DanielRavenNest Noe

See the SL Wiki page on "bones and rigging". If you don't want to use a modified version of the default avatar, you can delete that part, and just leave the bones.

Mayalily wrote: Can't someone design a shield of some sort to stop this invasion of privacy? It exists, it's called "rent a private island, and only allow your friends access". And it's not "invasion of privacy" in the legal sense, because we don't know your real name or where you live, or anything else about the real you unless you tell us. There is not an "expectation of privacy" in a public virtual world. In order for the system to function, it has to show you the other avatars and objects around you. The long time feature of private islands, and the new parcel privacy feature *do* create an expectation of privacy, and anyone breaking those features to peek in can be reported. Additionally, hidden "listening" devices that relay chat text are not allowed. The expectation of SL is local chat can be heard within 20 meters, and you would notice if an avatar was that close or their dot was on the minimap. Trying to circumvent that expectation will get you in trouble. As far as Linden Lab disclosing things before signing up, it's in the Knowledge Base, under Camera Controls So who do we blame for starting to use the product before reading the directions?

Hi Benjamin, What are you trying to make? It depends what your model is how you do the LOD's. For some objects, the auto-LOD within the upload window does a decent job of reducing the triangles, and it will map the UV coordinates reasonably well. For other things, like the small plants I have been making, I use a "billboard" for the lowest LOD. That is a couple of flat planes with a rendered alpha texture of the plant. Since you need the number of material IDs the same at all LOD levels, that means having some hidden triangles at both the high and lowest LOD to hold the alpha texture and main plant texture respectively. So in that case I have to do each level separately. So there is no simple answer to your question. Couple of things I can point out if you are fairly new to 3ds Max: * You can "bake" the UV coordinates to your geometry by collapsing the "Editable Poly" and "Unwrap UVW" modifiers together in the Command Panel > Modify tab. There are checkboxes both in the Editable Poly and Pro Optimizer modifiers to preserve UV's. Those will help keep them in place when you make changes for each LOD. * In the Edit UVWs window, you can use Tools menu > Render UVW Template from the high LOD model, and export the UV map as a texture. In the other levels you can set that texture as a background in the Edit UVWs window, to help align your maps at the other levels. You can also make your finished texture(s) for the highest level, and use them to align the UV mapping for the other levels.

You did nothing wrong. Mesh object surfaces are "one sided", meaning they only render from one side. For most objects it is wasted effort to render the "inside" of an object. For items like yours that need to be seen from both sides, you need to duplicate the geometry in your 3D program, and flip the triangles (or reverse the normals, which is the same thing) on one copy. That copy will now render from the inside, but not the outside. For a more realistic jack-o-lantern what you really want to do is enlarge the outer copy by 5-10%, flip the inner copy, and then join the edges at the openings with some more triangles. Depending on which 3D program you are using, there are functions like "extrude" or "shell" which can take a zero thickness shape and add thickness to it as a single step.

Jacki Silverfall wrote: Well, there were no uv maps and no textures on either item. I guess I'll never understand this aspect of 3D modeling. In order for the viewer to know where to put textures on your objects, you have to tell it what part of which texture each triangle gets. So each vertex (corner) of the triangle has an X, Y, and Z position to define the shape of the object, but it also needs a U and V position on a texture to say what part of the texture to use. U is horizontal on the texture, and V is vertical on the texture, with values from 0 (left or bottom) to 1 (right or top). Imagine a Christmas present that you want to wrap with a nice paper (a texture). Start with a blank wrapping paper and fold it around the box, and mark where the corners and edges of the box are. Now unwrap the paper and lay it flat. Your outline of the corners and edges is the UV map. Now color the wrapping paper with whatever you want to appear on the outside. Cut away any parts outside the outline, and fold it up again around the box. The wrapping paper will fit perfectly, carrying your colored design along. In 3D graphics, the unwrapping stage is actually called "unwrapping the UV map". The outline of the corners and edges is the map. Any part of a texture outside the outline is simply ignored by the graphics card. The edges of the outline are called "seams", like in clothing. A dress pattern is another kind of UV map. It tells you which part of the fabric goes on what part of the body. Since humans are complicated shapes, you need to cut the map into several sections so you can apply the map (pattern) to flat fabric, and then fold it up and sew it without too much distortion. The same goes for 3D models. When the shape is complicated, you need to use several sections in the UV map so it does not distort too much. Then you arrance those sections on your map so as not to waste too much space. How you do those steps exactly depends on which 3D program you are using, but hopefully this gives you the idea of what is going on.

