Kwakkelde Kwak

JacobSteven wrote: I do not understand what you mean ... I do not understand clearly I asked in what format should I uploatnut a mesh into SL and no one has the correct answer me: ( in .DEA format ______ The problem is people have a hard time understanding you. Besides that, people don't always answer only your question, they also talk to eachother.

They are all old versions I think, that's why they are so insanely cheap. A nice gesture though, not many companies do this. Offer ends today.

I remember being intimidated by the UI of 3ds Max where there are often four ways to execute the same command. When I got used to that a long time ago, the same was the case for Maya (Which I never really learned). Even the "easy access" Sketchup didn't make a lot of sense to me when I tried that. I think it's the same for any complicated program, although some are worse than others. One thing I do have to mention about 3ds Max (and I think the same goes for a lot of programs but not Blender) is that the basics didn't really change that much in well over a decade. I'm pretty sure you can still follow a tutorial from 1999 today. From what I read, yesterday's Blender tuts are often useless.

Venus Petrov wrote: Stuff remains 'on the books' until someone takes steps to fix it. True, but you forgot to mention this stuff should have never been in the books in the first place.

A bit of perspective? Here: The Reagan administration came into office declaring that a centerpiece of its foreign policy would be a war on terror. That war on terror has also been expunged from historical consciousness, because the outcome cannot readily be incorporated into the canon: among them an estimated 1.5 million in the terrorist wars sponsored in neighboring countries by Reagan's favored ally, Apartheid South Africa, which had to defend itself from Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, one of the world's "more notorious terrorist groups," so Washington determined in 1988. In fairness, it should be added that 20 years later Congress voted to remove the ANC from the list of terrorist organizations, so that Mandela is now at last able to enter the US without obtaining a waiver from the government. The reigning doctrine is something called "American exceptionalism." It is nothing of the sort. or maybe... During Ronald Reagan's presidency South Africa continued to use a non-democratic system of government based on racial discrimination, known as apartheid, in which the minority of white South Africans exerted nearly complete legal control over the lives of the non-white majority of the citizens. In the early 1980s the issue had moved to the center of international attention as a result of events in the townships and outcry at the death of Stephen Biko. Reagan administration policy called for "constructive engagement" with the apartheid government of South Africa. In opposition to the condemnations issued by the US Congress and public demands for diplomatic or economic sanctions, Reagan made relatively minor criticisms of the regime, which was otherwise internationally isolated, and the US granted recognition to the government. South Africa's military was then engaged in an occupation of Namibia and proxy wars in several neighboring countries, in alliance with Savimbi's UNITA. Reagan administration officials saw the apartheid government as a key anti-communist ally.[9] By late 1985, facing hostile votes from Congress on the issue, Reagan made an "abrupt reversal" on the issue and proposed sanctions on the South African government, including an arms embargo.[10] However, these sanctions were seen as weak by anti-Apartheid activists who were calling for Disinvestment from South Africa.[11] In 1986, Reagan vetoed the tougher sanctions of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, but this was overridden by a bipartisan effort in Congress. By 1990, under Reagan's successor, the new South African government of F. W. de Klerk was introducing widespread reforms, though the Reagan administration argued that this was not a result of the tougher sanctions. or.... Ronald Reagan was angry. It was October 1986, and his veto against the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act had just been overridden — and by a Republican-controlled Senate, at that. He had appeared on TV a month earlier to warn Americans against the Anti-Apartheid Act, decrying it as "immoral" and "utterly repugnant." Congress disagreed, and one month later, it produced the two-thirds majority needed to override Reagan and pass tough new measures against South Africa's apartheid government. These measures included a ban on bank loans and new investments in South Africa, a sharp reduction of imports, and prevented most South African officials from traveling to the United States. The Act also called for the repeal of apartheid laws and the release of political prisoners like African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela, who had spent the last 23 years in prison. or... As Americans honor the memory of Nelson Mandela, they must grapple with the inconvenient truth that one of their most honored recent presidents, Ronald Reagan, fiercely opposed punishing white-ruled South Africa for keeping Mandela locked up and for continuing the racist apartheid system that he challenged. Rhetorically, Reagan did object to apartheid and did call for Mandela’s release, but Reagan viewed the struggle for racial justice in South Africa through a Cold War lens, leading him to veto a 1986 bill imposing economic sanctions on the Pretoria regime aimed at forcing Mandela’s freedom and compelling the dismantling of apartheid. Wasn't Reagan diagnosed with Alzheimer's a year after he put Mandela on the list?

