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Sylvia Wasp

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Posts posted by Sylvia Wasp

  1. 4 hours ago, Marianne Little said:

    I just have to ask, do you find Session skins makeup heavy?

    Because those I find on the marketplace are fresh faced - as I define fresh faced. The shine is strong, but can be turned off and the lashes is easy to adjust. https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/session-Leah-Tone-00b-Lelutka-EvoX-Fullbody-Skin-HD-BoM-Appliers/23130594

    I bought a GENUS head and matching skin from sessions when I went with the body skin from them.  I purchased the most makeup free version I could see on the wall in my skin colour and it did look good ... on the box art.  

    When I actually wore it, it looked greasy and slick, the shine was glaring and I couldn't see a way to turn it off.  I turned off materials and turned the shine down to zero on all parts of the head I was able to but it still looked shiny/greasy.  Perhaps I purchased the wrong one, but I don't have the money to constantly buy heads and head skins.  I took a chance and spent about two weeks worth of money on it and it looked awful even after a couple of days with fooling with it.  To be clear by "awful" I mean i couldn't get rid of the shine.  

    Another thing about the sessions head skins (I did try a few more demos), is that the faces are all significantly lighter than the body skin, as if the face is wearing foundation.  I have found this before on a lot of skins LAQ included.  The face is lightened up for some reason I've never been able to get.  It just doesn't look real to me. 

    I guess I could try Lelutka EvoX but I wasn't very happy with my old Lelutka head and as I said ... money! (lol)

    The idea with this post is to get some advice before I flush more cash down the toilet, but thank you, your post was helpful in that regard.  

  2. Hello, 

    Every few years or so I post about this but I have yet to get a response, so here is me trying again, lol ...

    In the old days, you could make a female avatar that was just, you know ... a female person.  A person who isn't necessarily wearing makeup.  

    The new mesh avatars are obviously far superior, but the heads and head skins are almost universally those of women wearing a ton of makeup.  I've been wearing a LAQ head for years simply because they once sold one as a "fresh faced girl" without makeup, (Lulu) but even then, the skin is shiny and it has LAQ's permanent eyeliner baked in. 

    Before the angry-patrol chimes in ... I'm not going through this to criticise LAQ or to make waves of any kind.  I'm just trying to be straightforward.  LAQ has been the avatar creator I've leaned on for more than a decade, they do great work, and they do get very *close* to what I want.  

    Anyway ... I've finally found a more realistic body skin [session], but it no longer matches my LAQ head of course and session doesn't make skins for LAQ heads.  Also, the session head skins suffer from the same kind of "makeup-itis" that all the other vendors suffer from.  

    So, are there any heads or head skins out there that actually have a nice, realistic female skin without makeup?  

    I'm prepared to switch heads, switch body skins or do almost anything to finally get a realistic female avatar.  

    All I want to do is be able to hang out on the beach without wearing a ton of foundation, foot-long eyelashes and big puffy wax lips.  

    Thanks for any help, 

    Sylvia :) 

     

     

    • Like 1
  3. On 9/23/2021 at 2:21 AM, MBeatrix said:

    The whole thing is tricky. Personally, I don't give a single bit about SomaFM just because they are not looking for a solution. Should SL users try to find one? Would SomaFM pay someone who has a viable solution?

    I have a more serious question, though, supposing SomaFM gets money from SL parcel owners: is it fair that a parcel with very little traffic pays the same a club that is crowded most of the time does? If not, how do you control that? Traffic keeps changing, and it may change in a matter of minutes. Sorry, people, but the whole thing is nuts.
    It's true that we pay LL the same for a low traffic parcel than we do for a crowded one but we always get something valuable in return — space to do whatever and prims.

    More ill-informed, inaccurate mean-ness from you.  Not sure how a person like you lives with themselves.  Do you get up in the morning and think ... "I'm gonna make some random hater comments on a bunch of stuff I don't really know about but I sure have an opinion on!" 

    • Haha 1
  4. On 9/19/2021 at 8:56 AM, Frankie Antonioni said:

    Does anybody know of a streaming service that plays spy music? Like Secret Agent by Johnny Rivers, or music by Tape Five, Fantastic Plastic Machine, and many others? Also theme music from movies, and TV shows?

    SomaFM has a station devoted to that.

