Medhue Simoni

I know this thread is a little old, but I'm surprised that it is all over the place as far as what is best to use. IMHO, the answer is clear as day, and no other program really comes close to the ease of use and custom features specifc to SL. The program is BLENDER, without a doubt. If you combine BLENDER with AVASTAR. You have pure gold. Everything you could ever need, at your finger tips, and more. No joke! Personally, I've only been using Blender for about 9 months, but I don't see ever needing to ever pay for 3ds Max or Maya again. It would seriously be going backwards for me. Rarely to do I praise a product, but Blender is worth every bit of praise. I'm moving into more video types of production, and I couldn't ask for a better program. Fire, explosions, mist, rain, floods, fracturing, compositing, video and audio editing, and much much more all in 1 program, all done well. If you are talking about modeling. Imagine every feature you ever saw in any program, for modeling, in 1 program. Or just about. I still model most things in 3ds Max, but that is only because I've focused more on animation, and rigging in Blender, and spent little time actually modeling in Blender. I'm doing it more and more in Blender, and it pretty overwhelming having all these tools right at my finger tips. Texturing goes to a whole different level in Blender. You don't even need Photoshop. The texturing tools are far superior to any other 3D program IMHO. 3D paint built in also. Like I said earlier, you get the Avastar addon, and you got something custom made to work perfectly with creating things for SL centered around the avatar. Copy weight tools that allow you to literally weight 1 full outfit once, and never have to do much manual weight painting ever again. You just transfer those weights to all your other clothing items. Plus, Avastar has a custom DAE export option that perfectly fits the SL DAE format, with tools to fix errors in weighting, verts and more. To me, it's really the animation aspects, and custom character creation aspects that blow me away. Import motion capture and transfere it to any SL skeleton possible. You can export animations in anim file format and have more control of animation in SL, with access to more bones to animate other things. I'm going to just stop here, cause I could go on and on and on about Blender. Basically tho, the answer to what is the best program to use for creating clothing in SL, is without a doubt Blender. Hands down, not even debatible. Modeling, you might be able to argue for programs like Marvelous Designer is great for creating draped clothing or clothing in general, but AGAIN, you can almost do the same thing in Blender. Oh, and I'm not against shamelessly promoting products that are this good and help every1.

Cerise Sorbet wrote: There is an actual bug with animations where avatars can jump around between animations, and I'm absolutely positive it's not a matter of having a big enough cache. AVSitter is definitely not a cure, in fact I've seen it most often on furniture that uses it. The root positioning information gets lost somewhere, while the rest of the animation seems to play normally. It seems to trigger more often if public chat or other actions that trigger built-in anmations are in use. Several months ago I saw it happen in any viewer, lately I've only noticed it happen when stuck on Firestorm. Yes, there is a bug that will triplicate the first frame. This bug has been around for years and years now. I've probably been the largest complainer about this bug, as it shows itself more with animations that put the avatar closer to the ground. When you upload an animation, you have to adjust the in% to make the animation loop perfectly with this bug. This bug is not generally visible with animations that have the avatar standing. Here is the bug. It could very well be the bug that messes up AVSitter tho. Just a few months ago, I attempted to get a bug fixed with a built in animation. The walk_adjust animation's priorities are too high. Because I didn't know exactly what the problem was, as I only saw it with my turn animations, the jira was closed by LL, before I figured out what the culprit was. Notice how I had to be the 1 to figure it all out, and LL was not interested in actually fixing the bug, only that my initial observation was wrong. My AO uses rotation to know when to turn. This results in a much faster response than overriding the default turn animation. The problem is, that the walk_adjust will only turn off when you replace the default turn animations. Because turns work right when the default is overriden, LL closed the jira. I'd have to create another jira and fight with LL again if I want the walk_adjust priorities fixed, but I give up with LL, and will just override the animation with an anim file. This bug will only present itself when the avatar moves tho, and has nothing at all to do with this topic. Here is that bug jira. I have seen bugs related to typing overides when you are sitting. Again tho, this is not what Chaz is describing.