Alicia Sautereau wrote: Respect, some. Fact remains he was a terrorist and had people killed. Does he deserve all this world media attention who tell only part of the story? not in my opinion... They should add his history from befor being thrown in jail to complete the picture. You might want to elaborate a bit rather than blurt out random comments or accusations. Classifying Mandela as terrorist is something that's very hard to swallow for one, but even harder to back up. That is unless Spartacus, the founding fathers of America, Lenin or Ataturk to name a couple were terrorists. Maybe the French revolution was a terrorist act? The Indonesians or any other former colonies trying to break free from centuries of oppression? French (or any other) resistance in WWII? That's not terrorism, that's balancing the scales. If everyone could do that the way Mandela did, we would live in a much brighter, happier world. RIP

Cathy Foil wrote: If you have money to buy a 3D modeling program I go for 3D Max or if you have a ton of money Zbrush and Maya all of which are easier to learn and use than Blender. Every now and then I see this and I don't know where this misconception comes from. 3ds Max costs a bit more than Maya, about five times more than zBrush. zBrush costs $795, Maya costs $3675, 3ds Max $3900. I'm not sure if the user interface is the biggest problem with Blender. That's probably just a matter of getting used to, then again I use 3ds Max on a near daily basis and have only tried Blender for a very short period, a couple of years ago. The reason I use a commercial program is mostly compatibility and continuity (something I believe Maya isn't exactly known for either). I do agree on your advice about Blender, at that price it's hard to ignore it. It does pretty much everything Maya and 3ds Max do. Most people on the creation forums here use Blender too, so one can expect a lot of support. I only know of a handful of 3ds Max and Maya users that post here on a regular basis.

For DAZ, you can use the poser files, which you can find here. (Yes it's the wiki and yes it is there, I just checked) Poser 9 is on sale btw for another two days, personally I prefer that over DAZ. Make sure to use the cr2 files. For 3ds Max, you can use the free version of SLAV, found here. This free version only provides the female avatar and there's no easy way I know of to export bvh files for a non-biped from 3ds Max. Therefor I'd say go with either DAZ or Poser, which are better suited for animation than 3ds Max. (or you can use Blender with Avastar).

Right here if anyone is interested.

Not so much a stupid question as one you can only answer for yourself.

There is no average player, and even if there would be one, he or she would not be representative of anything or anyone. If everything is smooth to you, it's good enough for you. I cap my fps at 60. In busy or laggy sims, that number can drop to 25 or so. Usually I'm fine with anything over 15-20 I guess, but it really depends on what I am doing. If you fly from one side of a sim to the other, you'll need a higher framerate than when you are sitting on a chair and talking to someone for a "smooth experience".

You can still cap your FPS in your GPU settings. For NVidia cards, open the NVIDIA Control Panel, Manage 3D settings, open the Program Settings tab and find the executable of your viewer. (For example secondlife.exe) Then change Threaded optimization and Triple buffering on and set Vertical sync to Adaptive or Adaptive (half refresh rate) On a 60 Hz monitor that will cap your fps to either 60 or 30.

Storm Clarence wrote: I've played SL for years at ~10 FPS or less. I am currently getting ~70 on ultra. Yes, I notice the difference, but do I need all that? What are the trade-offs, if any? The only downside to a high framerate is your GPU working harder, using more energy. Besides the costs, that means extra heat, which can be bad for your computer. Your monitor refresh rate is probably 60 fps (Hz). Anything over that is useless. If you have a 120Hz monitor, that's obviously not the case.

Ah I didn't read your previous post very well, I thought that was you modeling and exporting. Still, you're missing some very basic things. As I said, a texture is a texture (or diffuse map if you will). You can have other, similar working maps, like specular or normal maps. A UV(W) map is something completely different. All the former maps are pictures, like jpg's, bmp's or png's. A UV map is a file or block of data that contains the relation between your geometry and the pixels in all the other maps. Anyway, in SL you get only two ways of texturing your model, "default" and "planar". I have found some, but not many cases where you should use planar mapping. For your object you want to use "default". Default means SL will use the UV data that comes with the object. (Regular prims have that data too). So if I understand you correctly, this would be what you call "mapped". If your object is unwrapped in 3ds Max and looks fine there, but the baked texture (render to texture output) doesn't work with your model in SL, that means SL isn't receiving the UV data. There are various things that can cause this, so it's hard to determine what 's the matter with the little information you provide. First of all, it would help if you could post the version of both 3ds Max and the fbx plugin you're using. Posting (a part of) your workflow might shed some light on things. How are your objects called? How are your materials called? What kind of materials did you use? How many channels did you use? Did you bake your map on the same channel as your UV map in the stack? Did you export your model AFTER you UV mapped it? Did you collapse the modifier stack before export or did you remove some modifiers instead? Is the number of triangles the same in 3ds Max and SL?

