Gavin Hird

Innula Zenovka wrote: Gavin Hird wrote: Ciaran Laval wrote: Toysoldier is correct here, it's a license to use content that you purchase or a license to use content that you sell or give away, the terms of service 7.3 states this. That has never been the question. The issue is the difinition of you, and you are the account holder - a RL person. An avatar is just a proxy of the RL person. So it would seem you're buying the licence for use in connection with a particular account that you hold. That is what they try to make it out at, but the account (avatar) is just a proxy of the account holder. It is the account holder that is the subject of the law, which therefore also has the rights to use the licence.

Ciaran Laval wrote: Toysoldier is correct here, it's a license to use content that you purchase or a license to use content that you sell or give away, the terms of service 7.3 states this. That has never been the question. The issue is the difinition of you, and you are the account holder - a RL person. An avatar is just a proxy of the RL person.

First of all Apple's usage agreements are based on the law, and not personal opinions that have no bearing in the law and cannot be enforced. Therefore Apple's usage agreements are specific to the country of residence of the customer. It means that all content are not available everywhere. Secondly they are based on RL persons, and RL persons only. The usage agreement allows each individual to register up to 5 devices per account (Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, iPod in any mix), where content and applications purchased on the account can be downloaded and shared as needed. Further you are allowed to share and sync content for up to 5 accounts on a device. When it comes to iTunes Plus products (which essentially are all music in the iTunes store), these are DRM free, and can be copied for reasonable usage (non profit.) Sharing an AAC file of music you bought on ITMS with your daughter would be reasonable usage (sharing in family). For the full terms in your country, you'd need to check their terms, but as you see, they are fairly liberal because it makes it easier to do business and it increase sales.

Fear not, I have no intention of using the one item bought from you as anything but inverntory filler. As for Apple, in good Apple tradition, you can share all content purchased on iTunes and in the Mac App store with all your devices and Macs without restrictions. Something to think of? ;-)

You in the TOS text refers to YOU the REAL LIFE PERSON reading this. So when YOU purchase something by proxy of your avatar, YOU have the right to use it. Any other construct will not hold water in any jurisdictial system.

A couple things to this discussion: The buyer does neither know the identity of the seller, so this is a two way thing. People often seem to infer that all merchants are in the US, but they could be anywhere in the world as could the buyers. So the only time US legislation might be involved in the transaction is for LL to be the payment and trading system provider. It is in essence a consumer to consumer (C2C) transaction and it could be governed by a random set of legislation I doubt any court would even touch this as a B2C or a B2B transaction unless the seller (B) had made full disclosure of their identity at the time of purchase. This is very seldom the case for goods and services traded in SecondLife. You are in essence making a blind purchase. Even if a coudt would see it as a B2C or a B2B transaction, the case would have to be filed in the country of the offender. ... and what would the offence be? A RL identity sharing something he purchased with himself? If you want more control over who purchase from you, create a restricted group in-world and set up a vendor system that will only sell to group members.

Toysoldier Thor wrote: She forgets that a usage agreement set by creator and selling IP rights owner can state ANYTHING it wants and if she purchases the creator's product - she has agreed to and is obliged contratually to this agreement (dont matter if the human or his/her agent is telling her). Yes, the usage agreement can state ANYTHING, but that does not make it a legal binding contract or lisence. In my country and in Europe, such contracts cannot bypass the law and the law's intention. If the contract/lisence bypass the law, it is the law that takes precendence. Many US software companies has found that under EU legislation their EULA's are null and void simply because they either don't satisfy the requirements of the law, or they are totally unreasonable and would not stand a chance facing EU's privacy, consumer or IP legislation.

The law governing this only knows about real persons, and any court would dismiss a lisencing, copyright or IP case based on virtual identities. Any purchase in SecondLife is between RL identities which operate via proxies. So the person holding the identity of proxy or proxies has whatever rights that has been granted through a lisence. Although the seller may not know the real identity of the proxy holder, in most cases there will be a credit card registration that would identify the proxy holder should a legal discovery process take place.

