Medhue Simoni

Connor Nowles wrote: Just for fun.. An example of what it actually can look like.. both are rotated forward -20, no vertices have been moved, only "moved" by weightpaintting.. I just put a texture on the modified avi to see the texture distortion.. :-) This is easily the best example of why the new weights were needed, and exactly why I advocated for it for years. There is easily a dozen forum posts where I have mentioned this jira in some way or another. That said, it's not this bone combination that I'm worried about, as this would probably not affect rigged meshes that much, as it was a horrible blend of weights to begin with. It is the differences in the crotch and arm pits that would really be disasters if your mesh was rigged perfectly to the old weights. As a creator, it is extremely frustrating to watch LL totally blunder things. Understanding that a fix like this should have been a priority from the start, is a basic thing. Yet Oz says they will look at it later. That says he doesn't understand the issue at all. Or, it says that he and the Lab are perfectly OK with having creators produce junk, not because of their own skills, but because of LL's ignorance and laziness. Who looks bad to the average user. We do, the merchants. In my honest opinion, LL should ditch Fitted mesh, and make a big commitment to a new and improved avatar. I'm not talking about a new mesh. We can make our own avatar meshes. I mean add more bones to the avatar. Add fingers, and wings, and ear bones, and a facial rig. This would make almost every custom avatar as versatile as the default. Then, they should implement a mesh morphing system, whether inworld, or imported. The avatar is the center of the virtual universe for every single user. That is where LL should spend their time.

The perfect solution would have been to allow clothing creator to import their own morphs for their clothing. It would be easy to create morphs to fit any size avatar possible, and give the customer more fitting options. Heck, 1 outfit could have become many different outfits. Besides being the best solution for mesh clothing, it would have also been an awesome thing for normal meshes. LL wanted to spend as little time as possible on the mesh clothing solution, which is exactly why we got this Fitted mesh monstrocity.

I've rigged quite a few clothing items for SL, and what you are saying doesn't match with my experiences. Yeah, you can use alpha layers, and should, when you can. The problem is that you can't do that all the time. In most cases, you can't use Fitted Mesh at all. The only case where Fitted Mesh works well, is if you cover the whole section. If you want some skin showing in some key areas, just give up and use standard sizing. If you have a top that only covers 1 arm, you can't use alpha masking on the other arm. 1 of the designers I rig for make a pair of short shorts with a bikini bottom sticking out. We could not use an alpha under the bikini bottoms. We ended up not making it fitted mesh because it couldn't work with fitted mesh. There was far too much skin showing. It's like LL didn't test Fitted Mesh at all. Of the dozens and dozens of clothing that I have rigged, only 2 did I allow to be released with Fitted Mesh. Everything else works better with Standard Sizing. Since the release of Fitted Mesh, I've been considering proposing, to all the designers that I rig for, that we do custom sizes. It's not hard. Fitted Mesh is a failure, so why not. I can do it quickly, depending on the outfit. It's all about how low I can get the pricing down, and what people are willing to pay for it. Really, my only big fear is that LL will up and do something stupid, like change the default weights. IMHO, I don't think LL will ever implement this change, as they haven't touched the jira since it was written, but you never know with their track record.

Trinity Yazimoto wrote: But when u say you extrude twice. do you mean you add one horizontaly and one vertically ? like if you had more thickness ? Yes, I'm adding what looks like as thickness to the clothing, but not like you are thinking. In the video, I make 1 extrude and pull that into the body or clothing. When I say 2, I mean I extrude once to kind of give the clothing thickness, then I extrude again exactly as I do in the video. So, the first extrude is a very slight distance from the original edge, and the 2nd is like I did in the video, pulled into the body. I feel for you with those frills, as it is not going to be easy if you use solidify, at least to rig. I recently had to do a dress with bows on them. They only looked good if we used solidify, but both bows were on major joints, with multiple bones pulling on them. Eventually, I gave up and detached the bows from the dress. I just attached the bows afterwards in SL. It worked out better that way anyways, because all that bending of the joints made the bows look weird too.

Siana Gearz wrote: As a word of note, i don't believe moving the discussion here as requested by Oz is reasonable - i think anything pertaining to whether and how an issue is to be implemented belongs on the JIRA entry. But we don't have much choice in that matter. I agree completely with you here. At the same time, like Oz, I don't want 50 emails about people going back and forth about BS. That said, Oz's scope for what is acceptable to talk about in the jira's seems to be extremely narrow. IMHO, LL needs as much conversation in jiras as possible, as I have little faith that they know what they are doing. Heck, they ask us every time they need meshes to test. That should tell you something about how they run their business.

