Masami Kuramoto

Modeling realistic human bodies from scratch is extremely difficult, if not impossible, because the brain is so sensitive to even the smallest errors. The results will always look slightly stylized in one way or another. In order to leap across the uncanny valley, professional studios apply laser scanners and similar technology on living human beings. The output of the scanning process is a point cloud representing the body surface very accurately, and the studio's modelers then create the final mesh on top of that, all quads, with proper edge flow etc. By treating the Victoria mesh like another point cloud and modeling on top of that, you eliminate all the creative, original aspects of DAZ's work and replace them with your own. It only works here because the shape you reproduce, a female human body, is not copyrightable by itself. So this is a very special case. I would not recommend this technique to reproduce anything else, e.g. game assets, because that would certainly be infringing.

Some bugs have indeed been discovered since the 2.63 release. The developers are considering a 2.63a bugfix release following soon. If you don't want to wait for that, note that you can always get the latest bugfixes with the SVN trunk builds from http://builder.blender.org/download/. (Ubuntu users can receive these updates automatically as explained here.) If those SVN builds don't fix your problems, consider filing bug reports.

Let me put this into simple words so that you can understand it: What I said about derivative works is backed up by law. Your opinion is backed up by wishful thinking. You seem insulted by the word "egomaniac". Let me take a moment to explain why it is perfectly appropriate here: You feel entitled to take someone else's copyrighted work, in this case Linden Lab's avatar mesh, and make modifications to it. But if someone else wants to take your derivative work and modify it further, you call it "stealing". That is not a level playing field; it is the very definition of a double standard. Obviously you consider yourself a special snowflake. Hence the term "egomaniac". Selling shapes and denying your customers the privilege to personalize them is essentially a type of fraud. You are tricking noobs into buying demos at full price. Later, when the noob discovers that the product is locked and comes back to you to complain, you trick them into buying the same shape again, at an even higher price, by pointing at your non-existing copyright. Fraudsters, that's what you people are. For once, let's call the child by its name.

Tiffy Vella wrote: "Stealing is immoral, no doubt, but if the IP owner does not mind the infringement, can you still call it stealing?" This needs to be corrected to: "Stealing is immoral, no doubt, but if the IP owner is not yet aware of the infringement and has not yet taken action, can you still call it stealing?" No, that would be changing the subject. This one is about IP owners who do not take action after being notified. Who are fully aware and choose to go easy on it, for whatever reason. I disagree with your inference that original mesh creators are only sore because they create "junk" which can't compete with stolen items. Not nice, logical, or true. In fact entirely malicious. I don't believe that ripped content bothers you because you are genuinely worried about Electronic Arts' bottom line. Therefore, if you call for measures that go beyond what is required by law, I question your motivation. If EA don't care, neither should you. Let me put it this way: Apparently there is a market for those game character avatars, and someone is picking up the slack. Those who buy the ripped content deserve at least half of the blame, because they provide the incentive.

Clarissa Lowell wrote: THAT - just blows my mind. First of all - the SL avatar shape IS vertices. So how is that different from changing a vertice or two of something YOU made? It is not different. That is exactly my point. The SL avatar mesh, including its morph targets, is © Linden Lab. By moving its appearance sliders, you interpolate between those morph targets and create derivative works which are not copyrightable because they lack originality. You are not adding anything that wasn't there before. The mesh, including its shape, is still © Linden Lab. I want to make one thing clear because it gets disputed again and again: The number of appearance sliders is totally irrelevant. Each slider moves vertices between two predefined targets designed by the creator of the mesh. Operating those sliders doesn't make you an artist. Anyone with an art background should be able to understand this. The entire expressive range of possible shapes offered by the SL avatar was conceived by the artist who created the set of morph targets. Even if you load the mesh into a 3D editor and make adjustments there, the mesh will remain © Linden Lab. Only if you create your own avatar mesh from scratch, that mesh will be © Clarissa Lowell, including all its possible shapes. Try saying that to anyone with any art background at all. Da Vinci didn't make the human body either - is there no difference between the Mona Lisa and a stick figure? All people can create what they see? You sound ridiculous. Da Vinci created his painting from scratch. His medium of expression offered total artistic freedom. He could have painted Mona Lisa with horns on her forehead or a third arm growing out of her chest. His choices were not limited to a few sliders modifying someone else's work. Ironically, Da Vinci painted Mona Lisa roughly 200 years before copyright was invented. Today we are dealing with an army of zero-talent egomaniacs who drag some sliders in a computer game and suddenly feel on par with Da Vinci.

