The Great Bakes-On-Mesh Debate

Omega

The Omega peeps have made three Appliers for BOM. You can get copies in the Omega Showroom. (Limited life link) Chellynne Bailey of Omega describes them as  “…there’s now 3 appliers in the box, Head, Body and Head+Body so folks only wearing a body or a head don’t accidentally have other bits go away!”

My understanding is this Applier will catch the textures coming from the classic avatar and paste them on the BOM capable mesh. Nice and currently free.

Kiki's Burlesque - April 8 2018

Kiki’s Burlesque – April 8 2018

There are some misleading experiences when using this Applier. The Applier is proof of concept for being able to use existing BOM textures targeted for the classic avatar on mesh attachments. But, the mesh attachments you are likely to use it with now are not designed for BOM, meaning this process/redirection does NOT trigger the viewer to hide the classic avatar parts. So, you will need an alpha to hide the classic body. That won’t be needed when attachments are designated to use BOM.

Copyboting

There are always fears a new something will make it easier for the thieves. The current fear is that BOM will make it easier to steal textures. I didn’t know it was hard now.

The fear is people will build HUD’s that use the BOM texture. Instead of placing controls like one would expect they would assign the head, upper, and/or lower BOM texture to the face of a big HUD and take a screen shot. Well, that is a problem.

The Lindens are uncertain how they will handle the problem. I’m not sure anyone knows whether or not baking to a HUD is a necessary feature with legitimate uses. We know it is possible and currently works. We don’t know if in the final iteration of BOM that will still be possible.

There are currently other ways to capture those textures. BOM adding one more doesn’t seem like much of an additional problem. Nor is blocking BOM render to a HUD fool proof.

Whirly points out that a part of BOM is the interest in using it for baking textures to prims. And with Animesh coming that is a very needed aspect of BOM. So, rather than make HUD, just make a cube-prim textured with a BOM-texture and wear it.

So, why not allow baking to HUD’s?

Summary

This is a new feature. There are things undecided. There are some omitted things people want. Experiments are showing developers how it works and they are thinking how they can use it. Most of the names you would recognize are excited about BOM.

I personally think it is a game changer that will be adopted by most designers. I also think it will be a big boost to performance.

6 thoughts on “The Great Bakes-On-Mesh Debate

  1. Thanks for trying to explain all this but I fear the people who currently don’t get it wont even take the time to try to get it, or even see anyone else’s point of view. Sometimes change gives people who want to complain an excuse to do so and reasonable people just stand in their way of achieving their goal of making everyone as miserable as they are. I wouldn’t waste any time on the naysayers as neither side ends up happy.

    Anyways, I wanted to try to understand your comments on the materials textures better. It seems like you should still be able to apply them to the same mesh surface. It would not be much different than taking an existing prim that has a base texture and then adding the normal and specular maps. You don’t need an onion skin to do that. Changing the diffuse texture does not automatically wipe the others, so if your mesh body has an option for shine or perspiration, I don’t see why that would have to change when replacing the diffuse map. If changing the BOM texture does wipe the materials or prohibits their use, I would be curious to know why.

    • I think you see it as I do. I should be able to add material to any mod-ok mesh attachment.

      The problem I am still unclear on is what happens if I have need of more than one material? Say I add a swimsuit. I don’t want my ‘skin’ water drops on top of it. So, I think the materials part is going to be complex and confusing.

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  3. Please note that the “bake on mesh” feature is not related *at all* to how avatar textures are baked (SSA/SSB or old bakes), i.e. you can use it as well in OpenSim, where textures are baked viewer-side instead of server-side.

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