Medhue Simoni

Drew Bhalti wrote: That's going to be cookie tracking. if you install ghostery you will not be targeted. lots of companies are doing that now. cookie based tracking to target ad's to you. I had been looking for socks for my grandmother, a specific kind for months and kept getting hit with ad's to buy socks with. once I installed ghostery I was not longer targeted. Well, technically, I don't really care. I have never clicked an ad in my life, and likely never will. As the other commenter pointed out, at least I'm not getting female hygeine ads. I may consider ad blocks or cookie tracking blockers, cause it is mostly the ads that slow things down, or cause problems. That said tho, I do like seeing what comes up, just to see who is marketing and who is not.

ChinRey wrote: I make houses and landscape details so I don't know anything about rigging. To me mesh is mesh no matter what software it was made with. But when I look at the new content LL has introduced recently: We have those miserable mesh avatars newcomers are tricked into wearing (as if they didn't have enough problems already), we have those premium membership gifts who regularly become laughing stocks among serious builders, we have that full sim catalog of how-not-to-make-mesh promoted as the Home of the Moles. And of course it's the countless JIRAs where the LIndens assigned don't seem to be able to grasp even the most fundamental aspects of mesh making. I think we can all safely assume that the person who made those mesh avatars is 1 of those people they are inviting into Sansar, and they likely used Maya to make them. The meshes are fine, but the rigging shows a serious lack of understanding of the SL skeleton, and rigging humans in general. Overall, the weights are not good, and many of them are obviously terrible in the armpits, which are ridiculous. The werewolf has a vertice on his back that pokes out a couple feet, with some animations. How does a professional miss this, with professional software? None of those mesh avatars have working eyes. Why? Did the creator not understand how to rig eyes. All my avatars have working eyes and there is nothing special about eyes. None of the avatars have a working jaw. All of my avatars have working jaws, because I use the skull bone, which is an extra bone, as the jaw bone. This is not magic. So, what do you think the chances are that LL will get this right? They didn't even have the knowledge to see the problems in their own avatars that they had created and released. With Blender's tools, and the Avastar addon, it's nearly impossible to get weights that bad, especially in the armpits. I also use Avastar's features to help me rig characters for other platforms, like Unity.

For awhile now, I've been seeing some SL ads here and there. Yahoo was a given, as Ebbe knows people there, but I've also seen some SL marketing on Youtube. Today, when I clicked on a TotalBiscuit video, there was Drax's LL commercial playing before the video. If people don't know, TotalBiscuit is the biggest game critic on Youtube. Now, I'm sure TB had nothing to do with the commercial, but it was a big shock to see the commercial before his video, cause he has a HUGE audience. I'm sure SL is going to benefit from that bigtime. If I were LL, I would definitely contact TotalBiscuit to give Sansar a critique, when it is ready.

Seriously? Early 2016, and they are just getting creators in, and don't have even a working concept of the main avatar? Prepare to be seriously dissappointed. Granted, I have not seen even a real screen shot of the place, but from what we are hearing from Edde, there is no way in hell they will be ready for beta testing in early 2016. They don't even know what they are going to do with some of the main parts, like the default avatar. A proper avatar for the new world will take months to create and implement. The avatar is so central to everything, and they haven't even started on it yet. How can they even have a tentative beta date when they haven't addressed the avatar yet? 1 problem with the avatar could set the whole thing back months. If I were the CEO, I would not be promoting crap, or setting any dates until I knew the avatar was fully working and compatible with any program, which isn't that hard, if you go about it the right way. Again tho, LL hasn't even started. Like I said, I haven't been in there yet, and all I can go on is what LL says. What they say tho, doesn't match up with these arbitrary dates.

