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DanielRavenNest Noe

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Everything posted by DanielRavenNest Noe

  1. If they want to limit the number of render passes (to maintain performance) just having a second map, and a selection dropdown to use it as Ambient occlusion, additive detail, normal, or specular would be a big step forward. Additive detail means you add the two texture maps, possibly with different UV tiling ratios. And low shiny is still too shiny for many items, make that a number entry (% shine)
  2. As far as I know, no, they are not. But people like me have started making replacement avatars with better geometry and UV mapping: Mesh Avatar Foot Closeup - with texturable toenails
  3. Crim Mip wrote: I hope all the creators who'll be rushing to put mesh stuff up for sale know that only a small percentage of SL users will be able to see it currently. I'm quite aware of it. But there is a need for builder resources, such as an avatar with skin templates. Then artists who are much better than I am can start making skins, after which regular residents will have a reason to upgrade. Right now there is little to see, so no reason for most people to upgrade yet. In fluid hydraulics terms, content creators leading the way is called "priming the pump".
  4. Umm, actually Blue Steel regions are still not mesh enabled, but I hope that will get fixed tomorrow. My mesh avatar has been on sale for a while now for skin makers, animators, and clothing makers to use as a template, and I have had no complaints. I put plenty of information on needing the right kind of viewer in the description. If there's anything other people would like to see added to the customer info, let me know, or make comments here: Full Body Mesh Avatar on the SL Marketplace
  5. Wrong, Kirstens S21(9) viewer is mesh enabled. And where did I say 20% of anything? You pulled that number out your nether regions. I asked for LL to give us some actual data so we know when to start building on parcels and releasing mesh items for sale.
  6. That's correct, my SL home is on a Blue Steel region, and it's not mesh enabled yet. Also, I have asked in the Mesh forum for lindens to report Mesh viewer percentage adoption. Even though it will be on all the servers by tomorrow, a very low percentage of viewers can see it at the moment. So builders and content creators need some information on how many people are able to see mesh properly, so we can tell when to start using/selling it for the public. If you own a private region and only invite your friends over, that's a different matter, you can rebuild right now if you want. But for most of us, we will want some fairly high percentage of the SL population to be able to see things properly.
  7. This is addressed to Linden Staff: (1) Could we get some reporting on percentage of mesh-enabled viewers over the next several months? By that I mean actual usage, not how many versions are available from the viewer list. Although mesh is rolling out to almost all of the grid today from the server aspect, it is likely to be less than 5% of viewers that can currently see it. As builders and content creators we need some idea of how many people can see mesh properly, so we know when to use it in public builds and items for sale. In the transition period we need to have notices and warnings, especially right now, but once mesh adoption hits some high value, like 90% we can stop that and just let the laggards deal with it themselves. (2) When will Blue Steel regions be updated to Mesh? I happen to live on such a region, and after 10 months of being active in the Mesh Beta, I am chagrined to find my home is still not mesh-enabled.
  8. Nacy Nightfire wrote:. Now with the current version it's included automagically, but there's no information I can find on their website which Collada version they are using. Aside from asking them directly, or on their forums, every Collada file, which is an XML format text file you can read with any text editor, has a string near the top which will read something like: <COLLADA xmlns="http://www.collada.org/2005/11/COLLADASchema" version="1.4.0"> So just have someone spit out a file and you can read the version number.
  9. Intel i7-920 Quad Core (2.66 GHz) with 6 GB DDR3 memory and Nvidia GTX-260 graphics card runs at 20% CPU in a mainland region with 3 other avatars in view. This CPU has hyperthreading, so it reports as 8 logical cores, but has 4 physical ones. Viewer = 3.0.3 (239192) Region = Cerura OS = Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Other software running: Firefox 7.0, Winamp, and Microsoft Security Essentials
  10. SL objects are data files, not clothing. The only question is if there is enough creativity involved in it's creation to qualify for copyright.
  11. You can change the texture "faces" of a mesh object the same way you do with prims. The only difference is a "face" on a prim is pre-defined, and on a mesh it is an arbitrary part of the object surface as defined by the creator's UV map.
