Rhys Goode

I used the Layered Photoshop with Vector Smart Objects from Robin Wood's UV Templates, along with Gimp, to make myself sets of 512, 1024, and 2048 templates in png format. All the jpeg templates I have found on the web are rather fuzzy, but my own templates are nice and sharp. And even after shrinking to 512 size to make a UV suit tattoo, the pngs give rather sharper lines in SL too.

I finally got a chance to play with mesh, and your suggestions fixed my problem. I think my main mistake was that I was detaching the sliders before changing to the non-default shape. Thanks so much for your help, and for building such a wonderful add-on.

Thanks for the suggestions Gaia. As soon as I get a chance to try, I will report back. I really cannot understand why they call it "fitted mesh". OK, it is a weighting system that responds to the sliders in a way that is vaguely similar to the way that the SL mesh responds to the sliders, but still. Oh well, I am sure there are some really nice things that can be done with turtlenecks and jeans. And I am *hoping" that I can get a custom fit garment to at least follow the physics, more or less.

I’ve been trying out fitted mesh, using Avastar (1.1.1020) and Blender (2.70 RC). I am aware of some of the risk of using works in progress, but I enjoy playing with Blender. So, here is my problem. I made a pair of ladies panties, with the mesh designed so that it covers only surfaces completely locked to the mPelvis bone on the SL avatar. This mesh is trivially easy to rig to the old bones, so I can make it fit any avatar shape very closely. If I load a shape from an XML file using Avastar, the resulting .dae file fits the SL Avatar very nearly perfectly. But something unexpected happens when I start using the collision bones. When I use collision bones with the mesh made for the default SL shape, the mesh fits well when loaded into SL. But when I use collision bones on the mesh that is fitted to my own avatar shape, it no longer fits when loaded into SL. And just to be clear, I am not talking about how the mesh deforms, just how well does it fit in a static t-pose. I can use different weights on the default shape mesh, it always fits in SL. The degree of mis-fit for the non-default shape does seem to depend on the details of the weighting. Am I trying to do something un-natural?

Hmmm. Makes me wonder. I have a very close fitting bikini, tailor made for my shape. And my boobs seem just a little bigger with respect to the mesh than they did last week. I'm not certain its the viewer, at least at first glance, looked the same with the newest LL viewer. There may have been some subtle changes in the rigging that worked into the code, along with the dumb collision bones, *BUT, a few hours later, it appears that what I saw was one of those one off things that happen on the test grid. No hint of an issue today.

"The 4.5 Beta is HORRIBLE with lag. I just uploaded the 4.6 version and it seems to be much better...but I only used it for a few minutes last night (after it took 45 minutes to download..and FS is aware of the problem)." huh? 4.5 beta never gave me a hint of a lag issue. And download the new version only took a few mins. Tex, you must have awfully bad karma, only explanation I can think of.

I got ghosted, just the other night. My ISP decided to go offline with no warning, leaving my Avi in limbo. For a few minutes, I lost all contact with the web. Then got it back, but could not log into SLfor 10 of 15 mins. When I did get back, I was told I had been standing there non-responsive, never showed going offline, just suddenly showed up on-line as I re-logged. Hehe. My alt got ghosted a few years ago, I could go see her hanging there for days, till they reset the sim.

" From what I read, yesterday's Blender tuts are often useless." Yes, tutorials in with 2.4 or 2.5 can be a bit confusing, there are big differences in the UI. But the underlying methods are quite useful, and once you get past the UI, so are the old tutorials. For a while I avoided them, but now that I can find my way around, they are back in play.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Creating-clothing-and-tattoos/ta-p/700055 Getting started? Read the overview, then google. Lots of tutorials out there.

I know there are lots of news aggregator sites who only present news stories from other sites. This is the first troll aggregator I have run into, though.

If you want to run twoavi's at the same time, it is a good idea to make sure they are using differenct chaches. You can specify a different folder for each cache from the preferences/network&cache tab. I use Firestorm, but you can just change "Firestorm" to "SecondLife" in the appropriate place, they both very similar folder structures. I also have different startup files for each avi. The default command line for the FS shortcut reads: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Firestorm-Beta\Firestorm-Beta.exe" --settings settings_firestorm.xml --set InstallLanguage en" and this results in the settings changes being ketp in C:\User\USER\appdata/roaming/Firestorm/user_settings/settings_firestorm.xml. (you cannot change where it is kept, and the appdata folder is hidden by default, at least for win7). I have a different shortcut for each avitar, and change the settings files to be xetting_firestorm_av1.xml and settings_firestorm_av2.xml. Keeping the settings and the cache for the two avatars helps a lot, turning down graphics and draw distance for one, or the other, or both will also help.

