Kwakkelde Kwak

Jacki Silverfall wrote: And they usually don't know their ass from their elbow. With rigged mesh it doesn't really matter whether you attach it to your ass or your elbow.

Are you sure you included all bones in the skin modifier? Are all bones listed in the dae file you're trying to upload? If so, I don't know what went wrong. It might help if you posted what you did exactly. "I rerigged it" isn't very clear.

Ceera Murakami wrote: Turn on advance lighting, and the frame rate drops to just under 10 FPS, but Advanced lighting does that to any computer. No it doesn't.

I would say your graphics card, in fact that's the model I fried with SL in 2007, well mine was a 7600GS. The rest isn't much better to be honest. If you want to give lowering your settings a go, it might be worth lowering your LoDfactor. I keep it at 2. I suggest with your specs, keep it at a maximum of 1. btw, you're talking about a "basic viewer". As far as I know that thing was scrapped by LL years ago.

You could either set the viewport clipping in viewport settings (right click the little plus in the viewport corner) or use the bigger model, save the weight table and transfer it to the smaller model. I think you can also set the scale in the upload windows in SL.

Jake Koronikov wrote: Maybe you should google word "3d repository" and go deeper into that word. Find out what it means and what kinds of licenses there are out there. Although in itself this is not bad advice, I would like to add a warning. If something looks too good to be true (or in this case free), it often is. A lot of those repositories with ((royalty) free) items contain tons and tons of stolen models. If the original owners of the IP rights find out you used their models, they can sue you and you're likely to lose, no matter what the website said about rights. You could sue the people offering the models on the website for your loss and then some (and probably win yourself), but who wants to go down that road?

LaskyaClaren wrote: The privacy issue, whether we're talking about identity, behaviour, or something else, isn't really about hackers, or purse snatchers: it's about governments and corporations having astonishingly sophisticated tools that commodify and profit from our private information -- who we are, what we do, and who we do it with -- for their own purposes. The entire business model of Facebook is based on this. Now that's the base of my main concern about (internet) privacy. A couple of simple examples: Let's say I like fast cars and bikes. Let's say I have a relative with a disease. So I look up those things. Insurance agencies could flag me as a risk, while I go around by public transport and am perfectly healthy. Let's say I have relatives in the middle east and I am writing a paper on nuclear powerplants. So I look up those things. A government agency could flag me as a risk. Let's say I like riding horseback, so I occasionally look at leather harnesses, crops, whips, boots etc. online. I also am a dedicated parent, so I often look up things about children. A government agency could flag me as some kind of twisted perv. Being just a number to them, I have little faith in agencies like that doing a whole lot of investigation to figure out why their systems flagged me, especially the private ones. If anything, I'm afraid they'd try to fill in the blanks to prove the fact (not a true fact) that I'm a risk. Sophisticated as the systems might be in gathering and combining data, they are lacking common sense and the ability to put things in perspective. On top of that, I have the distinct feeling that online identities are not a full representation of the person behind it. I think even some forum trolls here are actually pretty witty, funny, intelligent and even pleasant in RL.

Jenni Darkwatch wrote: On the other hand, trees and plants can quite often be switched. Be careful when you go around your sim though to change your sculpted or prim plant's alpha mode. Changing to alpha masking lowers the actual rendering cost, but it also changes the way LI is calculated. With alpha masking enabled, your sculpts and prims will be counted as mesh objects, with a potentially huge increase in LI.

When you import the avatar with SLAv, make sure your units are set to meters, also make sure the scale in the SLAv window is set to 1.0. It defaults at 40.0.

Is Salas wrote: ABOUT: Dance club, shops, hangout, Blues, RnB, Funk, Soul, deejays, events, live musicians, dancing, no drama, no sex, no nudity, no RP, no poofers/particles/lights, no child AVs or prim kids. Could it be as simple as the filter picking up the words in red, ignoring the noes?

