Maggiedoll Alter

According to the FMX blog it looks like they were attempting some sort of upgrade that killed their connection to SL somehow and still hasn't been fixed. There's a post on May 11 saying that they're working on "a little upgrade feature" and that it should be working in 48 hours, and then another one on May 15 saying that it's still not working and they're still "working with Second Life" so I've no idea what's actually going on besides that. I'd been using them to convert smallish quantities of IMVU credits into L$ for as long as they've been operating (almost three years, I think?) and I don't recall ever seeing this big an interruption in service before. I do hope they sort it out soon.

*ahem* The download is there.

/me waits for the betting to start.

Yeah, I tried to warn that there was something special about "faces" with the scare quotes. Perhaps "face" is too much a scripting term of art. Those eight UV maps are separately addressable by script, using the same functions as we use for "faces" in standard prims (where each of those "faces" may consist of multiple polys). Maybe I should have said "side", but that seems even more apt to be confused with "poly"--and indeed you used "eight sided" as a counter-example. I guess I could have said "UVW maps" to be technically correct, but then neither scripters nor casual readers would have the first clue WTF I was talking about. Unless it was somebody learning to use a 3D program, all the while getting totally frustrated that there's all that nice easy mapping that you can't use if you want the object to be a sculpty... Which must apply to an awful lot of people around here..

One of the nice features of the coming mesh design is you can make your own custom template for clothing It's a double edged sword. The downside being that without a clear standard, the market is going to fragment badly. Every creator will define their own UV mapping, and clothes from one creator will not match any other creator. You will then be tied to using only clothes from that given creator with your mesh avatar. I've seen this all too well from my years at Renderosity, and various creators making their own mesh figures (Victoria, Aiko, LaRoo,Stephanie, Poser std models, etc. ) LL's mesh may not be the best, but at least it sets a hard standard for clothing interoperability between creators. I fear that standard will be lost in the coming months/years. (at least until creators learn how bad for business it ultimately is) I'm not sure-- like you said, it won't be good for business to design a mesh that can only use one creator's clothing. Who would pay any significant amount of money for an avatar that could only wear clothing made by one person? Anybody doing their own UV mapping will probably go as close to "standard" as possible, and there are already mesh templates available for download, which again creates a standard. Moreover, I'm doubting that creating entirely new meshes for human avatars will be particularly popular. Mesh feet, certainly, and probably heads, but entire replacement avatars? Even hands will be minimal, since extra bones for fingers can't be added. Mesh avatar replacements will be great for non-human avatars, making ferrets and cats and dragons, anything currently being replaced by prims, but besides all of the possibie compatibility problems, what would be the *point* of entirely new human avatars? And could any possible points outweigh the negatives? So far as human avatars, the use for meshes is clothing and accessories. Jackets that move with your avatar, boots that flex at the ankles and knees, miniskirts that don't clip as soon as you move. And it'll be great to define individual UV maps for those things, but you don't need to re-map the avatar to UV map a jacket or a shoe. Those things might even replace parts of the avatar mesh, but there would be no reason to replace the entire thing. I can only think of two reasons to buy an avatar that isn't compatabile with the majority of clothing: if it's not human or if it's really, really cheap. Non-human and super-cheap are already seperate markets from the "regular" SL econemy.

/me makes an extensive raid on the 'Net for ferret bones & skins... /me hides her ferret.

Thank you! This is very exciting, I can't wait to try it out! That's awesome to know, Jenn! The possibilities for tinies and quads with this are really amazing. Off to find that .blend format av..

How about tossing a bone to those of us who have no idea what "FIC" stands for? I've now gone through a list of 56 different meanings of the acronym "FIC," which seem to include everything from "First International Computer" to "Family Involvement Center," "Firey Ideal Cut," and "Florida Immigration Coalition." http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/FIC Blender kicked my butt the first several times I tried to learn it, but there are a wealth of tutorials and groups focused on creation in Blender. Certainly, it takes time and patience to learn. But it also takes time and patience to use in-world tools to create something worth buying.