  12. Mesh objects are penalized for size and inefficient LOD and physics shape. So for large things like buildings they can come out more expensive in prim cost. Sculpts always cost 1 prim, but cannot do custom physics shape, or custom/multiple UV mappings. So which is best will depend on the details, and an optimized building may end up using prims, scultps, and mesh items as a mix.
  13. I wouldn't do it on my main account, because of the risk of trouble if it was ripped content. I do expect someone to set up an "upload service" for pay, for people who cannot get payment info set up. Not having PayPal or a credit card is not the same as having no money - anyone with an internet connection and PC to run Second Life has to have *some* source of funds.
  14. It will have your name as the creator. That puts the responsibility on you both in the case of it being ripped content, and for customer support in SL if it is sold to a lot of people (they will contact the creator, not necessarily the store they buy it from, often). If it was me, I would have them create a new account, with their real life info. You add your payment info temporarily. Upload that one item on that account, then delete your payment info, and let them have the account back. Then the upload will be in their name, and all the problems will be theirs.
  15. I'm hard to offend :matte-motes-big-grin: The "best tool for the job" has a subjective and an objective aspect. If the job is making mesh content for Second Life, you are constrained to making Collada .dae files as an output. So no matter how good the 3D program is of itself, or how much you like it, if it cannot do that, it is useless for that job. Programs like Max and Maya are set up to use "render farms" (clusters of computers) to render high quality sequences for films, because each frame takes a long time on a single computer and you need many frames to make a movie. If you are not making movies, that feature is not relevant. And I use several other programs myself besides 3ds Max, when they are better at a given task. What I look at is first, does the software have the features I need? Then if I have a choice, which one do I like better? Two years ago I had Max, Sketchup, and Blender 2.49 to start learning on, and for my own personal reasons I chose Max. Someone else might pick another program. So the original question in this topic "which is best?" cannot be answered, because each of us is different.
  16. guY Ralior wrote: Do you think Boeing or Aerospace Engineering firms are using Maya or 3DS for designing their planes and ships? Actually, they use CATIA (I used to work there). That's more an engineering design and manufacturing program. Instead of of outputting a rendered animation, it outputs instructions for machine tools and shop drawings for the airplane factory. Creating a 3D model is similar in any program you use, but what it gets used for can vary dramatically. Vivienne Schell wrote: So here goes the "shared building experience", the "collaborative approach", the "direct access" and all this... This "mesh" forum is more about tech tools than Second Life. Sad. What part of making animations, photoshop work on textures, editing sound clips, or sculpt making has been an in-world activity? And once mesh objects are imported, you still build with them just like prims (adjust position, link them, texture them). If Linden Lab had called them "custom prims" instead of "mesh", perhaps people like you would not find them so scary.
  17. Baloo Uriza wrote: Keep in mind that in most, if not all, professional cases, are in shops where managers who know nothing about the work make the purchasing decisions. All that proves is that AutoDesk and Adobe have nicer brocures, and setting your licensing fees per seat in about the same territory as a servicable used car triggers the "it costs more, so it must be better" response in the pointy haired bosses of the world. Not to start a software religious war, but don't you think the graphics artists who actually do the work would tell their bosses what they need to get the work done? I'm sure they complain at least as much as Second Life users do about which viewer they use.
  18. Baloo Uriza wrote: Why go for the two most expensive titles on the market for this, when Blender is FOSS? If you check what a professional computer graphics forum has for posts relative to various softwares, 3ds Max & Maya have 959,000 posts combined, Blender has 34,800. It appears to be a fine program, but it simply is not used by many professionals. Since that is my goal (to do professional graphics), I choose to learn Max and Photoshop. If I was just a hobbyist and wanted to save money, I would choose Blender and GIMP. I may yet learn to use it anyway, but for now I have other software to finish learning first. And by the way, I do have Blender 2.57 on my machine, I have nothing against it, but it was not ready to use at the time I started learning.
