Drongle McMahon

So bring on profits for the even fewer at even greater cost to the masses! Problem solved?

There are some with large businesses that will be seriously affected by the changes. I would be surprised if they have not already thoroughly involved their attorneys. In that case, those attorneys will surely have told them not to say anything in public. So the silence may be a sign of action, not of inaction. The danger is that the large providers may secretly negotiate different terms, leaving the rest of us relatively hobbled by the public terms. There is provision in the ToS for such special variations of terms (11.4).

Thanks. I am a bit clearer now and I can sympathise. Of course I have not been aware of any of the problems you may have experienced with mesh template sellers. The question of the rights LL demands affects both mesh and template sellers equally, as you say. However, it doesn't completely stop either. They can accept the terms. It's a matter of choice. The licensed texture problem actually prevents mesh makers from making anything except the untextured templates you don't like. I am afraid they are bound to see that effect as the overriding one at the moment.

"I was stuck unable to do anything" Ah, the joys of the Blender UI. :matte-motes-sour:

Ah. I'll rephrase the question and offer an answer to that. If the rephrasing is wrong, then I am sorry... Q: There are two mesh templates I must choose between. One has beautiful geometry, but the UV mapping is such that it is impossible to apply the sort of texture I want without unacceptable distortion. The other has less pleasing geometry, but its UV map allows texturing with much less distortion. Which should I use? A: Use the second one. Texturing usually has much more effect than geometry on the overall quality of appearance. ETA - Whoops! See, I guess we can be relied on to disagree about anything :matte-motes-wink:

From my point of view, texture making is a far more demanding skill than the rest of mesh or sculpty making. However, I don't understand your argument here. In particular, I can't see exactly what behaviors of mesh creators you are complaining about. You seem to be suggesting that mesh/sculpty makers who don't make their own textures should be happy to use textures obtained inside SL. However, most of the texturing is done by baking textures in a 3D program outside SL. Buying a texture in SL is no help unless the texture is exported. Even if that is allowed, the problems with uploading the baked texture, which has used a licensed texture, are the same. It makes no difference whether the texture was licensed inside or outside SL. So purchasing textures inworld does nothing to alleviate the problems mesh creators have with uploading licensed textures. It is possible, though a lot of extra work for mesh and horribly difficult for sculpties, to make the UV mapping (or the geometry for sculpties) such that general purpose textures can be used. Then it becomes possible to use textures purchased inside SL. However, there is an inevitable sacrifice in the visual quality of the mesh. So far a great deal more work, the mesh creator ends up with a less appealing product. I do try to make my mesh this way, mostly because the re-use of general purpose textures can have a large performance benefit, but if I was creating mesh as a business, this would be seen as counterproductive and a waste of time. As for people using untextured meshes with a UV template to draw the texture on, that template is of no value in isolation from the mesh. It can therefore be made public domain without any loss to the mesh creator. Now when you use it and upload the texture made on it, that is entirely your own, as long as you didn't use a licensed texture in the process of making it. In that case you are free to upload the texture and apply it to the mesh. You didn't upload the mesh, so there are no difficulties for you in applying your texture. Do mesh makers apply restrictions to UV template use that I am not aware of? On the other hand, if you want to use 3D software to do your texturing, with a dae file provided with the mesh in SL, you can still do that because you don't need to upload the mesh again. You already have it (unless you want to change the creator name!). This contrasts with the converse situation with the mesh creator who does need to upload his baked texture and is prevented from doing so. So in this respect, the mesh creator seems to be at a slight disadvantage compared to the texture creator, and buying textures inworld generally offers no solution at all. When it comes to the other aspect of the matter, the protection of rights, then of course both are in exactly the same situation. The reason mesh creators are perhaps more ouspoken here is that a substantial part of their activities is actually prevented, even if the accept the unwelcome transfer of rights.

I don't understand the question. It's the UV mapping that determines the distortion or otherwise of the texture, not the geometric shape of the mesh. So why should the beautifully shaped mesh not to have a UV map that makes texturing as simple as for the less beautiful mesh? Maybe it's because I'm not a clothing creator. Sorry, I should shut up.

This was happening sporadically some time ago. After initially thinking it was LL trying to couteract ad-blocking, I came round to thinking it was specific ads that were causing blank pag redirects if they were blocked from display. That fitted with the intermittent occurence better, so it only happened when certain ads were sent. I found several online descriptions of that kind of anti-adblock strategy. Didn't keep links - sorry.

Further, is it not likely that all uploaded assets are linked in the database with the identity of the uploaders account? In that case, that can very easily be cross referenced with whether that user has accepted the ToS. That would be as easy for content uploaded before as for that uploaded after the new ToS, wouldn't it?

