Toysoldier Thor

Yes Dart - I saw the spelling mistakes in the draft Wiki from Jeremy but I am totally willing to overlook that in order to get the value of the content that was being shared in this private document. If it was not ready to be viewed by any public then Jeremy should not even have placed the wiki for visibility by a restricted forum membership. And yes... your points on the closed beta are one of a few reasons I have not been at all in favor of the Closed Beta. So LL gags a highly restricted hand picked group of merchants and trusts that these few can speak on behalf of the general public with no allowed public consult with the rest of the community. It would have been fine if these Closed Beta users were allowed restricted access to the new code / system and had intimate talks with LL on how DD should work and LL's design flaws.... BUT... there should not be a Gag Order on them. These Merchants should have actually been encouraged to take what they saw to the Merchant forums to talk about it and seek input and get a feeling from the rest of us. We could have given them insight and new thoughts of functions / situations / requirements that DD should be tested against. But nope... LL loves its backroom secrecy... as we see today and in how little is coming out from even the Open Beta and from how little Brooke and her team is spending to publicly communicate and educate the Merchant community on DD. So now... likely a lot of the work done in the Close Beta is being challenged surprisingly in the Open Beta - IF LL is even proactively asking the open beta testers their thoughts and input. I suspect LL is not even asking the open beta testers what their thoughts are. Made... you are the only open beta tester so far to speak about your experience.... Did any LL DD staffer ask you for your opinions or thoughts on your experience?

If any fellow merchants want to see the two opening pages of how DD works and you are not an open beta merchant and you did not get the forum posted pages from Irene in your email... just IM me... I will email you what I captured.

Yes I have noticed that too. The good news is that I get all forum posts via offline into my email. So I can post what we have seen so far off of the SL Forums and talk about this more. LL has no control of websites like my blogs nor for us to openly discuss / speculate the information we are all aware of now. Its too bad that Jeremy and Brooke and no other Linden feels comfortable providing this educational information to the general Merchant public so that we all can get a better understanding of what is coming toward us in the coming days? weeks? months? They dont even assign one of their team 1 or 2 hours a week to post answers to a thread on the MErchant forum that is designed to inform the community. This is typical LL Customer Relationship management..... Keep us all in the dark as much as possible until the last minute then ram it into our faces where we notice issues / flaws but its the 11th hour and LL cannot do anything to fix their mistakes. So... I will ask the question again for those that are in the OPEN BETA... it seems the purchased items on MP will be delivered now right into the OBJECTS folder of our inventory. I thought there was going to be a special MP PURCHASES folder for items delivered from MP?

Thanks for the Open Beta update!! You are the first to report to the forums. Thanks! I am suspecting that maybe a lot of Merchant posted that they would actually try DD on the open beta and actually most did not. Maybe it was an empty open beta for DD testing. Made, how many fellow open beta DD merchants did you see in their to buy and sell items with via DD? Finally, did you say that when you bought something via DD, the item landed right into your OBJECTS folder of your inventory as a boxed item? That it arrived as a boxed item is not surprisng since 100% of all merchants in MP only have boxed items to sell. But it went into your OBJECTS folder?

So Irene - what does the link we all cant see say? Thanks Sassy for the thought provoking opinions and speculation. And I do agree with you for the most part. If MP for all of 2011 has pretty much shown very little improvements over a 12 month period and if DD is technically not that difficult for a team that supposedly has had it as their #1 Commerce deliverable for at least 8 months (likely more) of 2011, why does the math not work out that LL Commerce's #1 priority is DD? I will debate your point that DD is technically quite simple. Because of its integration with the financial system (hence the mess we all had to deal with in August September on transaction reporting sources), and because of changes needed in the viewer that needs to be propogated to the other 3PVs, and because of the MP code changes to UI and functional handling of the DD delivery system, and because of the need to figure out some smooth transition..... its not that simple. But, it should not take a development team almost a year if it supposedly was their #1 priority according to Brooke. So either they have run into some or lots of technical glitches / roadblocks or their initial design was flawed and they had to do a couple restarts or Brooke was not that truthful on DD being a priority and they havent spent too much time on DD. If that is the case, then really, what has Brooke and her team been doing all this past year. We all know she doesnt send out many COMMERCE UPDATES of LL's plans, up-coming updates, directions, etc. Maybe they spent more time fire-fighting their past coding mistakes that it took up too much of their go-forward DD development. All we can do in the forums is speculate as we still have no news of DD from LL or all these Merchants that went into the Open Beta.

