Medhue Simoni

RipleyVonD wrote: A problematic situation I immediately imagine would be an event like Gatcha where you have lots of Avatars adjusting what their wearing at the same time and clothing with morph shapes having become commonplace, your viewer would need to download every new morph shape that these Avatars decide to use. Its true a viewer wouldn't need to download all morph targets at once just dynamically when a new one is used. Having a compressed format while a morph target downloads to a viewer would be a way to ease the download burden. But we still have the problem of careless creators who don't care about triangle counts, the only solution to this problem is putting a system in place that dosen't render items above a certain amount of triangles like Cloud Party did. 3D Editors do have nice ways of doing things, but the environment is different they get to have that freedom. I thought it was way cool when Unity added support for Blend Shapes. Never really looked into how it was implemented though. If a resident one day decides they want to be a tall reptilian lady, a morph target is not gonna pull the dress over her tail. lol I know its a silly example but it shows how morph targets wouldn't be a solution. Well, I really think you are wrong about how the morphs get displayed. It's all in the 1 file. There is nothing else to download. Blend shapes in Unity kick butt. I've been working with a game company over the past few months. The first project I did for them was I attached their modeled head of their zen buddha master to a generic body and rig him up for Unity. Originally they just wanted me to do all his animation, but the rest of their team was busy, and I needed the character to animate with. They eventually asked me to give him expressions and be able to talk, which I insisted using blend shapes for. It worked out perfectly and the company loves what I did with him. They are even letting me expand on him more, and want me to do the same with the generic characters. Right now, I'm creating a whole set of snakes for Unity. The game company needs a rattler, so I decided to make 1 snake that can morph into any snake possible. They already told me they'll want a cobra too, so with 1 product, I'm giving them a crapload of different snake possibilities. Plus, instead of charging them for making 1 rattler for them, which would be hundreds of dollars, I'm just going to sell the snake product to all Unity developers, and will likely make more than from just this company. So, they get a sweet deal, and I get a product that is useful for many games. I'm just about to test it all out now. I only have to texture all the different snakes, and I'm done with it. Heck, any purchaser of it could actually make their own custom snake, by using different combinations of the morphs. So, truly, any snake will be possible. Here is a quick look at early versions of the morphs. Some have changed slightly since these images. They are all using a early version texture I did up real quick, so you can't really see the detail, but their own textures are coming soon. Top left is the snake with no morphs. If LL doesn't include morphs in the FBX, I will seriously be disappointed. If they do, I'll sell my snake in the New World also.

VulpesVulpes666 wrote: I have made skirt that goes to the knees,how to achieve not to get bleeding through effect and also not to use alphas to hide parts of legs cause it would look stupid,do i have to manualy weight paint the skirt or is there any other method to solve this problem,i've been messing with manual weight paint for quite a while but i never get the optimal result,does anyone know the secret of short skirt making without using alpha masking,i would really like to know that,thank you Can you post some images, cause I've rigged a few short skirts and I haven't seen many problems with them. I have many more issue with pants and long dress than with short skirts.

RipleyVonD wrote: If a system like this was implemented every morph that is not used will add to the download weight of a clothing item. This is not true, at least as far as I know. Yes, in some programs, like Maya, in order to create a morph or blend shape, you need to basically have another instance of the mesh with the vert changes. This is not what the FBX format saves tho, again as far as I know. It doesn't save different instances of the mesh itself. I've imported FBX files with morphs into Unity and the meshes are not more verts. Plus, even if it did, you are only rendering 1 mesh in SL, so the download cost or LI would not be affected. What I think you might be thinking of is an MDD file, which is exactly different instances of a mesh to make it seem like 1 mesh is moving. You can also do this with FBX and DAE files, but this is not what I'm talking about with morphs embedded in your FBX file. In Blender, you don't need multiple instances of the meshes at all to make morphs

Sassy Romano wrote: Solidify modifier is fine, the weights are duplicated. My point stands about applying the modifier as the last thing to do and then remove unwanted faced. No effort at all during weighting since you can turn the modifier on and off. Extruding as you point out is another applicable method. If you are going to remove the unseen faces, then it makes sense to use solidify. I'd give it a decent amount of thickness tho.