"I also don't think LL's lawyers are THAT stupid. " Hmm. Why not?

You are right. I certainly had the impression that no CC license was compatible with the ToS. In the case of cc-by, this was based on the impression that uploading required the waiving of all moral rights, including attribution. I still have little doubt that that was the intention, because from LL's point of view, there's no difference between having to respect the uploaders attribution right and having to respect the third party's attribution right. However, on a more careful reading, we can see that the letter of the ToS does not say anything about third party moral rights, only about those of the person accepting the ToS. I suspect that is a mistake (we may see it corrected, simply by changing "your" to "all" - have to keep looking, as they no longer have to tell us). Also, the license demanded does not include anything explicitly excluding the respecting of an attribution right (does it?). That raises the possibility that cc-by (but not other cc licenses) might be compatible after all. I think it depends on the interpretation of the sentence you quoted. On one hand, it could be argued that: you have the right to upload; the act of uploading gives LL every right they demand; therefore you do have the right to give LL those rights, and you do so by uploading; therefore your affirmation is valid. On the other hand, it may be argued that the rights obtained by LL when you upload are not given by you. LL gets the rights it demands, but they come from the original licensor, not from you. You have no rights to grant anything to LL in connection with the uploaded content. Therefore your affirmation is invlalid, even though LL legitimately gets everything it demands. It's a question of effective (first) vs literal (second) interpretation. I just don't know which would win. Of course, the only safe course is then to assume you can't upload (or can't accept the ToS), especially because the intent was surely to exclude anything that required attribution. So your arguments on this basis are not undermined in any way. Maybe I should have been a lawyer - they actually get paid for this sort of nit-picking!

There's another point I am confused about. It concerns the attribution requirement of the CC-BY license, often applied to third-party textures, whose only restriction is the requirement for attribution of the work to the originator. I believe attribution is a moral right. If the ToS is non-retrospective, then this question applies to uploading new CC-BY textures. If it is retrospective, then it could determine whether someone who has uploaded a CC-BY texture in the past can accept the ToS without making a false affirmation. Accepting the ToS requires that "you waive, and you agree to waive, any moral rights (including attribution and integrity) that you may have in any User Content" * (note that that does seem to be any, not just new content). However, the attribution requirement connected with the CC-BY license is not your moral right, it is the moral right of the licensor. You cannot waive someone else's right. So at first it seems you cannot upload (or cannot accept the ToS). However, you are only agreeing to waive your rights, and you have none. You have not agreed to waive any third party rights. So maybe there is no problem? In section 2.7, you agree not to submit (upload) anything unless unless "you are the owner of such rights or have permission from the rightful owner to upload, publish, or submit the Content and to grant Linden Lab and users of the Service all of the license rights granted in these Terms of Service." As far as I can see, there is nothing in the license rights granted in the ToS that says LL does not have to respect any third party moral right to attribution (as opposed to your own moral rights, excluded above). Neither can I see anything in the uses contemplated by the ToS that would be incompatible with CC-BY as long as the attribution requirement is met. So, it seems that there is nothing requiring you to affirm the right to waive third party attribution rights, and that there is nothing claimed in the User Content license that would be prevented by the requirement for that attribution. In that case, uploading of CC-BY licensed textures appears to be compatible with the ToS. That would mean they can be uploaded after accepting the ToS, and that those that have uploaded them in the past can accept the ToS without making a false affirmation. It would also mean LL would then be required to respect the attribution (and other) moral rights of the third party originator when they put into effect any of the licensed uses unless they obtain a waiver. Of course, this is all ignorant speculation on my part. I would be interested to know how others would interpret the effect of the ToS in this case. Is there something else in CC-BY I have missed? *blue text = quoted from ToS © 2013 Linden Research; quotations claimed as fair use. My emphasis in bold.

To be horribly pedantic... what gets uploaded is the internal mesh format, as others said. It is very nearly convertible back into the model in the dae, but not quite. That's because in converting into the internal format the numbers for the geometry etc. are converted into 16 bit integers. This conversion involves some loss of precision that cannot be recovered. So there will be small differences, although almost certainly not enough to make any practical difference.

"Hello, this is my credintials..." Thank you. I am sure this will make people here comfortable in contribiting to you investigations. You have probably noticed alreadym if you have perused this forum, that we are presently in the midst of an issue particularly relevant to that area of study. I look forward to seeing your survey. Bon chance.

"...I am currently doing a my doctoral research..." If that is the case, your best chance of getting cooperation would probably be to tell us what institution that research is being conducted in, who your supervisors are, what other research they have published and what ethical framework you are operating in. An abstract of your research proposal would also help, together with links to official sites containing these sources of information.

