Ashasekayi Ra

Naminestolenheart wrote: Actually I didn't want to resell them, I wanted to use them for personal use, like having a unique new shape for myself. and by the way thank you for the links. You're welcome. You should probably contact the company directly and ask about using it in SL for just your personal avatar.

Naminestolenheart wrote: ok, so it's not a good idea, I was just curious and I'm intrested in making mesh shapes. I thought would be nice to experiment with. As has already been said, you can't do that with Daz models. Even if you buy their gaming licenses, it isn't meant for a situation where you would sell copies of their model. The purpose for that license is say you need a main character model for your first person shooter Unity game. If you don't want to learn how to make a model from scratch, I'd suggest checking out the Makehuman project. They have a license that allows you to use their base model (not their data files) for commercial purposes if you give them attribution. Site Link: http://www.makehuman.org/ Their License: http://www.makehuman.org/node/320 Edit: Keep in mind this is not a game ready model. You will have to do some work taking the polycount down to something appropriate for SL.

When you use Avastar, you need to make sure to use their "export to SL" button in the Toolshelf, not the regular .dae exporter under "File".

You really shouldn't bother with the rigify plugin for SL right now since SL doesn't support custom armatures. So, you just need to skin your model to the SL armature. You can get the armature a number of ways for free. There is the avatar.blend file offered by Domino Marama and the avatar workbench offered by Machinimatrix. (To find the link on Domino's site, click "avatar" in the right sidebar of text.) Edit: And by the way, I've been getting errors with trying to export .dae files from the Blender 2.63 test build. So, you may want to go back to Blender 2.62 for the export.

It would help if you gave a rundown of the process you took to rig the dress. Also, we'd need to know which version of Blender you are using.

Fauxglove Silverweb wrote: I'm a freelance Mesh builder. Some of my best customers in the past have been merchants looking for new product to sell, and I'm looking to make deals with new clients now that I'm relying on this as a full-time job. As merchants yourselves, I was hoping you'd have some suggestions on how to best approach the topic. Would it be inappropriate to track a name down through a market listing and make a cold call? (If you happen to be interested yourself, you can see the stuff I've already done in mesh on faux-ink.tumblr.com . Plug plug! ) I also do custom resell mesh builds for merchants. So far, I've gotten clients through word of mouth. As for cold calling, that is a tricky subject in a place like SL where people are ready to yell "spam" at any moment. So, you'll probably want to be very careful with that. Concerning the rip off comment made in this thread: Knowing someone has an inworld store won't protect you from ripped mesh, sculpts or textures. If a client was ever concerned about an item I made, I have generally 20+ files in progress of the model being built, as well as a written building work log for the item. Basically, the person should be able to show mostly all the stages of work progression from cube to finished item if they made it from scratch.

veragr wrote: Hi everyone... I want to learn to create clothing for sl avatar but I don't know from where to begin. I already dowloaded Blender and ZBrush but I didn't found useful tutorials for clothing creation. Anyone can suggest good tutotials for mesh clothing? I have a few questions: How to import female avatar to this software and where I can find mesh avatar to import? What is the most suitable software for cloth creation? Thanks in advance You asked "How to import female avatar to this software and where I can find mesh avatar to import?": I explain a couple of different ways of doing it in the first two videos of this SL mesh clothing series: A good SL mesh and Blender resource is Machinimatrix: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/category/mesh/ As for must suitable software, that is subjective. It depends on what program you want to work with. I use Blender for modeling and retopology, Zbrush for detailing and texturing, Photoshop for texturing and Marvelous Designer for conceptuals. But, you could do all you needed to do with just Blender and Gimp if you wanted to. If you are new to mesh and Blender, I'd suggest these two playlists to start out: They are comprehensive and take you step by step through the process like a class. They are not clothing specific, but they will teach you the fundamentals. I haven't noticed a ton of clothing specific tutorials for Blender. I will make a series specifically on modeling clothes in Blender for SL. Hopefully, I'll get the first one out this week. But, here is one I came across a year ago. Keep in mind he just presents one way of modeling clothing. There are many different techniques. You'll probably want to reduce the polycount on any models using this method by deleting edge loops once it is done. (You can learn how to do that in the modeling series from Canned Mushroom I posted above). http://vimeo.com/14437630 Zbrush Clothing Tutorials: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXx12G0-9Lw http://www.selwy.com/2009/zbrush-clothes-tutorial/ http://www.pixologic.com/docs/index.php/Tutorial:_Pinup#Clothing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTNNUNoJGhs&feature=relmfu http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/store/products/tutorials/rsm02/ (not free, but one of the best ones I've watched) Keep in mind that if you make the clothing in Zbrush, you'll need to retoplogize it later to make a reasonable model to skin and bring into SL. Blender Topology/ Retoplogy Tutorials: http://cgcookie.com/blender/cgc-series/learning-mesh-topology-collection/ http://cgcookie.com/blender/2010/08/30/retopology-and-normal/

Looks like it is working again now.

Drongle McMahon wrote: Same for me. Don't you just love these informative error messages. They make everything so clear. The cryptic error messages kill me. They really do.

Some of the older Blender versions rotated the bones in a way that was incompatible with SL's uploader. The problem is fixed if you use Blender 2.62 and make sure to check "Export for Second Life" in the .dae exporter window.

Arghhh Well, at least it isn't just me then. Thanks for the replies.