First you create your clothing mesh. Then you add the bone skeleton. Finally you need to tell the 3D software which bone each vertex of your mesh needs to follow. In the middle of a limb, it's easy - it follows just that bone. At joints it's more complicated. You need to follow two or more neaby bones to get a smooth bend. That's what weighting is, telling the software how much to follow one bone vs another. The weights need to add up to 1.0 or 100% in total. Those weights get exported in the Collada .dae file, and uploaded into SL. You need to check the "skin weights" box on the 3rd tab of the upload window to have it use the data. Once in SL, your clothing will then follow the movements of the avatar bones as they animate, according to the weights you assigned.

The only survey that matters is how many people are actually logging in with a mesh-enabled viewer. The only people with the correct data for that is Linden Lab. Hey, Charlar or other Linden Staff, if you read this, can you get them to publish that data? It matters a lot to us to know how many people can see mesh stuff. By the way, Phoenix viewer is adding mesh too. It's only in their private code repository so far, but it's on the way. Combined with the 5 or 6 other viewers which have or are adding mesh, that will be most of what people are using. Having the feature available in the latest version is not the same as all users have updated to that version, but it's a necessary step in that direction.

A mesh avatar is a replacement for your standard avatar. Generally it would be three items to wear: The avatar itself, an alpha layer to hide the standard avatar, and a body shape of the usual SL kind for fitting animations better. If wearing clothing with mulitple parts is too much hassle for you, then yes, this will be too. If you can deal with putting on an outfit with multiple parts, you can handle a mesh avatar with three parts.

It's supposed to be a modular shelter that you can re-arrange. Pesonally I think it looks awful.

There is your problem (at least one of them). Get the Autodesk FBX 2011.3 plugin, and then use the Autodesk Collada exporter (which is part of that plugin). OpenCollada does not work correctly for Second Life.

First of all, did you make levels of detail versions and a physics shape for it? If not, the cost may be unnecessarily high. How many triangles in your stand model? (I assume it is something like a plant stand or side table). The mesh costing rewards you for efficient design, and penalizes you for inefficient design. Benefits of mesh that prims or sculpts cannot do: * Custom texture (UV) mapping for up to 8 textures, selectable smooth or hard edges. * Custom physics shape for collision * Rigging to animate when worn on the body * Fractional prim count for some objects, and lower count than some equivalent prim builds. Drawbacks: * Mesh is not flexi * Large or complex mesh can cost more than sculpts or prims for the same result * Making LOD versions and physics shape is more work * Mesh features are only at first release, some things were left till later by LL in this first version. Many people cannot see mesh objects yet, although viewer support is improving quickly. Note, it's Viewer 3.0 for mesh features.

Snarky reply: The reason the forum keeps past messages is so you can read and search them. So yes, go back and read every single post. Helpful reply: Mesh in Second Life is a new asset type with different features than prims or sculpts. It is created in an external 3D program and uploaded to your inventory for a small upload fee. Once uploaded, you can rez it on the ground, texture it, scale it, or wear it, similar to the other asset types.

Im seeing no effect from the pelvis offset. I used the maximum setting of 3.000. I assume that is meters, nowhere in the wiki does it explain what the units are. With a full body avatar with feet adjusted for shoe heels (toes angled down), the ankles are in exactly the same place as when the offset is 0, and toes sink into the ground or prims. This is with nothing else worn but the 4 basic avatar body parts that are required (skin, shape, eyes...). The model included skin weights, and animated properly otherwise, aligning with the underlying standard avatar. Perhaps I am missing a step, like checking the bone positions box below skin weights? Nope, that made it lose the rigging. Model was exported from 3ds Max with FBX 2011.3 plugin. ----------------------------- Second Life 3.0.4 (239704) Aug 30 2011 09:07:05 (Project Viewer - Mesh) Release Notes You are at 205,633.0, 178,645.0, 23.0 in Mesh Sandbox 23 located at sim9001.aditi.lindenlab.com (216.82.40.149:13000) DRTSIM-85 11.09.15.240906 Release Notes CPU: Intel® Core i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz (2672.78 MHz) Memory: 6135 MB OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601) Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 260/PCI/SSE2 Windows Graphics Driver Version: 8.17.0012.6099 OpenGL Version: 3.3.0 libcurl Version: libcurl/7.21.1 OpenSSL/0.9.8q zlib/1.2.5 c-ares/1.7.1 J2C Decoder Version: KDU v6.4.1 Audio Driver Version: FMOD version 3.750000 Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded) Voice Server Version: Vivox 3.2.0002.10426 Built with MSVC version 1600 Packets Lost: 1/8,415 (0.0%)