Prokofy Neva wrote: Medhue, I was just admiring your cross animations again the other day, remember you made those for me? Of course, I remember. Prokofy Neva wrote: So your notion that your goods are in short supply because your skills aren't replicable (ask the Luddites how that concept worked!) may hold for a while but will collapse, either due to copybotting or the "iron age" of mesh mass production. But at first -- for months -- a year? there will be a huge rush of people who spend like people always spend at carnivals. Well, I don't much worry about such things. Yes, markets are constantly changing, but so do the people. There are literally hundreds of different thing a 3D creator could do with their skills. Even when everything becomes 3D scanned, there still needs to be someone knowledgable to take that model and make it workable inside a 3D environment. We are still a long way away from mesh mass production, especially when it comes to avatars, which is really my specialty. Prokofy Neva wrote: You can claim altruism that you have to worry if your customers are taxed too heavily it will be bad for business. But you know in reality people will buy like drunken sailors on leave, especially animations and gestures. My observations on the matter have nothing at all to do with altruism. On the contrary, it is completely selfish. The good things is that my selfishness perfectly aligns with everyone else's interests, including LL's. The only people's selfishness that doesn't align with anyone else's interests, is LL's selfishness. They fail to see the imperical facts around sales taxes. They don't understand economics enough to know this is not in their best interests. Most of the other things you bring up, I pretty much agree with. Lastly, I just want to point out, that as merchants, we aren't even allowed to post new products in the forums, despite the fact that every single 3D marketplace does allow merchants to post products in their forums, and actively encourages it. In contrast, Land owners are allowed to post in the forums. So, the privileged class in SL are the land owners, not the merchants. To LL, we have no say at all, which is the reason their content creation system is so messed up. LL obviously doesn't understand the importance of creators, and I seriously doubt they will be vastly different in Sansara. Heck, they want to steal from us by taxing. They really just want to use us. It's also obvious in the first people they are letting into Sansara, which are likely their buddies. They don't seem to understand that the vast majority of creators use Blender, not Maya. Again, I will predict that LL will have massive problem with their initial Sansara avatar rig, because Maya rigs aren't fully compatible in Blender. All Blender rigs are perfectly compatible in Maya tho. So, if LL developed the platform for Blender users, everything would inherently work in Maya also, but not the other way around.

Oz, you should also tell the person who controlls the Youtube page to create a playlist of videos concerning the VMM. I personally don't turn on linked annotations on Youtube videos, which is currently the only way to find all the other videos on Youtube related to VMM.

Trinity Yazimoto wrote: Ah, the answer we got from Brooke Linden in the Jira about the fact some folders ended splited in several subfolder while you drag them to the VMM (https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VMM-95?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Acomment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=473940) is at the very least..... interesting and tasty. :smileyvery-happy: So it was an "expected behavior".... so this lead me to think that bugs are then expected behavior for any new LL improvement, and then suddendly it explain so well, all the numerous bugs we had to go thru all along the years lol. an "expected behavior" as she says, would make this happen EACH TIME a folder is dragged to the VMM without creating a top level folder. But the problem is that it doesn't happen EACH time. 80 % of the time, it doesnt happen. The folder is dragged to the VMM window and all is fine. A top level folder is automatically created and the folder with the items becomes the subfolder keeping its integrity. Yet for 20 % of my folders the "expected behavior " happened. Without obvious reason. So maybe should i report the 80 % of the folders safe from this "expected behavior" as a bug ? :smileyvery-happy: And of course she closed the Jira and .... the ability to discuss her point of view at the same time. I think SL can properly be described as genious, with underlying incompetence. What I mean by this is, that many parts of the system were ingeniously thought up, it's just the execution that always sucks. This is not a slight against the devs, but how those devs are managed. LL's lackidaisy attitude on fixing bugs has been the main problem from the beginning.

Sassy Romano wrote: Medhue, it took you this long to realise that the answer to that is "YES"? Well, they don't have to be so obvious about it.:smileysad:

Again I have to say WTF! Oz, do you realize that the COMMERCE section of your blog is not pushed to LL's Feature News? So, if a merchant doesn't specifically check the COMMERCE section, then we won't know what is going on. Are we(the merchants) so low on your scale that things like VMM aren't important enough to be in the FEATURED NEWS?

