My mesh body has shading seams on neck of default SL avatar.

[Malthrae Warwillow]

Hello y'all , let me jump straight into the problem

I have made a mesh body, at the neck of which the vertices are perfectly snapped/aligned to those of the SL avatar neck. When I put it on and enable shadows, there is a seam, even after copy and pasting the vertex normal value for every vertex from the SL avatar neck to my body's neck.

http://gyazo.com/eb7b45f7f9047a9389e9796deae40835

Trying on another mesh body, it does not seem to have this issue.

http://gyazo.com/3b27dfa46481a7518d5ddb617d14876a

The vertices at the neck are rigged to the mNeck and NECK bones of the sl fitted skeleton, so both to the fitted bone that gets affected by the slider Body Fat and the bone that gets affected by Neck Thickness.

What am I doing wrong?

Thank you in advance <3

[Gaia Clary]

You also need to "weld" the vertex normals along the object boundary. Here are 2 videos which explain why you see the seams. The videos are made with Blender but the given information is not dependend on the 3D tool that you use:

[Malthrae Warwillow]

Thank you Gaia for the very very quick response.

I have watched the videos, though I still have questions.

http://gyazo.com/8c85cfe8f0c341e2b75d73c200b305bb

As you can see in this zoomed-in snapshot of my screen in Maya 2012, where the upper , white-wireframe model is the SL avatar neck and the lower, green-wireframe model is my body, the vertices along the seam of the two models have the same normals. (I have left a few to the left not-matching so that you can see the difference).

You can also see the face normals there. What should I change?

 

[Gaia Clary]

you have 2 additional pitfalls here:

 

1. your mesh body vertex normals must match to the SL Avatar's vertex normals. From glancing at your image it looks likje although the vertex normals are welded in Maya, they do not point to the correct direction (as anticipated by SL). However i might be wrong here, judging where the normals point to from looking at a 2D image is not so easy
2. The vertex normals change with the Shape settings. So it might be possible that you get perfet matching vertex normals for your shape, but as soon as you make the head size bigger for example, the seams might get back.

[Malthrae Warwillow]

 

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Gaia Clary wrote:

although the vertex normals are welded in Maya, they do not point to the correct direction (as anticipated by SL). However i might be wrong here, judging where the normals point to from looking at a 2D image is not so easy

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I took two screenshots , selecting the two meshes independently so that it is visible :

http://gyazo.com/edbeeb2f12485d7c1b74d5106a20f4ae SL neck

http://gyazo.com/e7a01597745fbc0ecd1467cc9b2fe16a Mesh body

These green and yellow normal lines that I show are pointing exactly at the same direction and when i select both objects, they overlap precisely. Is this what you mean to point at the correct direction?

Because I have already done this on this upper edge and it still has a seam in-world :matte-motes-bashful: