Gaia Clary

It has been discussed in lenght and several times during the last year. The most recent information that i got about it was from a mesh meeting about half a year ago, where Lindens stated something like this: There are no plans to change the current default avatar mesh, because it would break all content related to texture based clothes. The comunity is free to develop one (or more) comunity standard(s) if that makes sense. I myself tried to create a mesh based avatar with the exact same UV-mapping as the curretn default avatar. But after fiddling with that for a couple of days i finally gave up. Although my first results wheren't too bad, but not as good as they should be. I also proposed to create a mesh based "default human avatar" unrelated to the default avatar (with its own perfect UV-unwrap) which should be made publicly available and free for commercial usage. But i could not get anybody into this boat. I am not even sure if it makes sense at all... So i doubt that an avatar-2.0 will be available.

Blender 2.49b is the last official release on the 2.4 series. That version of blender was released on 2009-Sep-16. So it is 18 months old, not 7 years... But it is true, that since end of 2009 developer efforts mostly go into the development of Blender-2.5. Although Blender-2.5 is surely less buggy and more future oriented than Blender-2.4, there are still some big advantages to use Blender-2.4: - Primstar-2 is not yet fully developed, although we are now very close to the completion of the sculpty part of it. - Blender-2.5 still has issues with Collada (which is relevant only, if you aim to build for meshes) Regarding fitness for purpose: I believe strongly that blender plus primstar is one of the best available programs for sculpting, if you aim for more than balloons and rocks... If you want to see what realy can be done with sculpties (made on blender 2.49b btw), then you should take a closer look on what Claudia222 Jewell has created. Here is a try to capture her builds on video:

This one is rather old (may 2010) but it may help a bit: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/3d-creation/blender-meshes-trail/meshes-overview/ Please note that Blender 2.5 is still not able to export rigged meshes!!! For now only blender 2.49 works for that. Also checck this video if you happen to get weird spiky results after importing your avatar to mesh: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/spikes-after-mesh-upload-to-sl/

I still believe, you have hidden faces and or duplicate vertices in your mesh. check the edges and vertices for duplicates. maybe remove duplicates can already solve the problem.

Maybe you have overlapping faces ?

yes.

I am always interested to learn about new approaches... Could you explain your approach briefly ?

I have been asked to do such a tutorial for many many times. I even tried some approaches but i always found the results very inconvenient. Most of the time i was simply moving edge loops and single vertices around, which i found very booring to look at. Hence i decided to always choose very simple and easy to make builds, so that i can show the principles. And even that takes a long time. Look for instance at my first 4 machinimatrix tutorials about the top-hat. Although this is a very very simple example from the 3D-modelling viewpoint, it takes almost 60 minutes of explaining and showing what happens when you go the wrong way and how to fix things and so on... If you want to learn how to do efficient modelling, then i realy recommend to go to your local book store and look for books about 3D modelling. My personal favorite is "3-D Human Modelling and Animation" which gives a short but very well done introduction into 3D-modelling. And it proceeds with how to make efficient human models, which i believe IS one of the more complex builds ... Ok, then you have to map that all to sculpted prim building, which probably is the most challenging part of all ;-) But that is what we try to cover with the machinimatrix tutorials ;-)

