Being a perfectionist on SL is hard work

When I first joined SL it was like a giant creative playground for me and using the limited technology available, I am pleased to say I did some pretty amazing things.

However during the time I had many friends say to me that Linden Labs were ruining SL.

I never really understood what they mean but today I kind of get what they mean.

Mesh behaving badly part 2

I am quite stubborn when it comes to things, and even though I effectively went in a circle in my last post, I didn’t give up, working on new theories to see if I could get rigged mesh to behave itself.

After lots of brain storming, some inspired ideas and thinking outside of the box I carried on testing all sorts of weird and wonderful  methods.

The result though, as usual, was crap.

Experiment  one was extending the mesh upwards to include part of the upper body.

The result was no change. I thought that just using the lower body had created a cut off angle for shading – an absolute cliff to fall off. Sadly though, it wasn’t that.

I then realised while local lighting was causing issues, it could also solve them too. So I built a body light system and brilliant part... it worked. Right up to the moment you put ALM on and the world washed out in an over exposed flash of brilliance.

Finally. I thought Face alignment issues could be the root cause. One thing I had spotted was the tummy seam wasn’t causing problems. However after straightening out , smoothing and realigning the stomach and back joints to be equal in angle, the test again proved pointless – the seam was sticking out like a store thumb.

My aim here was to find a “fool” way to make the texture seamlessly blend that would work no matter who was looking at you and available from Mid Graphics setting upwards.

The result is its possible. However its flawed in sooo many bad way that its not practical.

The fact of the matter is, Rigged mesh does not behave like the avatar body with Windlight. And that creates the tone differences.

No matter how good your repertoire of tricks is, the result is, fail.

The only way this can be solved is to make rigged mesh behave in the same way the avatars body does.

However, as many mesh creators know, this issue isn’t the only problem with rigged mesh.

Soft deformers not working, Liquid Mesh still in limbo, LL’s hinting that they are again working on some kind of soft deformer project.

Add that to the huge issues with texturing, clothing, appearance, etc etc and you get back to a conclusion I reached in late 2011.

Rigged mesh is effectively useless. Its not fit for purpose. Its bugged, half built and doesn’t do what it should have done from the start. And while designers are still sitting here waiting for something innovative to pop up to the solve the problems, its not happening. In fact in the last 2 years, I have not seen one single improvement or change to production mesh for rigging.

Static Mesh, as I concluded before, is fit for purpose.

Rigged Mesh though is not fit for purpose, its half built and while I am gagging for the day its going to work right, its slowly dawning on me that its not going to happen.

Which then brings me back to another wonderful invention that is starting to bleed its way in to the viewers at the moment.

The Long awaited Materials system.

Wow... now this has been on the wish list for years. We all wanted it. Advanced Shine, Bump maps etc. Finally we can do surface texturing that actually matches what we see in other 3D packages.

And its here now! Woo hoo!

Okay... no its not. As always there is a catch.

In order to use Materials, you have to have the Advanced Lighting model running.

All due respect, I still get customers today contacting me about their VSX products not displaying the particle functions. In fact usually 2 people a month, and lord knows how many read my explanation over it and fixed it themselves.

What I am hinting at here, is the fact the only reason particles are turned off in a customers viewer, is they are on the Low Graphics setting.

Seriously.

Over the last few years, SL has been advancing at a rapid rate, with new features being added.

However as you add more features, you also add to the graphics load to the point you are at 4 FPS and wondering why you seem to be watching a 1920’s film.

From what I can see, and from straw polls I have done with friends and customers, only 20% roughly of people are running the Advanced Lighting Model.

In fact I don’t run the ALM on my system as it taxes the system too much for building.

So, we are back to the problem here of being “fit for purpose”.

Materials – brilliant.

Commercially viable – is it heck.

A Scenario. I build some sparkly new product using all the features of the Materials system.

I put it up for sale, with marketing showing the effect Materials is having on the sparkly new product.

Customers see it goes “wow” and buys it, unpacks it and wears it.

However when they look at it, and then look at the marketing they don’t look the same.

This then comes back to lots of shouting at me from customers.

“Your product doesn’t look anything like it does on the box.”

Unless they have the ALM running, they see the flat version, which doesn’t look like the ALM Materials version.

It gets worse. Even if they buy it and they do have ALM running, 80% of people on SL are not using ALM, so they don’t look right to them. And thats not a good advertisement for a designer.

So. Materials get a big thumbs up from me. Shame its a waste of time and effort because its not fit for commercial purposes.

This brings me back to what I originally said about my friends comments.

The thing I am mostly seeing from Linden Labs with Second Life is positive. New technologies are the life blood of the system, however with so much happening at such a pace, there really needs to be a someone to do a “sense check”.

I have listed just two examples of excellent technologies that epically fail to deliver on their promise.

Creators are the life blood of Second Life, and without us, SL would be a yet another empty grid, with no products and ultimately nobody to buy them, as people would leave.

Giving creators tools to make better things is great, but if the tools come with condition, bugs, flaws, and omissions that render them useless, then they do nothing for the Second Life.

At the moment, Linden Labs usually sees fit to “inform” the users and designers on SL of new technologies when they have actually finished the job. There seems to be no method from creators to give feedback and input. In fact its fair to say over the last two years the method that we did have to give feedback have been removed or limited.

The sad thing is though, without us being able to give the feedback, the result will always be new technologies that are not fit for purpose. Its great to get them, but without actually knowing how these technologies will be used by creators, then there is no way Linden Labs can make a product that will work.

So all said and done I am back to square one. A meshed up and no place left to go.