DanielRavenNest Noe

That internet address has now been disabled by the registrar, so they can't scam anyone else with it.

Modeling polygonal/triangulated mesh shapes is not better or worse for clothing than for anything else. I use 3ds Max, and have made vehicles, furniture, houses, avatar bodies, and lots of clothes, and it's all about the same difficulty. The key is knowing how to manipulate the shapes to what you want, not what kind of object you are creating. In regards to animation, the SL avatar has a fixed set of bones. The triangles that make up the standard avatar body are "rigged" to follow one or more of the bones. The animation basically is a sequence of bone and joint positions, and the avatar shape just follows along with whatever bone it's attached to. Rigged mesh works exactly the same way. You tell your 3D program which of the avatar bones each part of the mesh needs to follow. For a skirt that would be mainly pelvis, and left and right hip bones. At joints you need your skirt geometry and the bone weights to smoothly blend, so it bends the way you want it to. That means assigning partial weight to two or more bones. As long as the program allows you to add and remove detail from the geometry, and assign the bone weights as needed, any program will let you reach the same final result. How they differ will be in the tools within the program, which make it easier or harder to do that task.

Please see the writeup in the SL wiki (which I wrote): http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Exporting_a_mesh_from_3ds_Max#Bones_and_rigging If any of that is unclear or does not work, post here or contact me and we can figure out what's not working.

Assuming you have permission from whoever created the .3ds model to use it in SL, you can contact me in-world about preparing to for SL. .3ds format is fine, that is the older format for 3ds Max, and the new versions can import that. Current versions use .max to save files, and Second Life requires Collada .dae format to save. Cost and time to prepare the model will depend a lot on the details, so I cannot give any idea until I can see what needs to be done. Most anyone else who will do such a job will say the same thing. Much of the value of SL homes and boats are in the scripting. Mobile objects are entirely different in their limitations than a boat which will sit at the dock and not move. I am not a scripter or vehicle creator, I make 3d models. So depending what you want, it might require finding other people to do those parts, or finding someone else who is multi-talented and can do the entire job.

The avatar body gets to cheat on download cost, because it comes as part of the viewer installation.

Re: question 3 - it's more efficient and lower prim (land impact) cost to use a "billboard" on the lowest detail. I do that with my plants, two planes in an X arrangement, with a rendered image of my high detail model. I stuck the excess texture on a hidden triangle buried underground on the high detail version, and swapped the texture IDs on the low detail one, so the billboard shows, and the detailed texture is hidden. My detailed model is ~600 triangles, and the billboard is 6, which results in a prim cost of around 0.5 (you can link two and it counts as one prim).

The general steps will be similar for any 3D program: - First create the geometry of the clothing item(s). That will be one or more sets of connected triangles or rectangles (meshes). It helps if you have a human avatar shape pre-loaded and locked in place to fit the clothing to, like a dress dummy in real life. Use as few triangles as possible to make it look decent at typical viewing distances. Extra detail too small to be seen just makes more lag. - Next, you want to make the UV mapping. That is what tells the SL software what part of the texture goes on what part of the model. If you have ever made skins or clothes for the standard SL avatar, you have used the result of the UV mapping. The clothing templates show what part of the texture is used for the arms, torso, etc. For mesh items you get to create your own custom templates, which effectively unwrap the 3d shape into a flat pattern like a clothing pattern in real life. That pattern then guides you making your textures. - Mesh can optionally bend when attached to the avatar, following the bones of the avatar when it animates. Some items don't need it (like a hat). This step is called "rigging", because it is similar to hanging sails onto the rigid masts of a sailing ship. For mesh, you "rig" your model to a copy of the bone set SL uses, within your 3D program. That tells the SL software which bone to follow for each point (vertex) of the model. - You can upload the model to the beta grid (Aditi) to test how it looks. The upload there uses "fake L$", so effectively it is free. With no textures applied, your model will be all white, but you can test how it animates at that stage, or upload and apply the UV templates or a reference checkerboard texture to see how the texture mapping fits and stretches. Once that looks decent you can then make the final clothing textures. - There is no rule that says a clothing item has to be 100% mesh, or all rigged. In particular, mesh can not be flexi. So for things like skirts, you can use flexi prims, and link them to the mesh parts. I think of mesh as being able to make custom prims of whatever shape I want, so they are parts to make a finished item, but not an entire item as a single mesh. - Like other objects in SL, mesh is one sided for texturing. At cuffs and skirt hems where you would see the "inside", you need to add more geometry facing the other way. At the moment, mesh does not adjust for all the appearance sliders, just the ones that affect bones (hopefully that will be improved sometime soon). Your choices right now are to use a custom avatar shape that the mesh will fit, make the clothing in multiple sizes to fit different avatars, and/or use an alpha layer to make parts that stick out transparent.

