance. good luck.

I like local textures a lot, especially for something like an alpha mask. I can load the local texture onto my avatar and start dancing. (How the mask works when animated is my focus.) Then I can poke around in Gimp, tweaking the mask. As soon as I save it in Gimp, it gets updated on my avatar. *Much* better than having to upload and apply.

Yes, clothing can be hard. But that is largely because *ALL* of the content in SL is made by the residents, and the residents have widely varied skills. "The normal clothing can cling weirdly to your character" ,,,, actually it is literally painted onto the base avatar. I am in awe of the digital artists who can use light and shadows to make it pop. Gotta find them, but they are there. "but mesh seems unnaturally rigid and doesn't cling hardly at all to your character". Yup. True. With rare and precious exceptions. I have found only two vendors I will buy without even trying on the mesh. Most mesh designers do not make it past the first animation with the demo. It is easy to make a mesh that looks good in a pose. Hard to make one compatible with the particular limitations of SL. A lot of designers kind of sniff, and say "SL oughta be more like my concept of perfection" A few look at reality and work with it. "Yes you can make it work if you're very experienced or whatever but it's not very newbie friendly." True, sadly. And hard to get around with all the amateur content. But for me it is a big part of the enduing charm.

I like my jewelery to be at least 10 cm in any dimension, so that I can scale it really tiny if I want. So, in blender, I add some *tiny* little triangles the the mesh. I use tris with a size of about .0000015, and I make sure to put them around the piece symmetrically, so they do not mess up the object center. I used to use larger tris as a separate material, then make them 100% transparent, but if I use small enough tris, they do not even render in SL, so I don't have to bother making them a separate material.

Speaking to your first issue, Sassy has the best description of the limitations of fitted mesh of any that I have seen. I had not thought of a burka, but yes, that would be *perfect* application of fitted mesh. If what you want is to closely fit the female breast, it is of no use at all. Talk about a badly named technology. Oh, no use at all is a bit too harsh. It might be of limited and actually interesting use with a female breast, tracking avatar physics. *If* you make a custom mesh to fit the particular avatar, and if you are not too fussy about what "tracking" means.

I get anywhere bewteen 20 and 100 fps with my setup, depending on just where in SL I happen to be. On "high" graphics, ALS on, shadows off. I can get 20 or 30 fps on ultra in most places, but it drops below 10 in a busy sim, unless I turn shadows off. The point is, fps depends a *lot* on what you are doing, and what is going on around you. Whenever I try to gauge these things, I tend to write down things like 20 - 30 for one locatione, 60 - 100 for another. Anything but a fixed number for me. Standing in a quiet sim alone in my house .... ~28 to 35 on the ground, 45 to 50 on a platform 2000 m overhead from my house. CPU: Intel® Core i7-2670QM CPU @ 2.20GHz (2195.09 MHz) Memory: 16362 MB OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601) Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 560M/PCIe/SSE2 Windows Graphics Driver Version: 9.18.0013.3489 OpenGL Version: 4.4.0 RestrainedLove API: RLV v2.8.0 / RLVa v1.4.10a libcurl Version: libcurl/7.24.0 OpenSSL/1.0.1e zlib/1.2.5 c-ares/1.10.0 J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.3.2 Audio Driver Version: FMOD Ex 4.44.26 Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded) Voice Server Version: Vivox 4.5.0009.17865 Settings mode: Firestorm Viewer Skin: MetaHarper Modern (AppalachianSky) Font Used: Deja Vu (96) Draw distance: 128 Bandwidth: 1500 LOD factor: 2 Render quality: High (5/7) Texture memory: 512 MB (1) Built with MSVC version 1600 Packets Lost: 1/1,793 (0.1%)

I use wifi to access the internet in my home, no problem at all with one router, it will not work a damn with the other router. When I travel (a fair amount), I will get onto SL from the hotel wifi, if I can. In about 1/3 of the places I stay l use the wifi without incident. in about 1/3, I can use it with annoying lag. Such places usually have plenty of bandwidth, but run high packet loss when doing SL. For these sites, throttling back the max bandwidth to 300 or 400 kbps will sometimes help a bit. Also, disabling http textures can help; I've seen it make a big difference on some connections, none at all on others. And setting graphics prefs to low and cranking in the draw distance. Minimize the load on the connection. and about 1/3 are unusable for SL. Bandwidth is not a good predictor of wifi performance. I find I need a minimum 500 kbps result from SpeedTest.net, but just because a line tests out at 20 mbpt does not guarantee SL. Packet loss when running SL is the best predictor for me. So at a new location, I log into SL, let things rez and stettle, then got to help>about and run the report. If the packet loss is less than about 0.5%, then it will not be an issue. 1% to 5 %, noticable lag, but more or less usable. >~5%, I look for other entertainment, SL is not going to be fun.