Keller Teichmann wrote: Firstly, on the basis of morals - just because someone doesn't care that someone stole something from them doesn't mean it isn't a bad thing. Secondly, because it hurts the competition - which as mentioned above, are usually honest working people who actually endeavour to create their own products. Thirdly, LL should care. The system they hyped up as being bulletproof isn't just failing to live up to that standard, it isn't even living at all. Things like what I saw this morning are what could get LL in hot water, and if that happens, all of us suffer, because some kid with a UE3 unpacker thought he could make a few quick bucks uploading models from Mass Effect (and Crysis, and Terminator, and so on). Stealing is immoral, no doubt, but if the IP owner does not mind the infringement, can you still call it stealing? Maybe you find it immoral because of the second point you mentioned: disruption of the market. In other words, high quality ripped content raises the bar for everyone and makes it harder to sell junk. That argument sounds familiar; I've heard a similar one being made against the distribution of freebies and against the introduction of mesh in general. There is just one thing to consider: If the IP owner decided to authorize the distribution of that high quality content, e.g. to promote the game it was taken from, the SL market would still be disrupted and amateur junk would still be a tough sell. It seems that the ripped content is a problem not so much because it was ripped but because it is high quality. Maybe this is why we see, again and again, people calling for Linden Lab to step in and take care of the matter "in the community's interest" -- effectively bypassing the law which requires no one but the IP owner to decide and take action. There is a word for that kind of thing; we call it "vigilantism". We frequently hear people claiming to have notified IP owners, but we rarely see any results. More often than not, the content is not taken down, and we never learn about the IP owner's response either, if there was any. Instead we hear complaints that the IP owner is "too slow" to react. Too slow for whom? Linden Lab's implementation of mesh is bullet-proof in that it allows to trace any mesh upload to its origin, an account owned by a person whose ID was verified through payment information. This is what Linden Lab promised and delivered. They never promised to police content preemptively. They couldn't do that even if they wanted to, because they are not in a position to know what content is infringing, what content is fair use etc. Only the courts can do that.

Keller Teichmann wrote: It also doesn't help having that sinking feeling knowing there's nothing one can really do about it, aside from notifying corporations and studios which often take weeks or months to do anything about it. Is there anything we as a community can do at all? No. If the owners of the IP don't take action, there is nothing we can do. They may even have good reasons to ignore it. We can notify them, but we can't force them to exercise their IP rights. It's none of our business. But I'm wondering: If the customers don't care, and Linden Lab doesn't care, and even the studios/corporations don't care -- why do you?

Kelli May wrote: Complaining that IP isn't 'intellectual' is just niggling over terminology. How about I call it "the right to not have your design ripped off"? If your skill is in creating shapes (or specifically, modifying the base shape into something more pleasing using the avatar sliders), you want to protect the ideas and forms that you've come up with, particularly if you want to make money from them. And people do sell shapes for surprising amounts. And speaking of surprising amounts, the number of possilble slider settings on the female av is 101^89 or 2.424 x 10^178. That's a big number - the estimated number of atoms in the visible universe is only 10^80. While most of these would be weirdly distorted freakish shapes, the phase space of possible, usuable shapes is unimaginably large, and the chances of matching one, number for number, is greater-than-astronomically unlikely. RGB values, by comparison, have a 'mere' 17 million (-ish) possible values. Where do we guys draw the line? I don't know, I'm not one of those guys. You'd have to ask a "the right to not have your design ripped off" lawyer. I'd argue that creating a "pleasing" shape in the appearance editor is not an act of designing. You didn't create the mesh, you just modify its boob and butt sizes within the confines granted by LL. That is about as creative as choosing a colour for a prim. The human shape is not your "idea", you didn't invent the proportions that make it look "pleasing". If your avatar's shape were your intellectual property, then copyright would grant you an exclusive right to use it. You would be entitled to DMCA or sue anyone choosing a similar shape for themselves, because they "rip you off" and "steal your idea". You would not only claim ownership of your particular set of slider settings but also of anything that comes close to it. And that reduces the number of possible non-infringing shapes in SL dramatically. So your argument about the virtually infinite number of slider combinations is flawed in multiple ways. The number of distinctive avatar shapes in SL has nothing to do with the resolution of the appearance editor sliders. Not to mention that such a copyright on a human shape would extend beyond SL. You would have a copyright on the shape itself, not on the set of numbers used to achieve it in SL, because it is impossible to copyright numbers. Which is why I was asking whether shape ownership has ever been successfully enforced. That would be news to me. If I upload an original texture and you take a copy of it and change a few pixels, it is still a copy of my texture. If I upload an original mesh and you take a copy of it and move a few of its vertices, it is still my mesh. So I'd argue that you can't claim exclusive ownership of any possible SL avatar shape any more than you can copyright a colour on a prim. You can't sue people because their avatar's butt has the same size as yours, sorry. And dragging a few sliders doesn't make you an artist deserving protection. Your avatar shape is fair game. The fact that someone may want to buy it doesn't make it copyrightable. People pay for all kinds of non-copyrightable services out of convenience. They go to restaurants and eat meals they could as well prepare at home. And they buy avatar shapes they could as well create by themselves.

