Madeliefste Oh
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Posts posted by Madeliefste Oh
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Mira Kamiguwa wrote:This type of thing will lead to a huge skill margin between pro builders who can afford to use mesh and normal residents.
The huge skill margin is already there. Some people come to SL with 30 years of RL experience as a programmer, while others never have seen one line of script in their whole life. Others come to SL with 20 year experience as a Photoshopper, while others have never touched any graphical design program. Some people learned how to make sculpties, while others didn't bother at all to learn this.
In fact the difference in skills that people have is one of the factors that drives the SL economy.
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In stead of a new products forum I would rather like to have a 'follow this merchant'-button on the marketplace. People who push this button by free will, will be notified as soon as the merchant has uploaded new products to the marketplace.
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Actually at the moment I'm working 'backwards'. The very first mesh I ever uploaded was a very detailed can, with ribs modeled in the metal top and set very smooth. At that time there was no PE count yet.
Now the prim count comes to 77. The effect of the ribs is something I can archive as good with a texture on a simple ONE PRIMS sculpty.
So every mesh I made that can as well be done as sculpt, will end up as a final product in sculpt.
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Brooke Linden wrote:Will the average purchaser care, or understand, what mesh means? We are not sure of that answer, so for the initial rollout we won’t be displaying a mesh indicator on a product listing or providing a capability to search for mesh objects explicitly. After that time, we will evaluate customer demand for those features.
My guess is that the average purchaser buys products that he likes, regardless about the 'material' it is made from, prims, sculpts or mesh.But there are also a lot of residents who don't work for the average consumer, but provide products for SL businesses. To name a few: business scripts, vendors, advertising devices, clothing templates. Also many sculptors are in this sector of the market. You can find most of their products in the category 'building tools'. And I'm sure there are residents who are developping a B2B assortment for mesh as well.Buyers in this sector of the market are mainly builders and creators themselves. I think it is important for this group to provide all necesairy knowlegde about the products. And mesh is something very different when it comes to primcount then the products we are used to till today. While the current known products have a fixed primcount, mesh has a variable one.The possibility to put in a number as prim count on the marketplace is just not good enough for mesh products. Because it is not true that a mesh has a prim count of X. A mesh can have a prim count of X when the size of the mesh is A. But when the size of the mesh is B, the primcount of the mesh is Y. You you can only offer fair information to your customer about a prim count when you can name the size of the product next to the prim count.Brooke Linden wrote:As we are allowing (and encouraging) merchants to mark their mesh offerings, adding those features at a later date will be simple.Adding those features at a later date might be simple for you, but can be a lot of work for us merchants. Re-doing your listings because of changes in the marketplace is very time consuming.Apart from that you are loosing your rank status at the marketplace when you make changes in your listings. -
Commerce team
Can you please tell us how mesh will be integrated in the marketplace. Are there going to be seperate mesh categories?How will it those be structured?
With sculpts it is messy right now: we have "building components ->building aids->sculpted prims" and "building components -> Sculpted prims Creators Tools"
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How about the IP rights of an object you make with help of a tutorial?
Tutorials are mainly made for educational reasons, you are teached certain functions of a program. But often these educational routes are leading to objects. Let's say I follow a tutorial 'how to model a robot'. I model the robot myself, but I was taken at the hand by the original creator of the robot, who tought me step by step how to make it.
Am I allowed to upload this model to SL en distribute it here?
Most tutorials I have seen don't have any statement about copyrights of the model you create by following the tut. Is anybody familair with the issue of IP rights for models made with help of a tutorial?
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I also curious if it's possible to watermark the mesh itself.
For the textures I plan to put my logo and "© Madeliefste Oh, all right reserved" on the UV map. For example:
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I have been long in doubt about this issue when I started selling full perms items.
I hope to make sure every costumer can read and understand the user license that comes with our products before they decide to buy. One wall in our in world shop is used to expose the terms of use in ten different languages. On the marketplace we also include the terms of use, and offer translations in all languages available on the marketplace.