    As an aside ... I can't understand all the hate and vitriol on this thread.  SomaFM is a small one-person operation basically and has done everyone a HUGE favour for many years simply by existing.  I've personally been streaming them in SL since I first joined in 2004. 

    Maybe we could give SomaFM a break? 

    Stop pretending they are some kind of big nefarious company? 

    Stop criticizing them for simply trying to exist?

    Understand that they don't have a microscopic sliver of the resources that SL has? 

    I mean SomaFM could almost be described as SL's default sound experience. 

    • Haha 1
  5. On 9/17/2021 at 8:39 AM, MBeatrix said:

    Whirly? Do you know any music player that doesn't display "now playing information"? Anyone?
    With that, SOMA sounds like a bunch of amateurs trying to make some money.

    All your posts are so mean.  SomaFM is a non-profit, ad-free radio station run by basically one person.  It's not like it's some corporation.  Get a grip and try to be a human being maybe? 

    • Haha 1
  6. 7 hours ago, LoneWolfiNTj said:

    Nope, it's not deprecated. The only "caveats" I see on the wiki are these: "The object owner must also be the land owner. If the land is deeded to a group the object will need to be deeded to the same group for this function to work."

    Are you sure the URL itself is still valid? Sometimes internet radio streams go temporarily-off-line or permanently-out-of-business. Have you tried setting the URLs you're using manually using your Land button?

    And, are you sure you sound system is working? And that "parcel music" isn't disabled or muted anywhere in your viewer? Can you hear parcel music when visiting other parcels?

    Thanks,

    I've checked all the usual things and I made and wrote the script for the radios myself.  I thought it had to be either the ownership or the script.  The stations I use don't go offline, but the answer is below apparently.  😕

  7. 15 hours ago, Mollymews said:

    my impressions on what I see here

    - stuff in the view that is not useful to the shopper

    disabled vendors are not useful to the shopper, so remove them

    Yes, totally agree.  

     

    15 hours ago, Mollymews said:

    - boyfriend chair

    put the chair by the entrance (side close to where you are standing). So when the boyfriend sits they can see all the vendors without camming.

    reason: We (the shopper) are wandering about looking at/thru the vendors. Boyfriend sitting can see us and what we are looking at. Boyfriend goes: I like that one ! Because they can see it from the chair

    we get the Demo, stick it on in the shop. Boyfriend goes: babe! And we say: Buy it for me please. And they go: gah! should of kept my mouth shut mumble mumble and then opens their wallet. Because boyfriend knows what they like, and boyfriend can have whatever they like if they pay for it

    we go home and I put on, boyfriend wants to get all snuggly. Boyfriend goes: I love shopping ! And I go: Me too! Lets go and do it again later, smoooch!

    a narrative/journey that began because shopkeeper understands what motivates boyfriends to go shopping with and buy stuff for their partners. A journey for the boyfriend that began with the placement of a chair in a shop

    two scripted needs come out of this

    - the vendor needs a method to buy and gift to another person. Boyfriend pays and I get
    - the packaged item I get needs to attach as HUD. So I can attach it in the shop and get the item into my inventory

    for some shopkeepers this is not a narrative/journey they want for their shop. Which is ok. But if we are going to have a boyfriend chair in our shop then have it work for us the shopkeeper

    I love this scenario! :) 

    Sadly, I don't do demos.  I like to make sure that everything fits absolutely perfectly, every time and that the quality of the clothing is far above the prices charged so, so far ... this hasn't been a problem.  No complaints so far.  

    I will move the chair though and I think perhaps a nicer version is in order.   

     

    16 hours ago, Mollymews said:

    - small shop limited LI. Example is 7 vendors

    the one in the middle (place of prominence) is for our Latest New Product. It says so on the vendor stickies: ! New ! Latest ! Hot ! Best Ever ! Is a single item vendor. Those stickies will draw the shoppers eyes. Same as they do in a RL shop

    the vendors on each side are also single item vendors. These are our two most popular items. The stickies say they are. Same in RL, people like to know what is popular, what is desirable, what do other people like the most. And we need to tell them what that is - with stickies in this limited LI shop setting ...

    Good thinking here, but very similar to what I already have.  I have three smaller vendors to one side for the "free" stuff and the low priced stuff and of course the vendors you are facing when you rez are always the latest product (or *would* be if they would recycle to the first page as I was worried about to begin with).    