I understand what you are saying, but the issue is much simpler than it seems. Having worked with characters across different platform, and having to deal with clothing issues almost all the time, I have seen most problems. What I do is create my own morphs for almost every clothing item I use in any program. Much like in Real life, clothing only has a few areas that need morphs. For pants, you need a waist morph to pull the waste out. You need a waist morphs to move the waist up or down. You might want a morph to make the pants loose or tight. You might want a morph that raises and lowers the bottom of the pants, and 1 last morph to pull in or flare out the bottoms of the pants. Oh, and you likely want a morph to make the butt larger or smaller. That's it. If every pair of pants has all these morphs, the customer can adjust the pants to fit any avatar. Like I said, clothing on virtual avatars is not much different than in real life, and a shirt would have similar set morphs to make them fit every avatar too. I don't dislike your idea, I just think it is a bit convoluted to expect customers to do the morphing. As a creator, I do this stuff all the time, and it literally takes 5-10 minutes.

Melysange wrote: Hi Gaia, I've heard about that problem regarding the teeth and eyes, but the avatar i have here comes in one single mesh object, i can't remove the eyes and teeth unless i work face by face and delete it myself one by one, would i have a chance to fix this Bone weighting problem if i do that? Technically, you don't need the head at all, so if you are going to do that, just select the whole head and delete it. Also, I would try parenting it with no weights, as you can transfer the weights in other ways too. Off the top of my head, I think you just have to select the mesh body, and then the clothing, and then hit the space bar, and type in TRANSFER, as seen in the image below.

I'm confused. Weight painting is a very specific thing, and has nothing at all to do with moving the origin of vertices. If you are talking about Weight painting, then it doesn't matter if customers can do their own, as It won't help their problems at all. It would actually be a very horrible idea to let novices, or newbies try to do real weight painting. If you are talking about moving the original position of vertices, then you are talking about creating morphs/shape keys/blend shapes. I have mentioned morph imports many times. Both collada and FBX formats can include morphs. Maybe a better way to show this is to show how this works in other programs with clothing. In DazStudio, it has to deal with a Genesis character that has thousands more sliders/morphs to adjust it's body. Genesis can morph itself into any human like form, from creatures to robots. Daz uses a similar method to our Mesh Deformer, but it also allows creators to include their own morphs for the clothing, or make them for the clothing inside of Daz. So, this is almost exactly what you are describing. Personally, I don't feel I need, want, or would ever use an inworld morphing tool, as I'd rather create the morphs in Blender and import them with the clothing. Here is a video of some morphs that I created for a clothing item in Daz, and I give many of these custom morphs away to other Daz users. It's also worth pointing out that if LL implements the ability to include morphs in the FBX format for the New World, then we don't need inworld tools, as the creator will just create as many morphs options as possible.

VulpesVulpes666 wrote: I am trying in Blender trick with duplicate mesh and then reversing the normals in order to get double sided mesh and everything goes fine until i try to rig it,i am using avastar addon and when i assign the armature and generate vertex weights and move mesh parts in pose mode everything goes nuts it appears like there are two meshes and all sorts of distortions appear,any sugestions how to solve this problem guys?Thanks Solidifying a whole clothing items is going to make weighting a nightmare. Being that no1 will ever see the inside of the clothing, using solidify is not the best option. That is ultimately up to you, but I do have an alternative solution that might work well for you. Here is a video where I show how to make it look like your clothing has a backside, but it only covers the areas you need to. I also want to point out, that today I like to add a couple more edge loops around the ends to add thickness to the clothing.

