Siddean Munro

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SH-2103 this is a long standing bug.

Thanks Charlar, I'll check

It's not a problem with rezzed mesh, it's a problem with worn skinned mesh. I logged it in the Jira here which Runitai helpfully closed under the reason duplicate, tho I can't see how the jira it's supposedly a duplicate of is in any way related. Anyway, you're not going mad, it's a real problem and plenty of people are experiencing it. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SH-2836 Besides, the duplicate says its resolved. I'll check today and if this is not resolved, I'll reopen that jira :-/

Zbrush has an excellent mesh decimation plugin which will get that poly count right down while preserving most of your detail so it doesn't take 3 minutes to rez . Decimation master, easy to use, preserves your uv etc. good stuff to get to know if this is the kind of work you're doing!

I spent some time testing it. "Almost ready" is not what I would call it. I would call it "a great start that I'm sure includes a lot of very complex mathematics that I am completely unaware of but needs a lot of work and refinement before it will be usable in sl for anything". But that's a lot more words. And Qarl never said "almost ready" either. This is very early alpha. I would really not be expecting it in official release sl for some time yet.

Also make sure you are getting them from a legitimate source, as many "business in a box" type things actually contain other creators items that have been copybotted, and you may find your innocently purchased items missing from your inventory if someone files a dmca on you. Best option is an affiliate system if you're not of the creative persuasion, or if you one day want to make your own, there are some great full perm kits available on the marketplace from legitimate creators that you can load up in your image editor to change and learn from. Affiliates and full perm kits usually have their own rules that you agree to when you purchase the items.

Ah yea now I see it! I had to restart Blender but now it's working fine! thank you

Thanks Gaia, but for some reason my operator panel doesn't appear where yours has. Now I know where to look tho!

I've hit a bit of an irritating snag in Blender 2.59. For the life of me I can't find where to define the number of horizontal faces a cylinder should have! It always starts with 32, and I find myself deleting edges to get to a lower facecount. I know in 2.49b there was a field to fill out to tell Blender to make a cylinder with 8 faces, 16, whatever, but I can't seem to locate it in 2.59. A pointer would sure be appreciated :smileyhappy:

There is no human v furry bias to be found here. I have seen human avvies with much higher rendering cost than these furry avvies, thanks to their 255 torus blingy bumpy jewellery, flexy prim alpha textured skirts that use all 1024 textures, and their masses of twisted torii and flexy and sculpty hair. It's efficiency vs non efficiency where the bias lies, not in what flavour of avatar you prefer.

Ah yes of course, I haven't used 2.49 in a long time and forgot the choice was there. thanks!

Just to add, and apologies if this was mentioned before, but I think the triangulation is done by the collada exporter, not the sl uploader, at least in blender. I had an issue recently with an obj file losing the uv map somewhere between zbrush and blender, and went back to one of my collada exports to find it already converted to tris when it was re-imported to blender news to me, I always thought the uploader did it as well.

Oh this is good news, will definitely check this out first thing tomorrow!

I lost the install files when my hard drive died I didn't want the upgraded version, I wanted the version I owned, that's all, I was quite happy with that. But Autodesk couldn't provide them. I even put in a support ticket which they never even answered. I had to pay again, for software I already owned, because they don't provide different versions. They'd do well to take a leaf out of Pixologic's book and provide version updates for free, talk about generating brand loyalty. I'd run backwards across an ocean for Pixologic. Autodesk, not so much. I thought it to be pretty low money grubbing to be honest, and Autodesk shouldn't need to do that. Needless to say I've learned that lesson the hard way, and now keep separate backups of my install files on a different drive. Shall I provide you with a list of the feature updates that pixologic has provided to their licence holders for FREE since Zbrush 2?

I bought Alias SBP for $240. When I had to reinstall it after I reinstalled my OS, Autodesk charged me $75 to get to the install files because they had bought it in the meantime and added their branding to it, while adding *no* extra functionality to the initial program. Same thing happened the next year when they updated the branding to 2011, another $75 charge to get the rebranded install files. I couldn't just get 2010 which is what I owned and didn't want to update. It wasn't cheap when I bought it. The fact that it is now annoys me even more $3500 is still better than $7000, I will agree there. Still far more than your average SL hobbyist or small business needs to fork out when there are very good cheaper or free options available.

When I can bill $300 an hour, then I might buy Maya. Autodesk ticked me right off when they bought out Alias and started charging an arm and a leg for the sketchbook pro rebrand and yearly updates, so I would take a lot for me to spend that kind of money with them. Until then, Blender is more than adequate. And more than adequate for a pro.

Blender is great these days, so Remington is welcome to keep throwing money at autodesk for overpriced software if that's his poison. Not sure why the rest of us need to as well. Maybe he's on the autodesk payroll?

Don't use the checker texture as an indicator of a good or bad seam as it applies to the final texture, you will create a seamless texture for it anyway. The checker will help you see if you have any bad pixel stretch or pinch and whether your texture resolution is smaller on any part than it should be, not whether front and back line up. Also, real clothing construction has seams too, which you can take into account when placing your models uv seams.