My experiments with womens tops have convinced me that "fitted mesh" needs to be cutsom fit to your avatar shape even more carefully than with the classic mesh. And even then, not much chance for avoiding alpha masks. Yes, with fitted mesh, the clothing will respond to a lot more sliders than it would before, but ..... not the same way that the SL avatar mesh responds. It is particualry bad for breast buoyancy, the new LEFF_PEC and RITGHT_PEC bones barely change position at all for different settings, even though that setting has huge impact on the shape of the avatar breast. Fitted mesh seems to be designed for long pants, and turleneck sweaters, where you can mask out the SL avatar, and do not really care if the shape of your clothes is the same as the shape of your body.

Thats what avatar imposters are all about. WIth LOD set properly, I can only see a few of them, and most of them cannot see me.

Yes, I know that I can wear high LI attachments without penalty to the local prim budget. I use the LI of that attachment rezzed on the ground as an indicator of the computational overhead. And indeed, the flex prim hair that adds about 10,000 to the avatar RC is about 109 LI, another that adds 20000 is about 190 LI. I hear lots of anecdotes, about the huge impact of high poly count on rendering, with PC's melting into puddles as a result. And I have no doubt that it all adds up, so the lower the poly count the better. But I would really like to be able to gauge the impact of the things I make against realistic measures. I have a very strong preference for data over opinion, even expert opinion. I added a third chain to my bauble, got the tri count up to just under 30000. Its a small object, with the lowest LOD is set to be just 3 tri's (one for each texture surface). The rezzed LI is 1, and it increases my RC by about 500. Because is small, it is invisible to anyone more that a few meters away, yet highly detailed for my dance partner. Every tool I have in SL tells me this piece has much less impact on my neighbors clientside lag that a typical flexy hair or dress. But people with far more knowledge and experience than I seem to be saying that using more than a few 1000 polys for an attachment is inherently evil. Frankly, I am confused. By the way, I know a bit about normal maps, I have deconstruced some of those game charcters, and a well done normal map can do amazing things. Free, public domain models can be downloaded from http://tf3dm.com/ Very instructive.

A recent thread featured the problems encounterd trying to load an attachement with abount 35,000 faces, and how this generates the MAV_BLOCK_MISSING. Well, I happened to be making a two chain attachement with 22486 tris, all on one texture face. So simply splitting the mesh into two different texture faces solved that problem, but in the previous thread, some strong statements were made about the impact of that many tris on client lag. Now it so happens that one of the things I want to do with this model is to try some normal mapping, but I am really curious with just how bad the full model would be. Strong statements are one thing, I like to the effects for my self, so off to the test grid....... The mesh is rigged to the collision bones. In all cases, I chose the lowest physics, analyze and simplify. First I let the uploader to all the lower LODs, high/medium/low/lowest 22346/5608/1401/699. LI 54.7, $L68. Standing bald, with UV tattoo for clothes, and a few odd attachemtens, I show a rendering cost of 4645. Put on my chain attachement rendering cost and the RC went to 10,381. I put on my hair, RC went to [15,000 to 55,000, depending on the hair. I have a pretty strong laptop, so I am not sure how this applies to other setups, but I could not see any impact on my FPS for any of the hairs or for the chain attachement. And I am all by meself on an empty platform. Next, I told the uploader to use the same LOD for High, medium, low, and 0 for the lowest LOD. 22346/ 22346 22346/21. LI, 1.1 (here the download cost is actually a bit lower than the physics in this case), $L13. Now when I wear the attachment, the RC goes from 4645 to 5517. As in the other case, no visible impact on FPS. The way I upload this mesh, has a huge impact on both the LI and the RC. I usually do my attachments like I did the latter. They are relatively small, so they only register as a small numvber of tri;s unless you are standing rather close. It gives low LI, and costs less $L too. Now I see the the RC is much less too. Now 23000 tris is not the same as 35000, but it is in the same range. And it looks like that range is right at the *low* end in RC for flexi hair. How can I estimate the real impact of such an attachement, if not the LI and the RC? I really do like doing things efficiently, I will be interested to see how the normal mapped, low-tri version looks. I'd be even more interested to know if I had a way to accurately gauge what the impact of such a change really is.

How does your packet loss look? The last line on the "about" report. SL can experience high packet loss, even when other apps work OK, and your symptoms are typical of what happens when packet loss is high.

Gosh. Who'd have thunk it was so easy you could figure it out in 3 minutes flat. WTG!