Zoe Madrigal wrote: In Blender it is not 47,000 vertices, so I don't know why it says that on the upload screen. I tried to upload it earlier and it told me 336 LI. I just tried it again to get a screen shot and now it's 438. I'm not doing anything different. Each time, it gives me a different value, all of which are way too much. In Blender, make sure you check both the Armature, and the Mesh tabs in the export window, down in the lower left hand corner. I would guess you are exporting everything in your scene, which is changing your vertice count. I would also check the overal size of your model in the upload window, under the Upload options tab. If your model is extremely large when you upload it, it will have a really high LI. You can adjust the overall size in the options under the Upload options tab, or in Blender. I know your setting in the image is not why you have a high LI, but you are using LOD settings that don't make any sense, other than to try and lower your LI. I'm going to post an image that show how I mostly do my LODs in the upload window. In this example, I really wanted the rifle to hold it's shape, even at the lowest LOD, which is why I kept it so high. I generally don't do this on most mesh, as the lowest LOD only kicks in at distances where you can't see the model well anyways. So, I generally go as low as I can go and still know there is an object there. Also notice in my example, that the Medium LODs are all the same counts as the High LOD. This is because SL's system doesn't save you any LI by lowering the Medium LOD. The other reason is that Medium LOD is the LOD that most people will see when they are around you. Most people will not be close enough to you to ever see the High LOD. Again tho, your biggest issue is your total number of Vertices. You could use the Decimate Modifier to lower your Vert count, and it will not destroy your UV mapping.

Vivienne Schell wrote: "I rather doubt that transfer of mesh will be useful, even if it is available at all. The internal data format will be different. We are led to expect that the acceptable format(s) for upload will be different. So even source files will need conversion. However, it is likely that measures used to restrict high-poly-abuse (currently just LI) will be quite different and require quite different optimisation. LOD behaviour and specification of collision behaviour will almost certainly be different. So mere conversion will be insufficient. The material system will almost certainly be quite different too. In particular the use of alpha channels of normal and specular maps is very unlikely to be transferable. While creators may be able to start with their existing mesh models, a lot of work may be required to make something useable in the new world." Most probably, yes. It´s clear that a blank environment without any working, initial content cannot be filled with appealing content within a few months or even a few years. And content is absolutely crucial. No consumer assets = no buy. But, even if there will be any kind of "upload" function, and Linden Lab gets the quality and Intellectual Property control right this time, it will take ages. Mesh uploads are up and running in Second Life since years, and neither the overall amount nor the quality is what one could call a "success" in artistic and business sense. Then the SL conception is based on total versatility. No one wants a sim looking exactly the same way as any other sim or an avatar styled in the same way as everyone else´s avatar looks like. I doubt that Linden Lab top executives don´t know this. So, basically, if I were a conceptioner there, I´d direct the user experience to a few essential (money making and probably hype generating) activities. Where versatility and the sheer amount of content does not matter that much. Content creation would come to my mind next. Not as upload, but in-world primarily. Native formats, an easy to handle creation tool/suite, basical 3D structures (Lego like), WYSIWYG editors for applying basical functionality, avatar interactivity and so on. Linden Lab cannot afford to wait for another four years for the new app to take off. Waiting for the professional 3D studios/modellers or even kinda skilled amateurs to adopt any kind of low poly game modelling, "marketpace" circuit in a larger scale has been a proven failure for more than one reason. I do not agree with anything stated here. Some of it, I have no clue what she is talking about. Because there will be a beta period in development, creators will have plenty of time to get things ready, or at the very least get the process started. Currently, in SL, there are thousands of items uploaded every few minutes. Yes, you can't expect the New World to have millions of products in the first month, but give it 6 months and things will start to really take shape. Another point to be made is that a new platform, that is compatible completely with other platforms, will gain creators because the products are compatible. So, for instance, if the New World uses FBX, or even multiple formats like Unity, then every Unity content creator will also be selling in this New World. That is just 1 example too. Their products are already done, and made for games. They would simply just upload them. Also, in Unity, you can just drop in blend files, which get converted to FBX automatically. LL would do good to make the New World as compatible with Blender as humanly possible. Today, especially since the word came out, I've been concentrating most of my efforts on creating Unity products, as I'm pretty sure it won't take much to convert what I make over to the New World. This week, a regular client of mine asked me to make a specific snake for their game. They are using Unity as their game engine. Yeah, I could make them their snake, and charge them hundreds of dollars for it, but I decided to instead make 1 generic snake and morph him into any snake possible. The client is pleased with this because they have other snakes in mind for other parts of the game, and they will get a very cheap price, as I'll just sell the product to all Unity game developer instead of just 1. If the New World uses FBX with all the same features, then it's just another upload for me.