    A couple of exceptions here are that I don't do "sales" and I don't believe in sales groups either.  I worked in the retail industry in RL for over a decade and grew very disillusioned with all the trickery and gimmicks and so on. So I prefer to just price things at a reasonable price, and everyone gets the same price.  If something is free, it's a freebie to everyone who comes to the store, not just group members.  I also regularly *reduce* the prices of all items over time; especially those that aren't selling at their current prices.  But I purposely never (or rarely) tell anyone about it.  I know all this is very weird, lol.  It's a moral choice not a sales choice.  

     

    16 hours ago, Mollymews said:

    three scripted needs here:
    - single item vendor
    - multi item variable pricing vendor
    - group gift vendor

    My current vendors are really item 2 already, but I would say that my further scripting needs are: 

    - making the vendors cycle back to the first item when not in use

    - "freebie" vendor (I've never been able to figure out how to make my vendor script give out something that has zero value, so I currently use $10L)

    - either a single item vendor (for the latest cool shiny thing) or ...

    ... a *display* of the latest cool product, in mesh, that you can also buy from. So ...  essentially a 3D version of a single item vendor

    I've been thinking about the display angle because my clothes sell on the basis of the fine details and craftsmanship, so not being able to see the product before buying it is likely a huge hole in my strategy. 

    Sylvia.  :) 

     

     

  8. 9 hours ago, Mollymews said:

    yes you are understanding this correctly. Don't make things more complex than they need to be for the situation

    situationals

    - as a customer

    i am not a fan of vendors that try to do too much

    for example: a shop that allows me to rez items for me to look at before I buy. I like to be able to do this, rez houses, garden and furniture settings, walk thru, cam and sit also

    when I like and want to buy I am ok to pay a vendor which is next to the rezzer as a seperate object. This costs the shop keeper 2 LI more than having the rezzer and vendor as one object. 2 LI cost for a complex-free no-hassle shopping experience


    - as a shop keeper

    i (typical shop keeper) have a satellite store and a 50 LI allowance. My satellite store is on on a busy entertainment region. Lots of traffic / potential customers. Is why I pay for the satellite

    at most I might get 20 vendors jammed in to the store, or I jam 20 products in each of my 20 multi-item vendors and think yeah!

    the thing is: putting on my customer hat. If all I see on the walk from the landing point to the entertainment venue is a whole bunch of vendors in the store then I am going to walk on past. There is nothing about a rack of vendor devices that is remotely compelling to me at that moment

    if tho there is a rezzed facsimile of your latest creation (think RL shop window display) and a vendor for that product then I (customer) might stop and have a look

    - as a little shop keeper on a little parcel

    less in your shop is better than more. Only display your latest products. Make the displays compelling to look at. With the aged/dated products stick them on Marketplace

    i see this a lot with little shop keepers. Open their first store with 5 things for sale. Next time I go back 20 things. Third time 50 things. Fourth time 100+ things, all now jammed into multi-item vendors. Everything they have ever made is jammed in somewhere. Is now like an op bargain basement rather than a product sales venue
     

    - weigh up

    as a shop keeper we have to weigh all these kinds of compelling and not so compelling  reasons/experiences

    decide what it is as a shop keeper that we want. Do we want to have cool and complex scripted sales terminals so we as shop keeper can jam more stuff into the terminals ? Or do we want to make attractive product displays, and simple (for the customer) one-click Buy vendors

    Interesting, and I think I agree.  I don't have that many items but I may be guilty of your "array of many vendors" rule, lol. 

    I try to keep it simple so the store itself is only two prims.  It's basically just a floor and a second (invisible) prim to keep folks from falling to their deaths.  The vendors are three prims each and currently there is a couple of empty ones.  A radio for music, a "boyfriend chair," and that's it really.  

    I try to organise things by category/vendor, but I don't do displays really.  Should I do displays?  What do you think? (picture attached) 

     

    Sylvia's Store_002.png

  9. 8 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

    In that sort of situation, there's little reason to even worry about it. (And that's why I was feeling guilty about taking the thread off-topic.)

    But in a busy environment—perhaps a shopping event opening day—buyers will end up with items different from what they thought they were buying. That's just gonna happen if the act of purchasing the immediately visible item isn't perfectly synchronized with the process of scrolling through items.

    One way for those to get out-of-sync is for them to be controlled by different people. Human reaction times aren't instantaneous and somebody pulled up a pear just as I was about to buy the cherry. Will I notice that detail before approving payment?

