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Mesh Clothing Parametric Deformer Project


Agatha Poleni
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I recently worked with Qarl on another project.  I know he's made a lot of good progress on it, but he's also got a lot of other work on his plate.  Next time I talk to him, I'll try to remember to ask him about it.

You can also read through the comments on the JIRA:  https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/STORM-1716?  The latest one is dated less than two weeks ago.

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It's not that they won't implement it.  LL wants this feature just as much as we do.  But the fact is it's a difficult problem to solve. 

It's easy to get mad when a feature we all want is missing, but it's important to do a reality check from time to time, and remind ourselves that there's usually a reason.  If something is slow to get developed, it's because it's hard to do, not because the hard working people trying to make it work are lazy or just don't care.  These things take as much time as they take.  No amount of complaining about it can ever make any development process go faster.  

These things don't run on magic.  Nobody just waves some magic wand somewhere, and all of a sudden we have new features.  If you think complaining can make it go faster, you might as well see if yelling at a pregnant woman will make her give birth in 9 minutes instead of 9 months.  How well do you think that'll work?

 

Qarl is literally one of the very best in the world with this kind of thing, and he's on the case.  He's got very significant obstacles to overcome, though, and it's not an easy task.

A big part of the problem, which I've discussed with him several times, has to do with the design of the avatar itself.  There was some questionable decision making on the part of the person who made the avatar model, nine years ago.  Design decisions that were made back then are problematic in the present. 

For example, the various hand poses (open hand, fist, finger point, etc.) are actually morphs, rather than skeletal animations.  Many months ago, Qarl told me he had things working almost perfectly, except as soon as the hand poses changes, it all goes haywire.  The way the morphs affect the vertices of the model causes interference with the way the clothing deformers attempt to determine the shape of the model. 

Had the original designer of the avatar used bones in the hands instead of those ridiculous morphs, this would be a non-issue.  But for reasons unknown, he chose to use morphs.  Now, nine years later, that decision has repurcussions with a brand new system that nobody back then ever foresaw as a possibility.

That's just one example among many significant diffuculties that need to be overcome, one by one by one.  There's a long list.

Patience, Grasshopper.  The right man's on the job.  There's no one better.  Eventually, it will get finished.

 

If it were up to me, I'd say just ditch the existing avatar altogether, and replace it with a better one.  But that's a whole other can of worms, of course.

 

By the way, just so you know, the idea that developing any one feature causes some other feature not to get developed is not really accurate.  Like pretty much all software companies (and comapanies in general) LL has lots of people, and lots of different teams, all working on different things.  The people working on Feature A aren't necessarily even qualified to work on Feature B, and vice versa.  Therefore, how fast A gets done often has absolutely nothing to do with how fast B gets done.  Sometimes it might, but usually it won't.

Also, it's worth keeping in mind that every single feature there is could be described as a "thing that people don't care about or even hate," and at the same time could also bedescribed as "something many of us would love," depending entirely on whom you ask.  One person's dream feature will always be somebody else's worst nightmare.

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Chosen Few wrote:

 

If it were up to me, I'd say just ditch the existing avatar altogether, and replace it with a better one.  But that's a whole other can of worms, of course.

sSig_agreed.gif

I really would love to see that happening one day.  Keeping my fingers crossed.

As a bonus we would then get a lot better working mesh deformer too.

 

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That is a good question, Agatha. 

I ask a question the other day about unwrapping the current av for  a layered clothing question I had in an In-World group, and the answer was it would require a new AV to do what I wanted to do.  The consenus of that group was, if a new AV was introduced it would be the end of SL.  Their reasoning was it would put so many current creators out of business and regular residents would be angry over no longer being able to use items purchased based on the current AVs, there would be a mass exodus from SL and LL would go bankrupt.

I have tried to look at this from a number of sides.  If they could introduce an additional AV, and give people a choice which to us,  it might be a palatable solution...could phase the old one out over time.  Personally, I wouldn't be very happy as a creator to have all my work and the major investment I have made in supplies go belly up because a new AV was required because of mesh clothes. If it was phased in, you could have new residents restricted to a newly introduced AV  BUT, I don't know what the technical impact this would have or how difficult it would be to do. 

Someone smarter and more technically savvy would have to answer that one.

 

 

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Thanks for the very thorough, informative, and instructive post.

I spoke hastily and without thought.  However, if LL would not be so opaque and would tell us what they are doing, what they hope to do, how it's going, and what unexpected problems they encounter, etc., I would be a lot more understanding and patient.  After all, if you don't tell people anything about what's going on, you can't blame them for assuming the worst.  They used to actually make some effort to communicate with customers.   

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  • 2 weeks later...

I agree with you Jennifer, I see no reason to implement a new tool to an old avi designed to do 5% of the actual tecnology is able to do. But I'm sure some big store on SL that sell skins will disagree because they have worked hard to make amazing skins for an average quality model since the beginning of everything on SL. Maybe they will put the screws on LL to don't adopt any new model project. But we can't give up, our computers are ready to news and SL can't drop behind. 

I've tested a few of items from my own creation using mesh deformer and most them works fine, but it's not exciting for making items that match exactly to the actual avi, I always try to cover "errors" bluring the skin weight. I wish this were not needed.

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