Da5id Weatherwax

Short answer: You cant. Longer answer: Fingers are shape morphs in SL, not bone animations. There are no bones in the SL skeleton that directly move an individual finger joint so there is no way to animate the fingers with an uploaded animation other than setting a single hand shape at upload time. Doesnt matter what program you use, or how you make the animation. You can ONLY control the bones that exist in the SL skeleton and fingers dont.

The avastar rig has many more bone sets than the base SL rig, to enable use of IK and to make tweaking individial rotations easier. Since it was designed from the ground up to make SL anims and rigs, provided you dont screw up the avastar rig itself somehow it tends to "just work" (but trust me, as I learned to use it I found a LOT of ways to screw it up!)

possibly, but in general "any hat with a brim" then generally one tends to wear the brim at about the same height on the av's head most of the time - it certainly works that way in RL. (yes, I wear a lot of hats in RL - fedora, bowler, topper, flat cap, assorted wide-brimmed stuff for historical costume - and the brim is about the same height every time) If the two hats coordinate well enough (lag permitting) then any minor displacement to have the second hat be properly positioned in the hand to make the sweep work will just look the start of the sweeping anim anyway. But yes, you've touched on another one of the scripting pitfalls there - the user has to have a way to "wear both hats" in a fitting mode that keeps your hand up to the hatbrim and keeps both hats visible so that you can adjust the one on your hand properly, again without needing to add too much in extra script code to it. Thank you for mentioning this, it's a lovely scripting design challenge. Probably one that if I pursue it will end up with me dropping it in frustration, but it does seem to be within the realms of possibility so far

For what it's worth, just to see if it was as simple as I thought I roughed out the scripts and there are some pitfalls in trying to script a "generic" solution that will work with any arbitrary hat of any construction and still keep it to one script per hat (which can be a big deal if you're dealing with sims that have script limits as a lag-control measure - it's bad enough having to leave a listener open all the time without adding to the script count). I'm not working on it as a project, just as an abstract exercise but if it should ever come together and work I'll throw together a couple of basic anims to go with it and drop you a copy of the whole shebang. If that should ever happen and it works well enough for you it might end up either on the MP or in the script library depending on how well it works

Dillon Levenque wrote: Thinking about it more, it could be something like the draw/holster or draw/sheath animation used with weapons. I can wear my Beretta anywhere I want. If I put the RH pistol backwards on my left hip, my right hand reaches across my body and draws (and holsters) the gun. No matter where or in what orientation I wear the holstered gun, it always appears in my hand properly. That's what made my fabulous (okay, I exaggerate) crossdraw technigue work. Seems to me the same thing could work with a hat. I realize that makes my earlier fantasy of having the animation independent of the hat even more idiotic than I thought it was, but I still think the idea has merit. A proper hat combined with a courtly bow would look pretty cool. Bear in mind that for most weapons the holster and drawn weapon are worn at the same time, it's just that the drawn weapon is transparent when its holstered and the holstered weapon is transparent (leaving only the empty holster) when it's drawn. You do the same thing with your hat, you need two objects. One is the hat worn on the head - it is listening on some negative channel for a message from the "other" hat, the one in your hand. Let's call them "Regular Hat" and "Bowing Hat" - you could end up with a sequence like this.... You are wearing the regular hat. It is fully visible and listening for the bowing hat, which is still dormant in your inventory. You wear the bowing hat and it attaches transparently to your hand (make sure of this in the script to avoid glitches) and triggers an anim to put your hand to the brim of the regular hat. bowing hat becomes visible and tells the regular hat to vanish, the visible hat is now the one on your hand, the one on your head is transparent. bowing hat plays the bow animation, that ends with your hand back up by your head as if you were replacing your hat. bowing hat tells the regular hat to become visible again, makes itself transparent, stops the anim (reverting you to your regular pose) and detaches itself from you, retiring to your inventory to wait for your next encounter with royalty. If it is something you might have multiple wearers of within chat range, make sure you script the comms protocols so that somebody elses bowing hat cant control your regular hat and vice versa. You do not want the spectacle of your bow to the visiting dignitary having the side effect of knocking off everyone elses hats! Edited to add: It would be two scripts, two anims and could be applied to any copy/mod hat of your choice, which at least gets you part way to your ideal of the system being independent of the hat - You could theoretically make it one script that detects where it is attached and acts as a regular hat or bowing hat accordingly but that would not be as visually effective since we depend on the bowing hat rezzing transparent for best effect.