Nothing similar is happening for the large majority of people. --- When it *is* a general problem, the techology group will really light up. Now clealry you have problems, but they are exactly the sort of problems caused by an intenet connection issue. SL puts special demands on a routuer, wiith lots of http channels opening and closing all the time, much more than say streaming video on your web browser, so SL will expose any issues with your modem. One friend of mine has to regularly reboot her modem to keep SL from hanging up too much. Then there is your ISP. I rarley crash myself, but when I do, I can usually detect "anaomalous" connection issues, like speed test showing half the normal upload speed, or ping time of 1000 ms, for a few minutes. These are my ISP having QOS issues, not SL. And flakey connections lead to corrupted data which often leads to the need to clear cache. And caches are hard to rebuild properly if thecconnection is corrupting packets. The first place I would look is the help>about report, at the bottom of the report you will see packet loss. If you are seeing more than about 1%, you should *expect* to see the kind of issues OP reports. I use wifi to most of the time, but I live in a fairly isolated place, not much RFI from the neighbors. Still, one of them does something every now and then, packet loss pops up, and I have to go bcak to my ethernet cable And here is a useful link for troubleshooting connections: http://blog.nalates.net/2011/10/26/troubleshoot-your-sl-connection/

So, if it is not perfect, it sucks? Coping with the world is one long process of dealing with imperfect information as best you can. In RL and SL both. For me, having some information about who is looking at me is useful, even if it is not perfect.

I don't believe there have been any system wide changes that would account for this, Ona. You (or at least I) can never tell about any given sim, I know my home (mainland)sim is slower some days than others about letting me rez, sometimes I have to ask for a reset to successfully wear attachments. So, my first suggestion, when you see this happening, try logging into a quiet Linden sim, like Hatton, or Hippo Hollow, and see if you rez faster there. If its affecting you in *all* sims, then I would suspect your internet connection. In the browser, look at the report you get from the Help|About drop-down. The last line shows the packet loss, and if that is more than about 1 or 2 %, then you have found the problem, clear up the packet loss, and you should fix the lag. A classic cause of sporadic high packet loss is outside interfernece if you are using wi-fi. And even if you have a direct wire, sometimes the router needs rebooting. My own router never seems to benfit from a reboot for SL, although it needs it from time to time to keep the iPad happy. And I have friends who need to reboot modem regularly to keep SL happy. Here is a good link for looking at connections. http://blog.nalates.net/2011/10/26/troubleshoot-your-sl-connection/ Good luck, hope this helps.

I have a mesh statute that is LI 4 as delivered, but if you make her really, really big can have LI 1087 (!). I listed it as 4 prims, but have some pics of her rezzed next to me, with various sizes and LI noted, and mention the fact that size matters in the text. BTW, my little statute was designed to be small; had I been designing a collossus, I could have made her have a fair bit less LI at large size by playing wiht the different LOD models; but small and detailed was my goal. The best over all model for a mesh depends a lot on whether you want to look at it from across the room, or from the next sim over.

I've not noticed a general slowdown. I've noticed evenings when SL is not so good for me, fine for the people I am with. Best I can tell, my ISP has some QOS issues.... Now I get out on the road a fair bit, use a lot of hotel hookups, so I see a lot of different connections. While many public wifi's will give unacceptable packet loss, that tendency does not seem to correlate with connection speed. And for a clean connection, I've noticed that once the download speed is above about 2 Mbs, there is very little change in SL performance. Back to my ISP, I usually test out at 18 - 20 Mbs download. But some evenings the test results are quite eratic, and down to 6 or 10 Mbps. On those nights, SL does seem slower. Even though on clean lines I cant see a difference between 2 and 5 Mbps. From all this I tend to suspect my ISP a lot more than SL when I have a laggy evening.