Others have provided a wealth of information already, but I am going to add my 2c, since that is what I do with regularity both here, on the Zbrush forums and through inworld groups and private lessons. To the OP, I understand that it's frustrating to get into the world of 3d creation - I've been there and it's hard when you're coming from a position of zero or limited knowledge. I had literally never touched 3d before I opened Zbrush to learn how to create a sculpty. Here is my recommendation for you. This would assume you're using Blender 2.59, which is the current stable release, and the one that works with skinned mesh export without having to futz around with the rotation of the bones. First, go to google and find yourself an introduction to blender tutorial. Once you get the basics, it becomes a lot easier. As for UI revisions, there has been one major UI revision to blender recently, not one a month. Just the one. And most of the features and shortcuts are the same, it just looks nicer and is easier to find your way around. Then, go to http://www.machinimatrix.org/ and go through their mesh tutorials. get to the point where you can successfully upload an unrigged mesh cube or something, UV mapped, LODS and physics shapes, and textured. Then find a skeleton that you can work with. The Standard sizing package Marketplace (DL here) contains 5 female shapes, in .blend format (you don't *have* to use the shapes, but you're welcome to use them) all of which have working skeletons and are proven to work, since there are a number of creators already using them, myself included. Then go to Google, type "Blender 2.59 tutorials" and go nuts on *everything* you can find. Watch tutorials about box modelling, weight painting, rigging, texturing, cloth animations, Ambient occlusion baking. It doesn't matter one single bit whether it's SL related or not. The SL requirements are about 2% of the entire process, so what you need is general modelling skills, not "how to make a mesh for second life" tutorials. The how to make mesh for SL stuff can be found in the excellent tutorials that Machinimatrix has done, and reading around on these boards, and in the Wiki.

Duplicating and flipping the normals as Chosen suggested will double your poly count. It is mostly unnecessary to duplicate the entire model, just select the polygons around the hems, the bits that will be visible when looking around your avvie and duplicate/flip them to create a facing, giving the appearance of an inner area without adding a bunch of unnecessary faces you won't see anyway. Do this in edit mode as the absolute last thing you do before exporting, after uv mapping, after weighting, after texturing, and you won't have to do any further work to it. Also, worn "rigged" mesh doesn't suffer from alpha sorting glitches the way regular prims do so use whatever file format you like, tho I'd recommend .tga or .png. If you don't want your alpha channel to cause problems in a solid texture, save it as a 24 bit .tga..

There are now 3 viewer 1 based viewers (Cool, Singularity and the under development Astra) that allow the user to view mesh objects rendered properly. No need for a new computer at all, just a change in thinking to use a viewer that has the same features that LL implements. What if there were still viewers around that didn't see sculpties, as there were when they first became available? Your point will be completely moot when the Phoenix team finally get around to adding that same code to their Phoenix viewer. Then all people will need to do to keep the "majority of users can't see mesh" mantra is downgrade to Viewer 1.23.

A properly made mesh bed need not be as many prim or Land Impact as the same bed in separate sculpties. You can separate out components into their own material groups so you get better texture resolution and use of texture space, as Gaia mentioned, sculpties waste a lot of texture space because of they way they must be built. They also take longer to load, as you need to load a sculpt texture, and a image texture for each sculpty. Mesh models with custom lods degrade much better at distance than sculpties do as well. Sculpties can be up to 2048 tris per sculpty, whereas a well made mesh bed can use 2048 tris for the entire model. Not to mention that building in mesh is the 3d industry standard, and sculpties are a clever, SL specific hack. If you can make sculpties in an external 3d program like Blender, you can make meshes.

Oh great, another phoenix is king derail. You are holding the rest of us hostage with your refusal to move with the times! Also, I don't buy "the majority" anymore. More and more people are moving to a mesh viewer every day. Soon there will only be you, running around wondering why everyone wants to wear donuts... And yes, there are some fab mesh releases coming out. I am very fond of my new red cardi from Celoe! It's really gorgeous!

Short answer, no. Alpha masks work like clothing layers on the avatar, not on attached prims. You could turn the offending pieces transparent, but this will most likely make the whole hair lock transparent. You could set it to 1% transparent and use an invisiprim around the top of the hat, but you may get alpha glitching amongst your hair where there wasn't before, and an invisiprim halo around your head if you stand in front of a wall with an alpha channel. Making a copy and editing the strands out of the way is probably the least hassle, best result method.

Pamela, I have seen that upload screen before, once on aditi, where it generated a hairstyle I was playing with to have 12000 tris in each LOD level instead of less tris for the lower LODs as it should have, as a result the LI and cost were astronomical. It could be a bug that you're looking at, as I have not seen the same behaviour on Agni.. In any case, I would also recommend making your own LOD and physics shapes. Also, don't build the bed like sculpties and assemble it inworld (I don't think you're doing this, but just in case!) build it entirely first in your modeling package, complete with LODs and physics shape (which should have approx 9-11 quads depending on if it has a headboard), material groups and UVs, and you should find the LI much improved.