Gavin Hird

Gadget Portal wrote: Teagan Tobias wrote: Just a question, what would it take to create a Second Life Better Business Bureau. Someplace where you can look up a seller or store and see if someone has reported them? And could that even be done? Helps for finding problem businesses in RL, why not SL. There's not a single resident I'd trust to be impartial enough to be in charge of that. And we know LL wouldn't do it. Besides you would have massive problems to over time maintain reliable and accurate information unless you operated with RL identities, and we know how the community have reacted to that. Perhaps you would get better results if it was possible for merchants to do their own brand building in a sensible way in the marketplace, and in addition be able to operate with different product lines without having to create alt accounts. ...another aspect of this is that copyright legislation and the legislation for fair use is quite a bit different depending on the country the person behind the account is resident in. It could also be that the copyright holder is located in another country so the US takedown legislation could never be applied or it would be way too costly to file the paperwork outside their resident country for LL to be able to remove the content in violation. This could also be a reason why we see ripped content that is never removed despite "everyone" can see the SL merchant can possibly not be the copyright holder.

First of all, let me say that ripping of mesh did not start with the ability to upload mesh in SecondLife. It started with availability of applications that with relative ease made it possible to convert existing (free...) mesh items into sculpts. If you look at some of the large selections of commodity sculpts that just popped up overnight, you can't help wonder where they originated. Leading to one of your clues. I personally found the process of creating and texturing sculpts convoluted. I even went to the lengths of purchasing Zbrush and Hexagon (DAZ) because of their ability to create sculpted items. However, I found the process unrewarding at all levels so I never created any scultps that made it to a commercial product. – So I never sold sculpts or prims. When the announcement of creating mesh was made by LL I started shifting my attention to learning how to create meshes, but any mesh creation process that applications are designed for, and that you learn in training classes will produce medium to high poly meshes, which are virtually useless in SecondLife both for technical and commercial reasons, unless it is a wearable where the LI does not matter so much (at least nobody asks when they buy it.) – Which may be another reason my people don't have in-world stores; high poly wearables takes quite a bit of land if you are going to display them in-world. The same goes for large size meshes (such as trees) even if they are low poly. Back to the above – even if learning how to make mesh, I had to relearn how to make mesh for use in SecondLife. This took a lot of time in experimenting both in SecondLife and also on a standalone opensim, where I still do almost all development and testing, Then comes the process of mastering UV mapping which still is convoluted and hard for anything but the simplest meshes. Perhaps this is where the biggest clue if a mesh i ripped or not comes from; how is it UV mapped? If a complex item is mapped for one very highly optimized texture, chances are it has been ripped from somewhere else. Why? – Because this process requires very high skills particularly when the UV map is applied to a low poly item (8-20k polys for a gaming character for instance - much less for other items.) Those who master them can most likely reap substantially higher rewards both in terms of $ and recognition elsewhere. Just my L$ 0.02

I have experienced exactly the same, where a person demanded compensation to remove a bad review. I flagged it both in the marketplace and made an abuse report where I included threats that the person made in convo on my profile page. A few days later the bad review was removed.

Madelaine McMasters wrote: SL still has the tinkertoys, but they're not competitive with things built outside SL. ...which I think is at the core of the retention issue. With the introduction of sculpts and later mesh you have to a large degree moved SL from a creative environment to a consumer environment, and the consumer experience is not particularly compelling compared to other virtual goods be it games, entertainment, and to an accelerating degree apps and experiences on mobile devices. Investment in SL content gives less instant gratification than investment in mobile content – which also is much easier to purchase or obtain for free. Compound that with the tiny return on investment most SL mesh creators experience – both in monetary and land impact terms, the incentives to create outside the wearable categories are few.

What beats me most about mesh based creation is how the (land) cost of mesh is very unfavorable compared to sculpts and for larger builds also prims. It often throws the creative process from being creative on to a track of optimization and re-topo to reach a target LI – it therefore fast becomes very technical and not very fluid or even fun. (In addition the mesh importer often throws the LI in not very intuitive or logical directions, where the final outcome depends on how and if you ungroup meshes.) I have for my own part a 12 sim OS running standalone where I don't have to worry about LI and where you can experiment, be creative and see how far you can push the viewer and the sim performance with complex and many meshes in a small area. I consistently find that the mesh builds are super efficient performance wise compared to sculpts regardless of how complex they are. The setback comes of course when you try to move creations into SecondLife, where you have to optimize the heck out of them to get to down to a LI that is acceptable (own land cost or in competition with sculpted items.) Most of the time I don't find the effort worthwhile. – So I have 2 years worht of creations more or less sitting there outside of SecondLife. The flip side is I had fun in the process and learned a lot :-)

The unfortunate thing about mesh creation more or less happening in its entirety outside of SL is that it removes the bulk of the creative process out of SecondLife where newcomers earlier could watch the progress of, learn from and be inspired by the building process, they now more or less see a finished, polished product they have no idea of how was created. It is then easy to think this is not for me or I will never master it. It can be compared to most younger people don't have the skills to make RL clothes any more because it moved off to China, and they have become passive consumers of garments they only have a vague idea of how was created. It also skews the economy because builder tended to need more land for their creative process, off the shelf textures are largely replaced with custom uv-mapped textures and so on.