Gaia Clary wrote: Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: Gaia Clary wrote: You can see that when you enable the display of collision volumes (either from the advanced menu or the developer menu (i always forget where it is :matte-motes-impatient:) Then you can verify that the bones move with the sliders. As I said, I hadn't done that yet (dev menu, render metadata). Still, if a moving bone, a HANDLE in this case, affects the skin/avatar shape, I don't see how there can't be any weights involved. The sliders change the scale and location of the bones. There are no weights needed so far. How the sliders change the bones is fixed and defined in the Avatar lad files (which come with the viewer) The SL animation system moves the bones (via animation data). Also no weights are involved here. The bones get animated. The meshes are attached to the bones via weight maps. Here you have weights which define how the meshes get affected by bone movements. Now if you have bones for which there are no weight informations available, these bones still get affected by the shape sliders and by the SL animation system. But since there are no weights on the meshes for these bones, the meshes do not get affect by the bone movements. Exactly (part in red) I think I'm just not making myself clear. Wouldn't be the first time. By moving bones, I mean moving within the rig, affecting the size/shape of the mesh. I'm not talking about rotating arms or legs. If a moving bone within the rig affects the skin (why else would it move?), it means the skin and bone are connected through the weight table/map. So if a slider moves the HANDLE bone, which through the weight table deforms the avatar skin, but doesn't move the attachment one builds (since the rig for that has no HANDLES), it means the attachment won't deform the same way as the avatar. From what I understand the difference is so small and the potential problems of having the HANDLEs in the rig so big, it's best to leave the rig as is. Anyway, here's the rig: If anyone needs it for their 3ds Max adventures, I don't mind sharing it.

Gaia Clary wrote: You can see that when you enable the display of collision volumes (either from the advanced menu or the developer menu (i always forget where it is :matte-motes-impatient:) Then you can verify that the bones move with the sliders. As I said, I hadn't done that yet (dev menu, render metadata). Still, if a moving bone, a HANDLE in this case, affects the skin/avatar shape, I don't see how there can't be any weights involved.

If they are not weighted, how can they possibly be affected by the sliders? Anyway, I'll leave them out, which will save some work

Thanks, so it is on purpose. Then the remaining question is... what do these two bones actually do? Are they only there for attachment points? I didn't take the time (yet) to see if any sliders will affect these two bones indepentant from the hip bone. If they do, that means you can never rig the lower torso correctly with fitted mesh (unless you add the bones to the rig of course).

I finally took some time to make a correctly scaled and rigged fitted mesh avatar for 3ds Max. So far so good, except for one thing. I downloaded the files from the wiki. Then I noticed two bones were missing in the dae and fbx files, as the title already said, the LEFT_HANDLE and RIGHT_HANDLE. I even downloaded Blender to see if the blend file had those bones, they are missing there too. I won't go as far as downloading a Maya trial to look at that file, but I suspect it's the same there. So, I have some questions: Are the bones not used at this point? (I doubt that) Does anyone know why they are missing from the files? Does anyone actually have a complete rig (weighted like SL) with them? Can we have it? Are the problems people are experiencing with the BUTT sizes caused by it? Thanks in advance.

arton Rotaru wrote: 3) I don't have a nicely scaled collision bone skeleton, sorry. As of today I do... does anyone know where I can post it? Or can someone else upload it to the wiki somehow?

I fooled around a bit.... You can import the new bones into your old rig. It's not difficult, but you have to be precise. First you open the fbx file and import the rig with bones, not dummies. In the skin modifier, under advanced parameters, save the envelope. Save the file as .max. Open your old rig with 26 bones. Import (merge) the file you just saved and select all the new bones, the ones with capitals. 3ds Max will notice the bones were linked in the old file, so confirm the linking. In the skin modifier, add the new bones and open the envelope you saved earlier. Make sure you match the bones by name. You should now have a fully functioning rig in 3ds Max with your old skeleton as a base. You still need to edit the DAE file.