Oz Linden wrote: seanabrady wrote: The assumption then is that VMM RC will be promoted to the defacto release prior to the 23rd? Probably not because we've just done a promotion and we don't feel we need to push a new update on everyone immediately just to get it to Merchants, but it's available now and we don't know of any problems with it. It is first in line for the next promotion though assuming that nothing really bad happens. Ummm, what? We get random updates on random days on a regular basis. Just recently I had 2 veiwer updates in 2-3 days. How many merchants do you expect to download release candidates? If the VMM is live, then it's ridiculous that it's not in the official viewer. WTF, it should have been in there for a while, way before you ever even think of pushing the system on us. I have yet to even look at this crap, cause I'm waiting for it to be OFFICIAL. Just because we are merchants, doesn't mean you can ignore us and treat us differently. We don't work for you. We are your customers. Give us the same respect you give everyone else. We aren't part of your dev team. Now, if you want to cut me a check, then you can easily ask me to play with RCs, and I will gladly comply. All that said, I EXPECT that when all of this will go live, LL will do the PROPER video tutorials and documentation. Again, we are your customers, not your devs.

I'm more of an animator, but I do make meshes and avatar meshes. I'm sure others will have other techniques, but since nobody else has responded, I'll chime in. To make a tattoo for a mesh body is not all that simple really. It requires you to make an exact copy of the mesh, and then scale it, ever so slightly to sit on top of the original mesh. Now, of course, depending on where the tattoo is, you could make them with out having an exact copy of the body, but that will take a lot of adjusting to get perfect, and the weighting needs to match that of the mesh body. Basically, making that tattoo layer takes all the same skill as making a mesh, cause you are making a mesh, it just sits above the mesh body.

Allow me to explain what is going on. The first frame is the reference frame. It tells the system which parts to animate, and which to not. When the first and 2nd frames of any bone matches, then that bone will not be animated, and can be influenced by other lower priority animations. In order for all bones to use your animations, you must make sure that none of the first frame bones, and 2nd frame bones match.

Aethelwine wrote: No one can make clothes to fit the standard avatar that don't require alphas unless all your shape sliders are precisely the same. With standard sizing alphas are needed and with fitmesh the same because not all the shape sliders are "bones" (is that the right word) that the mesh clothes can be rigged to. I have never had a pair of trouser I could fit in to without an alpha layer, without making my legs so scrawny and chicken legged the alpha is the only option. This is exactly my point. It's not possible, because oddly enough, it wasn't made to be possible. Yeah, I know, doesn't make much sense, does it.? That said, it is possible, if both the body and clothing are mesh, cause they will morphs the exact same way. As much as I would love it if everyone could work together and develop something that is easy and works for everyone, I just can't see spending so much time on it, only to get a small following. I have so many things going on as it is. Messing around with it all and making some clothes for these avatars was just so dang easy, and straight forward for a creator, that I just got a bit excited about it, and wanted to see if people really want it. Yeah, hopefully Sansara does it better, but I don't even think they've talked about it much internally yet. This is why I'm so insistant that LL let us Blender users in with the Maya users, so we can all bang out the avatar in a way that is sensible.

Prokofy Neva wrote: But that can only go so far as content creators and their customers will be discouraged if the tax is too high -- presumably the "sales tax" is only a consumer tax and not a creator tax as creators are once again the sole privileged class of SL. You know I love ya! As a long time student of economics, I understand that sales taxes and corporate taxes are counterproductive. They are both taxes on the consumer, in reality. That is just basic economics. The more you tax, the more things cost, the less people buy. Some economists try to agrue that there is some magic percentage that maximizes revenue for the government, but this doesn't take into account what might have happened without the tax at all. Every government intervention brings unintended consequences that can't be predicted. I guess you can say the 3D artists are privileged, but that would be because there are so few of us, compared to the rest of the community. Our value is enhanced because there is a shortage. All that said, we don't feel too privileged when despite millions of ways to extend value to us, LL is stuck on taxing our customers and lowering the volume of items that will be exchanged. As a merchant, I have no problem at all giving more money to LL, as long as they give me more of the things I need to generate more wealth. As I said, there are an unlimited amount of ways that LL could make money off the merchants, yet they don't either see these unlimited amount of ways, or they just refuse to do the work to create those ways. In the past, I've spent thousands of lindens a month on marketing. Over the years, LL has time after times changed these marketing options in ways that have lessened their value considerably. Heck, I remember spending 50k lindens a month on Paid Classifieds, until LL changed it and ruined their value. Ask any merchant, we all want more and better marketing opportunities, and we'll pay a crapload for them, if those services actually bring us a good return. Oh, but there is 1 way to tax the 3D artists directly in virtual worlds, and that is by charging more for the uploads, which I'm not really against, as long as I have every option to test the items before I upload it. If LL is just going to do the uploads like they currently do in SL, then NO I would not want to pay more for that crap. As it is tho, at 10L, I regularly upload dozens of animations and meshes testing them to get them just right. I would not do that if they cost 100L.