  19. I use 3ds Max, but that's because I started learning it two years ago, and have hopes to use it professionally. There seems to be a built in function (modifier) or plugin for Max for anything you can come up with. To some degree "better" depends on your personal style. I like how Max works, and do not like SketchUp or the 2.49 Blender (which was all that was available 2 years ago). I'm sure other people have opposite feelings about 3D programs, just like they love or hate specific SL viewers.
  20. Boaz Sands wrote: I spoke with a representative of Daz and was told that usage of any of their mesh or other vendor mesh on their site is strictly prohibited in any realtime virtual environment unless you have a professional gaming license. This becomes an interesting question when "their mesh" is exported to another 3D program and is simply used as a guide to model a whole new mesh, without using any of the actual triangles from it. To remove it even further, take photographs of "their mesh" from the x, y, and z directions and display them as a background image in 3ds Max (other 3d programs may have that feature). Using a background reference photo from real life is a common method for 3D modelers to get the basic shape correct. Obviously using their model with no changes to the mesh is not allowed if they say so. But at what point does using it as a reference only become legitimate? You cannot copyright the human body shape.
  21. Phong shading is named after the graphcs researcher who first came up with it in 1973. It can also be thought of as "interpolated normals". The "normal" is the direction perpendicular to a polygon surface. The angle between the normal and the light source (sun or local lights) determines what color to make a pixel from lighting and shadows, and whether the specular (mirror-like) highlight will be seen. So Phong shading treats the normal as gradually changing from the center of the polygon, to the center of the next polygon. That gives a gradually changing color. Flat shading (hard edges) treats the normal as being the same across the entire polygon, and changing abruptly at the edge. So that gives a sharp change in color. That requires two normal directions to be tracked at the edge, one for each polygon that meets there.
  22. Alina Graf wrote: Why the prims went down now? Only flipping normals? It seems that estimation is quite random In the past we were getting different cost numbers for the exact same model if you tried to upload it twice, so yes, it was random. I don't know if it's been fixed to give the same result each time.
  23. I was not picking on just you, Nacy. It's a persistent rumor about mesh, and is as incorrect as saying "all prims look alike". If there are 100 body shapes made by creators, and 100 different skins to fit them, potentially you have 10,000 combinations. The trick to making that work would be to adopt a common set of UV templates, so any skin will fit any shape. My avatar is actually two mesh objects (so you don't have to wear both if you don't need the second layer), but separated by 1 mm, and with the same vertex weighting so they move exactly the same way. I recognized that people want flexibility in their avatars and would want to combine a skin with optional makeups, tattoos from a different source, or clothes from yet another source. A better answer, though, would be to have layer baking for attachments like we have for the base avatar. That would not add extra mesh geometry for the viewer to render like my solution does. For anyone who does not know, the standard avatar gets their skin + clothing layers + tattoo layer "baked" into a single texture by the simple process of starting with the skin, and then layering each layer on top of that and replacing pixels as needed, then sending the result to the server. That gets sent to other people instead of the full set of layers.
  24. Nacy Nightfire wrote: It's possible that some mesh artists will make available the uv texture template that goes along with a mesh, just we all have for the SL avatar, so individuals who buy it can create their own skins. In that scenerio you could sell designs that people could purchase for baking into their texture maps. A gazillion identically shaped and textured barbie dolls is a real nightmare, imho. * Yes, I do provide UV templates with my mesh avatar for that exact purpose. There is no need to bake the tattoo, since I am providing a two layer avatar. The first layer is for skin texture, and the second is for tattoo/makeup/inner clothing. * I wish people would stop saying mesh bodies will all be the same shape. They are affected by the appearance sliders which change avatar bone size and position (because the body is rigged to those bones). So they are customizable. For the skin geometry which is defined by the mesh, a content creator can make a variety of morphs in different shapes, but sharing the same UV map and offer those as a set, or alternates. Then you would be able to buy skin A with morph Z, and and then further adjust the shape in Appearance.
  25. The .slm file is supposed to simplify uploading a model a second time, by keeping data and settings. In practice, I almost only upload a model again after I change it, so the .slm is an annoying item to delete before upload.
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