Thursday 21 March 2013

The Mesh Holiday Home Test



Today, having a little time on my hands between projects I sat down and decided to look at a side element of mesh that I hadn’t really explored – On sim mesh, in particular for housing.

Setting up the scenario. I have always loved building my own home in SL – its a nice little break from the day to day operations, and right at this moment I have my 3rd home in SL that I built myself.
Its construction is a hybrid of prim and sculpt.

Some time back I managed to split off the sculpt sections of the house and export the prim elements of it in to Blender. Today, I sat down and started to look at how I could recreate it all in mesh.
This is of course a different game from my usual work. Rather than detail, houses tend to be more about keeping things as simple as you can.
The fewer vertices you have, the better.

And now an intermission where I will play some jaunty music...

Four hours later, I am sitting down, with a part built system. It looks good and its totally optimised.

First issue I can see immediately is the wonderful physics elements. This is a new area of the mesh upload for me – don’t usually use it however inworld objects need to be physics objects so collisions can occur as expected.
First problem. Without physics, a basic upload cost is 75L$ however with physics on and set reasonably, its jumped to a staggering 350L$ to upload...
Can I say ouch...

Lesson 1 – Uploading physics enabled mesh is vastly more difficult (as the viewer packed in during early trails), and seems to cost more.

Next thing I found is partly an explanation as to why mesh houses that are on the market at the moment all look so similar and I will come back to that in a moment.

The thing I spotted first up, was the strange in world cost of the objects. In fact, they seemed to be just as heavy as if I had used regular prims. This actually surprised me, as they shouldn’t have been – I would have guessed they would have been lighter on the prim cost.
During my design process I was frugal over what I was using – if a wall need 4 vertices, it got 4 vertices. Nothing more.
It took a little while to figure out why and where all these costs were coming from, after I stripped back everything to see what was heavy, and what wasn’t.
A wall is a simple object really. 4 vertices, 1 face. Even a complicated wall with 5 angles isn’t that complicated – it is just 16 vertices, and 5 faces.
Obviously at heart a “house” is nothing more than a box with a roof... unless you are me. At which point the house suddenly becomes a slightly organic design.
I put in lots of nice curves, elements that give depth and detail. Except right there, is the issue.
Curves are not vertices friendly.
In my house, I have a nice little arch system – its a bit 1970’s but I like it. This is what it looks like



Now, lets talk about this.
In world, it is exactly 8 primitive objects.
Conversion to mesh took the 8 objects, cleaned them totally removing all unnecessary vertices, merged the objects together in to 1 object. Even when cleaned up, its not exactly massive really but the curves do add to the mesh costs. Total vertices is 380.
There is though a setting you can use before upload – either solid, or smoothed.
For it to look nice and chiselled, its best to use solid – total mesh costs on sim – 12.
Now, you can get better results by setting smooth, however when you do set smooth, it makes it loosened and less defined. Even with smooth on, the mesh cost on sim is 8.

So... same design, same look, and apparently the same cost – 8 with prims, and 8 with mesh (or 12 if you don’t smooth which makes it more costly).
And god forbid you try to link it to the house. I linked the mesh part to the house.
152 prims unlinked.
420 prims when you link an 8 prim mesh object to it

And yes, I checked that four times to make sure I wasn’t having problems reading it.

But, is this 100% right?
Well, I checked another area of plain walls in my hall.



What these are is a 5 prim element (specifically the back wall).
The mesh object does look nicer and smoother but once again, there is a problem. It is, with physics (which is required for that as its requires a collision area), 6 prims on sim.

So even a 20 vertices object, with physics, is slightly worse. I am sure if I smoothed it, it would be much less, but the fact of the matter is I am seeing no distinct advantage to using mesh over using prims here.

In fact all I am seeing from the various areas of the test is this – slightly improved design, slightly more in world cost all for the 4 hours I put in to remaking this.