Cerise Sorbet wrote: VFS doesn't age out all that fast, even with the default cache size. If there are persistent skips within a single login, something else is wrong. Even the largest animation assets with the new updated limits are only 120K apiece. Mesh assets in LL's format are generally not all that large either. It's a mystery why anyone is talking about BVH, that's only a viewer input format that is never uploaded to the grid. Well, without more info, this is all speculation. The data size for any 1 thing, is somewhat irrelevant, when you are talking thousands of items. You can't know the amount of things, so saying it can't be this because animation files are small, or mesh data is small, is assuming quite a bit. Probably the first relevent question should be, do the animations play without the problem jumps for him in an area where there are few objects around him?

Cerise Sorbet wrote: That's not how the cache works. Animations go into a part of the cache called VFS, which contains most assets that aren't textures or sounds. VFS is strictly first in, first out. Ugh fixed a typo that wasn't there. That's news to me, but it still doesn't invalidate what I said. If VFS holds meshes, it could easily get filled quickly. First in and first out, doesn't mean much when you are seeing all the meshes and the animations are sequenced.

Sassy Romano wrote: Medhue Simoni wrote: Well, pretty much everything I mentioned can be fixed by a larger cache. So, you could just ask them to check it and raise it, if necessary. It doesn't matter what size the cache is, the first run through the animations will still be an issue since they're not downloaded to cache at that point. The cache would have to be in the order of a few KB for recently downloaded animations to be purged due to insufficient cache size. That's not what I was arguing. There is no easy way to avoid the first jump, but he was saying that he was seeing the jumps after the animation was originally played. That likely means that the animation was dropped from the cache. If your cache is small, animations will generally be the first thing that gets deleted from the cache. This is because the objects and textures take up much more space, and there can be many more of them. Heck, I've seen single avatars that use up a gig. Plus, the objects are being seen, while the animations are waiting to be seen. If Chaz is talking about dancing animations, this is even more likely what is happening. Dance animations are played in clubs. Any decently popular club in SL is easily going to have 20 avatars in it. Just the hair alone is going to use up a gig or more of cache space. When you add in 60 second dance animations that are 30 fps, you are talking quite a bit of data. This is because you can't really optimize dance animations. The movements are so fast, you need, at least, 25fps, and they will likely need keyframes on almost every frame. I don't generally do dance animations, but I have made some. Fight anims also need a very high fps, and walks, but pretty much everything else can get away with less than 10 fps and keyframes well optimized.

Well, pretty much everything I mentioned can be fixed by a larger cache. So, you could just ask them to check it and raise it, if necessary.

Like Drongle said, we kind of need to know what program you are using. I sense that you are not applying the UV map. You might need to actually apply a texture to the mapping.

I'll try to tackle the issues you are seeing. In the last year, or so, the total length of animations was extented, which can result in more data. We have also had a big change in what is rendered when, meaning the cache system has gotten an upgrade. This could have something to do with what you are seeing. You may also want to check your cache size. If your cache is very small, then it will drop animations that you have already seen, causing you to have to redownload them. You might want to check your environment also. If your environment is vastly different, which causes you to hold more in your cache, then you'll be dropping animations also. Keep in mind that if you buy a game, it likely holds around 6 gigs of data, or more. If you compare this with SL, your cache really needs to be over 3 gigs to not cause a problem with constantly reuploading things.

All good info every1. I'd like to see more about people's experience with collision bones, but of course we all need working files first.

Well, I don't know if your topology is the problem, and I doubt it. Plus, you aren't showing the wire frame. There are some very good tutorials on Youtube about redoing topology in Blender. If you use the snap to feature, you can snap your polygons directly to the surface of the default SL avatar and build your pants directly on top of the mesh. I've never done it this way, but any game modeler in Blender should learn how it is done. You would basically do the same thing to make your LODs, if you wanted to.

Looks to me like you have 2 meshes. 1 is rigged correctly and the other is not.

Well, despite being swamped with many different projects, I could not resist taking a quick look at this new fitted mesh solution. First, let's start with LL's download. Why FBX? Do we not use DAE? Does LL not understand that Blender doesn't import FBX inheritly? Does LL not understand that not all FBX files are compatible with other versions of programs, specifically 3ds Max? I'm assuming LL did not supply weights for the collision bones, as I'm sure Gaia would have included them. How did LL test any of this without weights on the collision bones? Did LL test anything? These are just questions off the top of my head, but It's still troubling. At the very least, LL should have supplied something that shows us exactly what polygons are used for every morph slider. Nope, we got unusable FBX files. Now, let me go into the good stuff. Thanks to Gaia Clary and the Avastar team, we did get a version we could play with. I recommend getting the Avastar addon for Blender, if you plan on making fitted meshes. This is what I used to test out the fitted mesh solution. My first observation was that we have to weight the meshes twice. First you must weight the mesh to the SL bones, and then to the collision, or volume bones. In some cases, you can use the SL bone weights and copy them to the collision bones. With collision bones, we get a few more bones than the SL bones. All of the new collision bones need weights, which you must do almost totally blind, as there is nothing that shows you were the morphs are for those bones. You can use the shape keys to morphs the region you are working on, to see what areas are being morphs. This is still a very long process of trial an error. As my only reason for testing it all was to see if it would all work, and how exactly it is done, I did not fully weight everything totally, but just enough to test it all. Some areas, that I just copied from the SL bones, I did see that the mesh sits above the default avatar's mesh. I'm not sure why the mesh does this, but I'm sure those weights are correct. This is going to make tight fitting clothing not a good fit. I suppose you could create the mesh to fit into the skin of the mesh in Blender, and this might give you less of a gap in SL, but I have not tried it. As I did not completely finish the weights on the top I was testing, I can't really give a good analysis of how it all works out in the end. Why didn't I finish the weights? Well, like I eluded to, we don't have anything that tells us where the morphs are exactly, so I'd just be weighting, reweighting, and reweighting until I got things close. I just don't have the time for this. It's 1 thing to weight bones that animate, which most people understand how to get good weights, It's a whole other thing to weight things you have no way to test outside of SL. Literally, it is weight, log in and test, reweight log in and test. Again, I'm perplexed by LL releasing files with no default weights on them. At least with that, we'd have something close that we can adjust. It also worries me that we have 2 sets of weighted bones. To people who are not familiar with weighting, how are they going to get 2 sets of perfect weights, even if we get the default weights. The way things work with weighting, default are not perfect because the mesh is not in the exact same position of the original mesh, so there will be differences. If the creator has a problem, how will they know it is not the weights on the animated bones, or the weights on the collision bones? It's not a problem for me, but I can see how it will be for others. Here are a few suggestions that I'll make for those wanting to make fitted mesh clothing. Remember, I'm just an animator, not a clothing designer or a mesh expert, so take my words with a grain of salt. If you are a clothing designer or want to get into it, I will first suggest getting the Avastar addon. 2ndly, I'll suggest weighting your first set of clothing using a full shirt, with sleeves, full pants, and socks. I suggest this so that you have a set of clothing that has all the weights you need to copy to any other article of clothing. Spend as much time as needed to get a set of PERFECT weights for the animating SL bones, and PERFECT weights for the collision bones. You can then use those weights on any other clothing you might need to weight. I'd save that blend file as your default file to rig and weight clothing with. That's about as much as I can say about it all. If any1 has any other suggestion, please do post them here.

The default SL avatar comes with a skirt or dress layer. Copying the weights from there should get you most of the way there. It's all about weighting it all correctly. You will have to adjust your weights. The most important part is the middle transition inbetween the legs. If you are weighting the left leg, it should be all red in the area near the left leg, but the area around the right leg should be blue. The same goes for the weights on the right leg.

