Making mesh clothes without alpha? blender

[Embry Oh]

Hi,

 

I made a mesh dress in marvelous designer, then rigged it to a standard medium size in avastar.

the dress looks perfect in MD & Blender, but when I import it into SL it fits EXACTLY onto my medium sized avatar (instad of being a tiny bit bigger) & I see huge patches of skin on the dress. I know I can correct this with an alpha layer but was wondering if there's something i'm doing wrong because I'd like to not need alpa THAT badly.

Any suggestions?

[Monti Messmer]

Hello, you can play around with weight-painting until it fits while the avatar "stands" but when it´s moving, some walk animations are funny, legs and stuff will stick through.

Monti

[Nalates Urriah]

Moving from a modeling program into SL has several gotcha's. Read through http://blog.nalates.net/2013/04/23/second-life-shape-export/

AvaStar handles most of these problems.

When you get the mesh's vertices correctly positioned your next problem is getting the weighting of your item to match the weighting of the avatar. Even if you create identical meshes and perfect in every way but with one just a tiny bit bigger, you'll likely have poke through. 

If your vertex layout is different in the two surfaces, it is almost impossible to get it to work well. Trying to figure out how to average together the influence of four bones and weight  a vertex to work with 3 or 4 nearby vertices is way tedious. A well laid out mesh just isn't going to ever move in exact parallel with the less well made classic avatar body.

The problem is in how the animation system handles mesh. Each vertex is a separate calulation with no consideration for nearby vertices. In Blender you can do cloth and have the system consider 'surfaces' (nearby vertices - cloth collision) to avoid poke through but, the processing time per frame can be minutes. That feature is not in the SL viewer.

Also, the math used limits precision to speed up calculation. Vertices closer together than the math precision error range tend to appear behave a bit erratically. Round off is a problem.

It is an almost impossible task to keep close mesh layers from poking through each other because of the way the math works that moves the avatar and your items. The solution is alphas. 

In the days of old... clothes makers used glitch pants to hid avatar poke through of prim clothes. So, pants made of the same texture as a skirt, which sort of hides the poke through. I haven't seen anyone doing that with mesh clothes. But, it is possible.

You will see some very close fitting mesh not poke through and not have to use alpha. That is done by using the exact vertices layout in both surfaces with the exact same weighting and making the outer surface larger by just more than the error range. Various designers are better at this than others. I see this working best with mesh bodies of those brands that provide the basic body vertex layout and weighting to clothes makers. Those brands have better fitting clothes.

Well fitting clothes are the rage in the RLV community... well, 'rage' may overstate it. But, because the Firestorm viewer allows individual mesh items on an avatar be 'derendered' some want their nude avatar to be available without the alpha holes. So, well made clothes are in demand. The best fit is with a mesh body and clothes made specifically for that body. The clothes and body pretty much need to have the same vertex layout. Then the wearer can forgo using alpha layers.

[Embry Oh]

I see. Thanks for the info I guess alphas are a must till I get better at this.