Kelli May wrote: Shape designers, like anyone else, don't want to give away their IP to anyone who wants to come along and rip off their designs. So it's very common for shapes to be sold no-mod. Does anyone else find it mindblowing that something as mundane as a slider setting passes off as "intellectual property" these days? I'm curious. Has anyone ever been DMCA'ed for imitating someone else's shape? Can I claim copyright on something like "New Shape" after modifying just one slider? How many sliders would I have to touch until the shape becomes "mine" and illegal for everyone else to use? Where do you guys draw the line? Can I still set sliders to 50 if someone else has a shape with those sliders set to 49, or am I already infringing? Coming up next: copyright on RGB slider settings. Sorry for the rant, but it seems that the word "intellectual" no longer means what it used to mean.

Crim Mip wrote: The absolute highest real frame rate you can get in SL is 45 FPS. That's the most the servers will feed. Anything higher and all you're doing is rendering the same information multiple times, but you aren't getting any more video information at 170 than somebody else is at 50. This is not correct. It's true that viewers will never receive more than 45 updates per second about anything that happens on the simulator, but that doesn't mean 45 fps is the maximum you see on screen. For example, BVH animations on avatars happen only on the client, and although they usually contain no more than 30 fps of information, the client does interpolate between those frames, so what you see on screen may be much smoother than that. The client also predicts avatar and object motion between status updates, which is why server-side or network lag frequently causes an effect called "rubberbanding" (i.e. avatars walking off-sim, objects falling through floors etc.). And, last but not least, camera motion including alt-cam and mouselook is independent of sim FPS. You can literally turn around your field of view faster than your avatar. All these things will be updated at your client's frame rate, which is why you'll want that as high as your monitor can support, i.e. usually 60 fps in the case of an LCD/TFT panel, possibly more in the case of a CRT.

Wolf Brannan wrote: bin/do-not-directly-run-secondlife-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libGL.so.1: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64 This means that only the 64-bit version of the library "libGL.so.1" is currently installed. Second Life is still shipped as a 32-bit application, so it can only load 32-bit libraries. libGL is the main OpenGL library, so it is specific to the graphics driver you are using. If you go to http://packages.ubuntu.com/ and search for packages containing a file named "libGL.so.1", you'll see the list of candidates. Now all you need to do is find out which of these packages are currently installed as amd64 versions only -- and then install the corresponding package for the i386 architecture. I would do this in Synaptic Package Manager, but of course you can use the command line if you prefer. Why the missing packages were not installed by default I don't know. I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on two computers this weekend, and both were perfectly capable of running SL after adding ia32-libs-multiarch.

Bryce Randt wrote: "In Blender 2.59 there is a command "Solidify" which can be used to create thickness to the object." You are an angel. Going to see what it does to weights on rigged bits. It copies the weights so that both sides deform exactly the same way. It also copies the UV layout. It's ideal to make cloth visible from both sides, but remember to uncheck the "Fill Rim" option if the cloth is thin and does not need the additional faces around the edges.