Ebbe Linden wrote: Tyr Rozenblum wrote: ADDED: 1. I was curious also about the possiblity about morphs and head sliders. With the growing popularity of mesh bodies and heads, I was wondering if we would ever get to use the head morphs/sliders in the future? It would probably benefit head creators, as well as those wishing to have a little more HD experience. We will build a highly flexibly avatar system. Not clear that user created avatars will be able to take advantage of our simple avatar customization UI. It's something we would like to find solutions to but is a very hard problem. 2. Animated mesh: I know that I have helped contribute to many users fall im frame rate (sorry guys you know ILU), doing mesh creatures with my partner Nina. The problem is saving frame for frame and over lapping mesh using alpha is just, not a responsible way to do things. Yes we still do it, but its the only way to have any kind of animated pets and animals via mesh. Is there plans in the future to add ACTUAL ways to do animated creatures? You know without killing your friends and loved one's frame rate. Yes, we plan to support custom skeletons. Actually, Ebbe, it's not that hard. It does depend tho, whether you will support Blend Shapes embedded in the FBX files. If blend shapes will be supported, then it basically comes down to you choosing what things are done with blend shapes and what is done with bone scaling. You could morph all the body parts with bones, and do the face with blend shapes. This would require an excessive amount of bones. The other alternative is to only use length scaling on the bones, for taller avatars and longer limbs, but do all the other morphs with blendshapes. This would require an excessive amount of blend shapes in all of our meshes and FBX files to accomidate all the blend shapes on the avatar. Either way, you have lots of data. There is no way around that. Blend shape support is a must tho. If you don't do it, then creators will just end up using worse ways to accomplish the same thing. A basic default skeleton we can all build off of is a must too. It will keep us all creating for 1 skeleton, and not breaking up the market in to millions of sub markets where nobody can find enough content. To handle other types of humanoid like avatars, I think a good idea would be to allow us to attach bone sets to the default skeleton, or allow us to add onto the default skeleton. So, for instance, imagine I want to make a scary vampire with wings on his back. To accomplish this, there are 2 possible ways. I have the default skeleton in my 3D software, and I add the wing bones. I then upload the FBX into Sansara. Sansara looks at the skeleton, and see all the normal bones, so everything is ok, and he will work with normal human animations. My FBX could also include all my custom animation, including for the wings. The 2nd solution would be for me to separate the wings from the vampires avatar, and create it's own bone set, just for the wings. I would then upload them separately into Sansara, and attach the wings to the avatar inworld, with the animations for those bones in the FBX for the wings. The first example is cleaner, overall, but the 2nd example allows for more possibilities and options in the market, meaning, I make wings and just sell different wings people can attach. I would also suggest, that If the first option is chosen, that LL release their own skeletons with the most popular options of skeletal addons, such as tails, wings, and probably ears. I say this because then, for example, an animator like myself could just sell animation for those wings, tails, ears and so on, and everyone is using the same skeletal bones. Or, if you simple set up a naming convention for those bones sets, then if I name my bones the same way, then animation will work for anyone with bones of the same names. Just my thoughts! So, will you support Blend Shapes, or not? I still have yet to see the answer to this. It's probably the most important question for avatar creators.