Weighting avatars and their clothing is an "exact thing", not a "that's good enough thing". Yes, it is true that the default avatar is not the most pleasant avatar to rig clothing to, but a good rigger can get the weights to be almost exact, with little to no poke through. Yeah, Fitted mesh is a monstrocity and it is nearly impossible to get perfect weights, but changing those underlying weights will still have a negative affect on all old fitted mesh clothing and all standard size rigged clothing. Whether the affect is acceptable to you is your own opinion. In my opinion, Fitted Mesh is not acceptable, at all, yet LL released it. So, yeah, if you don't give a crap, like LL, then you'll accept anything. What if some1 paid me hundreds of dollars to make them a clothing item that fits them perfectly? I have actually done this for a few clients now. What about all the rigged clothing that has already been made, that are not Fitted Mesh? I was for this correction before Fitted Mesh, because I thought LL would make a good solution that every1 would love and convert all their clothing items over to. Now, I see this is never, ever going to happen, as LL created pure junk, that is never going to be acceptable for most of the community. Instead of Fitted Mesh being a solution, it is just another option for clothing creators to choose from. If LL wants to pull back this Fitted Mesh BS, and make it actually usable, then I'd not have a problem with implementing the better weights, as the current weights are truly horrendous.

I haven't read this whole thread, but I get the sense that you want to use solidify to create a back side of your clothing. This will add a bunch of polygons you don't need, and will also cause you more problems with weighting and parts of your mesh folding over each other. Here is a trick that I learned to make it look like your clothing has a back side. Nowadays, I tend to extrude twice, creating an edge around the end of the clothing. Here in the video I only added 1 extrude, which is not as nice as using 2 extrudes.

You can still use solidify. You likely have verts with no weights because of how you transfered or copied weights. Also, I would make sure to apply all modifiers, except the armature modifier. You can also check your normals by using the Backface culling option. You can also use Avastar to find your unweighted verts.

It really shows LL's ignorance of 3D creation that they aren't even thinking of implementing morphs. If they were in any way 3D geeks, they would have realized that if they had just implemented morphs uploads, possibly in a mdd format, they would have solved almost every problem that mesh clothing has, and allowed for so much more versatility in mesh objects. Instead of thinking, or talking to mesh creators, LL implemented that horrid collision bone solution called fitted mesh. It's like they have nobody on staff that ever created anything 3D.

Each face in SL is a material in your 3D program. So, you have to create different materials. 8 is the limit in SL tho. Here is a video where I briefly go over faces in SL.

What rig are you using in Blender?

How are you creating your first frame? The first frame is a positioning reference frame that tells the system where your avatar is in space, and also which bones to animate. If any bone in your 2nd frame matches your first frame, that will tell the system not to animate it. In Blender, you can either add your own first frame, which is usually a Tframe with all bones set to zero, or you can have the exporter prepend a first frame.

Cathy Foil wrote: How can I see the weights in SL? Is there some sort of setting like how you can see the resolution of textures? Well, Gaia's Avastar has all the weights. You could buy it and just use it to get the weights. Or, if Gaia is ok with it, 1 of us could just create images of all the weights, with verticies showing. Again, just a thought. Personally, I switched over to Blender from 3ds Max because I just can't afford to keep buying that software, especially when Blender has evolved at it has. I see Blender as the future and 3ds Max and Maya as dinosaurs. Mostly because of the pricing and the limitations they purposely implement to make users purchase the latest version. Many new studios are using Blender, and many more will likely change over the next few years. I used to think Blender was difficult to use, but after using it fulltime for the past year, I'm loving it more than any other program I've ever used. Now, because Blender is free and open sources, when I work on a project with other creators, we are all using the same version. When I rig clothing for clients or partners that I have recently acquired, we all use Blender, and we all have Avastar. This means we can all trade files easily. They not only get rigged clothing, but also all the files they need to adjust anything in the future, without my help at all. The biggest issue that I've seen when working for game companies or studios using independent contractors, like myself, is that we are all using different programs, and different versions of those programs. Blender eliminates all this.

You know Cathy, incase you can't find what you need, you could just see the weights and replicate them in Maya. The SL avatar is so low poly that it wouldn't be hard to just see the weights in images and replicate them. Just a thought.