Most of our products consists of two copyrighted parts: the sculpt maps and the psd files. The sculpts maps are included in the box that is sold. But the psd files cannot be delivered directly in SL,they are downloadable. Before the buyer can download the psd file that belong to the product, he has to agree with the terms of use, if he refuses to agree it is just not possible for him to download the file.
I plan to do the same for the UVmaps that belong to mesh objects I'm going to sell with full perms. For the mesh objects themselves, I'm still in doubt if can use the same user license as for my sculpts.
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Say I purchase a 3d horse model. I turn it into a product and resell it. I do not sell the mesh full perm. Is that OK? By my reading of the license, I am not redistributing the mesh for reuse, it is for direct sale as an item.... no different than selling a game or movie that contains that 3d character. If that is not a legitimate use of the mesh, then why doesn't the license simply state "YOU CAN"T UPLOAD THIS TO SL". Done.
Yes, in that case you are redistributing the mesh for reuse. You must reuse not interpretate from your position, with you as starting point, but the from the original creator.
When you buy a mesh car for example that is not allowed to redistribute for reuse, this means that you are the end user of the car. You might be allowed to upload it to SL, but you are not allowed to make any copies of it except for own use. You can not sell an object in SL that doesn't come with permission to redistribute.
Why doesn't the license simply state "YOU CAN"T UPLOAD THIS TO SL"? Because people can neither upload it to InWorlds, Avination, Blue Mars, IMVU, Deviantart and so on and on and on...
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Phate Shepherd wrote:After going through the LL mesh tutorial to be granted access to mesh upload, I don't know now if they would even care about the Turbosquid license. "Well, its from Turbosquid. We don't care if you paid for it, or how the license reads.... we are deleting it to cover our butts." A few of the "correct" answers to the IP tutorial leaned heavily toward CYA.They are covering their butts, but even more they are covering your butt. When you infringe on copyrights, the legal holder of the copyrights cannot bring LL to court for your behaviour, but he can make you pay for misbuse.You can be sure that big players in the field of mesh, like game compagnies and movie compagnies have registrated every single form of copyright right for the meshes in their products. When you get cought by one of those for using meshes without permission, it can cost you a big deal of money. LL doesn't have to pay that for you. The only thing LL needs to do is give them your name. That is why the payment info on file is needed. For the reason that the legit IP right holder can send their legal department after a RL person, in stead of after an anymous avatar.You can only be sure when a mesh is donated to the public domain by the original creator. You will often find those creations coming with copyleft or the GNU General Public License.I'm not sure if there is much mesh available with these kind of licenses, I doubt it. People who are good with 3D can make good cash with their skills. But still there might be some idealists or fanatic copyleft fans who make their 3D works available for public use.But you better be 100% sure that meshes you want to use in SL are free from any copyright claims. When you don't understand a license, you can better ask the seller of the license what is ment by certain parts in the text.hsupport, you can send him an IM or a notecard.
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When it comes to rezzable objects I will stick to sculpties. I mainly make one prims objects, since one prims mesh is not possible at all the costumer will be better with my one prim sculpts then with a two prims mesh.
I will invest in mesh only for avatar attachment. There is primcount less import as a factor to market your products.
So what worries me more then the prim count is the viewer issue. I don't like the idea I have to tell my customers "can only be seen with SL Viewer2".
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Medhue Simoni wrote:Rigging a mesh is difficult and extremely time consuming. Plus, a creator that wants to make rigged mesh clothing should really have the exact SL model with exact SL rigging to create clothing with. I think some people might have this for Blender, but I've not seen any SL default avatar models for any other program.
That is what Collada was invented for. I found a rigged model of the female SL avatar, I'm sorry I don't remember the site, I downloaded them more then half a year ago. It might have been somewhere in SL wiki, but can also be on a site of a resident. I think there was a rigged male available as well.