This brings me back to the current available mesh houses that are out there today and I don’t mean this as a comment on their quality (which is very good).
The simple fact is the designers of these houses as I now understand, have had their hand tied behind their back. These houses have to be simple, slab sided object. Boxes effectively and those boxes are what they are. They do look good, but the real creativity behind designing houses in mesh is limited by the fact they are far too costly to produce for customers.
Their in world costs tend to be far more than if you were using prim or sculpties.

So yet again, we have mesh failing epically to live up to expectations from a designer and customers point of view.
Yes, mesh does again have benefits when it comes to design, but the drawbacks seem to be very problematic and it does seem to be 100% down to how mesh was implemented in world.

I am going to perceiver on that front and do some more tests but the purpose of this test was to establish a baseline of what mesh can do for structures and buildings in Second Life, and the result seem to be somewhat underwhelming.
At some point, I may get tired of say that...

Tuesday 19 March 2013

Round and round we go... its that Rigged stuff again



I know... I am back on the box over rigging again, but like Tantalus I keep chasing water around, and trying not to die of thirst.

I have been working on the latest update to the cyber department with my new Airtek cyber boots and no matter how you cut it, you still end up chasing your tail.
The problem is, I think I may be a little too set in my ways and far too much of a detail perv. But I love detail and if things keep coming out wrong, how are you meant to get past that?
Now, this really comes back to the old “horses for courses” issue that seems to surround rigged mesh.

Give you an example. I saw a customer in store the other night. She looked pretty clued up and had a nicely assembled avatar, but she was wearing a rigged mesh t-shirt. Problem for me was it was suffering sooo badly from clip through issues. Every time she moved, the mesh warped a little and pieces of skin kept clipping through the shirt.
I am pretty sure that the designer of the shirt didn’t want that, and in fact didn’t even see that when designing the shirt. However, as designers we all love the idea of one size work, and we tend not to look too deeply in to how it works in a broad spectrum way.
Of course it is fair to say we are aware of the problem, but without testing close to 50 shape set ups for the body, we cant see what is really happening on the massive variety of shape files.
Hence, here was a case of one size tries to fit all, but never will.

Going back to the boot though.
The first problem is I am a detail perv, both in the detail and fine adjustment detail. While Blender may be a powerful tool, the fine detail isn’t as detailed as you can get it in SL.
Effectively, Blender is a powerful tool, designed for powerful uses. And while it can do that, there are discrepancies between what you see in Blender and what you see in world. You don’t know something until you use it properly, watching how it sits on your personal shape, or how it works with your AO. And in those cases, I find fine adjustment is needed.
Except, its rigged mesh. You cant do fine adjustment in world – you have to do it in blender.
That is the crux of the problems – you have to almost guess what you need to do from what you see in Second Life, go back to blender, make your guess, then spend L$ uploading those tests back to SL, and pray you get it right.
This guesswork process costs time and effort in a massive way. A tweek on none rigged mesh that would have taken 10 seconds, now takes financial cost and probably the better part of 5 or 10 minutes, if not more if you guessed wrong.
Back on the perving side of the detailing comes my secondary gripe with rigging.
If I am working through static items in world, I can position, tweek, alter and add or remove elements in a short space of time until visually I have what I want. Its a process that can be done on the fly, adjustments can be made over seconds or even days as you field test items.
When it comes to Rigged mesh, your hands are pretty much tied by what you can do.
At conception, you have the item as you think it should look, however what you see in Blender isn’t what you see in SL, even though poly to poly, its exact. The feel is different.
In addition to this is the principles of LOC (Levels of Complexity). If you design a straight boot, it may have 5 individual rigged items. The boot, a sole, heel, cuff, and a tip. Each of those five items needs to be weight painted or if you do like I do, you weight paint the boot and copy that to the other items. However, the more detail parts you add in, the more you need to copy and even adjust each piece in the weighting. Eventually it become nearly unmanageable above 30 items.
The short version is, you cant add the detail in your want without driving yourself bonkers as the more complicated it gets, the more unusual behaviour in world will start to appear, resulting in you spending most of your time chasing rampant polys around trying to get them to weight themselves properly. Of course, you could argue that you could merge the meshes together to synch the weights, but that then forces more problems with editing.