Thanks Arwen. I wasnt sure if you actually went in to test. And from Sassy's response its very clear she is in it and that LL has gagged her and all other Open Beta Testers. Sassy is not one to hold back on expressing her opinions unless she is mandated to. Sooooo LL has gagged the Open Beta Team... What A Go Brooke.... what are you and your team afraid of? Not confident in your team's skills and abilities to develop DD without major codeing / design flaws? I wouldnt wanna be a developer under your team - your GAG order speaks volumes on your confidence of your team and lack of respect for your customers. So I guess we wait. I also suspect things are not going well with the open beta knowing LL... since if it was good news - LL would be letting this information get out. Hold out to your Merchant Shorts.... its gonna be a fun ride for the early adopters.

That actually does sound scary if those words came from the LL Poobah. There are no Merchants and non-Merchants. As I classified the two Merchants before... there are Commercial and Hobbiest Merchants. But since I would estimate that over 90% of ALL merchants are the Hobbiest Merchants (if they agree that they are or not), having LL come up with a model / benefits / restrictions that promotes the Commercial merchants and hurts the Hobbiest merchants would have.... HUGEEEE IMPACTS to the SL economy.

LOL I agree. I would be MORE (did that for Mickey) than happy to be a gagged OPEN beta tester of DD if LL pays me to be a staffed software tester for them. Same with LL Staff... my time is worth money. For free, I am not going to waste my time and risk any operations when my time could be better spent doing other things like.... WAIT FOR IT... creating my first MESH MODELS!! yes I did this week... Pat me on the back Medhue

nahhh.... I now only CAPITALIZE the occassional word to piss off Sassy and if I really am trying to make a point. LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME !!

So looking back at the November DD thread, here are some of the Merchants which I thought were planning on going into the DD Testing Open Beta grid or expressed possible interest ... Paladin Pinion Zanara Zenovka Sassy Romano Darrius Gothly Awren Serpente and even our Inworld Merchant group mentor.... Sonya.... Are any of you in the DD Open Beta Grid? Yes or No. If so, lets her how its going or is it true that LL Commerce has gagged you to not speak of the DD Open Beta activities?

That is pretty sickening when LL Commerce is gagging even the open beta testers. Whats next LL... are you going to gag the first production merchants of the DD ? What part of OPEN BETA indicates that the particiapants need to be gagged. Chelsea... if your Merchant friend was gagged by LL on all that was happening in the beta, chances are that LL also instructed them to "promote" the DD to encourage its use. i.e. "If you are going to let things slip - it can only be that things on DD are AWESOME!" Knowing the maturity of LL Commerce Team.... this would not surprise me in the least. Thankfully - or I should say hopefully - the DD rollout will have a long window of time so that I can be one of the last in about a 6 month cutover. ADDED: Also remember that the merchants that took on the Open Beta of DD were already huge fanboys of the new system and even if there were any glitches... I know for a fact a few of my fellow merchants would have brushed it off and no biggie or would not have looked at the big picture. They would promote a bullet in the head because at least it wasnt a cannon ball.

yes there has BUT LL open up the OPEN BETA of DD to all Merchants in December so that any interested merchant can test out the DD on the open Beta grid. If you go into Marketplace Merchant page, you will see a big notice from LL telling you all about this open beta. BUT... I have not heard a peep from any of the excited merchants of DD that went in there to test DD. Why? such a hot topic and yet not one merchant in the open beta has anything good or bad to say?? Fishy