I think the original file was an .obj file, but I'm not really sure about that. I have saved all kind of avatar mesh variations from different sources, and I'm not really sure which was the one that had the good rigg.
Anyway I succeeded to import it in Blender, and save it as a .blend file, then to export it to collada and to import it in C4D with still the rigging intact. So what I can do for Cinema 4D, you must be able to do for Max 3D as well.
Blender is free to download. Only thing you need to find in that program is the import and export button. And then you can work with the rigg in the 3D program you are used to.
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Arwen Serpente wrote:2) The creator name will be the name of the Mesh creator, not the avatar creating the final piece UNLESS the mesh file is purchased and then "re-uploaded" by the purchaser (and only then by an avatar with PIOF). So the cost skyrockets (first buying a full perm Mesh, then uploading it to have your name on it). Most sculptors right now sell their maps with no mod permissions - useable to build with inworld, but not saveable to computer. I suppose this could be worked around by buying the file the same way as buying a PSD file and downloading it, then uploading the final product to SL. The costs could potentially be huge, as right now, when a sculpty pack is purchased inworld, usually it includes multiple varieties of the same item (say shirt collars - you get dozens of options so you can switch between them depending on the build).
This is an interesting point you bring up here.cYo is a prefab business, and we did not plan to change that for mesh products.As far as I understand it, you are not allowed to upload a mesh of which you don't own the IP rights. We are prepared to sell a lot of our work to other SL businesses to use in SL: the sculpt maps and the psd files for our sculpts products, the meshes and the UV maps (templates) for mesh. But we are not prepared to sell our IP rights.For Photoshop files it's different. We can sell them with a user license. Anyone who buys our products is allowed (by both us and LL) to upload the textures he creates with the help of the Photoshop file to SL. But not anyone is allowed by LL to upload a mesh. I think it is just not possible to make user licenses for meshes that must be uploaded again by an owner who has become a user license but no IP rights. We can only make user licenses for meshes that we as creators have uploaded ourselves.In the light of better protection of IP rights from original creators, it's actually not too bad that the systems saves the name of the uploader and does not allow change of it by a second, third, fourth creator... -
Chelsea Malibu wrote:It's a tough one to say as each product is different but in the end, yes, they can be a very costly way to not get sales unless you make hair, skins, shoes or clothing.
My experience is that clohting is the most costly segment when it comes to promoting your product. It costs you both a lot of time and money to get attention for your producs. You must do so many things to get your products seen, next to designing the clothes.
I have three different shops, the first one where I started with is a curtain shop. I invested a lot of time to develop the products together with a scripter. We first created enough to fill a whole shop and then we builded the shop. To our own surprise from day 1 the shop was there the products started selling. We had not worked out any marketing plans yet when the product was already booming. For about two year the income of this shop was very stable. Whether we advertised or did not advertise at all, it made no difference in sales. After a while we stopped every form of promoting and still the product was sold in the same volumes as we were used to.
When economy began to sink down the income from this shop changed with it. But it is still a profitable shop and I haven't spend one dime or one minute of energy for more then three years now on promotion. The only thing I need to take care of for this shop is customer service.
My second brand is a ladies fashion. I created clothes for about two years. Fashion is very promotion intensive, because the competition is so high, and the competition is also always busy with promotion, promotion, promotion. In the period I was a clothing designer I did spend about half my time at creating the clothes and half the time at promoting them.
In the beginning the promoting of the brand was kind of challenging. There was something to discover about marketing and I was always glad to find new ways to promote. But after a year or two I started to hate the promotional rounds after a design was finished more and more. For me promoting fashion in SL is mainly dull, repetive work.
I have always enjoyed the desiging part of the job very much, but at a certain moment I remarked I started the hesitate to finish a design, cause finishing a design ment a new release, with another round of promotion... and I just didn't want to do it anymore. I wanted to spend more time on desiging.