    Another source of asynchrony is lag, where a single operator can't be sure the product image they see in their viewer corresponds to the vending script's state when it gets around to processing a purchase.

    Combine a crowd of potential operators with script lag and… it's another shopping event opening day.

    This is what I was hoping the situation actually was (that it's not so serious) so I think I will simply not worry about it anymore.  I make and sell things because I like it, and because I like helping other people out by making quality items.  I have no intentions of ever being a "big store" and making tons of money in SL.  I think if that's the intention, from my point of view it's going about it the wrong way.  

    I was worried perhaps that the presence of a second avatar right-clicking to pay while the first avatar was scrolling through the items might "buy" the item using the first avatars money.  that seems like it might be a problem, although again unlikely.  If it's just a matter of the second avatar buying something they didn't think they were buying, then it's kind of their fault for being so rude in the first place, lol. 

  10. 7 hours ago, Quistess Alpha said:

    ( me neither to be honest) As long as nobody yells at us for continuing the tangent, another idea would be for there to be a separate "checkout" region. The personal vendor would communicate with the server and setup a third vendor in the checkout region ("please go to <landmark> and complete your purchase at locker 12") that would sell only the desired items to the intended customer. Perhaps that's adding even more complexity where it isn't needed though.

    I'm not going to yell at you, but all these ideas seem pretty horrible from the customer point of view. 🙂  I mean I'm not the best scripter and perhaps they sort of make sense from a scripting point of view but I do know customer service and I think these are things that customers don't want and would also be terribly confused by.  

    I'm not trying to be negative and it's all terribly interesting but this strikes me as putting barriers in the customers way rather than giving them any kind of bonus in terms of help, sales, security, etc.  

  11. 4 hours ago, Mollymews said:

    in this case there would be 4 states

    
    
    state default
       ... initialise
    
    state vend
       ... accept payment for current item from anyone
    
    state operate
       ... accept payment for current item from anyone
       ... allow only the current operator to page thru the items
    
    state disabled
      ... stop the vendor device from accepting payments and being operated

     

    edit for clarity

    we want the vendor to reset to the 1st item/page after a person ceases to operate the page display, which we do in state vend:state_entry()

     

    If I'm understanding this correctly then I won't do it.  

    If the downside of being able to reset the vendor to the first item is to have to implement a fourth state (operate) where one and only one "operator" is allowed and all that is checked and secure then it's really just too much fooforah for the relatively minimal payoff of being able to reset the vendor.  

    I don't quite see why that would be necessary anyway, so likely I am *not* understanding this correctly, lol. 

    I also see some discussion above about how a second party could buy from the vendor while the first party is scrolling through the items?  and a strong implication that this is considered "bad"?  But I don't understand why that would be bad, or how it's at all likely to even happen for the most part.  

    I mean we aren't talking about artificial situations like Gacha we're just talking a standard vendor with an infinite amount of each item.  I make my own vendors because I am a small store selling a small amount of items.  The whole store and all the items in it is less than 20 prims.  There isn't likely to be more than one person in the store at the same time, let alone multiple people champing at the bit to buy stuff from the same vendor. 

    Sylvia

  12. 7 hours ago, Mollymews said:

    there are a number of vendors which are written with one-user-at-a-time in mind

    quite a few can be found in places which sell buildings where the vendor doubles as a rezzer.  Others like Sweet Faces (hair) has a one-user-at-a-time vendor which allows the customer to page thru menus to choose the hair texture type they want

    these kinds of vendors typically have 3 states, the general design is something like:

    Okay, apologies to all, I've been a bit of an idiot here.  My vendor already has 3 states (not 2) making most of what I said irrelevant and ... well, stupid.  

    It starts with the default state which reads the notecard, requests permissions, does the dataserver thing , sets the current item, hovertext, etc. This state also has a link message because there are two other prims (forward and back buttons) that have to communicate with the main prim. 

    If the permissions are OK it goes into vend state which makes sure the current item and price are ok. Then there is a money function to cover all the possible money screwups, and another link message part (same reason).  

    The last state is just state disabled (for obvious reasons).  

    So, I'm guessing Rolig's very first suggestion: 

    state sell{
         state_entry(){
              llSetTimerEvent(60.0);
         }
    
         touch_end(integer num){
              if (llDetectedKey(0) != the customer who touched in state default){
                   llSetTimerEvent(0.0);
                   state default;
              }
              else{
                   //Do stuff to sell things
              }
         }
    
         timer(){
               llSetTimerEvent(0.0);
               state default;
         }
    
    }

    Would just go into my vend state, and probably cause no major problems? (as long as I do it right that is).  

    anything to look out for in terms of conflicts?  