Jennifur Vultee wrote: Here's what I don't understand Nyx...since everything in SL is already mesh why can't all viewers already see mesh when its imported? Why is special code in viewers needed to see mesh? I mean prims are mesh, the avatar is mesh, sculpties are mesh, the very ground and sky are mesh. I can do CTRL + Shift + R and see the mesh that makes up SL...so why are user imported meshes so different that they need special code? Because the file format the data is stored in is different for each kind of "mesh". Yes, the sky and ground are both geometric meshes, but the first is a fixed sphere, it never changes, so there is no need to ever read it's shape. Terrain has two dimensions always the same (X and Y grids). The points are always in the same horizontal position, and you only need to store the height data. Prims are "parametric primitives", meaning the set of triangles they are made of always stays in the same order of what triangles are connected to what other triangles. The edit window settings change the size and shape, but not the "triangle list". The avatar also is a fixed triangle list whose size and shape can be changed, but not how many triangles are there, or which ones are connected to which others. Mesh objects have none of those limitations, you can have any arrangement or number of triangles, so you have to download all the information about them. Now, once things get out of the viewer, and into your graphics card, at that point everything is textured triangles, so it is all treated the same. But what the Viewer has to do is take all the special object types and send them to the graphics card in a uniform format it can render.

Here is the OpenGL wiki page on the issue. It's a known problem with how OpenGL works, it's not a Linden specific bug: Tranparency Sorting

No, but my Viewer (3.0.4 beta) keeps telling me my floppy drive A: is not ready. I don't have a Drive A: since this PC does not have a floppy drive.

A good percentage of the visitors to my little mesh avatar shop who were using Phoenix thought it *was* mesh enabled, cause, like Phoenix can do everything, right? Well, obviously they are misinformed, so I now have a "download viewer 3.0 here" sign in the shop. I will add signs for all the other viewers once they get stable. So to answer the original post's question, non mesh viewers need to show them as ugly prims so the users know they have a non-mesh viewer.

Nyx Linden wrote: would be nice to provide a mechanism for the creator to specify how that value should change as the avatar gets modified, or to figure out a way to reliably calculate what the new value should be, but its not a huge priority for us immediately. If we provide a physics shape for a rigged mesh, can that be used to determine the correct pelvis-to-ground distance? The physics shape would not need to be provided for items that only are used above the feet (jacket, hat, etc). But for full body avatars or shoes, it would tell you what the intended lowest point in contact with the ground is, and the calculate the ground-to-hip-bone height from that. If the avatar is resized in Appearance, then redo the bottom to hip calculation. The presense of the physics shape is what tells you "the creator wants the ground contact to be here".

Perhaps the best approach is to tell Rodvik Linden loudly and often that "I will not buy mesh clothes until the clothes fit me, rather than forcing me to fit the clothes". I have heard that comment any number of times already directly from people in my shop and other shops selling mesh items, and on the forums. If people feel that way, tell a Linden, and keep telling them till they make it a priority to fix. I've done a more detailed description of the implementation in the JIRA comments. There may be a better way to do it, but the one I wrote is straightforward and removes any excuse that "we can't figure out how to do it" or "it will create too much lag". The cost should be about 1 animation keyframe per wear/login/appearance change. I used to test and document software for the Space Station project, so I do know something about writing software requirements. I don't know everything, though, so if there is a better way, I will applaud whoever comes up with it and happily use it.

The issue was taken private by the Lindens for a while, but now it has reappeared as JIRA SH-2374. Apparently you cannot edit the description any more, but we can still add comments. I revised and extended my suggested implementation as a comment, since I have read other people's ideas and had more time to think during the two weeks the issue was invisible.