It's not just mocap either - even without the outlay of hardware costs on a mocap rig and avoiding software costs by using free tools, it's a huge investment of time to even produce 30s of high quality animation. Back when I was maintaining an inworld store and a marketplace presence I used to do it all, build, sculpt script and animate. For the projects I still have ongoing I still do. The reason I had to shut down that business is that I simply couldnt keep up. You can make a dreadful keyframed animation for a single character in minutes, or seconds if all you want is a static pose. If it only lasts a few seconds you can make it "mediocre" in a few hours. If it's longer than that or you want better quality you're looking at many many hours tweaking individual frames to even make it "good enough", particularly if it involves more than one av. One item I made had about 80 couples 15-second animations in it, scripted so each one could feed into several others, with multiple branching paths from a single start point to several possible finishes. However each of those paths were only a few minutes long. Keyframing 40 minutes total of animations took me equivalent of more than two months of full time work. Call it another couple of full-time weeks to get the scripts to coordinate all that working. Counting sculptmaps, textures, animations and the "oh sh..!" moments from bad uploads I'd have needed to sell 10 of those to even break even on my upload costs, after which I start reaping the rewards for over 700 hours of RL work, a few RL bucks at a time. It's just as well I wasnt trying for a profit, only to break even on my tier and feed my upload and inworld shopping habit. Medhue is right, folks who are in the business of making anims for SL are WAY underpaid for the amount of work they do. The market simply wont pay them appropriately for the hours they put in, but they still put them in because the good ones wont let a bad anim go out the door with their name on it.

Sylva Petrov wrote: I think you could get away with modifying one of the open-source chain emitter systems - like CISS - to send the skeins to the hand, by affixing a emitter object to the hand with the thread texture to the receiving prim. However, I am not sure how such would align, so far as orientation of the 'thread'. Well I oversimplified the roadblock a little in my initial post - the item is designed to be as "realistically interactive" as possible - so you sit down, click the box of raw fiber and are given a piece of roving to wear on your right or left hand That piece is good for X minutes of spinning, you wear it and off you go. The roving is of course the particle target for the yarn.It tells the wheel it's there and on which side it's worn on a specific channel and the wheel triggers either the right or left handed drafting animation, starts moving, generates the particles and starts filling the bobbin. After your handful of fiber is exhausted, the fiber says "I'm done", dies and the wheel stops. You need to wear a new handful of fiber to start again. (a full bobbin also stops the wheel but that takes several handfuls of fiber - you need to swap it out for an empty one by clicking on the lazy kate - once all three on the lazy kate are full another click will clear all 4, but I intend to hook that for plying in a later version) The problem I'm having is that every method I have tried so far to tie those comms to the specific spinner sat on that wheel seems to break it altogether and I really want it to be possible for multiple spinners to be in chat range each with their own wheel without comms crosstalk.

well, here's a project got kinda stalled in the scripting - not for the working of the multi-mesh object itself but I hit a roadblock in sorting out the particle system to create the strand of fiber between the wheel and the spinners hand - havent had time to work out a fix yet)

you are being attacked by a wandering black hole and are about to suffer death by spaghettification

The mesh is rigged and fitted to an avatar with a different head size. You're hosed. A rigged mesh fits itself where it's "supposed" to be wherever it is attached to. You can attach it anywhere you want and it will appear in the same place and it isnt resizable, it sizes itself on attach to the dimensions relative to your avatar bones that the creator specified. It only attaches to the right hand on wear because thats the default and the creator didnt bother to change it.