Every 3D program is different. Without you saying which one you use, it's hard to give any advice. Blender, 3ds Max, Maya, Sketchup? Which version matters too.

Chosen Few wrote: When you infringe on someone else's copyright, you're doing considerable harm to that person. One of the deeply held tenets of our society is that innovators have a right to profit from their innovations. That, in no small part, is what transformed our nation from horses & buggies to jet airplanes and computers, in less than 100 years. Without it, we WILL perish. If you read the US Constitution, it grants protection for a "limited time" to inventors and authors "to promote progress". The reason it's limited is twofold. Once the rights expire, the general public gets to use the creation for free and build on it. But also, having them expire means the creator cannot sit on their ass milking one idea forever, so they have an incentive to create more. In the long term society thus benefits by having more creations. Some people feel, I among them, that the recurring extension of copyright terms, which have reached life + 70 years, has made the "limited time" provision meaningless. You cannot encourage a creator to create more two generations after they are dead, and the public cannot benefit from the free use of older creations if the rights never expire. An orderly society demands we follow the law as it is, but it does not require we think it is right in the moral sense, or if a statute goes against a higher law.

leliel Mirihi wrote: I'm sorry to say it but that is wishful thinking that goes against decades of economic research. In the absence of any concrete incentive to optimize the vast majority of people won't even know what that is, let alone actually optimize their builds or buy optimized products. As your preceding paragraph points out we've already been down this road with texture overuse and look how well that's turned out. For clothing, right now we only have a *slight* incentive to be efficient - that the upload cost is higher for complex meshes. If you expect to sell 100 copies of the item, though, the incentive ends up being less than L$ 1 per sale, so it is very slight. If the Marketplace commision on sales were L$1 per prim/land impact, that would be a strong incentive. Now creators might save L$50 or more per sale for an efficient design, and I would bet they would study hard how to get there. As an aside, when I was making clothing for the Blue Mars world, we had a 5000 triangle limit per attachment and a 512 kB total limit including textures for the zipped file size, and it was perfectly possible to make very nice looking items within that limit.

Siddean Munro wrote: So yea, using an out-of-world solution to create an inworld product is a complete non-issue and I don't really know why people keep bringing it up. Perhaps they think the Linden programmers will do a better job on in-world mesh tools than (Blender contributors, Autodesk, Google, Smith Micro)? No, that's not likely, people who specialize in that type of software tend to have a better grasp of how it works and make less errors. Their development teams are also lots larger. Perhaps they think the Linden programmers can come up with the One True User Interface that everyone will love? Umm, No, see Viewer 2. Outside software gives you choice of UI. Perhaps they think it's better to work in an all-in-one tool? If it were, professionals would do that. Instead, they use multiple specialized tools for each task. Perhaps they think it is ease of learning? Sure, just point me to the Viewer manual. What, you say there isn't one? Perhaps they think it's immediate results? Um, I keep 3ds Max and SL viewer both open, and can upload to Aditi and see my changes in under a minute.

The Collada schema is maintained by the Khronos Group (a non-profit entity): http://www.khronos.org/collada/ There are different versions (1.4, 1.4.1, 1.5), but as long as the 3D content tool and the SL uploader use the same version, it should continue to work.

I just report once per spammer account. I think the moderators are smart enough to see that a one day old account with10 posts all about something spammy needs to be deleted. Personally, I think accounts under a certain age which post more than, say 5 times in a day, should be flagged automatically and removed pending moderator review. Newbies who post a question or two will not be affected, and the rare newbie that posts a lot of questions will just get a notice their posts are under review.

Once again we have spam posted. Please do not reply to the spam posts, since that floats them to the top of the forum. Just click the "Report Inappropriate Post" link on the left, and the moderators will delete it after a while. You would think they would add a spam filter. It must be annoying to have to delete these posts every day.