A few months before I got my 'fashion promotion crisis' I started learning to work in Blender. In advance mainly because I found most sculpts I bought for fashion design so hard to texture. Then someone had shown me how you can make a template for sculpties, so you can texture the template of the sculpt, just like the clothing templates. But to learn how to do that myself I had to understand a bit more about Blender first, and though it was not very easy in the beginning this program fascinated me.
So the discovery of Blender combined with my growing resistance against the promotional work of my fashion brand, made in the end that I changed my working field in SL again. I'm now in the sculpty market, and I love it. The story of cYo is more comparable with my curtains brand then with my fashion brand. I spend about 5% of my time at promotion and customer service, and for the other 95% I can concentrate on designing. And that's just how I want it. Still my sculpty brand makes 4 times more money as my clothing shop ever did (and my earnings with clothing were not bad at all in the rich years 2007/2008).
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I also have a question about 'inspired by'...Is it allowed to advertise your car on the marketplace as 'NOT inspired by Mercedes, Jaguar or BMW'.
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Gaia Clary wrote:The longer i think about it the more it appears to me that the "punishment of mesh" indeed could be a way to keep people from swamping the grid with non optimized mesh objects.I guess the 'punishment of mesh' is not ment to be a punishment. We (creators, merchants) see it as a punishment because we are operating in the internal SL economie, and we know how things function there.I think 'take in account what a certain new feature does to the SL economie' simply is not on the worklist of any Linden. I'm not too technical or don't know much about programming, but I guess it is more in the direction like 'you must deliver such an such performance against such and such server costs.'We are thinking about the conditions that are necessairy to find buyers for our products, but Linden Lab is thinking about how it can be done so it will function for the platform as a whole against certain limited source costs.Lindens and SL merchants have different needs with mesh that simply don't meet. Because of the current PE count meshes are not attractive for people who operate in the SL economy. Rezzable meshes are deadborn babies.It will be different for attachable meshes. Those don't cost in terms of land fees. Wearing attachments is free of costs for the user. So that is where the new chances are at the moment from the economical point of view, avatars and avatar attachments. But for the rezzables it's just 'kill your darlings'.
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In Blender it is also easy to change the pivot point. You do it in a different way then in 3D Max, but just as easy.
But actually it does not make any difference which program you use to set your pivot point. In the end we all export our meshes in colada format. The colada file knows where you want the pivot point to be, but then when the colada files comes into SL, SL does not reproduce this information. SL just ignores what the colada file tells him about the pivot point. That is how it will be when mesh is released on the main grid. Work arounds are possible, but very hard. I stopped working on meshes that need specific rotation points, I just wait till LL releases a version of mesh where the pivot point functions.
But about Blender... don't underestimate this program. Blender is a very powerfull 3D program that can compete on most points with commercial programs that costs like 3000 usd. But Blender is open source, so free availabe for all of us. In that sense it's ideal for a group like us, SL creators.
Only thing with Blender is the user interface is less intuitive then most other programs, that makes it for the very beginner a bit harder to learn the basics of modelling in 3D. But Blender is working on that as well, since Blender 2.5 the user interface has improved a lot already.
I find Blender most interesting. I'm still using it and learning about it, next to my other 3D program. -
Animated dragons with seven heads...
But I guess the development of mesh is going to take a real long time. LL is giving us the very first version of Paint while it can be the newest version of Photoshop.
For example the rotation point of a mesh cannot be defined in SL when mesh is released. So a mesh can only rotate around the point the SL defines for him as rotation point, which is in the center of the mesh. So the mesh door in your mesh castle won't work, because it cannot rotate at the right or left side of the door. Unless you are so smart you can read 3D program scripts and translate them for SL, you won't get your door working.
While it is so easy for sculpts now. I only have to define the pivot point in my 3d program, and SL understands perfectly well where the rotation point of my sculpt must come and produces it.