    Sylvia 

  13. 4 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

    Several possibilities ...  Perhaps the easiest one that comes to mind is to put all the stuff that happens when a customer clicks the vendor for the first time into a second state, and start a timer.  Then, if the timer runs out or a different customer clicks the vendor (whichever happens first), return to state default and read the notecard again.

    Interesting.  In fact, I already have two states in my vendor script, one for the start up and initialisation of the notecard etc. and then a separate state for the actual vending.  This is because I was told by some people that it would be good to separate the vending part in that it would make it more secure, or less likely to be hacked, or something.  

    Could I add a third state without problems?  Or is there any problem just adding similar code to yours to the start of my vending state? 

    Sylvia

  14. OK, so I have a vendor that I make/use and it's pretty standard.  You can click through items one by one and right-click to pay and so forth.  I'm always careful to load it so that the best items are at the top of the list (it works off an internal notecard list of items), but folks are always leaving it just randomly showing some item.  What I want is for it to reset itself after a while and go back to displaying the top item on the list so that the next time someone uses it, they are seeing the best item instead of just some random third-tier item.  

    Now I guess I make a timer and then after a certain amount of time it can reset the script somehow, but I can't think of how to do it without creating some kind of fancy indexed list and all kinds of complicated extra junk like that when it's never going to have more than a dozen or two items anyway.  It seems like overkill.  Right now it works off of a simple notecard as I said.  

    Also, how do I detect when there is no one using it in the first place?  The last thing I need is for it to reset to the first item in the midst of a purchase or something.  

    any help?

    Sylvia

  15. Hello, 

    For weeks now, group invites have been failing for me (using Firestorm viewer), so basically I want to know if this is a widespread problem, or a bug, or how long it's been going on, if it's ever going to be fixed, etc.  You know ...since groups are a central part of how SL works and Firestorm is the most popular viewer, lol.  

    Specifically (in order of frequency): 

    1) Sending out group invites generally just silently fails.  You pick a person off the list, send the invite, but get no feedback at all.  The receiver never gets the invite. 

    2) Sometimes, it (seems to) work for the sender ... (notification that it was sent) but then the receiver still just never gets the invite.  

    3) Very occasionally, It seems to work for the sender (notification) and the receiver seems to get it (they get the dialogue and click "Join") but they still haven't joined the group.  

    Before all the "whatabouts" begin ... I'm an experienced long time SL user, the people I'm sending invites to are actually on my friends list, they aren't banned, it isn't occurring in high lag areas, etc.  I've been dealing with this for about two to three weeks although previous to that I was off for more than a year due to the deadly plague. 🙂

    It's completely reproducible, with the exception of the there variations above.  

    If I was to give rough numbers I'd say 1) happens about 70% of the time, 2) happens about 20% of the time and 3) happens the rest of the time.  

    thanks, 

    Sylvia

    • Like 1
  16. 19 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

    Count yourself lucky, "In my 2004" days I don't know how many thousands uploads i had to do to test the couple dresses I made originally. Thankfully we don't have to do that anymore :D

    I remember making a camisole in those days that cost similarly and sold for $150 lindens.  I think I sold 6 or 7 total, lol. 

  17. 3 hours ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

    Every word here is true but there something I will add to it, specifically for those people who are capable of the "vision" in MD and other tools but find themselves stumbling when it comes to translating the results of that into a model for SL or any other 3d environment...

    We're geeks. We do what geeks do and we use "terms of art" a lot. This can obscure that what we're really talking about is a way to think about the project. A "model" in MD or other design-oriented software is not a 3d asset in the same way that a fashion sketch is not a sewing pattern or a design sketch for a piece of furniture is not a cutting list for a carpenter. I used these two examples advisedly, because in both cases to get from the sketch to something usable you need to be thinking in the same way as you would to get from design to 3d asset  - and it's something that, shorn of all the geeky language, many of you already know how to do.

    Let's stick with sewing, since in many cases when raising these concerns we're talking about clothing models.

