Mesh – Page 7 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Second Life: Mesh vs Classic Bodies

2018/02/142017/04/10 by Nalates Urriah

The question keeps coming up in the SL Forum, what is a mesh body and why won’t my clothes show? I am so confused… Yeah, I can see how that would happen. So, I need something I can link them to. This is the ‘something’. I’ve tried to keep it simple for noobs without 3D modeling experience.

Basics

To understand Classic and Mesh avatars one has to understand Second Life™ has a history and understand some of the basics of 3D modeling.

Mesh & Classic Avatar 2017

SL Started in 2003, 2004 depending on what you define as ‘starting’. It started with a basic avatar that evolved over time. That is the Classic avatar. It is still with us.

If you take off everything your avatar is wearing that you can take off, you are looking at the Classic avatar. You can click the top menu Developer (press Ctrl-Alt-Q to reveal the menu item if it isn’t showing)->Avatar->Character Tests->Test Male/Female. This will set your avatar to the very basic (Classic) default-test avatar known as Ruth or Roth.

AvaStar: MakeHuman or Manuel Bastioni?

2017/03/302017/03/29 by Nalates Urriah

I noticed Machinimatrix posting a video on how to integrate Manuel Bastioni with AvaStar. BElow is an image link to the video as it won’t display embedded here. Sheeesh..

So, what is Manuel Bastioni? It is an open source character generator for Blender. Seems it is competition for MakeHuman. The download is here: Manuel Bastioni.

Second Life: Content Creator’s UG Meeting

2017/03/26 by Nalates Urriah

I’ve compressed parts of the video without voice to reduce the run time.

Short Synopsis

These are the tops discussed during the meeting. They are in the order they appear in the video. Because I was time compressing the video, I didn’t collect the time marks.

Slink Update

2017/03/15 by Nalates Urriah

In my article AvaStar Tutorial: Adding the Slink Model to AvaStar I provide the steps to get the Slink Mesh Dev Model updated in AvaStar 2RC5. Slink has been handing out a model made with AvaStar 1.1.34. So, there are a lot of AvaStar updates between that and 2RC5. Enough so that 2RC5 can’t update that old a rig.

I contacted both the AvaStar and Slink people in regard to getting the problem resolved. Siddean Munro, the creative behind Slink contacted me to say,

Second Life: Content Creation 2017 w09

2017/03/10 by Nalates Urriah

This week I actually got everything working and captured the meeting on video. Next week there is no CCUG meeting.

I sped up the video to cut the run time from an hour and a half to about an hour. About the only noticeable change is people’s voice pitch goes up.

Synopsis

The additional assets via HTTP viewer is in the pipeline. The server changes are running on ADITI (preview grid) now. As well as the new server OS versions. We can expect both of these to show up ‘soon’.

Second Life: Bento Add-on Problems

2017/03/09 by Nalates Urriah

While I am happy with my new Slink Dynamic Hands and the add-on Stiletto Nails, Strawberry Singh is pointing out that not all add-ons work with all mesh body parts. See her article: Cutie Loot March 2017 Unboxing Video. She is working to keep people honestly informed about the products she reviews.

That all this new Bento stuff doesn’t work together is no surprise to me. I was expecting problems, especially for facial animations. Strawberry ran into the problems with Catya’s Bento Bubblegum. Catya, to their credit, tells you the gum is designed to work with a specific Catwa head, not all Catwa heads.

Bento Heads are going to be a problem. Trying a demo before buying any Bento product or add-on is very important, especially animations.

The Bento heads have a load of new bones. Each of those ‘head’ bones is rigged and weighted to some part of the head’s skin. So, it isn’t surprising that each developer will do things differently… even the same developer trying to make their products as similar as possible will likely not be able to achieve full compatibility.

This means add-on and animations for different heads, even in the same brand, will likely have to be tweaked. A great looking smile animation for one head is likely to look odd when run while wearing another head. So, I expect to see a lot of …for specific brand and model only… notes on Bento products.

There are some conversations in the user groups about how to minimize these problems. But, it may be awhile before things get ironed out, if they do.

So, be careful. Try a demo before you buy.

Hopefully, we will see some people using Advanced Experience Tools (AET) to make some nicer demo tools. I really don’t want to see more animation demos that work like dance demos… the ones where they put 10 to 50 animations in a pose stand and you click through them. Tedious.