Gaia Clary wrote: Also i hope that we will see more bones in the future. Maybe the logical next step would be to keep collision volumes bound to their original task and introduce "shape bones" instead which actually could even replace morphs entirely at the end. Now, this would be a huge bonus if LL would consider it. Not the replace morphs part tho. A whole skeleton tho, with facial bones, breast bones, butt cheek bones and finger bones. Maybe also add in tail bones, wing bones, ear bones, and individual toe bones. That would be a ton of bones, but would give us almost every option we'd need to make almost any creature. Breast and butt physics wouldn't even be needed anymore, as the animators would add them in. With a full facial rig, we could have a fully animated face with any option. With fingers, we could make sign language gestures, and much more. Ulitmately, I'd love to see a bone attachment system, where we could attach whole new bone sets to the default. Imagine a guy with 6 arms, or a properly working centaur. There is no reason both a new default skeleton and attachment bones done later can't exist together, and it insures that every1 making facial expressions, or any other normal avatar movement, is using the exact same bone set, and every1 can use them. Anyways, we can dream. lol

I propose that we call the final mesh solution FITTED MESH. This seems better and less confusing that any thing else, unless some1 else has a better suggestion.

Technically, I really can't have a serious opinion of which is better, as I have no experience with the collision bones and mesh. I haven't gone thru the workflow, nor can comment on it's end result, and I likely won't be doing any of that this year. What I will say about the mesh deformer is that is works, works very well, and is no extra work for the clothing creator. Where I will differ from what Gaia is saying, is that I do not see how the mesh deformer could be a problem down the line for LL, or any1 that used such a thing. The mesh deformer uses the positions of the meshes verticies. Mesh verticies are never going to change anytime soon. I don't know alot about collision bones, but I will say that it is always open to change, as technology moves forward. Mesh verticies are more "standard", than collision bones, in my honest opinion. LL could completely change the avatar and how every single thing works on it, and the Mesh deformer would still work. In the end, is collision bones the better choice? I'd say that is impossible to determine at this point.

Personally, I think LL went way overboard when they attempted to control 3rd party viewers. If this had not happened, we'd not be dealing with any of this over the past 2 years, and we'd of had a system for mesh clothing that was fully tested. Instead, we have painstakingly waited, and dealt with countless misconceptions, and complete BS over the mesh deformer. Even 2 years afters it started, we have people still barfing up their "Theories" about how the deformer works, instead of actually knowing and making something with it. Even this "Theory" of the mesh deformer creating lag, is total BS at this point, as it has not been fully tested on a mass scale. Should we have 1 code to rule the meshes, like LL wants 1 TOS to rule the IPs? That can't really be determined, if all available sources are handcuffed. As far as the residents, it would not even be noticed by them, unless 1 of the solutions was purposely broken. They would just get the mesh and it works, why is not something they would care about at all. Do I think we should have 2 solutions? That is a difficult question because I see no avenue to this. LL is never going to implement both. They sat on 1 for 2 years, so implementing it now after their announcement seems out of the question. Personally, I think LL's choice to control things is unwise. If they did not try to control things, 3rd Party viewers would have the freedom to take the chances that LL won't. The best solutions would become very obvious over time. LL already forced creators into a system where they had to do obscene amounts of work for a very bad solutions, that was Standard sizing. So, any talk or claims of LL, or any1 else, that anybody is thinking of the creators is total BS. Nobody has been thinking about creators from the start, accept those who actually helped and supported the real solutions. Notice that LL was not involved at all, until a few days ago. Now, Inworldz decisions from here should be interesting. They already implemented the mesh deformer. Will they also implement the collision bone solution? It will be interesting to see. I think they might have to if the creators scream for it. I'm not saying it's a bad place to be in for Inworldz, just that it will be interesting.