Lilli Halsey wrote: I finally chanced upon what step I was missing. I needed to export the clothing as an obj from 2.62 and import it into 2.49 before rigging. Then I just have to remember to delete the materials and it works just fine although my 2.49 keeps crashing if I try to do the rigging for more than one item in a row. Thank you for your reply though! Lilli Just curious, why do you feel that you need to move from Blender 2.62 to 2.49? You can rig and export just fine from Blender 2.62.

Has anyone been able to upload mesh to Aditi in the last hour? I keep getting this error: NewAgentInventory_ServerError. I even get it with models that uploaded fine just yesterday. I used both Exodus and the Main LL Viewer and got the same results. Edit: Date: April 22, 2012, 1:25 SLT

Imagin Illyar wrote: We are all the exact same standard avatar - all our many differences come from deformation - which we do with sliders. Those with extreme body types already suffer from texture stretching - in everything from their skins to layer clothing. I really hope that Qarl gets the time to push this forward. As someone with a well-endowed avatar, I know the system clothing stretching issue very well. However, this is a common problem across programs when you use more extreme morphs on a base avatar. That issue won't change with the current technology that is used. You can minimize the problem by adding extra resolution to the stretched areas though.

They really do need to sticky some of these threads. As for official documentation, I asked about that in the last content user group and the response was that they weren't planning on adding any more documentation at the moment. Now that mesh is part of the regular feature set, I assume they only have so many man hours to give just to mesh issues. *shrugs*

Thanks for the interesting experiment, Drongle. One thing that I noticed when experimenting with the skullcap was that it didn't seem like I could change the order by importing the objects in. To use hair as an example again, I had this one hair that I designed without a skullcap. Later, I changed my mind and wanted to add a skullcap underneath. However, nothing worked to get the alpha order of that skullcap to appear below the other hair. I even tried exporting out each hair piece and re-importing them in the correct order. That still didn't work. I ended up having to rebuild it from the bottom up. Note: Each hair piece did have separate material ids.

If you have never successfully uploaded the model and the "skin weights" button is greyed out, it probably means that you don't have the essential 21 bones in the model. Look in your vertex group listing and make sure you have these 21 groups. -- crucial list (21)-- mNeck mHead mChest mTorso mPelvis mCollarRight mCollarLeft mShoulderLeft mShoulderRight mElbowRight mElbowLeft mWristLeft mWristRight mHipRight mHipLeft mKneeRight mKneeLeft mAnkleRight mAnkleLeft mFootRight mFootLeft If you have successfully uploaded this model before and then the "skin weights" button becomes greyed out on the next attempt with a model with the same filename, hit the "Clear settings and reset form" button. Then, you should get the "skin weight" button back. This seems to happen because of an .slm file bug.

I'm assuming you used automatic weights or weight copying? The spiky points are surely unweighted or inconsistently weighted vertices. I would recommend that you do some retopology on that Zbrush model. From the picture, it seems to have a large amount of polygons. If you retopoplogize it, you'd get a better polycount, and it will be less difficult to weight paint the dress properly. The other side benefit is that the lower the polygons the easier it is to fix weighting problems in the model.

Drongle McMahon wrote: Ash, I remember testing your method successfully during the beta. I think it would be very valuable if you felt like explaining it to people here. I actually don't remember what I wrote back then for Blender 2.49. But, I have been working with hair more in Blender 2.62. My process has been to give each individual layer its own material id. But most importantly, I make sure to build the hair up until the piece that needs the highest alpha priority is on top. For example, I build the skullcap first, then the bottom strands and finish with the very top layer of hair. After some experiementing. I found that if I created or imported in a skullcap after making the hair, it would always appear to sit on top of the hair because of alpha sorting issues.

Your question was pretty much answered in this thread: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Sources-for-learning-blender/m-p/1490525#M13537

You can control the glitching within the hair by controlling the priority given to each layer. The process probably depends on which 3D modeling software you use. If you use Blender, I could explain how to setup your model.

Medhue Simoni wrote: Having some early knowledge of the issue, I would have pushed LL to pay this issue the proper attention. Admitly, I was 1 of those people begging LL to just release mesh, as we waited for so long. I didn't quite anticipate how much creators and consumers would feel compelled to have mesh clothing, especially knowing the state that it was in. That said, If I were LL, I would have seen right away just how important the issue would become, and devoted a good amount of effort to make the deformer solution happen as quickly as possible. It does seem to me tho, that LL just has too many hoops to jump through to make anything happen quickly, lol. I was one of the people that brought up this issue to the Lindens *a lot* during the beta program. There were a couple of other people that voiced concern about the scale issue as well. However, the Lindens didn't feel that mesh would be used for fashion that heavily. They were convinced it would only explode for rezzables and rigged avatars, not clothing. So, they were made aware in the early stages. They just didn't find it to be a priority at that time.

Thanks Luc I'd also add Jason Welsh's different Blender playlists: http://www.youtube.com/user/cannedmushrooms/videos?query=blender&view=1 He has complete training series on the following topics: modeling, texturing, animation, Zbrush/Blender workflow and the Blender game engine.

Mikki Miles wrote: Ashasekayi Ra wrote: *laughs because she is so not a morning person* I'm still waiting for the day that we get more hours in the day. I will open a JIRA. LL should provide 24 additional hours a day for SL premium members, that's the least they could do LOL... I totally agree!

hehe You are welcome. Good luck with your first project.