Tegg Bode wrote: I see sculpties being a bandaid on the way to mesh. As far as I understand sculpties are a limet form of mesh. Mesh is much more powerful and more content available, I don't see any game engines upgrading from mesh to sculpties. I think it is important to understand why sculpties where introduced at all. And why they have been introduced in that particular way. Before we had sculpties, there where prims. And prims where unbreakable blocks of building units. We had 15000 prims available on each SIM. And the entire infrastructure for these building blocks was optimized for an "online game engine with dynamic content"... But Prims came with limitations regarding modelling capabilities. It was amazing to which level you could get with prims only. But time moved on, and the desire for even more expression came up. So the next level was ... meshes.But now there was a problem (or two...): Since the entire infrastructure was setup on having primitive building blocks, (arbitrary) meshes would not at all fit into that scenario. How to evaluate a mesh ? How to compare its "value" with the value of Prims ? How to keep it stupid simple for the users ? ... And how to keep the existing infrastructure at all with meshes ? So it was necessary to created a sort of "extended prim" which stll was sort of a primitive building block, but had more capabilities regarding modelling. It must fit into the existing system, should not break anything and it must be efficient like nothing (that was the goal at least). The finally introduced limitations where: Use a fixed mesh topology: The mother of all sculpties is a rectangular surface bended and stretched in 3 Dimensions Use a fixed texturing scheme (UV-map): All textures work the same way. The system always knows how to wrap a texture around a sculptie. Nothing to take care, all the same, no extra data to be downloaded for displaying sculpties (no uv-maps, no normal maps) Use a fixed amount of vertex space per building block: to fit well into the existing infrastructure of Prims. Use the existing data-containers: Iimages where the only binary content allowed for upload to SL And the final result where Sculpted Prims with all their Quirks. Please understand that Sculpted Prims are an invention made by Linden Labs (or for Linden Labs) to fit into their infrastructure! So you will not find Sculpted Prims anywhere else in the world, except in SL-clones... Now we are (hopefully) closer to regular meshes than ever. But the original issues remain: How to evaluate, compare, integrate meshes into the existing infrastructure without breaking the whole existing content ? I can imagine that solving this equation is a nightmare. But is there an alternative ? Creating "Third Life" maybe and just forget about SL ? Wasn't it what Blue Mars tries to provide ? A better environment in all aspects ? Did they succeed ? I haven't looked into BM for a year now. Maybe i should do to see how they evolved... And to get back to the original question in this thread: I doubt that "enhancing the sculpty features" is the correct move. It makes much more sense to me to enhance the infrastructure for building blocks in SL instead of optimizing the building blocks for the existing infrastructure. And that is a tedious and time consuming process (as we can see). But i am sure that once meshes gets to main grid, that will boost creativity, usability and experience. Tegg Bode wrote: The biggest problem I see for the consumer is shape & sizing of bodies & clothing, hopefully some sort of standard will occur. I'm hoping most items will still stretch and shrink to enable some fitting to be possible for bodies that are taller or shorter and slightly different proportions. The resizing issues with avatar clothing are only related to "rigged clothing", aka clothes which move along with the avatar skeleton. If you just attach non rigged meshes to the avatar, they can be scaled like any other building block (prim,sculptie). So when you are not interested in rigged clothes, then use non rigged clothes and everything is good for you ;-)

Little Ming wrote: As I said in another thread, what they really need to do is put together a current list of bugs/complications that they are working through with Mesh on the beta grid. Much like a 'patch list' or a 'change log'. Isn't the Secondlife Bugtracker for Project "CTS" exactly what you want to see ? https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/CTS

Nacy Nightfire wrote: Gaia, lol, I think you meant to reply to the author of the thread. That's right. I was not able to correct the linking after i created the message so i just left it as it was. Nacy Nightfire wrote: The idea that Blender is harder to learn then other programs is a myth. If you never have been exposed to 3d programs the learning curve can be daunting in ANY software package. Many advanced/professional users have not liked the Blender interface, but who cares. They are already advanced users and have access to software packages that cost thousands of dollars with expensive training options. And the newest version takes care of this anyway...you can set your own shortcuts and interface to work exactly as you expect to. Chosen Few (one of the Maya Gurus here) told me a while ago that his original opinion about blender (2.4) was that it had an unintuitive, inappropriate and hard to learn user interface. But he realised that it was not the program itself but its documentation which made it hard to learn. BTW blender 2.5 comes with a "Maya preset" which is meant to keep Maya users comfortable (I can not tell if this is a good thing because i do not know Maya) I think that the biggest problem in sculpty making is not mastering the 3D software, but understanding how sculpties realy work. They do have a few properties which make it very hard for beginners to deal with. And professionals usually have the most problem with what they learned about good modelling practice and can not be aplyed to sculpties. I do not exactly know how good the sculpty related tools for other 3D software are. But i know that the blender add on for sculpty development (primstar) offers so many features and makes the creation of Sculpties easy and efficient on blender (IMHO). And it integrates so nicely with blender (2.5) that you hardly can tell that it is an add on ;-)

I recommend to take a look at the Sculptie section in the Secondlife wiki. There is one 3D Sculpty Software guide full of information about many 3D programs (free and commercial). That should give you a very quick overview. when you want to know about which software is mostly used, then looking at the tags in this forum section might give you some further hints ;-)

Tactical Eizenhart wrote: Well i've been using 3DS Max for 12 years so switching to Blender would be inconveniant.. 12 years of using your favorite editor will be almost impossible to be topped ;-) Well, i am working on a tool-independent video named "the basics of sculpted prims".I have published the first 4 minutes draft version on youtube and i hope to get back on it soon, to make the yet missing last 26 minutes ;-)