Ultimately, the more detail you add, the worse you end up chasing your tail going back to the beginning.
That begs the question though – and its a serious one really. What advantage does rigging offer?
Well, Rigged mesh has two advantages. Its self adjusting to height, and the joints bend smoothly
Its disadvantages are though, lack of detail, it doesn’t self adjust to width, and you end up with a lack lustre product because the fact it is rigged means you cant do the fine detail work without driving yourself round the twist.

Realistically then, the advantages of using rigging seem to be far outweighed by the disadvantages.
This is now to the degree that I only really see a selected few advantages, which almost could be sorted through using a mixture of static and rigged elements.
Static mesh would give you far more power to detail and fine tune, even though it is mesh.

In a final look at the Airtek Boots, I have to ask the question – what advantage is there to making these in pure rigged mesh? The answer is, none.

Overall this does bring up an interesting point though. For everything it offers, Rigged mesh slowly shows its failings to the point where its applications are very limited.
If you are dealing with a simple, easy to work with item like a mesh body, it will do everything you want, even if its utterly impractical. If you are doing simple boots, it has applications as long as you can keep the detailing under control.
But anything more detailed than basic clothing, boots, etc the rigging applications are extremely limited.
To that end, while static mesh comes with its own series of disadvantages, I will be using this more to create what I need in SL with Rigged being used only where necessary.

Restrospective

Back in April 2009, I opened up a small store on Second Life called Violet Studios. The rest is history really, but I kind of felt the need to sit down, and put some words down as I know people have been asking me, when is new stuff coming.

In the first two years of Violet Studios, it is fair to say things were really on a roll with new products being released almost daily, and when things like that happen, its always going to be the case that before you realise it you have a lot of products in store.
Of course, it is part of business, that the work you did last year, can always be improved on the next year as you will always have learnt something new and during the second year, I started to improve the products I released.
One thing that was out of my control though was Linden Labs ceaseless “tinkering” with Second Life itself. During 2010, we saw new features arriving on Second Life like Alpha masks, and Tattoo layer, which were a plus point, however there were less well known and secretive project going on too, like their Script Limiting which in turn created chaos for both customers and designers who really didn’t have a clue what was going on or why items were failing.

During 2010, and early 2011, the steamrolling of new items started to slow down, as more and more I had to turn my attention back to projects that either were not up to my own standard and needed improving or replacing, and doing damage control as Linden Labs started to strangle the script limits, almost on a monthly basis.
On top of this, during 2010/11, the highly secretive “Mesh” project was building in momentum, however as most people involved with SL knows, being so secretive was not a good thing, as the rumour mills went in to overdrive, with certain people making wild, inaccurate claims over what mesh was going to be able to do and predicting that the virtual sky would fall when mesh arrived.
When Mesh was eventually released (with Linden Labs awful Viewer 2/3) in August, the rumour mill was put to rest, the sky didn’t fall, and frankly, even today mesh is struggling to make a massive impact on how we use SL as it is vastly limited by what it can do. However, back then, I didn’t know that.

By the end of 2011, the stream of new products was now slowly dribbling through, rather than the rushing torrent as I was spending my time going from A to B, to A, to A, to A... and wondering “when does C arrive?”
2012, was a poor year really. For almost the first 6 months of the year, I spent it in all out warfare with Blender, trying to teach myself Mesh and investigating exactly what mesh really could do, and reaching some pretty disappointing conclusions by the end of it, and feeling like I had wasted those six months. However I also realised that while I had been so focussed on getting new products out and repairing and updating items that needed to be fixed, the whole business had been suffering.