That's an awesome tutorial - explains why in lighting a stage you use so many "steel" and "straw" gels, thats for sure! (as an aside - it's a lot easier to think in terms of stage lighting when lighting your rendered models, you wnt a hard edge you use a hot fresnel or a profile (blender spots), softer edges parcans or floods.. (hemis, suns and areas) and never EVER use a "naked lamp" without color correcting it to the effect you want)

I cant say I've tried it but I would have thought a simple cylinder isnt not the right way to begin a shrinkwrap-based boot... My gut tells me to create a cylinder open at both ends stretching from the top of the boot down to the ankle, angle the lower end by 45 deg and set the offset pretty high so it stands clear of the av mesh by a useful amount.. mess with the position of the lower end until it makes a 45 deg angle across the avs ankle under the modifier, then disable the modifier and extrude that end down the axis of the foot until you hit the toes and close the end, then re-enable the modifier. I'd use that as your starting shape for introducing the edge-loop cuts to improve its contouring and then apply that modifier once you're happy with it and are ready to start adding extra geometry for details like bucket tops, heels, buckles and straps etc.. Like I said, I haven't tried it but thats where I'd start if I was going to...

install it into a distinct dir rather than its default and install the same plugin zips as you already downloaded for the other.

Learning mesh isn't easy - My SL partner runs a very successful clothing store by applying her own creativity, eye for color and style etc to mixing and matching templates from different creators into her own distinctive styles. She's in no position to tackle the everest-like learning curve of mesh creation but has produced excellent results using mesh kits. I, on the other hand, was already experienced in making static models but I know I suck at texturing.... The solution: I tackle the still-steep but by no means as daunting as starting from scratch task of learning to rig and weight models well and I make kits for her to texture. They'll be unique to her business once I get good enough at this that we agree they are now good enough to sell, but until then she's doing pretty well with some of the kits out there. Give it time, as more designers either learn mesh themselves or team up with others who already have learned it the variety will increase.

Drake1 Nightfire wrote: And for those of us that cant or dont make mesh? Invisiprims work just fine for me. They might seem to, but to anyone using a powerful enough machine and/or graphics card to turn on shadows, you'll look a mess.

Ceera Murakami wrote: If you want to wear mesh clothes, you have to turn off 'avatar physics', the stuff that gives you jiggly boobs and butt. Mesh doesn't know you're jiggling around. The 'standard sizing' is a flawed method anyway - well-intentioned, but only a stopgap for mitigating the half-implemented way that LL released mesh. It helps, to some degree, but many people find that none of the 'standard' sizes come close to fitting their idea of how their avatar should be shaped. Qarls deformer takes account of avatar physics

Coby, Masami and Toysoldier are all correct. The blender UI is somewhat opaque to new users (a little less so for somebody coming into it with the new UI when they havent tried to learn the older one, but thats beside the point) but it IS as powerful as folks say, and it's open source which makes a big diff to folks that cant justify the cost of a maya or 3ds license and wont go all piratebay to rip 'em. While it's orders of magnitude more visible because of the greater complexity of the program, the difference is somewhat akin to the differences in UI between photoshop and gimp. You can learn whatever UI you can afford at the speed you can cope with and it's all good.

No quibbles on my part that the skills for being a successful merchant are WAY different than to call yourself a skilled builder... Take myself for example - I made *everything* for my builds.. I did the prims/sculpts/(mesh wasnt around yet), I carefully lined up textures that I had appropriate perms for or I tried to create them from scratch, I did the anims frame by frame, I did the scripts... and I tried to market them. My products sold well enough for me to break even on a few inworld locations and on marketplace until the economy tanked and the income would no longer support my rent/tier and my upload habit. I learned that theres 2 necessary things for getting any RL income out of SL that I dont have - I SUCK at texturing and marketing. My products sold on being creative with how the scripts made the object visually interactive as opposed to simply saying "object does something to you...", not on their visual beauty or by their containing custom anims of Medhue's quality. When (not if) I re-enter the SL market it will be with added mesh skills, but still as somebody who sucks at marketing so I dont ever expect to do more than break even, and thats ok by me.