No problem. In that case you just freeze Blender to the last working version until the addon has been fixed, then unfreeze. The whole point of software repositories is to make these operations easy and secure. You don't uninstall, clean up, download, authenticate, install and archive individual packages and their dependencies any more. You just select the version you want to use from a list and click Apply.

I frequently see people here using outdated versions of Blender. Since the COLLADA exporter issues in 2.6 have been resolved and Blender's mesh editing system has just greatly improved with BMesh, there is really no reason to stick with older versions any more. If you want to go even further and be at the bleeding edge of development all the time, you can configure your system to receive up-to-date Blender builds automatically every day. Here's how to do it (in Ubuntu): Launch the Update Manager app.Click the "Settings" button to open the software sources window.Switch to the "Other Software" tab.Click "Add" and enter the following repository ID: ppa:cheleb/blender-svnNow close the software sources window and check for updates. If you have installed Blender before, you should now be offered an update to an SVN revision that is less than 24 hours old. I've been using this upgrade channel for several months now and found it very convenient and reliable.

There is another method which is faster and less repetitive if you have a lot of vertices to merge: In edge select mode, select the two corresponding edge loops you want to merge (e.g. via Alt-Shift-Click). Menu: Mesh --> Edges --> Bridge Two Edge Loops. Select the new edge ring you just created between the two loops. Menu: Mesh --> Delete --> Edge Collapse.

There used to be a separation between the object-level mesh (saved with the .blend file) and the internal EditMesh (now BMesh) structure which was transient and not accessible to Python. The object-level mesh would not be updated until the user switched from edit mode back to object mode. This is why there are two separate undo histories in Blender. Performing undo in object mode rolls back an entire edit session, while undo in edit mode is much more granular. Blender's COLLADA exporter is no longer a Python script but may be subject to similar limitations. In order to be able to export an entire scene, it has to work at the object level. If I remember correctly, the Python-based exporter in 2.49 just enforced a switch out of edit mode in order to apply any pending edit operations. This may be the solution here, but I'm not sure if I want that old behavior back...

Naminestolenheart wrote: Can you use your favorite poser models and make them into mesh shapes in sl? People will hate me for saying this, but the answer is: Yes, if you rebuild the topology from scratch (which is what you have to do anyway to get a SL-friendly polygon count). The Victoria mesh is copyrighted, but there is no way to copyright the various human shapes it can be morphed into. Since Victoria resembles a generic realistic (i.e. non-stylized) female human body, no one can stop you from creating a mesh that resembles Victoria in some way or another, e.g. by modeling on top of the original model. In fact it will be impossible to prove that you did. Just don't copy any parts from the original mesh.

Are you using the same material names in each LOD file? Have you linked them to the material indices in the same order? Have you made sure that each material index is assigned to at least one polygon in each LOD mesh? Have you deleted the previous .slm file before re-uploading the same model again? Have you tried uploading with the latest V3 instead of your TPV? Have you exported the .dae files from Blender 2.63, the latest version?

Pamela, one quick question: Would you like that bug to get fixed, or are you just here to complain? If you want it fixed, you need to be more proactive. Grab the official LL viewer to compare and find out whether this problem is specific to the TPV you are using. Then file a bug report at the appropriate place and attach your .dae file so that the developers can look at it.

Zak Kozlov wrote: I been rushing for the 3rd day on this trying to get the pants straight , like default SL pants map is basicly The default SL pants map is basically crap. The simple truth is that it's impossible to unwrap a pair of legs into less than four major UV islands without heavy distortion. Which is why the default SL pants map has been such a pain to work with in the first place. You don't want to make the same mistake here. Unwrap the pants into four parts and don't worry about the seams because clever texturing will make them invisible. If you mimic the seams of real pants, the basic unwrap function will produce shapes quite similar to RL sewing patterns with minimal stretching. All you need to do next is rotate, scale and arrange the islands in the four quarters of the UV area. This way you can avoid wasting too much space on the pixel bleed area between the islands because the layout will be mipmap-friendly by default. However, the first thing I would do with your model is fix its topology. Your current mesh is unnecessarily high-poly and doesn't have an edge flow that is animation-friendly. Pockets and other small details should be textured rather than modeled in order to avoid lag and low frame rates. You can bake shadows and/or ambient occlusion from the high-poly mesh to the (unwrapped) low-poly one later, but if you are going to project photos onto the model (aka. "photo-sourcing"), all those little cavities and wrinkles will be included anyway so you don't need to actually model them. The basic principle of photo-sourcing is to make separate UV maps which are aligned to a set of photos of the RL object you are replicating as a mesh. That's what the "project from view" unwrap functions were made for. Using these projection maps as sources, you can bake multiple photographic angles into the aforementioned 4-piece target UV layout. The bake results will look patchy of course, but since they are all aligned now, you can load them into a layer stack in GIMP and blend the patches into one final texture easily.