Gaia Clary wrote: This is hilarious! Really it is. The solution to the, "what about the buttons" is to make the buttons separate. Seriously, was that all that difficult to figure out? As Cathy pointed out, collision bones won't be any different. The rest Cathy covered pretty good, so I won't go into it. Wouldn't the solution to this be to give all vertices of the buttons the same weight ? Then the buttons would scale but not stretch. With the Mesh deformer you would have to make the buttons separate and static i guess ? But then wouldn't you get really ugly issues with garment animating due to avatar movement while buttons stay at their attachment place ? You'd have to attach the buttons to separate attachment points, this way each button moves with the bones too. Yeah, it's a mess for the users to set up on a unique avatar, but I think that would be the only way for it to work well. Of course, clothing is not my market, so I'm sure others can think of better ways. If it was up to me, I'd avoid buttons, lol.

Pussycat Catnap wrote: A famous question on this issue was "what about the buttons" - and once you understand that question, you begin to see why a deformer is never viable for a good result. This is hilarious! Really it is. The solution to the, "what about the buttons" is to make the buttons separate. Seriously, was that all that difficult to figure out? As Cathy pointed out, collision bones won't be any different. The rest Cathy covered pretty good, so I won't go into it.

Nalates Urriah wrote: One of the big problems with the Deformer was the base shape. For those making large and small avatars, that includes fat and skinny as well as short and tall, use of the default avatar shape as a base was unsatisfactory. That resulted in the ability to specify your base shape for the deformation. Thus the XML file shape exports became a way to specify a base shape for the Deformer to work from. But, understanding how that worked and how Deformer offsets worked in general was/is difficult. Using custom base shapes was seen as an overall problem and complication by the Lab. They were concerned about how custom base shapes were going to be explained to new users in the market place and how they would figure out which clothes could be used with their shape. While people could have worked out a solution, history shows us that many uninformed people sell in the MP. So, there would be well explained items and poorly explained items. Basically a confusing mess for novice SL users. Anything that adds confustion or adds significantly to the learning curve is a problem for the Lab and they avoid it. Fitted Mesh eliminates that problem, confusion, and learning curve. I made clothing with the mesh deformer and am selling it in InWorldz. It works with almost every size female possible. If I really wanted, I could have made 3 versions, all using the default base, and it would have fit small children, and the other fit the biggest strongest, fattest avatar in SL, meaning every1 that uses the SL avatar. I just didn't feel the need to. I even showed the video of me using all the sliders. There were no problems with the deformer at all. Making the clothing and rigging it was simple as pie. No real extra work, but maybe tweaking a little at the extremes. If some1 got different results than I did, I'd chalk it up to inexperience, before blaming code, which works the same for every1. It's really all about weighting the clothing perfectly. Once you get a perfect weight balance, you can use that to copy to any shirt or pants. Oh, and I'm not a clothing designer. I must also refute any claims that the custom based shapes had any validity at all. They were not needed and never were. I personally think Qarl conceded only because it really didn't matter and he knew it. Well, obviously he knew that, but if it quelled fears, then why not add it. The actual bottom line was that you could have used any shape as the default, as long as that is the default for every1. IMHO, adding the other sizes only gave credibility to irrational people who didn't understand anything about the deformer. I show in my own product why the whole concept was BS, because I could easily get any shape to work perfect with only weighted to the Default.