Lali Kamala wrote: 1 Can someone help to get new avatar with normal bones for 3dMax, as on first screenshot ? Because SL don't understanding "Dummies" and strange FBX-bones, as on my second screenshot. There are no strange FBX bones in that file. They are perfectly normal bones, just scaled and rotated strangely.

arton Rotaru wrote: The bones are all in that file for sure. Try importing the fbx and select "Convert to Dummys", in the Bone Creation section. This way you will see at least something selectable. You can also import as bones then realign and stretch, and make the bones a bit thicker with the bone tools in the animation menu. I didn't look into it, but if you do this, the bones are a bit shorter in appearance (not reaching the next joint) and realigning the feet messes up the heels. It seems to work fine though. To select the bones you can't see, either hide the avatar, go into wireframe mode or use the select from list (h).

Gaia Clary wrote: [edit] one more essential difference between vertices and pixel pon screen: Make a simple flat face with 4 vertices Upload that to SL put a 1024*1024 image texture on it. rezz it and move your camera to it until it covers the entire screen Now you have 4 vertices and 1 million pixels You now have about 1 million texels The amount of pixels is the same as your screen resolution or it can be more when you throw in some anti aliasing. (Or it can be less when you run SL in a window)

All I meant was a low render weight/arc doesn't always equal low lag. A high one will equal lots-o-lag, so my comment was more of an addition to yours. I've seen the people with 500k+ and I can't say they make me any more thrilled than they make you.

Perrie Juran wrote: I'm getting tired of running into Ava's who's render weights are topping 500,000 units. The problem with these kind of setups (very detailed high LoDs and minimal low LoDs) is that by the SL calculation the render cost will probably be not all that high. From a distance you won't have to render the object at all, which seems to justify the relative low render weight. However, in SL people usually flock together, so especially for attachments it's the higher LoDs that determine the rendering performance (lag). Anyway..that triangle count is completely unjustified, regardless of the weight SL puts on it. My experience is that SL runs well on my old computer (which is probably about as powerful as the average user's computer) when the total triangle count on screen is under 700,000. 5% of that for just a small attachment doesn't fit that picture very well.

Ayumi Dagostino wrote: I've seen another person nearby having done a lovely job of making custom walls for their apartment and they managed to get the entire mesh down to only 1 land impact, which I'd love to know how to do. Help me, mesh gurus! <3 Here in the forum we can guess and guide, but it seems the answer is right in front of you. Just edit the 1 LI object you mentioned to find out who owns it, then contact the owner. If you have the same building, that person might even give or sell you the object. btw, if you use "wallpaper", I would link the object to something very simple, like a prim box or even a single mesh triangle or even better to some (unscripted) piece of furniture. If that simple object is the root/parent, you can set the physics for your wallpaper to "none".

I saw some ways in which "advanced object hierarchy" is useful. I missed one of the most important ones though. Let's take the doors Rolig mentioned. You have a house. All non moving parts can be one object which will be the "grandfather". To the house you can link some doors, the "fathers", to the doors you can link handles, the "child". This list can go on and on. Now if you move or rotate the house, the doors and handles will follow that movement. If you rotate the door, the house will be unaffected, but the handle will move with it. You can rotate the handle without affecting any other part. The avatar skeleton is making good use of hierarchy. the hands are linked to the lower arms, which are linked to the upper arms, which are linked to the shoulders, which are linked to the chest, which is linked to the abdomen, which is linked to the hip. Move the hip and everything listed above will follow, move the abdomen and everything except the hip will follow, etc.

People already gave some links for Blender, which is possibly the best entrance to 3d creation. You could give 3ds Max a spin. Autodesk offers a 30 day trial, but after that you will need to cough up several 1000 dollars/euros/whatevers for it. I wouldn't advice you to go that route unless you are really determined. 3ds Max has some excellent built in and/or downloadable (I forgot which) tutorials that cover the basics and extensive, always up-to-date help and documentation. As far as I know the same is the case for Maya.