Looks like there may have been a different issue for you this time, but usually if I get that message, I will try logging into a different sim. If my home sim is being reset, from a crash or a rolling restart, then I will get that message, but be able to log into a different sim just fine.

Ahhhhhh! In many other places, I've seen "Ruth" refered to as the "default avatar", sometimes she is useful when you are stuck as a cloud. But that has always seemed a bit odd, she is so ill proportioned. I'll have to be sure to call her "test avatar" in the future. And Avastar works so well, I never even thought to look that carefully. Thanks so much for the clear explanation!

Thanks for the references Gaia. I am beginning to suspect that I do not understand what "default SL avatar" means. I opened blender and inserted two instances of the defalt Avastar. Then I went into SL, and used Advanced>Avatar>Character Test>>Test Female to set what I have always thought was the default SL avatar, fondly known as Ruth. I exported her shape to XML, and loaded the shape onto one of the Avastar, and renamed her Ruth. Avastar and Ruth are entirely different shapes. Here are the slider readings for the torso: slider avastar default "ruth" torso muscles 50 36 neck thick 42 38 neck length 50 40 shoulders 41 23 breast size 50 59 breast buoyancy 43 21 Breast cleavage 19 36 Arm Length 80 44 hand size 50 27 torso lenght 50 29 love handles 33 14 belly size 0 0 Now I know that if I tightly fit some clothing to the XNL based torso in Blender, it seems to fit perfectly in SL for the same shape. Avastar, Blender and SL line up perfectly for me. So, I am still confused.

I've been making some mesh necklaces, attachments, not rigged. My necklaces never stray from the part of the torso 100% weighted to mChest, so they follow my body very closely. I wear a tattoo made from the SL avatar UV template, so I can precisely align my necklace with respect to the SL mesh. Both in Blender and in SL. Thanks to Avastar, I can easily look at a small collection of SL shapes, and I see that even with the ability to scale x and y independently there are minor variations of the shape that you can’t tune out. The fit is better than I have ever been able to achieve with prims or sculpties, but not quite perfect, depending on the shape. So, I use the default Avastar avatar shape, which turns out to be a reasonable compromise, at least for my shape collection. I was recently surprised to find out that the default Avastar avatar shape seems to be quite a bit different from the default SL avatar. So I my simple minded guess of “use the default” was never doing what I thought it was And I think I heard something about how starting from the default shape was important for fitted mesh. All of which leads to the question on the subject line… Any thoughts on what is the best “average” avatar shape to use? Is there a special shape that should be used as the starting point for rigged mesh?

LOD factor 14 may be an issue. The default LOD factor is never over 2, even when on "ultra" graphics. I cant even get it set to higher than 4 using the FS sliders. If I understand LOD factor, setting it so high will make your machine work a *lot* harder. Enough to explain your problems? dunno.

Yeah, anyone who thinks they will be able to throw away the alpha masks is in for a real dissappointment. I've been looking at doing a skimpy bikini top. Trivally easy to rig with the old bones, impossible with collision bone. The fit of the top is affected by 5 different body sliders. There are only 3 bones one can rig to, and there is no way to adjust 3 variables (the weights) to indpendently satisfy 5 constraints (the sliders). If I custom fit the top to my shape, and rig to collision bones, it does a halfway decent job of following avatar physics. But if the boob size, or separation ,or especially bouyancy sliders are moved more than a few points it just does not fit anymore.

I have a collection of obscurely named textures, and use the items temselves as the index to find the textures. If I want to find one, I edit the item in question, go to the texture tab, and click to bring up the choose texture panel. If it is inventory, the current texture will be highlighted.

My on-the-road experience with wi-fi and SL ..... about 1/3 of the time, no problem at all. about 1/3 of the time, struggle with packet loss. About 1/3 of the time, look for something else to do.

I frequently log in using my 4G hot spot. My first advice is to find yourself some software to monitor you usage. I use BitMeter from phttp://codebox.org.uk. Use it to make sure you stay within budget, and to see just what you can afford in terms of SL activities and data usage. I think Freya's list is accurate and comprehensive, and you did say *minimize*, and it is very true that a crowded club will take more data than standing alone in a skybox. But I am not in SL to stand around alone, so my own drill is to set the graphics quality to low, the draw distance to 32, and make sure I use my own music, rather than streaming. It ususally costs me 50 - 100 MB/hour, hanging out with friends.