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I just found a movie of a guy who has attached an extra bone to his avatar skeleton, a stomach bone
This is a pic of a detail of the skeleton. The white point that sticks out of the body is the new 'stomach bone'.
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I'm not 100% sure, but I think it is something different. I think you are editing the length of the bones. You must see the skin (not the photoshop skin sl merchants sell, but the mesh skin) as something that is attached to the bones. When you stretch the bone, the skin stretches with it. When you rotate the bone, like when you walk in sl, the skin rotates with it.
So for avatar clothes, yes I can understand how you can let them move with the avatar. When the clothes have bones on exact the same position as the SL avatar... or maybe you can even see it better as: the clothes use the bones of the SL avatar. Then when an avatar edits her legs and makes them longer, the pants that 'listens' to the SL bones will grow together with the legs.
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Medhue Simoni wrote:My statement about formats was just a generalization, probably cause i was to lazy to explain it. Yeah, a sculpt can be used in other applications, but at that point, would it not be then an obj file, or something similar? I've made sculpts in wing3d, they had a nice plugin for sculpts, and I could make that same file an obj. I'm sure there are better programs for this kind of stuff. But, a sculpt is an extremely inefficient model, with reguards to vertices and polygons.
Depends on the program, things I made in Blender are saved as .blend files. Things I made in C4D are saved as .c4d files. Obj is also a well known file format. Most 3d programs can read obj. and for example Photoshop (ext) can read .obj
In most of the cases a sculpt is an extremely inefficient model, I admin. But on the other hands a single prim sculpt is a still a very small model for a 3D program. So the only consequense is that my computer has to work a tiny bit harder when I use a sculpt mesh then when I had created a more efficient mesh from the start. But since the machine has no problem to work with meshes that are as large that they would take a two sims in SL, for me this inefficiency does not matter. The difference is not more then 1 sand more or less on a beach.
Would be different when I had to model things for lets say a game compagny, then efficiency counts for the end product, then I can not come up with sculpt like inefficienty. But for most things I do in 3D at the moment I could perfectly well use my SL sculpt meshes.
As far as I know, there is very little documentation on rigging. The only reason I know anything about it is the tests that I've done, listening to others, and seeing what they are making. I have made a mesh avatar and used the slider bars in the edit body shape windows, these are the morphs i was speaking of. Like I said, not all the sliders work, but most that actually stretch out, or squash the body shape will also affect the mesh.
I know a bit about rigging and I can rig at beginners level. Rigging is one of the hardest things to do in 3D. Weighting (which also has to do with rigging) is another one. People who are good at those things will be most important for the development of mesh in SL.
Rigging is something different then morphing. Rigging is making a functioning skeleton for a 3D object. Our avatar is a rigged mesh. But you could as well rig a dog or a whale.
The only forms of morphing (at least that I am aware of that it is morphing) are the facial expressions and some hand expressions in our avatar. Morphing has actually nothing to do with the skeletion that is in the avatar. A morph is a variation of the mesh. It is made by moving points of the mesh itsself to different spots. So your avatar can laughs because there is a mesh variation of the head available with the laugh expression.
Same for the peace sign an avatar can make with the fingers. There are no joints and bones in SL fingers. The peace sign of the fingers is a morph of the basic hand mesh.
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Medhue Simoni wrote:As I said before, I have not played with mesh clothes enough to really be sure that everything will work as it should. What I do know tho, is that mesh clothing will react to the morphs(meaning that it will stretch in the body editor). Not all sliders will affect the mesh, but I think most that stretch the avatar, do work. Poking thru should not really be an issue if the mesh is rigged properly.
I'm interested to know more about this subject.
To what morphs do they react? Does the clothing creator have to make these morphs, or are they already 'build into the avatar' and will every mesh cloth react to this 'avatar morph', I have no idea how I must understand this.
Or any idea where I can find more info about this?