Perrie Juran wrote: Medhue Simoni wrote: Lexi Zelin wrote: Sorry if any of this sounds stupid or whatever cause I REALLY am confused here Also, now, if you transfer out your lindens up to $20,000 LL will send you a W9? ummm when did they tell us about this!? THEY DIDNT. A big name mesh creator brought this to our attention yesterday and im just so confused... LL what are you doing!? Cause I really feel you are planning for a bigggggggg fu*k us over fest.... Hmmm, this implies to me that LL has some insider knowledge of moves the fed government is going to take. This also makes me wonder if the new TOS has something to do with this. I seriously wish LL would just say what the heck is up. That new free trade agreement is being hashed out right now, and there is much talk of a complete redo of IP. Of course, this all circumvents the laws of each nation involved, but why would politicians care about that. To them, it's all good. One day maybe in our wildest dreams Linden Lab may learn the value of transparency in customer relations and how far it could go in growing SL. They also need to learn the value of being proactive and communicating BEFORE the fact and not AFTER. http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Commerce/Required-Tax-Documentation/ba-p/2336109 Why this is coming up now and hadn't in the past is anyones guess. It could have been prompted by a simple request by the IRS and LL had a WTF, uh oh, we better get in compliance moment. Or it could have been that one of their Attorneys needing some more billable hours was doing some reading and realized LL had been neglecting this. But yes, it sure does appear to be the Law that they are required to do this. What is crazy is that it looks like a situation where it is the state and LL vs us, which is seriously screwed up. It should really be the state vs LL and us. Corporations are so tied to the state now, that they are afraid to even inform their patrons ahead of time. If LL was truly on our side, and half way intellegent, they would have been setting up a Linden to Bitcoin exchange a long time ago. In theory, we could cash out to Bitcoin, and have no tax liability until we cashed those Bitcoins out for dollars. In essence, we'd be preserving our wealth until we needed it, and possibly making a profit on that too, a big profit possibly.

Madeliefste Oh wrote: I think it's the consequence of what is going on for a while now. The IRS was after Bitcoin (and comparable virtual currencies) because they see an increasing use of virtual currency for tax evasion and laundring money. There were just a hearing in the senate about a week ago. Because of the conclusions from the hearing, I will be setting up a Bitcoin option on my website, so that my customers can pay me with it. I'm not an advocate of buying Bitcoins, but if you can acquire them through sales, why not. It's as good a currency as any, and if I want to sell them for dollars, it's no big deal. I'll likely hold some tho, just to always be in the market. Here a video of my favorite philosopher talking about it.

Gaia Clary wrote: As a sidenote: I do not understand (and never understood in the past as well) why LL does not inform their customers beforehand. All what i had until yesterday was an informal note that i got about a year ago from Linden Labs. They asked us to better not give collision bone rigging out to the public because the lab could decide to break this approach at any time. That is the core of what annoys me about the whole thing. I can see some things being a secret, but why was this? Why allow your community to complain and get upset, when you are working on it. Just say that you are working on it or looking at this or that option. It's like they are playing a game with us. Even I find it difficult to be upset for too long over this. The goal was to have a solution for mesh clothing and now we have something. You gotta be happy for the clothing creators, and their customers. In the end, especially this issue, I don't really care what solution they go with, as long as we have something that works reasonably. As far as Oz's statement at the end of the mesh deformer jira, I'll just point out that Oz get's paid to be annoyed by those emails. We do not. All that said, I'm still waiting for LL to put out a revised TOS. So, this collision mesh announcement means absolutely nothing to me. I haven't uploaded anything in months, and I've been working on projects for other platforms. I have no intention of uploading anything until the TOS is reasonably reworked.

Gaia Clary wrote: For those who use Avastar: I just added a testversion with the new collision volumes. its in your download folders. enjoy Damn, you are fast! lol

You know, a part of me is happy, but mostly, I just annoyed. Why now? Why no word before hand? Another big secret? Instead they lets us rant on and on and on about it. Then, 1 day they pop up and say look what we did. Seriously, I want 5 lindens to come to my sim so I can just use them for target practice for an hour. That would seriously make me feel better. 2 years to make a decision. It's fricken nutty. I really want to see what Gaia says, and how this relates to AVASTAR. I not going near collision bones until it is working in Avastar. It would just be a waste of time. I got better things to do in the mean time. Really, I feel sorry for the Avastar team, as after they spent all this time perfect it, now they have to change it again. If LL was smart, they would implement new actual bones to the skeleton now, while the avatar is in flux. No, they likely won't. They'll wait until Avastar adds this, and then makes them redo the plugin again when they finally decide that it is important enough, even though they could literally implement new bones over night. Sorry, I'm cranky today. Yippie, LL wasted 2 years cause it takes so long to think.