Thanks for the tips. "ReTopo" basically means to remove the doubles? and here is the question I cannot grasp in my mind and what I believe is the main reason my texture maps dont even come close to fitting on my mesh in SL.... Why do I have to "UV" my model and EXACTLY how does one UV the model? Is it simply one button in blender? I just hope the MODE in blender is there when I import the obj. I tried to follow a couple simple "how to apply a texture onto a mesh in Blender" but options in the video under texture (like MAPPING") do not exist when I bring in the Sculpty OBJ even though the video shows it should. Blender has a bad habit of removing/hiding modes and options for obscure reasons. I will sure try this XNormal plugin. But of the two programs of Zbrush or Blender, Zbrush for me is the lesser of two UI Disaster evils.

Funny you mentioned that today.... I was thinking the EXACT SAME THING!! The beta grid has been open and supposedly some brave merchants are happily testing the DD for the past month. So no news is good new? Or is it that scary than it cause merchants to lose their ability to post about it? lol Since LL Commerce Team has given up talking to the Merchants... who knows what they are doing behind the covers and with those merchants they do talk to in the back rooms.

I am really not sure why Merchants in this thread are taking this topic so serious and passionately and with a lot of barbs flying back and forth. As I have said early in this thread... it really is not a topic that has ever been received well by the merchant community on the countless times it is brought up.... and as you all can see from this thread... it hasnt again. Personally I believe that the unique dynamics of the SL Business economy and ecommerce environment is not suitable or supportable of any formal structured type of BBB or Merchant Standards Group or Association. There are those that treat their SL business as serious as if they were running a RL business with B&M, staff, assets, inventory, taxes/fees/insurance. To these people. a BBB will sound like it makes all the sense in the world. There are those (i.e. I would suggest MOST of the Merchant community of about 70,000+) that do not treat their SL business with the same level of business operation criticality as a RL business. As much as I love the awesome monthly profits my SL business generates for my RL pocketbook, I 1000% fit in this category. I own a RL business and if I ran it like I run my SL business, I would be bankrupt. For someone like me, as much as the concept in theory might have merits, it would be an utterly useless group/organization. In fact, as many have stated, this BBB would likely add a new risk to my business rather than help me. Why? Because I am happy how my business operates. As sloppy as my business runs, I have customers with near 100% satisfaction and that love my products and love my awesome customer service. I would not want to jump through hoops just to get a "Im a SL BBB Member" sticker to place on my store and products. Since I wouldnt, then there is the risk that a SMALL % of customers in SL might actually make a buying decision based on it. I doubt many would care if a merchant is BBB or not but a few would. As such, the BBB adds risk to my business. Finally, the added risk is that IF this BBB Merchants group were to somehow be successful, it would likely be populated by the top sales generating merchants - the COMMERCIAL Merchants. The risk is that LL might begin to listen to their opinions and thoughts on the fiture direction of MP or the SL economy or how the business us run. These BBB opinions would obviously be of self-interest to the top teir merchants and against the 90%+ of hobby merchants. Pretty much most Merchants know that LL management is already secretly influenced by these top merchants but this group would give LL a legit argument on why they do some of the stupid things they do... "Because the Merchants told us to as stated by the BBB". Anyway, fighting and personal attacks over this topic is not worth it. If someone wants to take a shot and basically waste their time creating this BBB group, more power to them. I will put 10,000L down now as a bet that a year from now there will not be any significant BBB like group in SL. This thread clearly proved why.

