Comments on: Why the SL Avatar Mesh Fails

By: GG3

GG3 — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 23:52:09 +0000

Mesh fails because the same old animations used for second-life has been dumped on Mesh.

Mesh has no flexible points so fingers and toes won’t even move. Hair stretches but that’s about it.

By: Reader

Reader — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 22:02:54 +0000

old threads stay old!

By: Shnurui

Shnurui — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 05:10:03 +0000

The mesh.
Is not the Problem.
The layout, rigging, and uv template are.

Also, Triangles randomly sticking out is a KNOWN INTEL PROCESSOR ISSUE. INTEL CAN NOT AND WILL NOT FIX IT. it occurs between the perfect processing and the output to the video surface, after post processing.

By: Pudding

Pudding — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 04:09:10 +0000

Not to mention the crotch area…ugh.

By: Jeremios Constantine

Jeremios Constantine — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:25:46 +0000

Anyone who thinks those triangles aren’t bad, just TRY to import the mesh into ZBrush and see how far you get.

By: Karl Reisman

Karl Reisman — Fri, 01 May 2009 20:48:16 +0000

It why I never got into clothes, it’s not the triangles per se, it’s the bad triangular layout. I worked on thegame industry for years as a character modeler, and the SL mesh is passable as mesh but could heve been “weighted to the joints” better.

The real crime is that they were very lazy with the UV mapping (how textures relate to the mesh they are applied to) and the templates were made so that the original SL developers would just scan copies of the Abercrombie & Fitch or J. Crew catalogues and just plop theimages on the template with a minimum of editing and let areas such as the sides, the armpits and the crotch distort because at the time, they didnt think it was important.

Anyone making clothes these days, especially men’s clothes, knows what a hellish area the pecs and shoulders are on an AV, and the “insufficient wiping” smears caused by texture stretching inthe crotch. it’s bad, and I do not see them getting better. the thing is people that WOULD make clohtes and have the talent to do so could make better use of better UV mapping if they used the space more efficiently and made sure the front and back of the texture lined up with a minimum of seam issues.

They won’t of course, but we can still dream..

–Karl

By: Witness X

Witness X — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:53:43 +0000

Unfortunately while it’s a good idea, that’s not enough to get Linden Lab to do it. They’ve done all sorts of things that appeared stupid at first look, and turned out to be stupider than anyone could possibly have imagined. And they’ve taken ideas that were brilliant, gutted them, dried them in the sun, turned them inside out and put them on their heads as silly hats.

By: Alyx Stoklitsky

Alyx Stoklitsky — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:13:52 +0000

The avatar mesh has been shit since day fucking one, and anyone who has ever done any texturing for it knows this already.

This is not news.

>You can’t particularly upgrade it without completely obliterating all of the past work of all the clothing and skin designers.

Yes you can. Just support new and old meshes side by side and phase out the creation of stuff for the old mesh.

By: We

We — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:37:26 +0000

You’d also have to keep in mind that the avatars we use weren’t even designed for an infinite amount of animation. When SL, using those avatar meshes, was released it had no custom user animations and an extremely limited amount of base animations at that. It wasn’t until version 1.4 that the ability to add custom animations was added, and the model hadn’t changed any before and after that.

We are somewhat technology locked in regards to the avatar now. You can’t particularly upgrade it without completely obliterating all of the past work of all the clothing and skin designers. Likely nothing will ever be done about it, SL will keep going along with an old and somewhat flawed avatar mesh until the SL-boat finally sinks or something better comes along.

By: Witness X

Witness X — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:06:02 +0000

To a point, yes, “We” – you’re mostly right on the geometry tearing. The texture stretch issue could have been helped by better UV’s – but you’re right, the generic models having to be made to work for a wide variety of geometry isn’t helping.

Then too, the model density decision was made five years ago – modern graphics cards would barely notice the difference if you went to a six-thousand polygon model instead of what we currently have, but I don’t see a way to roll out a new one without really messing up the clothing industry. Sooner or later, though, it has to be done.