MIstahMoose wrote: How would you be able to identify if its weighted correctly? The weighting job of the SL avatars isn't the best, mostly due to its terrible topology. Actually, the topology is 1 aspect that is bad, and the weights are another aspect that is bad. There was actually a jira created years ago to improve the weights, but LL ignored it, as usual. Now, it would be impossible for them to give the avatar better weights, as it would ruin all the mesh clothing made. This shows you just how bad LL is at making decisions. Now, if LL actually had some1 on staff that understood 3D creation, we'd have a much better SL. Or, they could have actually listened to us.

Not really related to this, but it is also worth noting that AO bakes are influenced by your avatar's pose. For instance, you will notice that when you bake pants or short, between the legs are very dark. If you move the legs so that your avatar is making more of an X shape, then the shading between the legs will be less dark.

Definitely something that will help Blender immensely. I do wish they would talk about the project a little more tho. Yes, we hear about who is working on it, but we know nothing about what the movie is about. Maybe this is on purpose tho. It looks so strange from the trailer, as it uses many different styles. It almost reminds me of Animatrix, where the creators of the Matrix movie had animators around the world make their own part of the Matrix story in their own style.

The reason why so many don't make weapons that fit on your back, is because they can't find the animations for that. This is also why it makes no sense to try and mod the product, as you still need to have the animation. Incase any creators do see this thread, I sell sword unsheathing and sheathing animations for swords that go on your back.

Brodi3 wrote: I think my mapping is off, the dress I made has been amped into a circle with a lot of the map in the middle then fading out, this is why my texture goes from blurry to clear, but is there a way to remedy this? We probably need to see the mapping to give you good advice. Blender is actually a very good tool for texturing a mesh, but you kind of need to understand it fully. MD should create a usable UV map, but I have not seen everything made with MD, so I can't say for sure if your's is good. I rig clothing for a number of designers and they all use MD. I frequently have to adjust UV maps, as they aren't that well optimized by MD, but I've never had to completely redo the mapping. Generally, I just reoptimize the mapping for the designers as just an extra thing that I do for them, and because I usually do all the different sizes for the clothing too.

Well, I think Avastar is an amazing product, with a support group to match. You've done so much with the avatar, I'm going to start using it for characters in some animated videos that I want to make. With all the expressions and options, the avastar figure should be fun to use in animated videos. Kudos Gaia!!!

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Hey Gaia, I'll just mention, what I think is a bug, a problem I've been seeing with long sleeve shirts. With both classic rigging and fitted mesh, when I attach the mesh to the sliders, the forearm sections of the mesh stretches. This happens on both male and female avatars. I've tried everything to correct it. I made body suits for both male and female avatars to more easily transfer my weights to other clothing items, but both body suits are having issues with the forearms.

Yardie London wrote: Also many of the updates were not being supported by Firestorm. Some creators have being making fitted mesh that works on SL for sometime but they have been using Avastar or Firestorm. First, you are wrong. Totally wrong. Firestorm is only now released with versions that support Fitted Mesh. 2nd, why the heck would you complain that a 3rd party viewer doesn't work with another 3rd party tool. LL makes SL, not Firestorm. LL makes the official viewer. That is what you should use if you want to use the latest toys, not some 3rd party viewer that is generally months behind the official viewer. I don't normally use Firestorm, but I do have correspondence with some of those people and a month ago they were asking me for fitted meshes to use for testing. They barely had a working dev version a month ago.

Let's imagine that, in the future, all our basic needs are taken care of. Isn't this what the ideal leftist ideology consists of? Really tho, this is very doable in the future with robots and other technologies. From this, people speculate that society will get worse, as no1 will have a job, or produce income from themselves. That is what I'm talking about. The SL economy is a reflection of that future. It makes sense that people will all become creative in some sense or another. Yeah, I guess every1 would simply be a hobbiest as you wouldn't need much after all your needs are taken care of. Essentially, we would all become prosumer. Producers and consumers. The fact that we can't physically harm others in SL, is simply a reflection of what we would all prefer. Here is an interesting video from many years ago that tried to predict the future. Of course, my ultimate point about bringing up SL, is to show, a little, how a completely nongovernment regulated market works. People get together and form standards. They regulate themselves. In the future, we won't need regulator and centrally controlled panels to approve things. We'd all be those regulators. Even today, technology has advanced to the point that any1 can pay to have their food tested. Any1 can have the soil analyzed. Any1 can buy devices to check for radiation. We don't need those regulators anymore. Technology makes this possilbe. When you look at the cost of employeeing all those regulators, and the impact they have on the economy, it becomes even more obvious that we are basically burning money, which means wasting our productivity, so we can have corrupt people decide what is legal. As if we were children.