Ashasekayi Ra

Toysoldier Thor wrote: The next problem I never was able to overcome was to get my beautiful and easy to paint Sculptris texture into SL. I had a beautiful texture on the Sculptris model but even though I exported the Texture map out of Sculptris, when I brought it into SL and slapped it on the SL model - it looked blotched and stretched and had major gaps. I am sure it has something to do with the UV from Sculptris but the NOOB I am on this - I have no clue the steps to fix it. I'm not sure what your workflow is. But, I generally build my model in Sculptris or Zbrush. Then, I use Blender to retopologize the model so that I can get nice edge flow and UV layout. (Zbrush has retopology tools, but I despise the tool.) Once I have my low res model (from retopology) and my high res model (from Zbrush/Sculptris). I take both .obj files into Xnormal and export out the maps I need. One of the maps that you can bake is a high to low texture map. In essence, it takes your Sculptris painted texture and makes it fit the nice, neat and orderly UVs created for the low poly model. Xnormal is an opensource program that works wonderfully as a helper program to Zbrush and Sculptris. Here's a tutorial that covers the Zbrush to Xnormal texture pipeline. You could easily substitute Scupltris or any other sculpting program though. http://eat3d.com/free_zbrush_xnormal_pipe As a side note, to remove doubles: Select the vertices in Edit Mode, hit the "W" key -> "Remove Doubles".

Well, I *hope* that by the time Qarl feels the code is finished that LL will work with him on adding an on/off switch of some sort for the deformer. It really shouldn't go live without it.

I use Sculptris and Zbrush from time to time. One issue I noticed with Sculptris models is that they sometimes made these extraneous floating vertices. So, I would have to take the model into Blender, go into Edit mode and remove doubles. This got rid of the duplicated vertices. Then, I would have to check for and select non-manifold vertices. This is when you'd see the cloud of floating, disconnected vertices. You can then delete the floating vertices. You may also get the floating cloud of vertices after using a decimation solution. So, it is good to check for them then as well.

Why should the Lindens get an earful about the deformer when they didn't create it? As for the effect the deformer has on mesh avatars, Qarl has already stated that an on/off switch needs to be added since every rigged mesh won't need the deformer.

Gaia Clary wrote: ok, here is one of the weird issues with good old blender. I have never seen this happen before, but ok. Look at the following series of images: That's an odd bug. Have you only noticed it in Blender 2.49.

You can definitely use Maya for rigged mesh in SL. Others have done it. If you are getting an error message, it could help if you post it. That way someone can possibly help pin down the problem.

Neural Blankes wrote: It would be nice if people would stop acting like paranoid hoarders with info on mesh, and start sharing more with the community. Mesh has the potential to make SL into an amazing world, but you won't make any money off of it if you hoard your secrets, because there will wind up being so little mesh content that users will start to spend their money on traditional items. /rant Hoarding information? You really must be kidding. Out of all the rants that have come into this forum, this one is by far the most offensive. Those of us that have made tutorials and have helped people out personally have not "hoarded" anything. In the future, I'd suggest that you ask people for help first instead of insulting a group of people that have volunteered their time for free.

I may be wrong, but I think you can report an item that has misleading keywords.

I'd agree with Drongle that your implication of favoritism for Blender is way off base. It wasn't until recently that people were able to make a workaround to import rigged mesh exported from Blender 2.6 and (rigged mesh with joint offsets from Blender 2.59). Every external modeling program has its own issues with the SL uploader. As for "industry standards", that is a moot point for SL since it is a place where anyone can create not just commercial 3D game studios.

Eilfie Sugarplum wrote: 2011-12-12T17:20:06Z INFO: LLModelPreview::verifyCount: Error: (expected/got)3282/2955verts This means that all your vertices aren't weighted to a bone. Try moving the pelvis bone around and you should see that some of the mesh is stuck in place. Just assign those vertices left behind to the proper bone.

Thanks for taking the time to leave that comment, Zeven.