Haven't you been playing with blender recently ? Whichever 3D tool you use, this video would give you some hints: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/3d-creation/video-tutorials/sculpties-older-tutorials-page/sculpted-prims-for-the-blender-purist/ The video is made with blender but the basic information is true independently from any 3D editor. But unless you are a purist or your 3D-editor does not support the quirks of sculpted prims, you should not have the need to construct a sculpted prim by unwrapping from an existing object. It is almost always better to redo your object by using one of the ready made sculpty base shapes. At least i would start working with a plane like i show in the video. That is pretty easy going ;-) However at the end you need to get from your uvmap to the correct sculpt-map (the rainbow-colored image so to say). That is the challengiung part of the process. The simple approaches of using red green blue blending textures only works correct for spherical objects and toruses. Your best bet would be to use one solution which supports Sculpted prims out of the box. Dealing with UV-unwrapping for sculptied prims is very high level technical artwork -)

I guess, she uses v2 development viewer on the main grid.There is nothing wrong with that. And maybe that is also the cause of all missunderstanding ? I haven't tried any other viewers besides the mesh development viewers and Kirsten's viewer for a long time. They just look way better to my taste (regarding graphic quality), They seem to be more stable (i can not remember of any crash since many weeks) and maybe they are optimized to better use the capabilities of the (my?) graphic card ? What i have seen recently was, that these viewers also work almost twice as fast (for me) after i migrated from 32 bit windows-7 to 64-bit windows-7. Nobody could tell me why that performance increase happened just from upgrading the operating system, but it was very very apparent and i was delighted to see 60-80 frames per second where i could only see half of that before ;-)

"Now you also say, that inefficient buildings like hair built on 200+ distorted torus-shapes is as inefficient as anything can be." these are your words not mine, i said nothing about Torus shapes. Sorry for the wrong citation. You where actually writing about hairs with 200 resize scripts. But just to say it again. I am with you here, not against you. i have nothing against Mesh. its V2 that is the problem. and i have already said all this.. Then i do not exactly understand why Agents summary about where meshes are better than sculpties receives this answer from you: "you dont want to get the reality do you. its gonna be a lonely world when theres no one buying anything." As Agent doesn't talk about v2 in that text at all but only about meshes...

Dogboat Taurog wrote: you dont want to get the reality do you. its gonna be a lonely world when theres no one buying anything. I do not exactly understand, what your opinion is ;-( On one side you say that you want that SL gets more efficient, because otherwise you fear that Second Life will quickly get to its end of life. And yes, i can understand that and also second that. Now you also say, that inefficient buildings like hair built on 200+ distorted torus-shapes is as inefficient as anything can be. And avatars wearing 400 active scripts is nothing anybody realy wants. Right! But then on the other hand you seem to say that introduction of mesh makes the situation worse. IMHO Agent Tairov has summarized a whole lot of reasons why meshes are in fact more efficient as sculpties or even more efficient as regular prims. And there is certainly no reason to assume that mesh based builds will be charged higher than regular prim based builds. We have seen lots of lots of examples where comparable builds can be done far CHEAPER with meshes regarding L$. BTW one of the major reasons why LL has decided to go with meshes was in fact "efficiency"... But you say, this is not true and you say meshes will bring SL to death. So what are the arguments on which you base your assumptions that mesh is inefficient and will kill this platform ? Regarding the efficiency and quality of Viewer-2 compared to viewer-1 based developments i am also a bit confused. For example we have been trying a lot of viewer-1 derivates and we have finally given up on that technology because: 1.) For us viewer-2 brought a much better stability for film making (we use Kirsten's viewer) 2.) Complex rendering like shadows and ambient occlusion processing looks much better on Viewer-2. We never could get anything comparable out of viewer-1 regarding visual quality. I know many people dislike viewer-2 and i respect their arguments, especially when it comes to building! But i also learned to love the v2 features, especially those regarding visual experience. And isn't that also something that makes SL better at the end ? Maybe you have pointed out your arguments before and sorry if i missed your explanations. But i am realy curious to get to know what makes you so annoyed about mesh and v2...