"...and each of those lawyers thinks they are right..." Shouldn't that be "...and each of those lawyers pretends they are right..."

"Corry's Wildwind AC72; Tronth's AC72" Those look good. Do they have races? Can they be sailed single-handed, or do they need the whole crew?

"Manchester United Football Club:" Yes. Same thing really, except that we don't call them "The English" as far as I am aware (and not forgetting Alex Furguson, Scottish, without whom they are looking rather average, so far). To be consistent, I suppose we should call them "The Americans", if we are to go by the owners, as for the Oracle team, although in this case, there are none at all in the team! Chelsea = "The Russians", etc. ? PS. Someone should make one of those boats for SL.

If you looked at the crew list on the official Oracle team site, the figures were New Zealand = 8, Australia = 7, USA = 2 (plus one multiple nationality), Netherland = 2, others = 5. As far as the crews are concerned, it would be best described as NZ1 vs NZ2! However, that just goes to show, it's not about sailors or sailing, it's about MONEY.

Re: video linked by Luna Bliss Well, Toy, I suppose we are both guessing here, but, the credits at the end being longer that the video, I am guessing this was a clever and enjoyable way of suggesting why they might wish for the waiving of attribution. As such, it is a good point, although I am not sure how far it is justified, as I imagine attribution need only be attached to individual items, not the entire world all at once. It is certainly true that attributions can accumulate alarmingly when several sources are combined, each perhaps already having multiple attributions.

"I'm also now wondering if any content licensed under a Creative Commons or similar license could not be used in SL anymore." Section 2.3, paragraph 4 : "Except as prohibited by law, you hereby waive, and you agree to waive, any moral rights (including attribution and integrity) that you may have in any User Content..." I believe all CC licenses, even the most lax, include the attribution requirement. In that case, it would appear to me that any of them would be incompatible with the requirement to waive moral rights. For my own (non-lawyer) purposes I interpret this to mean that the only things you can upload now, while remaining in compliance with the ToS, are those for which all components are either entirely created by you or are in the public domain.