I wouldn't hold my breath about PIOF going away. They've already stated that is here to stay. And since it is a decent way of connecting RL identity with uploaders, many have no problem with the requirement. I agree about the content double standard. All assets that can be imported should have the same restrictions. However, LL's policy is not to disturb old content. This can be seen by the entire implementation of mesh. You can animate the geometry created by a sculptmap and lag a SIM to your hearts content with a script. But, they removed the capability to do that with mesh. So, with mesh, they have tried to start off on the right foot by considering real costs on the system. However, they knew they couldn't go back and apply the same costs to sculpt maps and other assets because it would disrupt the community.

Drongle McMahon wrote: "Rule: All LODS need to have the same number of Necopots" Now I am confused. I guess it all depends what viewer version people are using, but I thought that was the old rule. and that the new rule is that the lower LODs can have a subset of the Necopots in the high LOD, but they must each have the same name (material attribute in <triangle> or <poly> tag) as one of the high LOD Necopots. Was that reverted? Or is that error message from an older viewer? In my current experience, the LODs still have to have the same material ids listed in the high LOD when uploading on the main viewer. Although, I know it says it just needs to be a subset. It's the same with partial bone lists in rigged mesh. I believe officially you are supposed to be able to use a partial list, but you still need the essential 21 bones.

Thanks Pamela I am working on a sort of layman documentation for mesh in SL. It's really just a re-organization of the notes I've taken during beta and this whole long process. The problem is that things are still changing a bit with the code. There have been bugs fixed in one viewer that aren't in the main viewer for example. So, you have to use workarounds in one viewer that you don't need in another. And well, it would be confusing for the reader if you have 2 or 3 different instructions for the same process. I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with that part of it since I want it to be understandable for beginners. Edit: As for your file problem, I'd really need to see the .blend file to be able to help since it seems a mystery from the description of the issue.

Duke: This isn't the case where a sculpty is needed. A mesh bed post could be made with 1 LI. As for the Medhui's comment about LODs, most people have been talking about the "quality" of handmade LODs not the lower weights. Of course, you could use lower percentages for the LODs made by the automatic SL uploader and get a size as low as you want. But, they won't look good. Unless the person makes a high LOD with too many triangles in the first place or makes a highly organic form, the decimator algorithm used by the SL uploader does a pretty horrid job visually, especially for the low and lowest LOD.

I've gotten around that bug by applying the first listed material id from the high LOD to the physics shape. As Arton said, it's been fixed in the development viewer.

We could probably help you more with the weight painting issue if you posted some pics of the rigged object in Blender. You may want to give this weight paint primer a try if you want to understand weight painting more:

I still get the message "You must be a premium subscriber to enter this region." for the mesh sandboxes and HQ on Aditi. I tried using the main viewer.

Yes, you could duplicate parts of the mesh seven times to make an animation and use alpha on individual material ids to make an animation. There are products that do that on the market already. However, you then have a model that is far heavier in triangle count than it needs to be. And, the display cost skyrockets when alpha is used. As I said, there is no efficient solution for this problem at the moment. Hopefully, they will add custom skeleton support someday.

As for pivots, they used to support pivots a long time ago in beta. They removed the code because it was having issues. The devs stated they plan to bring it back some day. Until then, there is a workaround for the issue that is pretty straightforward: As for performance, the more textures that have to be downloaded, the slower it will be. Of course, you can preload the textures to help out the animation smoothness. Animation through texture just isn't ideal for many reasons. But, it's your only option right now if you want to animate an object not worn by an avatar. Yes, you can have separate objects in your dae file that once uploaded to SL come in as a linkset. You could bring them in separately. But then, you'd have to realign them manually.

Great post Maeve. ^^

Thanks for finding that Daniel. The bias modifier would have been a great addition. I wonder if it may be considered in the future if/when a second project is put together.

It sounds like the eye model didn't have enough vertices to work well with polypaint and the detailed texture that you used for the eye. When using polypaint features, you need to work with high resolution models if you want to retain details. Once you are done with all the high resolution painting, then you can bake the high resolution details to your low resolution model.

I contacted someone in live chat and they stated that it was a known issue, but you could add to the bug tracker. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-7445?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Acomment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=295922#comment-295922

I am premium, and I can't log into them now. Do you have to do something special like changing your password to get your account on aditit to update?