What you call "center points" might be the poles of your sculpty. Have you started with a sphere shape ? Then near the poles your rectangular faces should become "distorted" into triangles. Or at least into very long quads (faces with 4 edges). These parts of a sculpted prim are usualy not so easy regarding texturing. Maybe you can provide an image and possibly the sculptmap or even the blend file for inspection ?

the sculpt should not loose detail. But because the vertex locations for sculpties are restricted to only 256 values along each axis, scaling the mesh might let the location grid show through in form of ugly bumps and wrinkles. But thats not a loss of detail, but a scaling up of the inaccuracies.

that looks a bit like a different interpretation of unit scale. One program might use centimeter for the unit while the other one uses meter. Hence a factor of 100 between them. maybe that ...just a guess.

The default avatar mesh is just a guideline and you can say it will give you the correct order of scaling, but not the correct shape. But since you can change the default shape of your avatar, you only will get the right scale if the avatar-mesh you have is derived from the avatar in Second life. You can however export your shape as .obj when you use phoenix. So if you can get the shape from the avatar for which you build, then your builds should be exact in scales and proportions. Here is a small text tutorial how you can get your current avatar shape out of Second Life and into blender (or any other 3D editor): http://blog.machinimatrix.org/3d-creation/blender-meshes-trail/rigg-your-avatar/ Note: this tutorial is made for Mesh beta, but the initial part about how to get the avatar as .obj works on main grid.

Caitlin Loxingly wrote: thanks but the basics are not a problem understanding and if there is an attempt to convince me that OpenGL is able to render 1024 quadrilateral faces with less than 2048 vertices and less than 2048 actual faces in memory i would point you to OpenGL org for some reading. I'm not gonna touch a flash file hosted on an untrusted server with being logged in under my account name anyway. so naa, i do not want to convince you about anything, just try to get the numbers right ;-) So here another try: You have 32 faces along X ... when you look along the x axis, you see it is evenly spaced and it has 32 edges along X. these 32 edges need 33 vertices to be constructed along X. The very same is true for the Y axis. So there you also have 32 edges along Y and 33 vertices to construct them. This spans up a square matrix of 32 * 32 faces, made out of 33 * 33 Vertices. 33 * 33 = 1089 vertices 32 * 32 = 1024 faces (note that the inner faces share all their vertices with adjacent faces!) Now each face is a quadruple and it will be transformed to 2 adjacent triangles when actually processed in your graphic card. That makes 1024 * 2 = 2048 Triangles And maybe there is just a different interpretation here ? If you name Triangles also faces, then we are d'accord ;-) But still the whole sculptmesh needs 1089 vertices. BTW: The movie from my previous post is on Youtube and its not a flash movie but an MP4. If you prefer the youtube link, here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsaYC0ThZUg And you say the Machinimatrix server is untrusted ? Is there an official way to get it to become trusted ? I would like to let it undergo any procedure that makes it trusted. Maybe that is why i do not get so many hits on it ?

Caitlin Loxingly wrote:there is still a problem with numbers there, if a sculptie has 1024 faces that would require 2048 vertices (4 vertices per face with 2 of the 4 being able to be used in the face adjacent) and becomes 2048 faces once it is passed into OpenGL and converted from quadrilaterals to triangles as OpenGL can not render quadrilaterals. a geometric solid sculptie can be made from a 63x64 mesh, which is 4032 vertices, effectively 4096 once stitching is taken into account, for a minimum of 3906 faces in a 64x64(x4294967296) sculptie map. Maybe it makes sense to show you the first 4 minutes of my upcoming video tutorial about basics about Sculpties ? Maybe that helps a bit: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/3d-creation/video-tutorials/sculpties-basic-tutorials//

hmm. oops, i am a noob when i use v2, could be so ;-) Unfortunately i don't care if i am a noob or not. Fact is i use viewer-2 because it works best for me. But then that is my personal (noobish?) opinion. And maybe you are right. I should just start using moap and not care about my customers... hmm... A big moap noob i am

you love V2, thats like saying you love offal as you have never tried anything else. yep you have a fast computer, most dont. Moap is media on a prim which was supposed to be a fab new feature of V2 where you could play games in real time. in fact it was almost the selling point of V2. i have never seen one game in the wild. I think the top reason why Moap is not used is because Viewer-1 adicted hesitate to switch to Viewer-2. And since most shop owners are very carefull with their customers they refuse to use technology that can not be seen by all residents. I myself wished all so often to use moap and honestly i hope for meshes arriving soon so that viewer-2 becomes mandantory. Then i will immediately start using this awesome feature in my shop ;-) Now beat me if you like ;-)