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Toysoldier Thor wrote:Medhue Simoni wrote:Here is 1 thing all creators need to remember.Mesh, and collada are common 3d formats. which means that your stuff can be used in other worlds, not related to SL at all. Sculpts will not work in any non SL based world, ever.
Actually - your statement is either incorrect or a bit misleading .... you said... " Sculpts will not work in any non SL based world, ever.".The statement is incorrect.
Mesh is a model made in a 3D program. Whether you make it in Blender, Maya, Max, Sketch up, its just the collective name of objects that you model in one of these programs.
Collada is 3D format. It was develloped to function as a bridge between several 3D programs. I work in Cinema 4D, my collegue works in 3D Max, we cannot work together on the same models if we would like to so without something that translates the c4d files to 3D Max files and vice versa. We can export to collada which both our programs can ´read´.
Once it existed it was picked up by game engines (like Unity and such), and now its picked up by SL as well as useable format for mesh import.
Basicly is every sculpt a mesh. When you create a sculpty you start with making a mesh. It is a mesh with much limitiations, because the endresult must be able to fit into the SL system. The mesh you have created can only become a sculpty by writing its information to a colormap (the sculpty map). That was a long time the only format of mesh SL could show.
But I guess most modelers don't only safe their sculpty maps, but also their originals from the 3D program. Those are meshes you can use outside SL. Not only on open sims grids, but wherever you like. It are not the most ideal meshes, because they were created for the strange habbits of SL, but it are still meshes, you can use them elsewehere, you sell them elsewhere, you can make derival works with them. You are free to do with them whatever suits you (as long as you are the original creator who owns all IP rights including textures).
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Medhue Simoni wrote:Madeliefste, this example is not quite right. LODs on mesh are completely customizable. So, you could actually make a mesh that does not loose it's original shape at all. You will just end up paying for it in PE.I'm assuming that you just used the default settings. If you did adjust the LODs to a reasonable level, then the sculpty would be far worse then the LOD on the mesh. You can even create all the LODs for each level of depreciation, so the LODs are all up to you. A LOD expert should really chime in on this.
Yes I did use the default upload settings. Like I said I did not dive very deep in creating mesh specific for SL, yet. I just have been dipping my toes in the SL Mesh waters.
What you suggest I also tried a while ago, making a mesh that does not loose shape. I have added that one to this picture, its the most right one.
I gave the new mesh an extra LOD level in the 3d program. Now we win one LOD level of stability in SL, but for what price? The new mesh has a primcount of 22. Adding another extras LOD level on the original so also the lowest mesh stays in shape, will bring the primcount to about 200, I did not even try that, because it's not a realistic option anyway.
So adding a extra LOD level in the orginal is also not the way to it.You must try to keep the orginal higest level as low as possible and find better solutions for the lower levels.
But now I want to show you another test from someone who is really digging deep into mesh for SL, Gaia Clairy.
At the left the sculpty, at the right the mesh. De sculpt object and the mesh opbject are made in exact the same way. The only difference is the one used the sculpt upload format and the other the mesh upload format to get the object in SL.
For the handle in the upperpart of the picture she made a mistake, it should look nice round like the handel on the sculpt, so that is difference is not cause bij SL.
The upper kettles are seen from 40 meters away. Both look the same. Then the kettles in the lower part of the picture are seen from 60 meters away. At 60 meters the mesh transforms to a lower LOD level, while the sculpt still stays in shape. The sculpt has 10 meters more "LOD range", it deforms not before you look at the object from 70 meters away.
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I think that is not different from how you define the IP right ownership of sculpted products.
I don't know how you do it with your products, but I never ever sell any IP rights to customers. I sell objects with a user license, but I stay the IP right owner. This user licenses gives the customer rights to use my products in their own creations, and to distribute those creations with limited perms within the world of SL. It also garanties them that they won't experiences any problems with IP rights as long as they use the product according to the the user license.
It won't be different for meshes. At least my 'prefab' meshes will come with user licenses and not with IP rights.