Could be 1 of 2 things. Let's start with the simplest. It could be your shape. In the sliders of your shape, there are a whole set for eyes. Play with them. It's probably best to just create a new shape in your inventory, and wear that, to test this. The other possibility is that you are wearing a mesh, it could be any mesh you are wearing, that has a customized SL skeleton with offset eyes. Just detach all your meshes, and relog.

Sassy Romano wrote: Medhue Simoni wrote: Well, it's not a perfect copy, as the resolution would be lower, cause you are taking a snapshot. It would be close enough for most but like I said, just snag the original from cache anyway *shrugs*. I'd be more interested though in the response from creators, should you wish to try the experiment and see how many would send you the texture in the first place. My guess is about 0 You know what is funny? I criticised High Fidelity for just grabbing models from open webpages, but I somehow expected skin texture makers to hand out textures. Of course, there are other options, like those appliers or other ways, but it's still a decent point. Maybe, if all the models were the same, like the bodies, and free, then skin creators could just release their skins already on these models. Really tho, rigging is a ton of work. I do a crapload of rigging now, and I really don't think I have the time for all this, especially with some of my other projects, and clients. I think I'm just getting too antsy about these new worlds coming. These custom avatar jobs have pulled me back into SL tho, and I am going to release a few new products soon.

Theresa Tennyson wrote: Unlike "skins" and "clothing", "textures" can be put on any SL object. This means that if a skin maker gave out the actual texture someone could put it on a square prim attached as a HUD and take a screenshot, giving them a perfect copy of that texture. This is why mesh body parts use appliers instead of texture files. Well, it's not a perfect copy, as the resolution would be lower, cause you are taking a snapshot.

Well, you are probably right. I probably should have started this a long time ago. Lately, I've just had a few different people having me rig custom avatars for them, which led me to messing with mesh bodies and clothing. With Sansara starting soon, I probably should just concentrate on my Unity projects and characters. They should all be compatible with Sansara, if LL does it right, lol.

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: MariMoons wrote: I'll pay you 2k to mesh my body & skin Unless you created your own skin or got appliers for it from the creator, you coudn't use it on your mesh body. Well, she could use the texture tho. Yeah, people might have to contact the creators of some skins, and ask for the actual texture, but I don't see why that is a problem.

MariMoons wrote: I'll pay you 2k to mesh my body & skin Good to know! If we can get enough people to start it. I'm sure it will catch on. I already sell a set of weights for classically weighted clothing, and for fitted mesh clothing. What somewhat surprised me, is all the designers buying it. I knew rigging avatars and clothing isn't easy, but I never expected so many people buying my weighted bodysuits. I'll likely just update that pack with my avatar weights, and a rigged avatar for them to test on.

How about these 2?

Pamela Galli wrote: I just quoted you cause I love Tom Petty. Hey.....Baby.....There ain't no easy way out

Dude, there are significant bugs in SL that are older than most of our children. Do you think LL cares about those?

Nova Convair wrote: That could make me wear a mesh body. The mesh that is available at the moment I'm not interested in for the reasons you posted. I have seen quite some avatars lately that are obviously overburdened and wear non matching mesh bodies and clothes. So there is probably some demand. On the other hand: they don't care or don't see it That's encouraging. Now, because I do quite a bit of rigging for clothing designers, and I have some connnection with big designers, I kind of hear the issues that they talk about. Although those mesh bodies do look very good, they add more and more work to the clothing designer's list. The first thing said to me, when I proposed this to 1 of the larger designers was, "you mean I have to rig for another body?". This is my point too, that on top of having all these systems, like Standard Sizes, and Fitted mesh, now they have all these bodies to create for. These mesh bodies can be vastly different from the default too. I understand that people want to be creative, but there is a limit to how much they are stressing the clothing designers. It's nearly impossible to be profitable if you are spending days rigging just 1 clothing items for 8 different avatars. It reaches the realm of ridiculousness. That said, I really think the problem with this idea, is getting people to mesh their avatars. I'm sure I could get the designers on board, but they need an audience to sell to, and prove the need for it.