Jo Yardley wrote: Madelaine McMasters wrote: Mesh is the least accessible form of content creation yet devised by LL. So much for enabling creativity. Is it? I found it pretty easy to learn how to make mesh and it has opened up a whole new way of building and being creative for me. Mesh is for most a massive learning curve both because you not only need to un-learn traditional SecondLife creation skills, but also because of the often prohibitive cost of mesh compared to sculpts, you need to learn to master low poly mesh creation and optimization. Add to that the often very tricky part of uv-mapping and texturing a low poly mesh to make it look good in comparison to other building methods.

As of Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) Collada is supported right out of the box, where the system included Preview app will render wellformed collada. – SecondLife rigged meshes is more than Preview can chew, though...

Go to this link http://www.cheetah3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=63264&postcount=36 and download the SL skeleton Cheetah friendly.jas.zip file that you find there. Use this skeleton rather than the one from the simplebot file.

here is the correct bone hierarchy

You seem to basically have done the right thing with the simplebot skeleton and your mesh, but where you might go wrong is the order of the bones when you do the find/replace in the dae. They should be in the order I gave you above in this thread. Don't worry about the attachment point. Any point will do including right hand.

The reason it comes out all twisted it possibly because you have not rotated the skeleton and figure 90 deg and then burned the transformation (Coord system menu item from the Tools menu.)

There is only one. Could you post the JAS file you try to export there so I can have a look at it and the resulting DAE?

It is still possible to upload rigged meshes from Cheetah3D 6.0.1 if you replace a section of the generated DAE file. I use the text factory in BBEdit and do a grep search for count="26">[iD0-9 ]+</Name_array> and replace it with count="26">mPelvis mHipRight mKneeRight mAnkleRight mFootRight mToeRight mHipLeft mKneeLeft mAnkleLeft mFootLeft mToeLeft mTorso mChest mCollarLeft mShoulderLeft mElbowLeft mWristLeft mCollarRight mShoulderRight mElbowRight mWristRight mNeck mHead mEyeRight mSkull mEyeLeft</Name_array> You can do the same in any editor that supports grep (most Mac editors do these days.)

You wil have to create a physical model in Cheetah also, and export that as DAE separately, and then import the physical model as part of importing of the real model (Physics from file in the physics drop down.) Cheetah does not support the concept of exporting just selected parts of your model (the physics model), so a workaround is to save your file with both the physics and real model in jas format (Cheetah native), then delete the real model in the Object browser, and then export to DAE. Then without saving, undo to restore the full content, delete the physics model from the object browser, again export as DAE, and finally undo to get the content restored. If you somehow good up on this, revert to the saved file. You can of course save the physics model in a file separate from the model to be on the safer side.

I don't suggest that they would shut down the marketplace as we know it anytime soon. I am only suggesting that their development efforts are channeled into supporting a different market (and clients) still in development. The culprit for the current state of affairs is that they don't see the merchants and content creators as partners. They are hardly seen as stakeholders at all, hence they don't need to be consulted nor informed.

> in fact since @Rodvik does not even seem to be aware how critical MP is to the growth of SL Here is a novel thought: What if the MP is not critical to the growth of SL at all? For one, it drives in-world participation down and erodes tier payment from merchants and creators. If they develop client for mobile devices (which they have said they do), there might be other mechanisms like in-app purchases (not the same as in-world purchases) that is driving their direction, and the current MP is just a transitional tool in which they don't want to invest too much in.

DAZ Studio has some game licenes for some of their content, and while it may be something you could explore, my understanding is that you will get a rather low resolution character at the end of the license. It is expensive too and there are some requirements to size of company for you to be able to purchase one if you otherwise qualify. See http://www.daz3d.com/i/shop/itemdetails/?item=12479 as one example of such a license.

Rigging is possible and works provided you run the resulting dae through a filter to replace a small section of the file that the viewer does noe understand (version 1.4 vs 1.41 COLLADA problem.) The new scripting API should make it possible to write custom output files, so it may be possible to create SL friendly rigged files directly.

If you are on a Mac, Cheetah 3D is an excellent choice for non rigged modelling. The UV mapper in Cheetah works pretty well and DAE export is solid.

The item name and the listing name does not have to be identical, but if you have unicode or even more than 7 bit good old ASCII characters in your listing name, the system will fail to deliver. Any character you can use in items names in the viewer Inventory should be safe to use in your listing name. This is a major design flaw in the DD system, and unless corrected, makes it impossible to supply product listings in non English languages.

You gotta love the Lab. ... after I identified the Unicode bug, all I got on my support ticket was: Hello Gavin Hird, The Dev Team has access to all of the orders in the Being Delivered state and it is not necessary to provide those each time they occur. Regards,

It sure does. I do a lot of testing and development on mesh on a local opensim. Uploading physics works slightly different in that you only supply the physics file and don't touch any of the other buttons. Rigging works as expected. Of course since opensim does not have land impact, you need to test that on Aditi or Agni to see the impact on your creations.

I have not had any problems whatsoever uploading Mesh with the Linden viewers on Lion. It works perfectly fine on both SecondLife and opensim (where I do a lot of testing). With the Phoenix viewer the story is completely different for more complex meshes...

It looks like the first batch of products I converted from boxed items to folders at some point in time has reverted back to boxed items. I think it must have happened over the last 24 or less hours. This might be isolated to me, but it could be worthwhile checking your products. The Items in question suddenly sorted first in the Manage Listings screen, so if you have the same issue you could expect to see the same. On the plus side, it looks like they ran the stalled transactions to completion. :matte-motes-big-grin: