Category Archives: Clothes Skins Etc

Strawberry Meme & Liquid Mesh

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I read the memes that Strawberry comes up with each Monday. I’ve never taken the time to do one. The post Strawberry wrote to start this week’s meme is one of the better articles on Liquid Mesh. Her position is intelligent and rational. I decided to provide more of the background on my thinking about Liquid Mesh. Rereading my articles I think I the last one was overly negative. See: Inventory Meme & Liquid Mesh.

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And consider.

Liquid Mesh items are being sold across the grid. Not all are labeled Liquid Mesh, but the advertising term is gaining popularity. As word of the possible destruction of Liquid Mesh spreads we may see more items sold under other promotional names. All will convey the idea that a mesh item can be changed to fit your shape. There is no official Linden supported way to do that that supports a change when the Leg Muscles setting in the Appearance editor is changed. Continue reading →

Second Life Avatar UVMaps Quirks

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When the current avatar was made the Lindens were optimizing for performance. This meant they took some crafty shortcuts to save download and CPU time. One of those crafty design features creates some strange behavior with the Second Life™ avatar’s UVMap and how the viewer handles it.

Gaia Clary of Machinimatrix.org has figured out what is going on and how to compensate for it.

To understand the problem and how to work around it check out the video that Gaia made.

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The problem is complex. Solving it allows one to make better looking skins and system clothes. Understanding what is happening allows one to make better mesh clothes.

Drop by the SL Forum and thank Gaia for this video and figuring out how the UVMap is being maniplulated. Improve UVs for SL compatible meshes.

Obviously making mesh clothes is complex. As time has passed we have learned how complex it is. That makes for a very steep learning curve. Perhaps while the Lindens are talking about Liquid Mesh they could say a word or two about how to make things easier for new clothes makers.

 

Second Life Quick Standard Size Modeling

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I came across Sidden Munro’s video on her work flow for making the various standard sizes. Her process save slots of work. This is a 9 minute video that will save you huge amounts of time making standard sized clothes.

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Starting at the 07:00 minute mark she starts showing how to export the different sizes.

She did the 5 sizes in the video in under ten minutes. I expect people can get the process down to 5 minutes or less.

Matching Skin Color – Second Life

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This tutorial is intended for those people using RedPoly kits. But, anyone can learn some basic ideas on how to match skin color. Like starting with changing Windlight to eliminate extraneous color and shadows. (7:40 min)

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I usually run my viewers on DEFAULT Windlight or local region settings. So, I haven’t needed to change my Windlight for some time. I had forgotten how few Windlight settings come with the new viewers: 36. The CalWL setting was not in my current viewer.

Continue reading →

Best Building Practices in Second Life

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With the coming of Materials, being able to use normal and specular maps, how one builds is more important. Knowing or not good building practices is going to determine the experience in Second Life™. Poorly built items, whether clothes or objects, have a detrimental effect on our frame rates.

Penny Patton Efficient Building

Penny Patton Efficient Building

The SL Wiki has a page about Good Building Practices. There is lots of good information there. But, a significant number of creators ignore the guidelines or don’t know about them. Or… it may be they don’t understand them.

Penny Patton has a new article up titled: Building a Better Second Life – Tips for squeezing both better performance and more detail out of SL through efficiently made content. This article is something that every person building in Second Life should read and learn.

Penny covers using textures and scripts. She gives examples of what efficiently built things look like. Her M&C fantasy build (some sections are NSFW) is an example of efficient building practices. Penny does get to her ubiquitous near mantra ‘build to scale.’

I believe her points are keys to a better SL.

Second Life Hover

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If you have played with the new avatar Appearance Setting HOVER you may have noticed it is less than ideal. The slider ranges from 0 to 100. At 0 the avatar is lowered 2m. At 50 the avatar is neither lowered nor raised. At 100 the avatar is raised 2m.

Since the sliders are integer settings each setting increment of 1 moves the avatar 4cm (1.6 inches) up or down. If you watch the change from 50 to 49, it looks like it moves more than 4cm to me. (see image below – click to enlarge images)

New Appearance Setting: HOVER

New Appearance Setting: HOVER

I’ve used third party viewers (TPV) to adjust my height and found much better control. But, with the release of SSA (Sever Side Appearance – baking) those adjustments in TPV’s will stop working.

SO… how do we get our height adjusted now? Well, the choice for now is Appearance HOVER. But, what if you only need to adjust 1 or 2 cm?

Continue reading →