Ah, ok – got you :smileyhappy: Actually the base Genesis at sub-d 0 (which is the one you must use when creating morphs in say Zbrush) is only 17k polys. According to a DAZ forum posting this morning a 7k game ready Genesis will be available mid April.

As for exporting avatars, you could always go for the commercial game developer lisence at $2500 a pop. http://www.daz3d.com/i/shop/itemdetails/?item=12479 Not sure if they would allow it into SecondLife though. If they would, it would amost be a no-brainer to lisence Genesis for SL.

Chosen Few wrote: From thumbing through the Zbrush help docs just now, it seems the focus is primarily on automatic unwrapping. I don't see any references to manual editing. It's possible that it's just not an option. As far as I have been able to find out UV Master in Zbrush is quite good at unwrapping a sculpted model and placing the seams where they best fit, but I can't see that you can manipulate the UV map as I can for instance in Cheetah 3D both in terms of stacking, resizing and placement on the UV canvas. I also have not found I can use it actively to make quick selections of vertices when modeling in Zbrush. I believe you are right that Zbrush assumes UV manipulation must be done in an external modeller or a dedicated UV mapper application.

The way to view it is to consider the UV map area (which may be a tile of 1024x1024 pixels) as a viewport onto up to 8 different maps – one per material for a single mesh. Here is a picture of the combined maps in the 1024x1024 viewport for a model that has 7 different maps with corresponding materials. With the corresponding map for the part of the mesh that will receive the eyes texture (material). This map becomes visible and selected for modification when selecting the material that has been assigned to it. Depending on your software, you will be able to actively work with different UV maps for different parts of your single mesh model. Exactly how this is done in zbrush I have never bothered to find out as it works brilliantly in Cheetah once you have wrapped your head around the concept.

Since my home sim is a BlueSteel sim that was rolled back, it might be that the folder was created there before the rollback and I just had not seen it before today. It is also on Aditi. The BlueSteel sims had the full DD code for a few days as I understand it. It is also visible on an old Imprudence 1.32 viewer. I thought perhaps it only was visible with the latest beta 3.3.0.250306.

There is a new Basic Root folder in Inventory. What is the purpose of this folder and is it related to Direct Delivery?

I guess it is almost possible to implement such a mesh if: 1. The texture area mapped out for the lower body was split into socks, pants and underpants for a total of 3 regions For the naked lower body you would apply the skin to the socks, pants and underpants regions. For pants you would apply the full pants texture to both the pants and underpants regions and skin to the socks region For socks only you would apply the socks texture to the socks region and skin to the pants and underpants regions 2. The texture area mapped out for the upper body would be split into the undershirt, shirt, arms and gloves for a total of 4 regions You would composite the upper body in the same manner as the lower body to end up with a more or less dresses body3. The head would be the last part of the mesh for a total of 8 regions for a single mesh. This could be implemented as mesh is today simply by mapping up the mesh uvs to fit existing textures. Where you would run into problems is of course that you don't have any way to composite alphas onto underlying skin or clothes layers, so in essence you would only be able to do full lenght sleves for a shirt and same for pants. But it would make it possible to use existing skin and clothes textures. The biggest issue is of course to uv map a new character mesh onto the existing textures. I don't see how this could be automated with a single click option on import since the imported character meshes could be very different in topos.

One way to use this could be to create an avatar that has the head, upper and lower body mapped to the corresponding textures of the thousands of skins for the current SL avatar. That would take 3 material zones / uv maps on a single mesh. If you could load the baked textures for the current avatar, you could in principle dress up a new avatar with the same (texture based) clothes as you already have in your inventory with skin intact.