Cathy Foil wrote: There are two versions of Skype. The free version which you can only call other people who have Skype and a paid version where you can call normal phone numbers using Skype plus a number of other features the free version of Skype doesn't have. Heck, today, I don't pay any cellular carriers. I just pay about $6/month for Skype. I work from home, and ALL of my business calls are through Skype, so I decided to drop my cellular coverage completely. I was pretty much using Skype almost exclusively as it was. If I'm out and about, and I can find a wifi signal, then I can make calls. Most places I go, wifi signals are plentiful. The only place that I goto where I can't get a signal is my son's softball games. Plus, I love the fact that I'm not paying those cell phone companies for their overpriced crap service. At home, I never have to hold a device to my ear, and it is much more clear and stable than any cell phone could ever be. The big added bonus to using Skype tho, is the ability to transfer files. Most companies I do work for today, don't even need to use Dropbox or anything else, as they can just use Skype, which everyone can have for free.

Zoe Madrigal wrote: I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong or how to upload them without lowering the LOD too much as I really like how they look as is. Thank you in advance! There are 3 major factors that is going to increase you LI. Your total verts is only 1 of the 3. Gaia mentions your physics shape, which should be a simple box for clothing items. The 3rd part is your LODs. Of course, a real modeler would tell you that you need to make all your LODs, but who has time for that? I generally stick to a simple upload process for LODs on clothing items. The highest 2 spots should use the actual mesh. The Low LOD, I generally just make sure the object holds it's overall shape. The lowest LOD will have the most influence on LI, so you can make this whatever you want, to get your LI to be as low as you need it. I'm pretty sure LODs on Avatar clothing works differently than static objects, but this is just how I do it, and I've never had an issue. Essentially, lower the lowest LOD, and you should have a much lower Land Impact. P. S. I agree with every person that says 25k is far too much for just feet. My whole Lycan avatar, with hair, is only barely more than that.

BijouxLux wrote: This turned otu to be a scripting question, not an animation one -- sorry! Actually, you can fix it with animation also. The chicken dance is included in the set of animations that LL gives out for free. So, you could take that animation and bring it into Qavimator, or Blender and do whatever you want with it. Here are the free animations.

Racheal Rexen wrote: I thought this thread was going to be about money I was thinking the same thing. lol Really tho, seeing a Linden is a little like spotting BigFoot. No wonder they don't come around more. Bigfoot understands how crazy people are. It's a good thing we all have cameras with us now. lol My experience is a little different, cause I rarely leave my sim. I have gone to many user group meeting over the years, and even pissed on 1 during a meeting. I was a werewolf and he was a tree. Beyond the meetings tho, I have only seen a Linden inworld about 4 times in 7 years. As a merchant, I have too many sales to check each 1, but I only know of a dozen or so Lindens that have purchases something from me.

Feldspar Millgrove wrote: Perhaps I was not clear: there won't be any prims. I would not bet on that. A prim serves many purposes, besides building things out of them. Every single modeling program in the world has primitives. Just like in SL, a primitive is used as a container to hold things. In Blender, you would use a cube as the boundery for special effects, like fire, or water simulations. My point is, that primitives are an essential part of almost every single 3D platform there is. It would be dumb for LL not to include a set of primitives.

Use Youtube! I have my own channel where I have tutorials on how to do stuff for and in SL. Mine are mostly centered around animation, but I do have tutorials on UV mapping and some on making and rigging clothing. https://www.youtube.com/user/medhue Gaia Clary has many tutorials, and recently did a tutorial for beginners. https://www.youtube.com/user/gaiaclary Basically, you can goto Youtube and search for anything you might want to do in Blender. I would suggest searching for Beginner Blender tutorials https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=absolute+beginner+blender+tutorials+

Vulpinus wrote: lol, like it. Not so much obsessive preservation, but it did cause me major grief last time I did a clean install even though I followed the guide to the letter. Firestorm wouldn't even run at first. Yeah, I'll bite the bullet later. "Clean install" refers mostly to when you need to uninstall a program and then reinstall it. You do not need to uninstall SL, just clear your cache.

Ssmiles wrote: Anyway, I figured you made your poly count higher with either subdivision surface or multires (subdivision surface makes my suit look funny for some reason but, as they say, that's another show. ) but I wanted to double check in case I missed something or haven't learned some Blender tool yet. When you use the subdivision surface modifier, you must make sure all your sharper edges or ends are supported. So, if you have a sharp corner that needs to stick out, you need to add another edge loop to support that corner. On that wetsuit, when I finished the open ends, if I had only left 1 edge loop, then the subdivision surface modifier would collapse that edge, or round it off. I hope that makes sense.

Ssmiles wrote: Thanks for that Mehdue. Quick question (I know, I am full of them) you say at the begining of the tutorial that the body suit is higher poly than the Avastar avatar but when watching the tutorial on the making of the body suit, you said nothing about making the wet suit poly count higher than the Avastar from which it was duplicated. Am I mssing something here? Why does the wet suit in the weighting video have a higher poly count? And, does the poly count matter in this instance, when it comes to doing the weights? That's actually a really good question. I didn't show how to do the higher poly version, but I do mention it in the text at the end of the video. I didn't show it, because I wanted that video to be just about how to use the avatar to make clothing from it's body. All that you need to do to make the wetsuit higher poly is to add a Subdivision Surface Modifier to the wetsuit. The other reason I didn't add this to the video, is because I did not want to promote importing high poly models into SL, even tho I might do this for some items. As creators, people can make those decisions on their own, but I didn't want to promote it, cause in most cases, it isn't needed. After playing around with things as much as I have, I do find that using a much higher poly model to transfer weight is far better than just using the weights for the lower poly SL avatar. Not only is there a big difference, but it saves you a ton of time. Most clothing that you will make is not going to match the SL avatar exactly in polygon density, so transfering weighting from a mesh that is lower poly is not going to give you the best results. It would actually be much better to create a really high poly mesh with the perfect weights, as that will be higher poly than any clothing you would make, and the gradient in the weighting should be much better than from a low poly mesh. Plus, it just makes sense that if Blender has more vertices to match up with your mesh, it will give you a better gradient in the results.

Poenald Palen wrote: What about kickstarter to bring the store over, each purchase ends up with a product of some type that is your major product? I agree with the premium getting OnLive app, I wonder if the next one will be like that? And, yeah SL in name though and if they keep the same people then regardless of tech you can argue it is the same community and maybe the people make it SL and the culture transfers. To a customer, one who is strictly a customer, maybe they feel it is about the people and not the tech and to them they will be SL2. That's not a bad idea really, the kickstarter thing. I mean, if I think I need $5000 to comfortably spend a few months converting things over and to be able to give a good enough supply of products, it would be nice to just sit and create, knowing that you can pay for everything that is needed. You'd have to be pretty big and notable to even attempt this tho. The problem I have with calling it SL2, is that it most likely is never, ever going to be SL2. We aren't talking about recreating Minecraft using the Unity engine, which is generally a simple task. SL has so many more aspects and uses. The new tech alone will change things significantly. Things that fit the new technology will be the things that take off in the New World, not the things that fit well in the Real SL. How things are done will be quite different too, which will change the incentives to do things, which will be different than the REAL SL. In our current SL, there were/are specific things, and businesses specific to the platform. The incentives are what drives the creations. Even in Real SL, changes in incentives have changed how SL has evolve, for good or bad. You can't expec the New World to have all those same incentives and markets. The tech tho, will change everything. I think it is crazy for any knowledgable creator to think, or want to just convert products over. In some cases, it might be worth it. In most cases, there will be better ways of doing things, that are either more efficient or just better that will force creators to change things. If you just spend the time to convert them over, and your competiton takes the extra time to use the features of the platform to make their product better, than you just wasted your time and won't make much money. Plus, things just won't work the same, so outside of a mesh statue that does nothing but sit there, creators will have to change their products, sometime in extensive ways to make them work in this New World. Even for me, mostly selling animations, I'd have to convert all the animation over onto a new rig, which is no small task. I'll likely have to add things too, like finger animations. There is no way I could do all that work and then just give those products away, even if they did buy a similar product in SL. I do give free updates for my SL creation, but that is a whole other matter than designing something for a brand new platform.

Ssmiles wrote: Anyway, I have another question, if you are simply using this body suit for weighting purposes, why give it thickness or make it look double sided? Does making it look double sided help when using it to weight additional clothing meshes, or is it for aesthetic purposes only? Originally, I made the wetsuit to go with my scuba diving stuff. So, it was a product to start with, but I had in mind from the beginning to use it to transfer weights. Because it can serve multiple purposes, I just wanted to show how to finish it off.

Poenald Palen wrote: 3. SL's new streaming App service that allow mobile devices means people have more chances to use SL and may be less disuaded from logging in as it is more convenient. Mobile devices are cheaper and this removes the hardware costs that Brain Balm's study found was a major SL usage stopper. 4. Ironically, SL2 is not in a worse position right now but in a better one because it will attract the creators that like to get on the new tech and SL will filter new customers there. Thousands a day, thousands with LESS resistance to adoption because of less system requirments IF they are using this streaming service. Not saying it will be HUGE, but the one competiting thing is the next one. Whatever they do, they should include the mobile app streaming feature in with your Premium subscription. Just think if LL made a deal with Onlive for existing premium SL members. I've been a premium member since 2008 and it basically gives me nothing. If the premium membership included Onlive, then I'd actually think the premium membership was worth it. To expect someone to pay for both a Premium membership, and then pay another $10/month for Onlive, is a bit of a stretch. I would probably pay more for the Premium membership, if it included Onlive tho.

Well, i reject the premise that the NEW World could ever be SL2. So, I will based everything I say on that assumption, as I think it is the only rational assumption that can be made about the New World. What I'll try to do, is make good products. The rest takes care of itself.

Lakhesis Nikolaidis wrote: Thank you for this tutorial. It really helped me grasp what I needed to know Blender and my animations are already much better than they used to be, before I started using Blender last week. Np, I really do perfer animating in Blender than any other program out there.

If I have time, I will try and take a look at this. Looks very interesting. 1 thing I will mention, is that I think it is important to be able to use 2 kinect cameras. I use IPI's desktop mocap system, and I use 2 kinect cameras. The reason is that with 2 cameras, you can get a full 360 view of your body, and the system has 2 sets of data to determine the real position of limbs. The twisting probably does have something to do with IK, but I think the deformation in the thigh might be from the preserve volume feature in the Armature. I only say this because I've seen similar weird reactions when presurve volume was not used. For the twisting, I wonder if setting limits on the joint would make it better, or in some cases cause the problem.