To me it looks like you have a "double door". This seems to be a bug with exporting from 3ds max to SL. One of your doors has the correct UV mapping, the other has none, you can see the artifacts where the two "fight". There have been several threads on the subjects on these forums. You might want to look them up. Make sure you check your channels before export, both on your model and in your multi-sub material. Acording to your video, the exporter also warns you about turned edges. I don't have a clue what you mean by "a regular texture", a texture is a texture.

Medhue Simoni wrote: Looks to me like you have 2 meshes. 1 is rigged correctly and the other is not. To me it looks like the pants could have an in- and outside. That wouldn't only be terrible for performance, it could also result in..well in what you see in the second picture. Mikey, if this is the case, just remove the inside of the pants, except the cuffs.

High framerate isn't the only thing that puts a load on your system. You could lower your graphics settings (in SL), with ctrl-P. Use the advanced settings and play around. I'd start with lowering the draw distance and if it's enabled, disabling shadows. If you're a bit adventurous, you could open your laptop and see if there's any dust.

At first glance it looks like you included the foot bones. Just make sure the bottom of the dress is only affected by the lower leg and I think you'll be fine.

That's caused by texture bleeding. You need to do two things to overcome this: - make sure your UV islands aren't too close together - set the padding a bit higher in the RTT window (picture below)

Good to know, I was just about to get some top-notch legal advice from google.

TristanMercer wrote: I am not going to explain the legality of the Terms of Service. Consult Google or your attorney. Or are you not going to explain because it's a load of nonsense?

TristanMercer wrote: Linden Lab Terms of Service is a legal document that DOES NOT extend beyond their servers. That is fact. Why is that "fact"?

Sassy Romano wrote: [...] but as others have said, to get that to render in the likes of Marvelous Designer, takes a while for the simulation to complete, during that time it is calculating all the positions of the various vertices, how they interact, what collides with what and then it's saved ready for playback at normal speed. The PhysX APEX (and similair software) is capable of real time rendering the cloth simulation, you do need some up-to-the-task hardware of course. I have no idea how hard it is to make an on/off switch for people with lower end computers, but as long as rigging itself isn't near complete in SL, I'd rather have LL focusing on other things.

Like Masami said, it's possible but very hard on your hardware. NVidia has a system for a good couple of years now that includes real time cloth simulation, called PhysX. A good place to start reading about the subject might be the development page of APEX clothing (part of PhysX). The last video on the page shows a MMOG using the system. If you don't mind a long read... Or just google "real time cloth simulation" As far as I know APEX works with OpenGL and the latest versions work better on CPU's. I think that last part is very important, since a good part of the SL community doesn't have a fancy video card and has no intention of acquiring one. Another big issue will most likely be the fact that it took years to develop. A similair system would have to be integrated into the SL engine, so that would take a huge amount of LL resources. It's also far from a magic fix for clothing. I'm not sure, but I think it is just an extra layer on top of all the rigging and painting etc, not a replacement. So although it would definitely improve the looks, it would mean more work for the builder, not less.

First of all, that is a great looking sim. However, you are talking about two entirely different things: performance and looks. The sim in the video looks so good because the builder obviously has talent, not because prims or sculpties are so wonderful. Apart from the flexible cape and hair, I don't see anything that couldn't be built (more efficiently) in mesh. For example, the pyramids use 12 triangles from any distance, a pyramid in mesh would only use half of that, reducing the load on the end user by a staggering 50%. The giant statue would probably cost a fortune in LI if built in mesh, but it would still be at least as efficient and probably slightly better looking. One thing I unfortunately cannot answer is how sculpts, prims and mesh compare in network lag. A prim is probably less than 100 bytes. A 64x64 sculpt map in uncompressed jp2 format (used internally in SL) only takes 3kB. Most data of a sculpt is shared and stored locally. A dae file of a a sculpt (I figure the internal SL format is similair) object takes 300kB, or 30 kB when compressed. The uncompressing could result in some lag as well. So if you have a lot of unique mesh objects, things could get laggy I suppose.