The difference is this: A singe UV map for a mesh maps every vertex into a common map of say 2048x2048 pixels. Multiple UV maps for a mesh maps regions of vertexes of the mesh into the same 2048x2048 pixels multiple times, thereby creating sub-maps, if you may, for the same mesh. This makes it possible to map each region of the mesh that has a separate materials assignment into separate UV maps. Used cleverly it will greatly increase the detail of the textures that are assigned to a single mesh. Larger meshes will (possibly) benefit more from this. The tradeoff is that you may load up to 8 textures for a single mesh. As an example, say you wanted tp create a character mesh. You would separately UV map the face, the torso, the arms, the eyes, etc and create textures for each map. When combining the meshes to one for rigging, the combined mesh would have material assignments for each of the parts, with a corresponding UV map. Imported into SL, you would select each face (material) and apply the texture for the face to the face, the texture for the torso to the torso and so on. The original UV mapping would be preserved. If not, you'd have to create an overall UV map for the character with far lower resolution (1024) than the combined textures you would apply to the material zones of the imported character.

In my experience you can have as many UV maps per mesh as you have materials (8) I don't know how to do it on other software ( I use Cheetah 3D on the Mac), but you basically create separate parts of the mesh and UV map each individual part. Then you apply the material (texture) to the UV mapped part. Next, when Cheetah merge the parts to one bigger mesh (import children), it preserves the materials assignments and also the UV mapping for each part. Thus, when imported to SL or opensim, and you select the texture faces, you can apply the textures to each face and it will be UV mapped to the original UV mapping that was set up for each part in Cheetah. When you look at the UV map for the combined mesh in Cheetah, it looks like a complete mess with all the UV maps in one UV map space, but they are in fact individually accessible.

Baloo Uriza wrote: Irrelevant, given that the Lab's in the business of a specialized kind of hosting, not the viewer market. If LL was only in the specials hosting market they would concentrate on making their hosting platform both stellar and proliferate it. LL is in the business of marketing an integrated product comprising of both hosting and viewer. You could liken it to Apple's iOS business model where the iDevices are the hosting and iOS is the viewer. What lacks for LL to have a fully integerated product is own content. So what we see is in essence a struggle between LL and the content providers who wants to move the experience forward much faster than LL is ready to (or in a different direction.) The failure on LL's part is the total lack of a developer program that clearly communicates to, and with the content developers to build a shared strategy for how to take both parties business forward, and make the overall experience much more compelling.

From what I can see on the systems requirements page that machine fills the minimum requirements provided you upgrade Mac OS X to version 10.5. You will probably be frustrated by the systems performance and you would only be able to display basic graphics on that machine. It would most likely not be a good match.

Ah, good :-) Interestingly latest Dolphin viewer seems to be up to speed already. This is what Singularity 1.6 sees

Come to think about it, I guess the Received Items folder will only be created if the account is visited by a capable viewer. But that might mess up the ability to use a legacy viewer with the account later. – Loads of quetions here...

I have no idea how this will work for people who don't have the Latest&Greatets™, but I assume the server side has the ability to inquire the viewer about it's capabilities and invoke legacy methods for delivery (could be terribly wrong on that.) Your concerns are absolutely valid. It could also lead to temporary fragementation of the customer base as merchants who move their goods to DD will (presumably) only be able to deliver to Latest&Greatets™, while legacy customers may see non-delivery. ... or do we have to double list both DD and in the old servers to cover the market properly? Yes, you can only test this on 4 sims on Aditi (the beta grid.) - Named GC Test (n)

I think my point is that since the current SL viewer, both on the production and the test grid does not place a copy of a rezzed object in the originating folder, it might just as well place it in the Received Items folder for clarity. In my case, I'd usually have to move it anyway.

Did the following test: Uploaded a mesh item, moved to a target folder, rezzed it to the ground from the target folder, copied the mesh on the ground, too the original mesh back to inventory, took the copied mesh back to inventory. All tested with Second Life 3.2.9 (249510) Feb 16 2012 18:58:20 (Second Life Beta Viewer) RESULT: Standalone opensim: original taken back to original folder. copy taken back to original folder Aditi MeshHQ 1: original taken back to original folder, copy taken back to Objects Aditi GC Test 9: original taken back to original folder, copy taken back to received items So actually the viewer does not do what you sais it does for the copy on Aditi anyway.