In the middle of 2012, I realised that I needed to focus on what I had in world already, and take a long, hard look at what needed to be done, and what needed to change, taking each department, and breaking down what was wrong, where I could improve, and not forgetting, where the newer features Linden Labs had introduced could be put to work to improve not only what you see, but how I worked.
I wont bore you with the break down of the projects, but using an example, take Verotic Evolution.
As customers, you have come to expect that I would be constantly developing new products, new make ups and new skins. But Verotic had grown in to an out of control monster and I needed to come up with a solution that would not only mean you could get the new items, but I could also build them without breaking out in a cold sweat at the thought of doing it.
The Stacked Multi Layer tattoo system has not only given you a huge boost in new make up designs, but also more choice in how they are set up. For me, it means that there are no more cold sweats, and I can even start to look at the new skins have had sitting in inventory for some time now.

Which brings me back full circle really to where are we right now?
Well, as it stands, there are two and a half projects really left to do. One is completing the market place update, and the others are some smaller projects that will be out in the next few weeks.
As it stands though, 95% of the work is now complete and I am now at the point where I can start putting all of the unfinished or in development projects in to full production.

No more massive updating or redesigning work – at this point, “C” is finally in sight and it means for you, that Violet Studios is going to be a busy store in 2013.

Hemi

MMM.... Marketplace Migration Mess

Following on from the main blog's Emergency Marketplace Migration posted on 10th March...

A few weeks ago, I became aware of some orders failing a great deal more than usual, and they were specifically targetted at items which I still had in Magic Boxes.
However this problem has took an unusual and quite bad turn in that the usual process of failure, had in itself failed.
Short version was Linden Labs were keeping customers money, failing to order products and it turn merchants like myself were having to deal with rightfully upset and annoyed customers. Worse was, we couldnt do anything about it either.

The "Bug" (or perhaps deliberate?) seemed to be totally confined to items that were still in Magic Boxes (the old XStreet system).
This is significant as Linden Labs had only a week before this sent out a mail announcing that they were decommissioning the Magic Box system, in favour of their new Direct Delivery system.
What is singificant though was the date for cut off and decomissioning was the 16th April not the 8th March....
It does seem unusual that mysteriously Magic Boxes fail in such an epic way shortly after this announcement.

The upshot is, it appeared that the market place software seemed to have already killed magic boxes, but worse, it also meant it was keeping customers money.


Regardless - this is now repaired from my side of the fence and it does appear that linden labs have repaired and refunded customers correctly.

An addendum to this story was although I was unaffected by this, yet again the mysterious Direct Delivery Merchant outbox bug had again reared its ugly head as a number of annoyed merchants were posting back to the JIRA on this, so not only were their magic box orders failing, but they couldnt update to Direct Delivery because their Outboxes wouldnt initialise.

Cubby... Disaster Zone clean up... Isle 3....


What a total and utter mesh... (May 2012)

Even though I had already found out about the many issues surrounding Rigged Mesh, I was being asked on a weekly basis if I would be releasing a rigged mesh body and being a stuborn so and so, I didnt like being defeated by rigging, so I percivered and continued to investigate, slow adding more and more nails in to the coffin.
This  document was written off the back of my final Mesh Investigation Project, which although more complicated than this, effectively came to the same conclusions.
Just to be clear though, the main focus of this was attempting to make a new mesh body system for customers and didnt go outside of that.

_________________________________________ 
 
Introspective look at Mesh bodies, and their realistic application in Second Life.

Since February this year, I have been buried up to my neck in research and development on mesh. And as you will have already seen, I have made significant headways in to mesh and rigged mesh. But as I have previously said, Mesh while being powerful, is unfinished. In fact its got so many drawbacks it can get unreal at times.
The simplest way to put it is in some areas mesh is a godsend. In other areas its a utter waste of time.

For me, I have been a kid in a candy shop working on ideas, and the one that draws my attention the most is mesh bodies. Its been one of the heaviest areas of development I have worked on and perhaps the biggest disappointment of mesh. But its not because there is that much of a problem with the technology. It works fine. Its how that technology has been implemented on SL that is the problem that makes mesh bodies utterly impractical.