In essense that is what the 31,000 model is. Using the Sculptris Reducing Brush, I reduced the polys all over the model where there were a lot of straight lines and where there were a lot of detailed curves like the hands, fingers, breasts, pecs, forehead/nose, etc. I left the poly count high enough that it was not changing the skin geometry. So the 31,000 model is the 9000 model with high details on the model where it counted. I am not sure if an over reduced poly count was a factor to why appying a texture on the SL mesh looked so terrible. I increased the poly count even on the flat areas but it didnt help much. I used a seamless texture on the mesh in SL but unlike a Sculpty, the seamless texture on the mesh looked TERRIBLE. It was distorted and stretched and not uniform. The 31K mesh made the seamless texture look a little better but not by much. Also, when you apply a texture on mesh I noticed you have to switch from DEFAULT to PLANAR (not sure the difference but the texture was not visible on DEFAULT). So I got a lot of things to still learn on how mesh behave in SL and how to get the beauty of a Sculptris or Zbrush painted texture to look just as beautiful on an SL Mesh model. If anyone has a youtube video on them I would love to know.

Siddean Munro wrote: Zbrush has an excellent mesh decimation plugin which will get that poly count right down while preserving most of your detail so it doesn't take 3 minutes to rez . Decimation master, easy to use, preserves your uv etc. good stuff to get to know if this is the kind of work you're doing! The problem is that by using Sculptris as my freehand model molding tool (which is awesome at doing even though it spews 100's of thousands of triangles in its process), the problem is that the Sculptris exported OBJ that imports into Zbrush does not seem to be visible as a poly that the Zsculpty outputting DAE generator can read. I am sure there is something I am doing wrong in Zbrush that does not let Zsculpty see the imported "tool" that came from sculptris (even Zbrush is a bit of a black art to me regarding fixing and importing and initialize a model). Now that I know how to bring in a mesh into SL, I might draw the next sculpture directly in Zbrush and avoid the Sculptris import. UPDATE on my progress... BTW, last night I used the Sculptris REDUCTION tools and I got my statue down from 172,000 triangles to 31,000 and then to 9000. It can be very accurate as one reduction tool is actually a scalable brush. A smart reducer like you said Zbrush plugin has would be awesome (i.e. give me the lowest poly count without changing my model more than x%). I Mesh uploaded all 3 model to SL. The LI of the 3 were 75prim, 6prim, 2prim respectively for about a 3meter cubed shape. I settled on the 31,000 triangle mesh because although the two looked almost identical in form, you could see deformaties / boxiness in the fingers of the 2Prim model. The next problem I never was able to overcome was to get my beautiful and easy to paint Sculptris texture into SL. I had a beautiful texture on the Sculptris model but even though I exported the Texture map out of Sculptris, when I brought it into SL and slapped it on the SL model - it looked blotched and stretched and had major gaps. I am sure it has something to do with the UV from Sculptris but the NOOB I am on this - I have no clue the steps to fix it. What I would really love to understand and just cannot grasp nor have found a simple tutorial on is how to texture paint in Sculptris or even Zbrush and get the resulting texture to be on the model in SL. That would be a DREAM! IF anyone knows of a very DUMBED DOWN version of this process for Sculptris or Zbrush TO SL, I would love it. Also, as of last night I rememebered why I SOOOO MUCH HATE BLENDER! It makes flying a plane seem easy. I threw up my hands trying to find modes that didnt exist in certain states, modifiers that were cryptic, useless "scene" windows that open but I have no clue how to close (no "x" button), even simple model movement keys that are not like any other tool on moving a model. Last night confirmed that I will never go back to Blender except if I have to export a DAE. Anyway, I did make the deadline for the University of Western Australia 3D Artists Challenge last night. I used TWO of my 31K models and linked it with 8 other basic prims and with animation srcipts in a few prims including one of the mesh. I linked them all together and the total build was 45 prims. I would show a finished photo of my work but I am at RL work. Cheers