I think part of the problem is terminology; UV map vs UV template vs texture etc... I will be very pedantic in an attempt to make the distinctions clear... Quote "I'm not quite sure what you mean by "applying the UV map" and "replacing the UV map". A UV Map is a texture, it consists of certain faces on a 3d model that once imported in world can be applied in the edit menu under the texture tab to place it as a texture in SL. Whatever faces are on that UV Map when the 3d model was uv unwrapped, those faces will be applied to the 3d model. A UV map is a mapping between triangles (and their vertices) comprising the surface of a mesh model (in 3D space) and triangles in a 2D plane (2D space). It can be used to define how a 2D texture is to be applied to the mesh surface, in which each triangle from the 2D texture space is stretched to fit the corresponding mapped triangle on the mesh surface. Note: A UV map is NOT a texture. It is a mapping between texture space and mesh surface space. It is part of the model. Thus it makes little sense to speak of a UV map being applied to a model. Rather, the texture is applied, using the geometric transformation implied by the UV map. In SL, the mesh data contains a triangle list in which each triangle has pointers to each of its three vertices in a vertex list. Each entry in the vertex list include both 3D geometric coordinates and 2D UV coordinates (and a normal vector). So the UV map is not a distinct entity. It is intermingled with the rest of the vertex data. Note: It is usually desirable for practical reasons, but not required, that the triangles in 2D space that will be used to apply a single texture (a single face in SL) are non-overlapping. On the other hand, careful overlapping (stacking UVs) can be useful. It never matters whether the triangles to be used with different textures (i.e.. Different materials/SL faces) overlap, as different textures are being sampled. For most efficient texture use, the triangles to be used with each material/face should fill as much of the 2D unit plane as possible. This is not the case for the mapping you showed, in which the triangles for the different textures/faces are still kept non-overlapping. I don't know how it goes I 3Ds, but in Blender, you can use the whole space for each material by selecting the material and then unwrapping, repeating for each. I have a feeling that is hat Kwak was suggesting. This is NOT the same as using multiple UV maps. It is a single map with overlapping triangles. Multiple UV maps imply additional alternative mappings from texture space to model surface. They may be useful for using different transformations, for example, for applying textures and baking the results. However, SL cannot use multiple UV maps. If they appear on the dae file, only one will be used. Quote "All UV maps are already applied before you render the templates." UV maps are only applied if the 3d model has been uv unwrapped from the modifier menu tab in 3ds Max. If the 3d model wasn't UV unwrapped, once the 3d model is imported in world (SL), applying a texture to it would look stretched. As above, maps cannot be applied. "the 3D model wasn't unwrapped" presumably means that no UV map was generated. Therefore, the way the texture is transformed for application to the surface is undefined. (I don't know what 3ds does in that case. In Blender it simply omits the UV map section of the dae file, which results in the uploader using uninitialized data in its place. That leads to a variety of unpredictable texturing effects, none of which is useful.) Quote "You can export the model as it is when you render those. In SL the four ID's should translate into face 0,1,2 and 3. You can apply your textures (or with the way you made the UV map a single texture) in SL." Exactly but when I apply my TEXTURES, I can only apply ONE UV Map, do I choose "select face" from the edit menu in SL when editing the 3d model to select the 4 faces that translate to 0,1,2,3 as you said to apply a different texture to each ??? As above, you can't apply UV maps in SL. The model has effectively only one unique UV map that gets used for all the textures. To be more precise, each triangle on the model surface has only one corresponding triangle in 2D space from which the texture will be taken to apply. Which texture that triangle is taken from depends on which texture you apply to the face that includes the mesh triangle, and can choose that by using "select face"* and selecting the texture from inventory, by dragging and dropping the texture onto the face, or by script using the face number. *Note that you have to click on the face to select it, otherwise just checking "Select face" leaves all faces se;ected and the texture will be applied to all of them. Quote "If you want the UV templates to show in 3ds max, just assign the rendered templates to the four corresponding diffuse map slots." Didn't the pictures above taken from 3ds Max demonstrate that the UV Templates are assigned to the corresponding diffuse map slots ? I assume "UV template" here refers to the diagram showing the layout, in the 2D texture space, of the triangles which are mapped onto the mesh triangles by the UV map. (This is often called the UV map, although, as explained above, that is inaccurate and can be misleading). Thus they are textures (diffuse maps), and can be applied to the mesh, using the UV map, the same way as any other texture. Quote "Anyway, do you mean "assigning the UV template as a texture" when you say "applying the UV map ?" Yes that is exactly what I mean, since the UV Template is imported into SL, its basically an image which consists of faces from the 3d model previously rendered in 3ds Max and that UV Template is specific to only that 3d model. Here it sounds as if "UV template" (previously "UV map") is being used to describe a baked texture. That is to say, an image in which each of the 2D triangles in the UV mapping is filled with (suitably stretched) texture from the corresponding triangle of the rendered surface of the 3D model (without specifying how that rendering was achieved). In that case, application of that image to a face of the model in SL can be achieved in the ways described above. As long as the UV map used for baking is the same as the one imported into SL, then the appearance in SL should be the same as it was in the authoring software (after allowing for lighting differences). .... On second thoughts, I guess you mean the version of the UV template on which you have painted some texture effects in Photoshop? Doesn't make any difference really - as long as the UV templates were generated with the same UV map that is uploaded, it should be ok. Quote "If that's the case, aren't you assigning them to the same ID? You still need 4 ID's for the templates, or for your final textures." Once again, don't the pictures above show that there are 4 Material ID's assigned to 4 UV Templates for the 3d Model and materials assigned to each Material ID under diffuse ? I think they do (although I don't know 3DS). However, they don't show us whether those material IDs have been correctly translated into <polylist>s in the dae file and thus produced the intended four faces in SL. Can you select each face (using "select face" and then clicking on it) and thus set them to different colors? If you can, then you should bne able to apply different images in the same way. If not, then something is wrong with the export (I can't help with that, as I don't use 3Ds).

All quads in the collada file are converted into triangles by the uploader because the internal data format onlu knows about triangles. If you have quads that are not flat, the uploader will have to choose between the two poassible diagonals to split the quad into triangles, and it may not choose the better one. To change that, you have to triangulate in Blender before exporting. When the quads are seriously non-flat, the triangulation can make a lot of difference to the way it gets shaded.

I would say whatever works. It's only because the uploader sometimes messes up if you leave it with the choice by having joined/overlapping/touching pieces, which can result in higher physics weights because it makes more hulls than it needs to. I could say that as long as the physics weight is less than the download weight, it doesn't matter, but it does still affect the amount of work the engine has to do. Look at the hulls by using the view-exploding slider and you should be able to see if it's being silly. Same thing for choice between "surface" ans "solid". Sometimes one works better and sometimes the other. I haven't worked out how to know which in advance.

The main thing about keeping the cubes separated is that it is better at forcing "Analyze" to choose the right hulls to break the shape into. It isn't strictly necessary, but it is much more reliable. With connected mesh, the automatic breaking into hulls can sometimes be very inefficient. With separate pieces, it has to do what you want.