Another Voice on Liquid Mesh

Second Life Liquid Mesh
Second Life Liquid Mesh

Gaia Clary, author of the Avastar Blender add-on, has posted an article on Second Life™ Liquid Mesh. See: Liquid Mesh. Gaia commented on Strawberry Singh’s blog at the end of the article: Hucci Akita Boots & Questions regarding “Liquid Mesh”

Gaia provides the same take on Liquid Mesh that I do. Gaia is, however, more strongly saying creative types should be avoiding the use of the technique in products.

Gaia has a stronger belief than I do that collision bones won’t go away. I suspect there will always be some part of the avatar that is used for detecting/calculating collisions. There is no doubt collisions will always be need to be detected. That is part of how virtual work.

Neither of us has any idea how likely a change to collision detection is if the avatar changes. Nor can we anticipate what changes to Second Life performance might be an incentive to change the detection system. 

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Second Life Liquid Mesh Continued…

Strawberry Singh published an article asking questions about Liquid Mesh. Several people are answering and some are asking more questions. See: Hucci Akita Boots & Questions regarding “Liquid Mesh”. In many cases the questions come from ambiguous terms used in the discussion.

Strawberry made a video to demonstrate what she was seeing and asking about.

[youtube -q9_ZciPBlw]

The boots are gorgeous.

They are ‘Liquid Mesh.’ The precise technical language is to say the boots are rigged to the collision bones. For most SL users that is meaningless jargon. 

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Bits and Pieces 2013-34

Reflecting back I find this year to be a year when I know more about what the Lindens are doing and have in the pipeline than at any time previously. Yet, we still know almost nothing about what the Lindens plan to put in the pipeline next. That is typical in the free world’s competitive business market place. But, it is certainly annoying.

Really nice lighting and decor. Designed Chaos
Really nice lighting and decor. Designed Chaos

Many of the things the Lindens are doing now are large projects. When Rod started with Linden Lab the plan was to start fixing and changing problems to make SL more enjoyable and useable. First the easily fixed things were fixed. In these years managed by Rod large projects are more the order of daily business. Bake fail was a problem long before Rod arrived. In 2011 the Lab started working to figure out the causes and now in August 2013 a change to reduce bake fail has just rolled out. 

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More on Second Life Mesh

Loki Eliot has a post up about his experience with mesh: Materials Post Mortem. It is a good article. You can visit the region named  Escapades to see what things Loki has built.

...up stairs... at Loki Eliot Store
…up stairs… at Loki Eliot Store

Loki is pointing out some of the problems when trying to build for ALM-Enabled people and ALM-Disabled people. (ALM = Advanced Lighting Model) I think it becomes clear builders are having to decide if they will build for ALM-D or ALM-E. Building for both degrades both.

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Strawberry Meme & Liquid Mesh

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.

[youtube ePIdSw10tHE]

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.

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Second Life Avatar UVMaps Quirks

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 … Read more