Its so funny of this exact "SL should consider a BBB model" solution idea pops up in the Merchant forums about once a year - only to be dismissed for it unworkable logistics by others in the merchant community. I heard this idea and was part of this thread discussion way back in 2009. I remember it mentioned in 2009. I cannot recall it mentioned in 2010 but I am sure it was mentioned. The failure of a BBB model is in the logistics. Who will run this group, committee, organization? Will it be a department of LL? If so, they already basically have a version of BBB when you file a complained or a support ticket with them. How would LL get extra staff to properly run this new department when they are so short staffed now that they cannot properly deal with SL Customer Service and development priorities. They are rationed staff now... why would LL Execs staff up for a business function like customer service when they dont respect the function now? Will it be an arm's length organization that LL agrees to be its enforcer? If so, who will staff thes daily operational roles? If its fellow Merchants elected to a committee then the biggest issue there is "trust". Will merchants wanting to be BBB endorsed be blackballed because of personal issues or because of competitive advantage with a committee member? Will it be outsourced? We saw how effective that was in 2010 when LL decided to outsource their helpdesk. Customer Service became the #1 laughing stock operation in LL by all LL customers. Nice ideas folks... but I think this is just theoretical wishful thinking. A BBB for SL Customers & Businesses will never fly.

Hmm - interesting Asha... I will try those ideas as well to see if Blender can further improve the efficiency of this Sculptris model. Telling me exactly where to find the "EDIT REMOVE DUPLICATES" really helps as I totally lost touch with Blender. Although I do not know what "non manifold vertices" are, exactly how do I execute the steps to select and delete these? Also, should I decimate first and if so - exactly how does one Decimate a model in Blender? ONE QUESTION to the LL Mesh Gods.... how was I able - even in a shredded state - to get SL Model Import to successfully ingest a 172,000 triangle / 212,000 vertices DAE model into SL? As a few have said... this is supposed to be impossible. Maybe a LL Mesh developer should take a look at my resulting mesh in SL and diagnose it. They will have to wait 3 minutes for the model to rez but it will rez on the sim.

Dont laugh but the SL Model Importer reported that the DAE had 172,000 triangles and 212,000 vertices. I am gonna play with this more. As bad as the process was to get this model into SL, I found it intriguing that so many triangles/vertices could actually not be very LI expensive. For Sculpture / Statue Making - this might be a Godsend for 3D and 2D artists like me that would love the higher vertices needed to make free form sculptures with no physics. I just need to learn all this complicated reducing and decimating functions of making a mesh model for the restricted world of SL's grid. thanks for some of the hints on how to bring my sculptris texture into SL. I will try. Not sure how to get this UV from sculptris.

Drongle McMahon wrote: If you use the high poly models to bake a texture and then put that on a low poly version in SL, you might get acceptable results? I am very surprised that you got anything to upload with that vertex count. The upload format uses a 16-bit integer to index into the table of vertices. So it cannot ever index more than 65536 vertices. The uploader really should prevent the upload if you give it more than that. :matte-motes-agape: LOL Well Go Figure! I guess we all learn something new. My 172,000 triangle model did get sucessfully imported (well sorta successful) after I played around with the Physics and setting the LODs of all but HIGH to 0. As I mentioned earlier, my first shot was that I got an error message afer like 2 minutes of the sim server trying to calculate the model's upload and LI. But if you wanna see it live on the SL grid I can show you. And strangely its LI cost was not that bad - 75 as you can see. But as you can also see, the model is riddled with triangle holes and the sim server took about 2 to 3 minutes to rez it on my parcel. So... its not that it technically CANNOT do it... it can somehow but clearly with poor interpretations of what to do with all the extra triangles beyond its 65000 limit. You tell me how it didnt reject and got it generated into SL? ADDED COMMENT: So as you can see I did texture this model in Sculptris... but how would I get this texture out of sculptris and into SL? I know I can get the texture into PS as a PSD but I dont think these are usable in SL.

Thanks Nooto for the suggestions on how to reduce the poly count. I didnt know about the REDUCE function of Sculptris. I saw the button but I really didnt know its purpose. I will try it BUT my fear is that since I made a sculpture of the human form with continuous soft intricate curves and shapes (like the fingers), I fear that the REDUCE will begin to destroy the form if I use it too much. But I will experiment. As for the DECIMATE modifier... LOL well that is one of the main reasons I left Blender in the first place. Its obscure surper tenchical functions were so hard to understand and use that I just got frustrated at Blender. Last night I installed the latest Blender simply to use it as a way of creating a DAE file. I have noticed that the new blender's interface now looks completely different than the 2.49 I use to use. I remember ther were modifiers in blender but I have no clue how to use them or where to find this modifier. So I guess I will try to reduce the poly count with only the REDUCE button. I dont use Sculptris as my default tool to make sculpties. I used to use Blender and switched to Zbrush. Not that Zbrush was vastly less confusing but it was better than Blender. I use Sculptris to make amazing freeform hand sculptures that I 2D photograph and make into 2D art. I never had intentions to actually bring the sculptures into SL. But now I have been asked if I could bring my sculptures into SL. Here are two examples of my 2D photo art of my 3D Sculptris models... http://toysoldierthor.deviantart.com/art/Swimmers-The-Arrival-277100164 http://toysoldierthor.deviantart.com/gallery/26942771#/d3fczrr I could never imagine bringing these models and my texturing of these models into SL - as much as I would love to.

I think some of you are nailing how this issue needs to be resolved in MP. Since the term "MESH" has several legit meanings - as many of you have provided examples - then no listing should be flagged because a listing title or keywords has the word "mesh". Unless of course the listing is explicitely stating in the title or keywords that indicates "this is a mesh model" and its not. If customers are not in the fad of searching for anything MESH MODEL to buy, then there would have to be either a complely new unique word to describe a mesh model or the listing template would have to have a category that can filter out items with a mesh object in it. My concern about LL chasing this need is that its only a FAD. Right now there are some customers that are amazed by the new technology of mesh but will this special filter be that important in the future? Do we need a filter that allows customers of MP to search for anything SCULPTY? or anything TEXTURE? or anything PRIM ONLY? No. A customer is looking for something like a HOUSE or CLOTHING or LANDSCAPE and if it uses a mesh or a sculpty is just a specification of what kind of house. I dont think we should cater to customers with a Fad love of mesh and promote / convince LL to once again distract them from fixing more important MP weaknesses and limits. In two years from now when Mesh is a main stream technology... no one will be looking for anything MESH.

LOL ... I figured the number of vertices might be too high with physics and LODs so I tinkered and set the physics to lowest and set all LODs but the highest to 0. It actually successfully calculated the mesh model and surprisingly it was way lower than I imagined - upload cost of 14L and LI=75. So I said "why not" and uploaded it. It took about 2 minutes to upload. When if finally arrived I dragged the model to my floor and waited. About 3 minutes later the model popped up. I thought it was just invisible and I created som phantom mesh. But it just took 3 minutes to rez. Next issue... the mesh model is riddled with triangular holes in it. I have to assume that its because I was so far over the 65000 limit that the Model importing tool made arbitrary decisions of removing triangles... So here is the result of a Sculptris model, exported to OBJ, imported to Blender, exported to DAE, imported to SL. I put the image in EDIT mode so you can better see the countless triangle holes in my mesh.

OK I was playing around some more and it seems that Zsculpty plugin within Zbrush just doesnt know how to work with the OBJ imported and generated mesh that came from Sculptris. My next thought was - maybe Blender can do it. So I installed Blender and imported the OBJ there. The sculptris model showed up in Blender just as it looked in sculptris (and zbrush for that matter). I exported to a DAE and tried to import the model into SL (or at least just see its costs). I knew it was gonna be high if it was created in Sculptris that has no vertices limits as it creates.... I set the the physics to the lowest (I dont care if there even is physics) and the LOD for medium low lowest to generate. There are 174752 triangles and 201965 vertices. I assumed the upload and LI was not gonna be good... Pressed calculate. SL took a minute then came back with the following : SWIMMERS-mesh failed to upload. Multiple errors while validating asset. NewAgentInventory_InvalidAsset. See the log file for details. I am starting to think that importing a sculptris model into SL is impossible.