Awfully Artful wrote: I always thought that Blender could only be used for simple sculpties/meshes, and even simpler texture baking. Short films made entirely (modeling, rigging, animation, rendering, editing) in Blender: As far as Second Life is concerned, there is hardly anything you can't do in this program.

Blender Retopology Tutorial/Workflow: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icqPZnD_3lA In my opinion one of the best video tutorials on retopology in Blender. This is the stuff you need to know if you want to quickly make multiple LODs from organic high-poly models while maintaining a proper edge flow (which is important for animation). Use this instead of the Decimate modifier.

Nacy Nightfire wrote: Clearly you are too busy with your real life responsibilities and your Second Life projects to read carefully. My op was never a suggestion that everyone MUST participate in a mentoring relationship. I don't remember misreading you like that. I am encouraging those who are too shy to contribute to the forums or unable to make public videos they can make a valuable contribution by teaching on a one to one basis. And yes, via IM, because that's what its there for. That's fine. I have no issue with it. Now tell me. This post has been up for a while. How many thousands of enthusiastic yet impolite mesh beginners have IMd you to rudely demand your mentoring service, thus interrupting your bliss. I've had none. I've had one polite request to help install Blender and the Primstar scripts on a Mac. It didn't bother me (although I couldn't help), but I know for a fact that these requests bother others. Some in-world groups even have a no-IM policy because of that.

Nacy Nightfire wrote: Sorry Masami, you can't argue your point in two different directions. On one hand you have said your knowledge is your intellectual property, a commodity and worthy of compensation. On the other you are saying it's wrong for an individual to control how he/she disseminates his/her knowledge and one should make one's knowledge publically available to everyone here on the forum for efficiency sake (and also for free - which you claim to deplore). Wha? I am arguing two points which are entirely unrelated to each other. The first is that publishing is a more efficient knowledge transfer method than private mentorship because what you publish will reach more people. This explains why Amanda Levitsky's sculpted prim tutorial, published many years ago, still appears near the top of Google's search results. On the other hand, what you taught Pamela is unlikely to reach a wider audience. The other point is that we should not expect teachers to share their knowledge without some kind of reward. I never said your model of mentorship is "wrong", and obviously you found it very rewarding. I just said it's wrong to encourage newbies to approach publishers via IMs and ask them for personal training. Those who want to reach as many people as possible (see above) will find the mentorship model less satisfying than you did. That doesn't mean they are less generous to share their knowledge. People rejecting private support requests may be happy to answer the same questions in a public forum instead.

Ashasekayi Ra wrote: Are you saying that you were banned from LL's forum at some point in the past because you ignored a private message for help? No, it was another forum. The person whose request I ignored started trolling every discussion I participated in, posted libelous statements about me, and finally convinced the forum admin to ban me. It took me quite a while to get my name cleared from all the libelous accusations. Nacy's suggestion to ask for support via IM and not to give up if the requests get rejected or ignored is sending out the wrong message. The result will be that this forum's most proficient helpers will be swamped with IMs by different people asking the same questions over and over again. It is important to understand that most people, by default, do not welcome unsolicited IMs and emails. Those who do should advertise their availability. Even if you enjoy person-to-person mentoring, there is a limit to the number of trainees you can handle at the same time. For some people that limit is zero, and we should respect that. What worked for Nacy doesn't work for everyone. Exactly how would a mentor pick a newbie that they don't know exists? How would I know if someone needed help if they didn't ask me for it? Newbies ask for help here and in support-related open chat groups such as "Blender Users" all the time. They are not hard to find at all.