Weight painting determines which bone a given vertex of a mesh will follow. So for long human hair, you can weight the upper part to the skull, the middle to the neck, and bottom end to the chest. Then when the head turns or tilts, the bottom end will stay in place at the back, instead of rotating and intersecting the shoulder. However weight painting (also called bone rigging) has the purpose of animating something to follow bone movements. That is not the same as making a flexible prim. For the ends of skirts or hair, or tails, a flexible prim would likely work better. You can link mesh parts and flexi prim parts together, so there is nothing stopping you from using a mixture to get the result you want. For example, using mesh parts for the hair close to the skull, which does not move much, and link flexi parts for the loose ends.

Sae Luan wrote: I thought they had planned to start charging per listing.. What happened with that? I have no clue what happened to that idea. Personally, I would be fine with a per-store fee of L$ 30 per week, the same as for showing a land parcel in search. People can still give stuff away if they want to, but even a small fee would clean up redundant Marketplace listings and put it on a more even basis with in-world shops.

ralph Alderton wrote: @Madelaine, This problem, the SUPERABUNDANCE of dross, has existed for several years and now is reaching fantastic proportions. There are a number of reasons for this and one of them is the SUPERABUNDANCE of dross, 10L$ poor quality products at the marketplace. To quote Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word. It does not mean what you think it means." When I do a search for "Shoes" under "Apparel" in the Marketplace, 7% of the items are priced at $10 or less. When I exclude the ones tagged "demo" that drops to 6%. That is hardly "Fantastic Proportions". The only superabundance here is your hyperbole.

@ Aniya - If your PC meets the system requirements, there is no harm in trying it, the download is free. If you don't like it after giving it a try, then just un-install. @ Ralph - your complaint has nothing to do with mesh specifically. Any quality SL item takes time to make. What you want is to change the functionality of the web-based Marketplace. For that, a JIRA issue in the WEB category or attending the correct user group meeting with the Linden staff is the right place. Complaining to us here does nothing.

However you do your modeling workflow, the final output needs to be Collada .dae format. If you use Maya, then use the Autodesk Collada export, either 2011.3 FBX plugin or standalone FBX converter (it depends what version of Maya you have). The Second Life upload does not use normal maps (yet). Those carry information about angle of the object surface relative to light sources for lighting and shadow display, without adding extra geometry. Since we don't use them, you would have to bake any shading into the simple textures we do use. The most important thing for a real-time environment like Second Life is to make your geometry as simple as possible. Doing static photos or offline animations (like making movies) you can take minutes per image. In SL you have milliseconds per frame, and your object is one among many that has to be rendered. So think in terms of hundreds or thousands of polygons, not millions. Second Life also uses "Levels of Detail" at different distances. When your camera view is far away, you don't need to render as much detail. You can upload 4 separate .dae files with different detail levels. Baking detail from a high polygon version into a texture is a valid workflow, it is commonly used in making game art.

Was the change for a new upload, rez from inventory, or just standing on the parcel? Did you resize the objects at any point? Which grid, and what server version was running? (you can find server version from Help menu > About Second Life)

Perhaps naming them "3D Mesh" would distinguish them from the clothing items?

Nalates Urriah wrote: If you want to know what is going on with it, ask at the mesh meeting. Noon PST is often a time I cannot attend, but I have added it to the question list. You are correct that 650 votes is small relative to all residents, but the JIRA has always been an obscure site for most SL users. On a relative basis this is the 18th highest number of votes ever on the JIRA, and the 2nd most voted for this year, after bringing back last names. On that basis it ranks pretty high.

I'm disappointed to see that SH-2374 has beed downgraded from a near term fix (sprint 28) to "Someday/Maybe" without any explanation. Given that 650 people voted for this issue and 258 are watching it, at least some feedback from Linden Lab would have been polite. To change it in silence I will take to mean "The Lab doesn't think mesh adapting to our avatar shapes important enough to comment on".

"OpenCollada" is not the preferred way to export from Autodesk products. Install the Autodesk FBX 2011.3 plugin, then use "Autodesk Collada" in the export choices. Eoul Derryth wrote: Solution: updated opnCollada plugin for Maya 2010 to latest version

<--- predicts this will not end well. * Many people have asked for surveys in the past on these forums. We SL residents on here have developed an instinctual reaction to them, much like rats in a cage who have gotten too many electric shocks. We are not, however, lab rats. So I will start by asking *you* some questions. Your response is not mandatory, but may influence how many people are interested in contacting you. * Have you considered the fact that some people will answer randomly to your survey just to mess up the results? * Where is your literature survey of past investigations of Second Life? Are you repeating past work? * Have you accounted for these forums not being a random selection of SL residents? It is doubly self-selected, first for choosing to use the forums, then for choosing to participate in your survey.