Medhue Simoni wrote: Toy, I came to the Marketplace Forum and talked about mesh to hopefully help people like yourself, Pam, and Mad, because you are fellow merchants and I knew you all were in the sculpty business. I preferr mesh because it is the logical choice, and for no other reason. If you choose to call people names and reject the help that we freely offer, what more can I do? The simple plain facts are that sculpties cause lag, and well made meshes do not. Why would I advise people to use sculpts? I'd be giving people bad advise. Of course, you can choose to do whatever you like, but I'd like to point out that every single day, your sculpty market gets smaller and smaller. As a business man, I'd rather be making things in a market that is growing, not a market that is shrinking. Hey, as long as we are making predictions, considering LL just told us 22% of all sim have a mesh rezzed on it, I'd bet that this will grow at more than a 10% rate per month. This would mean that mesh with have close to 100% sim adoption by the summer. All this, despite people like yourself screaming your propaganda, and you don't even understand mesh yet. In all fairness to both of you, Toy is not in a market that is shrinking. The particular area of sculptmaking Toy serves, and serves VERY well, will not be eclipsed by mesh any time soon or even ever. Large size scenery (that you dont need to walk on) is a speciality product and for as long as sculpts are still one prim will never be overtaken by mesh. If you need to walk on what you build, or it is on a smaller scale then mesh has increasing advantages and that changes the market dynamics. This is no different to how things were when sculpts were introduced - there were still things that could be better served by an experienced prim-torturer and there still are. Meshes with custom physics models will take away a few areas from both of those but I really dont see that either will be totally eclipsed by the introduction of mesh. Mesh penetrance in both the "inworld content" area and "viewer capabilities" area will continue to rise. As it does so the market will shift, and the specific areas best served by all the building methods will slowly shake out until the most efficient tool for a particular build is not only known but the market leader. Personally I predict that in a year or so, to justifiably call yourself a skilled builder for SL you'll have to know how to build with all three methods, primtwisting, sculpts and meshes, and will have to know which roles are best served by each and have that factored into your design decisions.

My kid uses a very similar-spec MSI to the one referenced above, and I've a high-end Vaio - mine has a 400-series GPU and his a 500-series... Both can handle Battlefield 3 just fine in ALMOST full-pretty mode. SL v3 with everything turned on doesnt make mine even break a sweat.

So long as you and Domino are still hacking on primstar and avastar, Gaia, I suspect the utility of blender for SL will remain undiminished The line I usually used when advising a blender newbie is that "You can do it without this addon, but you'll have a much lower level of frustration and keep more of your hair if you just go get this. A couple of better python coders than I'll ever be* have automated the gnarly bits of the workflow for you..." * I'll give you a run for your money in perl but my python code is for crap

Pamela Galli wrote: I got this error: BTW, all the models had the same one material assigned. I've seen that infuriating X appear in the loader a few times when I know everything has only the one material assigned too... The green "ship it" appears when I load the highest LOD and then changes to that error as soon as I select files for any of the lower ones. After selecting all the LOD files, try hitting the "reset form" button - I found that flipped all the X's back to nice green checkmarks and I was once again invited to ship it

Agreed, Medhue. I suspect many of us are going to end up building primarily to a particular "scale" which will fit into a few general groups... "small scale" - where one is building jewelry, small avatar attachments and decor items, "Avatar scale" - clothing, avatars, furniture and other midsize items, "large scale" - larger vehicles, architectural components and entire buildings. We'll end up with general rules of thumb for optimization in our heads that will vary according to the scale of the items we usually build and will treat the LOD slots in our modelling accordingly.

link on wiki page labelled for 12-05 points back to the 11-28 meeting instead of to https://http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Archive/2011-12-05

Pamela Galli wrote: :-) Yes, when the dust settles maybe something written by a non tech person who nevertheless understands the technical stuff and can break it down for the rest of us? I know that is a tall order. Not everyone can do that sort of thing. Heck, I'm a techie and hardcore math geek myself and some of the details involved would make my head spin without the stuff Drongle and a few others have posted on here. I'd say the ideal "team" for writing that doco would be Drongle who's done the in-depth practical research, Charlar who knows the code so well he probably reviews patches in his dreams (hint, Charlar, thats a sign of overwork!) and Gaia who's been documenting it for "general users" since the early days of beta... Of course whether any of that crew would have the time to do it is another matter