Chomping at the bit

In early November, I ended up having a nice lunch of my words when Linden Labs in a shock move announced their "fitted mesh" project. Seriously - Fitted Mesh. I liked Liquid Mesh better, but Spiffing Mesh would be just as good. Fitted sounds soooo dull.

November and December have now been and gone, and I have been waiting with baited breath for further news on this project.
From an official stand point, in the usual way Linden Labs works, their last news was the initial announcement (helpful as always), so you are forced to dig through the official JIRA on the project to get any information.
The first disappointment, considering the vast majority of designers in SL use Blender, is that for the first two months of testing, Linden Labs didnt release either a DAE or Blender version of their new skeleton to test with so only people with other supported packages could really test.
You could of course get a copy of the blender file from good and wise people who have been kind enough to create a version but as always Linden Labs utter contempt for its userbase really should be addressed.

RTFM...
Those that arnt familiar with that term it means Read The F***ing Manual and this is the second area that really should be addressed by Linden Labs.
On the Wiki pages for SL, you can find lots of useful information... nah... you cant. Its effectively a "here it is, sod off and do it yourself".
Any information that is often on the wiki comes from users, with very little technical details actually being posted by Linden Labs.

With Fitted Mesh though, it seems even the wise and the good are struggling with it, as am I. Having downloaded the official LL's file, I was confused by the fact, and after reading other people research, that the main skeleton didnt have any bone weights on the included mesh.
From the dozen or so resources I had found, everyone seemed to be convinced that Fitted Mesh was going to cause a massive headache. I will try to explain.
According to what we know, 1 face can hold 4 weights. Most of the time on the SL body, thats not a problem however you get to a cross over point on multiple areas, you can get 3 weights. Shoulders / Chest / Upper arms are one such zone.
With Fitted Mesh, you are utilising the second skeleton on the avatar - the collision skeleton.
And from everything I had read so far, this is an additional to the SL skeleton, hence you double your weights up. Fine if an area has 2 weights, as doubling up, means 4. But in those cross over zones, you end up with 6 which... well, it doesnt work.

Every article I have read so far agrees with that which brings me back to RTFM.

Having downloaded the official blender file, I found a strange issue. The collision skeleton was fully weighted on the mesh, but, the primary skeleton which we have used to rig with since mesh arrived... that wasnt weighted at all.
What is odd though, is even without those weights, you run the skeleton through a series of poses, it behaves 100% as it should do. Move the primary skeleton leg, the leg moves without issue and this got me questioning things. After all it did seem rather silly for Linden Labs to release technology that is flawed - they could have done that years ago!
Hence I went back to my research, trying to find out more information... as usual, the Wiki was a waste of time nothing more than the usual here it is, sod off.
Everything I read, was still arguing the same points about double weighting with some people complaining bitterly about how painful the process was.
Until I scrolled further down to find one person making a well balanced comment on one posting, saying what I was trying to confirm.
Fitted Mesh uses Collision skeleton weights only, as they are interconnected to the main skeleton. As long as the vertice groups use the skeleton, everything else is fine.
This was a revalation only backed up by bitter realisation that this is once again a case where Linden Labs, in 3 or 4 paragraphs, could have told us this.
And yet they are simply giving us the "thingamabobby" tool, and we are having to learn what it does ourselves through experimentation and then end up ranting about it on the internet.

However... even I cant confirm this is the case. Why? I haven't tested it yet as I have two issues.
1/ Until this is in RC beta, I wont spend time on it as things can and often do change at the drop of a hat, and I have other projects to get on with.
2/ I wont touch the test Viewer... I already have enough issues using viewer 3, without adding another migrane to it.

I may however do a classic Liquid mesh test to see if that works - by that, I mean strip out the extra weight groups added to the Fitted Mesh project and see what happens - I will addendum this with what I find out.

I just wish Linden Labs would do two things though. Hurry up... and please, for the love of god, put up some more detailed information on how things work.

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Addendum

First time I read up on this subject, I had a very specific reaction to how it works... I will come to that in a while.

Short version as this has been going now for near enough 5 hours in actual testing mode.
All I seem to be able to get Liquid mesh to do, is explode really.
I started off trying to make a set of prototype boots work... failed. They started off as shrunken sticks, and the more I tested playing with weights and multiple weights, it just got worse.
I thought it was me being daft to be honest...
Downloaded the "project viewer"... that didnt work.
Reweighted it all... that didnt work...
Thought it may have been a version issue (I use blender 2.49... oh hush... I am used to it)... 2.66 didnt make any difference
I then... in desparation, tried to upload the SL out of the box rigged model to test with.

That didnt work... so right now, all I have is a migrane and I am no closer to understand what or how fitted rigged mesh works.

Hence... my initital reaction to this was...