There was a feature request in the JIRA by Maxwell Graf to have rigged mesh conform to all the appearance sliders, not just bone changes. The issue (SH-2374) got taken internal to LL, so we cannot see the status. I added a question about the status to the upcoming Mesh Import User Group agenda. I am visiting family and will be unable to attend the meeting. Could someone who is going please make sure the question is addressed? Given that it had at least 260 watchers before going private, a LOT of people are interested in it. Some background for people who didn't see the issue before it got hidden: Right now rigged meshes are set up to follow movements of the standard avatar bones, including length and position. So if you make your avatar taller, the rigged mesh will stretch too. But they do not follow "skin morph" changes, such as body fat. This puts mesh in the unhappy situation of forcing people to adapt their avatar shape to fit the mesh, rather than the other way around. The appearance sliders have complex and overlapping effects, but the end result is simple. Each vertex of the standard avatar's visible skin is moved a certain distance and direction from the "neutral" or "default" location. Conforming a mesh would simply move the mesh vertexes the same distance and direction as the nearest underlying skin vertex on the avatar. I suggested additional Edit window controls for "Strength" and "Bias". Strength would be a multiplier of the vertex movement, with a range of something like 0 to 2 times how far the skin moves. Bias adds a small amount closer (negative bias) or farther (postive bias) from the bone axis. Additionally, bias controls the render order. Higher bias items are rendered later, so will appear on top of lower bias items. These added controls will allow better fit and layering of mesh items to the standard avatar shape, and among different mesh items made by different people. My personal opinion is this feature will make mesh clothing and attachments hugely easier to design and much more acceptable to most people. The former because now we will only have to design for the "neutral" or "standard" avatar shape, or at worst a few different ones to adapt for the extremes of possible shapes. (One size fits all mesh items would stretch textures a lot on an extreme body morph, so it's better to make a few sizes with correct texturing on each to minimize the stretching). The latter because many people like the shape they have, and don't want to change it just to wear a clothing item, and *nobody* likes a situation where several different mesh items are designed for several different body shapes, and thus no single shape will work with all of them at once.

Ishtara Rothschild wrote: You can't apply a clothing layer to an attachment, only textures. And even if you buy full perm clothing textures, you'd need to adjust them for a different UV map and bake them on top of the mesh avatar skin. You certainly can apply a clothing layer to a mesh avatar which is designed for it, which my Tirion Designs one was. I have fishnet stockings and makeup over the base skin layer in the latest version as examples. My clothing layer uses the same UV map as the underlying skin. It's an improvement over the standard avatar by having toes, separate arms, etc. Having an alternate clothing layer which uses the original (quite awful in spots) UV mapping to make use of the large amount of existing clothes is a good idea. I will try to include that in a future version. Thank you for the idea. Every time someone says you can't do X with mesh avatars, that prompts me to find a way you can. Your's and other's comments about "everyone looking like Barbie" gave me the idea of "mix and match" body components. The 8 main parts (Feet, Legs, Hips, Torso, Arms, Hands, Face, and Skull) would come in different shapes and sizes, but designed to fit seamlessly with adjacent parts. Clothing being limited to the one designer who made the body shape has been solved by providing 3D templates to use in various 3D programs. Those are simplified versions of the avatar model which can be used as "dress dummies" to fit the clothing around. A better solution will be to have mesh attachments morph with the underlying appearance sliders, but we don't know when that will be available, if ever. Got anything else that can't be done, so I can find a solution for it? Shoes are on my to-do list with alternate foot shapes for heels (right now it's only set up for barefoot or flats). I consider my avatar a "beta" version. I know it isn't finished, but I wanted animators, skin artists, and clothing makers to try out and give feedback. What has surprised me the most is how many people have bought it to wear as is, in it's unfinished state.

Set system units to metric (either meters or cm work). The exported Collada file will have a scale multiplier to say what one model unit is in meters (which is what SL uses internally), so cm scaled models will end up the correct size. Since this thread got started, I have added a lot of notes on the 3ds Max SL wiki page . Since mesh is out of beta and more or less stable, if something is not covered well enough there, we should work on improving the page. I think that will be one of the primary places people will look for information.

Leviathan Flux wrote: Oh, I just realized that scaling the model larger makes the prim equivalncy increase. Any way to help with this? It is that way by design. Larger objects are seen at higher levels of detail (LOD) across a larger distance by more avatars. That is extra load for the servers (to send the higher detail versions), and extra load for the PCs which see the increased detail (slower frames per second, more download lag). So there is a cost penalty in prim equivalents when you make a mesh item larger. The way to get that PE cost down for mesh is to efficiently reduce the triangle counts on the lower level of detail models. Methods have been discussed on other threads in this forum. In cases where you really need the extra detail at long view distances, you might find that sculpts are preferred. Their cost (and those for basic prims) do not scale with size. They ought to, but that would break existing content already out on the grid, so LL has chosen to "grandfather" the older object types when used on their own. On the plus side, smaller mesh objects can have costs of less than one prim, so you can combine two or three and have them total only 1 PE (prim cost is rounded up to the nearest integer, so fractional prim objects by themselves still count as 1).

Obsidian Stormwind wrote: Likewise, not having hair integral to the head mesh is also desirable by most residents since they want to be able to customize the hairstyle on one's head. I did my mesh avatar bald, and regular SL hair works fine with it. Another reason for a "headless" avatar is to use the facial animations of the standard avatar - at least until LL gives us more bones to animate meshes with. You just need the body designer to match the geometry and skin textures at the neck so it makes a smooth joint.