Second Life Mesh Clothes Tutorials

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Update: See Mesh Deformer Changes for an update on mesh clothing.

There are several people that make tutorials for Second Life™. Others explain aspects of Second Life. We can find their stuff in blogs, web sites, on YouTube and Vimeo, and amazingly enough in the SL Forum. Of all those the stuff in the forum seems to be the hardest to find. So, here are a couple of the forum jewels.

In modeling mesh that moves, avatars and clothes, the arrangement of the vertices and how they form loops of quadrilateral polygons is an important concept to understand. Arranging them well determines how well the model can flex. The arrangement of vertices and faces is referred to as the model’s topology.

Mesh Modeling Topology
Mesh Modeling Topology – By: Codewarrior.

Codewarrior Congrejo has a couple of good tutorials in the SL Forum. I think both are too good to just be buried in the forum. They will get little love from Bing & Google. Quickly they will scroll out of sight on the forum. So, I’m putting links here on my blog.

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Second Life News 2013-15 #2

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It seems the updates for the Release Candidate planned to rollout on Blue Steel and Le Tigre did not make it. So, the package planned for Magnum was rolled to all three RC regions.

The Magnum package is the HTTP one with a crash mode fix.

So, if you have been testing the new Animation Override functions, you are out of luck for a week or so. The scripts you have made will continue to work. But, compiling (saving) new scripts to test is going to fail.

 

SL Material’s Transparency

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If you are playing with materials and trying to do transparency with specular maps, you may have run into problems. The problem came up on Plurk and Geenz, the one coding the project, replied in the comments on Inara Pey’s site.

Laverne Unit – April 10, 2013 at 16:56

After some testing, it seems that you can get specularity with diffuse maps with alpha masking, but not with diffuse maps with alpha blending. I don’t know what the intended behavior is, but that’s how it works at present.

Geenz Spad – April 10, 2013 at 17:36

The intended behavior (eventually) is that alpha blended objects will be able to support both normal mapping and specular mapping. Currently this is a work in progress, and due to its current state, it hasn’t been added to the viewer just yet.

 UPDATE: 4/10 – [16:02] Open Source Meeting – Geenz Spad:

So yeah, be on the lookout for materials on semi-transparent objects, it’s coming, I’ve even been working on it for the past week; don’t mope about it not being there too much.

Specular Maps Tutorial

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There is information about the Materials System in the SL Wiki and Forum. The part I found interesting is the link to: Brief Considerations About Materials. This is an article by a teacher for a Post-Graduate Course on Game Art.

Materials Tutorial
Materials Tutorial

The emphasis in this article is on Specular Maps. This is something many of us have little knowledge about. But, the specular map is going to be far more complex than the normal map. This is the area where knowledge will be key to making nice object textures or great object textures.

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Mesh Deformer in Action

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There is a new video on YouTube showing the Mesh Deformer in action. 6 minutes. Notice that Enhanced Avatar Physics are enabled. That apparently surprised some of the people commenting in an SL forum thread.

[youtube TJ0JJXmOBwc]

Check out the Forum thread: MESH DEFORMER PROJECT NEEDS YOUR VOICE. WhiteRabbit0 posted.

While I understand the frustration, there is so much wrong with that post I’m not sure where to start.

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