    We talk about "edge loops", "topolgy" and "UV mapping" when we're talking about many of the same concerns involved in creating a pattern and laying it out on fabric. If you sew at all you've probably worked with stretchy fabric. You know there are ways you can construct a garment that work with it and there are also wrong ways to do it, that might conceivably look ok  pinned to a mannequin but will never work on an actual body. The skin of your model is like that, we talk about working with quads and keeping clean edge loops and we're thinking in exactly the same way as you are when considering whether a particular piece of fabric should be cut on the bias or not, we're looking at the grid that makes up our model like you look at the weave of your fabric and just know that "it can't be made to stretch like that there" and you have to cut that piece differently. If the grid of your model looks too tortured to be made in cloth, it's probably not going to work well as a 3d model either.

    When we're saying "your UV map is inefficient" and you can't get your head around that, try thinking "Don't lay out your pattern like that, look at all the wasted fabric. That stuff's expensive!" The edges of UV islands are called "seams" for a reason!

    Too many vertices? that's like a design that needs to be pinned to the mannequin every couple of inches to hold its shape. You know you can do better than that in cloth, you can do it with vertices on a 3d model too.

    None of this is anything you can't do, you just need to not be daunted by it, make the link between it and the skills and knowledge you already possess in creating stuff for the "real world" then see how the same approaches can translate well into making your creations not just "real" but also "good" in SL too.

    I love this.  A very succinct and insightful take on the problems (and rewards) involved. 🙂

  18. 13 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

    MD is a fine piece of software for what it does, but it is not a modeling software. I'd call it more a "design" software. It is a great tool to bring your vision of a specific garment into the digital space (as long as you don't mind not being in full control of the result).

    You can use MD for years and still know nothing about the skills you will need to bring your idea into secondlife, or any other game.

    And sure you can consider that next step as simply "beneath you" and not worth your time, hell, you can probably outsource it to someone else for a hundred buck.

    The reality however is that all those steps are ultimately connected, how you will UV your model depends on the textures you will use, how you will LOD your model depends on what matters and what doesn't detail wise, and even when you are still designing and refining your idea in MD, these are things that have to be kept in mind.

     

    Which is why you see time and time again the same mistakes being made in SL, which lead to bloated geometry, bloated texture resolution, dodgy rigging, dodgy texture UVs and a worse experience for everyone.

    I'm not telling people that they have to be perfect, just that they need to try to care at least a little. This is no different than the prim era, you can be smart about it, or you can just cram as many prims and textures as the linkset limit allows.

    Agreed.  I know I have to learn some Blender skills in addition to Marvellous Designer.  

    It's just that right now, to me, Blender seems like a mathematicians nightmare, but in RL I can make a dress.  Marvellous Designer allows me to take the same pattern for the RL dress and simply turn it into a 3D model.  It's using skills I already know, it's faster, it's more intuitive etc. 

    Being the super-picky person I am, I know once I start using it I will find that I will have to use Blender to "fix" the model before upload.  The UV is especially important to me as I have spent a couple of years trying to texture other peoples mesh and a bad or poorly thought out UV is almost always the problem.  

    Sylvia. 

  19. 15 hours ago, Semirans said:

    In regards to Local textures, this is a godsend. I've made textures and then uploaded the item into SL only to discover I forgot to remove the alpha (making the texture too complex) or that something didn't work on the garment that wasn't obvious in the program until I pasted onto my mesh blank.  A good example of this is matching seams on a garment.  I don't know why mesh makers do it, but almost every pair of pants I have has to be tweaked to get the patterns to match at the seams.  There is also some difference once the texture is on the mesh blank.  I make a texture, it looks great in PS with all the shading and such then I upload it and place on the grament and it looks washed out or muddy.  (my hubby explained it one day to me, but most of it was lost between OH LOOK new Textures, and aren't my mesh feet gorgeous?)

    I have all these same problems.  

    I've just resigned myself to spending about a thousand lindens in uploads on everything I make.  🙂

    I will *try* Local Textures (at least I keep telling myself that), but the texture picker in SL, and having to navigate that horrible inventory tree is so tiresome I'm almost ready to just keep paying the price.  

    That being said, I haven't tried it yet so perhaps I'm talking nonsense.  

    Sylvia 

  20. On 3/9/2020 at 8:07 AM, Kyrah Abattoir said:

    I think the answer on those is either:

    • They sell fullperm mesh 'kits' because they are beginners and they don't have the ability/time/drive to make it a complete product.
    • They don't care and they know that their customers don't know any better.
    • Time spent vs asking price.

    I think perhaps you are a tad too harsh here.  

    I've been in SL for ages and have met and worked with some of the great creators and it's always seemed rather obvious to me that the skills and qualities required to make good mesh are entirely opposite to the skills and qualities required to make nice clothing.  

    It's not that the full perm mesh makers are lazy, or poor workers, or don't bother to make "complete products," it's that they would like to make clothes, and have the vision for what is required, but they don't have the skill set.  Because the kind of person who's good at using a 3D mesh making program is not the kind of person who is generally good at design, colour, intuition, etc.  Good mesh makers have an engineering mind set, not a designers mind set.  

    In a way ... by introducing mesh but not providing an easy way for the average person to make it, Linden Labs has somewhat ruined SL.  The idea that we are living in a "user-created" world has never been further from the truth than it is right now.  There are no supported methods for making mesh "in-world" and there are no tools or utilities offered by Linden Labs to make mesh outside of SL either.  A simple plug-in to allow us to export our prim-work as mesh and then re-upload it would be the obvious next step, but Linden Labs has shown no sign of taking it.  You can futz around with that sort of thing if you use Firestorm, but the results are somewhere between dismal and non-functional. Long time SL residents like myself, who are expert prim-workers have seemingly acquired a skill that is now entirely useless.  All we have left is our ability to texture things.  

    That's why programs like Marvellous Designer are a godsend.  

    They allow folks who don't have that mathematical/engineering mindset or simply don't have the wherewithal to navigate a complex, counter-intuitive program like Blender or Maya ... to make mesh in an intuitive way.  

    What I've learned from this thread is that apparently they do also need to also learn a few basic cleanup steps in Blender though.

    good to know 🙂

    Sylvia

    • Haha 1
  21. 7 hours ago, MaxMare said:

    This is bad UV mapping and I`ve seen  A LOT of that with full perm mesh...there are so many new full perm stores and it is painfully obvious they are literally just learning...The approach 99.9% new creators have is: 1. create a mesh in Marvelous Designer, 2. rig in Avastar, 3. sell...Needless to say, they skipped at least 2. steps a professional would incorporate (optimize mesh/retopo and fix UV mapping)...Stretching can also be caused by sloppy rigging  (usually occurs between legs, under arm, shoulders, front and back mid section of longer skirts/dresses etc)

    If your business is based on full perm mesh, I would suggest to buy only meshes that include a textured sample as well as UV map sample in the DEMO (for example, CBB and Underground demos include this), it will save you a lot of trouble down the road with texturing and also prevent you from wasting Linden on meshes you won`t end up selling in your store...

    Edit: When it comes to just a tiny bit of stretching along one axis, you can compensate for that with your textures (make pattern more dense for affected areas)...

    Thanks for the advice.  

    There is indeed a boatload of badly made full perm mesh out there.  I'm hoping to make my own soon simply because of the complete lack of any really good alternatives.  I'm not sure why mesh makers don't make good full perm mesh for SL use, but they don't.  

    - The few folks that make the good stuff are usually just making things for themselves and make only one or two items, rigged only for the body that they use.  

    - The people making full perm mesh for sale, are typically amateurs as you say, and don't even know how to rig properly.  

    Sylvia 

  22. On 3/7/2020 at 10:51 AM, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

    Local textures are available in Firestorm, you simply need to open the texture picker ...

    31611781_localtextures.jpg.87e2848528f57f9cdf34c982b1c8f579.jpg

    That explains why I've never discovered it ... I never use the texture picker.  🙂

    One of the worst things about SL in general is the dreaded inventory and I learned long ago that one can make life more tolerable by reducing the times you have to navigate it to a minimum.  I usually just drag and drop textures into the edit box.  It's way faster and far more accurate.  

    I'll have to make a decision on whether the extra hassle is worth the savings in Lindens I guess.  

    Quote

    It's basically a 3D term that's been shortened for expedience, but retopology literally means the rearranging of the topology or "layout" of the polygons that comprise a 3D model, (which is pretty much the dictionary definition of "topology")

    I see that it works for the geographical meaning of 'topology' (which I wasn't thinking of, lol)  I was referring to the mathematical definition (topological transformations etc.) which is almost opposite really.  

    Quote

    3D Coat is available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. 

    Cool.  I will definitely check it out then.  

    thanks again, 

    Sylvia

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