I have had a lot of people asking me if I will be supporting “this or that” mesh body, or if I will be doing my own. On this front I have had a lot of thinking time, and the answer I will have to give right now is no, I wont be supporting either my own, or others mesh body works on clothing or skins. Not at least until several major issues with mesh have been sorted out which knowing Linden Labs, that wont be any time soon.
But I hear you ask... why?

The question is a good one really. And I will try to explain by taking a human female body, and breaking it down.
The body is effectively a grouping of a number of parts. Head, chest, waist, pelvis, boobs, butt, arms, hands, legs and feet.
The current thinking is the head should be removed. Short version is the stock SL head offers more configuration.
Arms, Chest, legs, waist and Pelvis are pretty generic but can be improved on alot. But to be clear, an arm, is still an arm and as much detail as you can add with mesh, its still an arm.
Areas where the SL AV is let down though is the crotch, the hands and feet, and of course the butt and the boobs. But for the sake of argument, the hands are okay, the crotch is very hard to get right even with mesh, so that leaves us with three areas to improve on – the feet, the butt and the boobs.

So lets take a look at what you can do with Mesh bodies, and with the Regular SL Avatar.

Starting with the SL AV. Starting off, you get avatar physics. Nice. You also get alpha masking so you can hide parts of the body. You get 3 lower clothing layers, 3 upper clothing layers, a jacket, and a Tattoo Layer. All making the avatar very configurable. You also get shape adjustment, where you can alter parts of the avatar to your specification and those specs while limited are far more advanced than you get with mesh, with fine (if sometimes poor) adjustment for multiple areas.
Finally there is also the skin layer. And also with the new viewer tech, you can not only have 7 layers of clothes on, but add multiple same version layers (so 3 shirts for example)
Sum it up... you can wear skin and 7+ layers of clothing, you can have a jiggly butt, you can wear prim parts and hide that part of the AV, and you can fine tune your shape with great detail, although not a great as mesh. But most importantly, these are all out of the box supported elements of Second Life that require NO special treatment.

Moving to mesh. Avatar Physics... no. You cant have that. Alpha masks are gone too. If you want to hide part of the avatar you have to use Invisiprims, or create custom meshes to hide the elements. You can have one upper and one lower clothing layer. No more than that due to Alpha on Alpha clipping issues. You can, assuming you have left the stock SL head do fine adjustment to the face (although even with a 100% skin matched body, there will still be a butt ugly neck seam there), but the main mesh body will only be adjustable in rough factors such as height and width – no fine tuning. Also, if are looking at improving the breasts the shoulder width causes issues with the breasts shape (I will come back to this). Finally, while you can use an SL skin on the body, much as with the clothes you will need an applier system to apply those textures to the body.

So summing this up, you get limited shape, a poor neck seam joint, no physics, no alpha masking so you can wear other prim parts, clothes and skins are limited and have to be built through appliers.

Already, you can start to see mesh is looking like a horror story. And lets just be clear here.
This is so you can improve fractionally the design of the arms, chest, legs, waist and pelvis and also improve reasonable amount on the design of the butt and the boobs.
But honestly... considering what you are losing compared to what little you gain, is it too far?

Well, it is a matter before the public, but of the people I have talked to, it seems that many have already said no. They like the flexibility of the original avatar, and the almost gimmick nature of mesh bodies wore off quickly.

So far I have focused on the technical requirements for mesh, but believe me, this story isn’t over. It does get worse.

Creating rigged mesh is a lovely idea until you realise that one of the features that makes it have a bonus, also creates an error on heavily busty avatars. Now at first this may sound very counter intuitive, but sorry – I am a perfectionist.
Breasts are supposed to be round and bouncy and when you design them in mesh, that is what you do but you also forget that they are going to be affected by the rough shape changes you make. I wont bore you to death with the hows and why, but the short version is, you actually have to keep the rough dimensions from the original shape of the mesh model. If you decide to go mega wide, or super thin, the breasts behave as the avatar does and they go thick and wide or thin and tall, as opposed to keeping that lovely round bouncy shape. I have also found similar issues to a lesser degree with the butt.
Then there is texture distortion. Using the original skin, even if that skin is high definition, creates massive issues over the polygon arrangement. This is why implant breasts using the original skin look rubbish. The short version is, on the mesh avatar, too much skin area, and too few pixels on the textures. This also leads to that classic awful nipple area.

Finally on this front there seems to be a whole oxymoron over the Second Life idea of implants.
In Second Life, having implants isn’t just about having them. Its about the whole range of features you get from them too. Not only do you get great looks, but you get growth, clothing, nipple configurations, RLV and so much more. With rigged mesh, what you get is... well, you get seamless breasts. That’s it.

Finally, while not pertaining directly to the mesh body, those that know me, know I like to give my customers the best I can. So that would mean creating a whole range of support products for mesh bodies. Now, genuinely, if something uses a standard SL body UV Maps on the mesh, then shouldn’t it be easy?
Well... no. Most customers see my work as “skins”. But to convert my skins over to an applier format, and to move my clothing over to appliers, would mean creating over 2000 separate appliers.
And on the clothes, thats even less easy as while they may use the same textures, I use multiple clothing layers. So, instantly, those multiple layers mean I would have to merge layers, and create multiple option appliers on the clothes. And then while I could distribute the Body skins easy enough, I would need to do the face layer of other options... but I have no way of distributing the faces.

Suddenly what started out as an easy job turns in to an “oh dear” job. And as much as I have tried to work out how to get around this, I cant short of a manual intervention for each and every customer.

Logisically, it would take me around a month to polish up a range of mesh bodies based on what I have already designed. And to convert the skin and clothes over – my best guess is 2 to 3 months.

Let me just put this logically.
Three to Four months work, solid, day in day out getting appliers built and working on mesh body designs.
And what would the result be. Well, over what I already have, 10 to 15 new products...
No... thats wrong. It would be 10 to 15 fundamentally flawed new products that customers would get bored of in a few weeks.


Conclusions then?
Well, Mesh bodies really are a torment for designers like myself, as there is a massive amount of things you can do with them. And for designers personal use, they are really neat as “we” can do what we want with them. But for you as a customer, you want easy methods. Not difficult ones. And making mesh end user friendly is a whole different story.

On the Plus side, with mesh bodies, you get a nicer body shape, better butt and boobs, and proper feet. You do get the option to wear clothes too. But only on a single layer.

For the Negative Side. You loose physics, alpha mask, fine shape adjustment, you are limited to designs that include appliers for skins and clothes, you are blighted by the shape adjustment, you loose multiple clothing layers and tattoo layers, there is still a seam joint on the neck, the nipples look awful, you get texture distortions using the original textures and for the most part, they are nothing more that a short lived item.

So from a logical perspective, what you gain from using a mesh body is certainly nowhere near what you loose. And right now, I will throw an even bigger spanner in this works just to make it utterly clear just how futile I personally feel mesh bodies are.

If you want better feet, then I know for a fact given a week, I could design a perfect set of mesh feet to be used with your avatar. While replacing what you already have, they still would give you the best of both worlds and look good to boot.

If you want better breasts, they why reinvent the wheel? Breast Implants are widely available and give you massive advantages and options, and not only that they look better than Mesh breasts ever could. The only advantage Mesh bodies have is seamless breasts, but considering everything you loose with mesh bodies, is loosing that seam such a horrific prospect?

And sadly, the butt is the butt. But is it really that awful you have to sacrifice all of your options to just have a cute bum? I think personally I would say no.

And finally, as I put this down in to the ground there is a realisation of futility on this front as two things currently in the works could scupper the whole idea.

Firstly, Mesh isn’t a fixed item. Its a flexible long term project. What is applicable this week, may not be so next week. I  know of two or three projects on mesh that could fundamentally alter the whole design ideas of what we are doing with mesh at the moment. So the question is, what is round the corner and will it make mesh bodies as we know them redundant. Would you want to waste 3 months working on something, only to find that the week after you finish, all your work get made redundant?
Finally, there is another project at Linden Labs, hidden away in their projects list that could in theory make most of what we are looking to achieve with mesh bodies, useless. The so called AV2 project is a massive change to what we know at the moment with the second life avatars, both male and female. And yes, its a new, higher quality, more flexible, and better deformer base mesh avatar that is designed to “Replace” the current SL AV. I would only assume it would come with better shape overall, better muscle control, better breast shape, nicer ass, and hell, real feet. The nice thing is, it should work with all SL stock textures and be fully compatible (although I am guessing toes could be an issue).
So if AV2 is on the table, and gives you everything you could want from a mesh avatar, while giving you everything you have with the stock SL AV...



When I started working with the idea of doing a mesh body, I started at the beginning in Rome. I went through, and tried to overcome each piece that was giving me a headache.
But the more I looked, the less I became convinced until the day I ended up back in Rome seeming having gone round in a big circle in my mesh body journey ending up right back where I started, feeling a little wiser, but a lot more disappointed.

The Sentiment behind mesh bodies is solid, and as a designer, I really can make it look good.
But commercially and logistically, considering what customers will loose, the time it will take me, and the looming threat that all the work I do could be made redundant overnight I have to say, I wont go near mesh bodies from a commercial perspective, either my own design, or for others.

But I will do mesh bodies. The work wasn’t a total waste. I will be releasing, based off this work some replacement mesh avatars, but not in the way that you would think. The ones I will be doing will be unique mesh bodies in Macro and Micro designs. They also will strictly be stand alone products. Not a seamless integration with Violet Studios other products. Simply put, while stock replacement avatars are flawed, you cant do a 1 foot tall or 100 feet tall avatar based off the standard SL AV, and that is enough of a benefit to make mesh bodies practical. Although... the idea of seamless breasts is again out of the window. Any mesh avatar I will be doing will come with regular sized breasts and will be able to use vstrings as frankly they will offer a better shape.

(Recap) Of Mesh and Pink Elephants April 2012

I originally wrote this up a year ago as part of my "Mesh Investigation Project". Needless to say I felt rather robbed of time after spending a few months on Mesh and the results were underwhelming.

______________________________________________

Here at Violet Studios I am always interested in learning new design techniques, and obviously the big one out there at the moment is “Mesh” – the so called super amazing magic bullet that will remake Second Life. To that end, I have spent the last 4 weeks in research and learning mode getting to know this new “Super tool”.

At the outset, it seems there is two kind of mesh – the static “prim” style mesh, and the so called Rigged Mesh which you wear and works with your body.
Handling the static style first, my investigations have proved it to be a really good tool that has surpassed sculpties by light years. I will be doing many new items with mesh on this front and in fact the first generation of these items is already finished and ready for release.

When it comes to Rigged Mesh though. It is in my books perhaps the biggest pink elephant I have seen in my life. Second Life’s key selling point to people is infinite diversity. Thanks to the way the Avatar works, you can configure it how you want with ease – change the shape, the hair, the clothing, the skin, the prim attachments.
Its all easy.

With rigged mesh, you in theory can do the same. But the infinite diversity of the stock avatar is gone. You have to use the skins the mesh designer offers, you have to use the clothes the mesh designer offers, prim attachments don’t work. Its a mess.
So unless you have a 30 feet tall demon then simply forget using mesh to replace your stock avatar.
Will I be doing rigged complete mesh avatars? Short version yes, but I will only be doing a limited number of very special out of the ordinary models. I would love to do something to clean up the many errors you get on the SL AV, but the loss of functionality is too much of a bridge to cross. By that, I don’t mean for me. I mean for you, and I am not one to sell gimmick products.

Obviously another area with amazing possibilities is mesh clothes, however after a long research session looking in to this, and without getting too technical, the whole idea is fundamentally flawed thanks to the way that mesh  has been implemented.
My list of ideas went from infinite to just a handful.  This for me was actually one of the greatest disappointments. I know there is the mesh deformer toolkit in the works, but I am dubious if it will work in a predictable way, but I guess I will cross that bridge when I get there as we are months away from seeing this on the grid. I do find it ironic though that it is a 3rd Party who is designing this and not Linden Labs.
(Edit - I was being overoptimistic there... its now over a year on and the deformer tool kit has not arrived, and Linden Labs actually did their own version of it. Is it coming? At this point I am not holding my breath)

To really sum this up, Rigged mesh is a useful item but thanks to poor implementation its nothing more than a limited use tool. Mesh right now is the unrealised dream which promised a lot, and sadly seem to have become something of a pink elephant.

Over the next year I will be releasing many mesh items, but I do genuinely say this – don’t expect to be blown away by super amazing items. If and when mesh’s various flaws are fixed, who knows what will happen, but right here and now we are talking items that will offer more quality, and give a more natural feel. I think its fair to say after all the hype and rumours of the last few years, if Mesh was going to have transformed Second Life, we would be there already. Fact is, it hasn’t.

Mesh does offer some really nice features and I am pleased its in the toolbox for me but right now, from a commercial perspective, the Rigged Mesh system is a lost opportunity.

Clears throat, gets on the box and .....

You may not know this, but amongst friends and fellow builders I have gained something of a reputation for my overly logical and at times amusing rants in world.

My rants can cover a whole host of subjects, but generally they are focused on Second Life issues and technologies that are getting my back up. I will occasionally go off topic though.

Joking and ranting aside, this blog is also designed as a stand point for ongoing technical and theory issues. Issues like Mesh, Rigged Mesh, Viewer issues, Market Place problems, etc.

So, if you want to sit back, grab a coffee, enjoy watching the loony attempting to take over the asylum with nothing more than logic and a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits.

_________________________________________

Okay... I suppose if you are going to be reading these blogs, maybe you need to know a little more about the person behind Hemi.

It ain't pretty.

It does surprise people sometimes that 4 years ago I knew nothing about building in 3D, or Second Life.
Its still a standing joke that Second Life baffled me and for near enough 2 months I spent on SL was sitting in a bar on the Dublin Sims, scratching my head over what SL was, and what the point of it was. The reason I was sitting in the bar was, I didnt really know that there was a world full of unique sims outside of there...
Yeah... I was that clueless but following the Durr moment I had realising what SL was about, its fair to say I am a very quick study.

So... if I am not a 3D designer, what am I?
From an early age you couldnt keep a pencil out of my hand. Constantly sketching, doodling, and teaching myself how to draw.
Oddly though, at University I did my degree in Biochemistry, Genetics and Human Anatomy although there was method in my morbid madness, as during my degree course, I got a job working in Comic Books as a junior freelance artist.
Crap thing though was it was a short lived career as the well known company I was working for went bust.
From there, a few friends at University introduced me to the weird and whacky world of the internet back when 99% of the population had no clue what WWW meant.

I set up my own design firm a year later, and established one of the UK's oldest and long standing new media design houses which to this day is still out there with over 17 years in business now and mutiple awards behind it.
During that time my work has been varied, ranging from GUI and character design work in Video games, large multinational websites and loads more. I also teach as well, being a certified trainer in multiple packages. 3D work was more of a hobby. I had Poser and at the time 3D Studio Max but while I loved tinkering with things, it never really went beyond that.

I find nothing more satisfying that learning new things though, and SL presented me with an almost limitless possibility for learning... the rest is history.
But, the fact remains, everything I have learnt about 3D work, has been learnt off my own back. Self Taught so to speak and I had little previous experience.

Told you it wasnt pretty.

Anyhow... enjoy the rants and see you in the next posting