Fitted Mesh testing and production & Biting my tongue

Looking back in a week in hell

If you were reading the blog last week, you will have noticed my outspoken and quite upset comments about everyone favourite company.
The issues are now resolved finally and I am back (I hope) to business as usual, however you will have noticed that my comments have disappeared.

I did write up a pretty scathing assessment of the situation last week when it was concluded, and needless to say what I was saying wasnt wrong and was very justified.
However it occurred to me shortly after publishing that final assessment that here was a company that had no issue with denying payments to their customers without warning.
The old saying "Dont bite the hand that feeds you" comes to mind - quite literately.

All I can say is fear got the better of me and that is enough. I will bite my tongue.


Fitted Mesh - moving to the next level.

Having to recover from last week hasnt been easy for me as I did end up so stressed I got physically ill. So, on Saturday I thought I would do some tinkering that ended up getting vastly out of control.

Going back to my earlier work, I took one of my prey boots, and did a quick productionised experiment to see if I could get this to behave, and needless to say, that first experiment came out very well really. The boot looked exactly as it should do in world, textured and operated the same as rigged mesh, but it did work well with the soft deformers too.

So I decided to go to the next stage which was full on shape testing to see where the limits were.
I found out, with boots at least, was there were three problem areas.
The first one seems to be a well known bug over the ankle - the joint seems to misbehave.
The second was the knee angle - this slider only seems to move the leg itself left and right which effectively means knee angle is useless.
The final one is bodyfat. It seems bodyfat uses some odd deformers. The outer leg remain fine, however there is quite a heavy (no pun) deformation on the inner leg that the Collision skeleton doesnt like so you get a clip through overhang.

So first genuine look at Fitted Mesh shows that it cures many of the major issues that were absent in Rigged Mesh however it is still an imperfect system.
However from my understanding of things it never could be perfect.
With the SL avatar, its been set up with deformers. These are physical groups of vertices that are programmed to behave in a certain way. This is a very accurate way of getting things to behave right.
Fitted Mesh though uses the collision skeleton. This actually has zero affect on how the SL avatar does its business on deformers. There is no link between the collision skeleton and the deformers.
The purpose of the collisions skeleton is from my understanding, physics. Take away the avatar, the collision skeletons purpose is to stop you walking through walls or falling through the floor.
That all said, while the body deformers are not directly linked to the collisions skeleton, the sliders that operate the deformers are linked to the collision skeleton.
Its a way of recalculating the mass of the avatar so it can judge if your body size is equal to the that of the body mass on the collision skeleton.

How it does this is almost like spheres of influence. There is a mass balloon inside each collision joint. You go from 50 to 100 on the slider, the balloon inflates.
By rigging the mesh to the collision skeleton, you effectively can inherit the properties of the balloon, so if you are looking at the upper leg, it will inherit the properties of the parent bone, therefore offering the same properties you get on rigged mesh, but will then include the mass balloon too, therefore the sliders will work there too.
However that makes the assumption that the deformers behave in the same way as the balloon does.
For muscles its pretty accurate, but for bodyfat, its not as the deformers alter themselves in a different way.

There... my probably inaccurate overview of Fitted mesh and hopefully showing that while a vast improvement, the system is still imperfect.

I did say though my tinkering as always got out of control.
The reason for that is, I now have a full set of production model Prey boots in world. Literately the whole line and the extras have been built, rigged and fully assembled.
The only issue that really affected the boots would have been the ankle joint, however Prey has even on rigged mesh, had a fixed ankle so that instantly cures the ankle as there isnt one.
At the moment, I am testing them but in a lovely way, I could release these tomorrow without even having to wait for the official Fitted Mesh release.
Why?
Well, this is the secondary quirk of Fitted Mesh. While the Fitted Mesh project is still in beta, the collision skeleton isnt new. In fact its always been there right from the start.
Prey boots dont use any of the new bones being introduced in the Fitted Mesh project, therefore, I am wearing the boots right now using an older viewer without fitted mesh and they look, behave and work perfectly.

I have found a few little bugs I didnt spot, which will require some minor reworking, but overall, I am very happy with how these have turned out. With some in world beta testing time, I think by the weekend I could have the Version 4 Prey boots in store and released.

Sadly though I will have to wait to do more work as above the thight, you will need to have the full fitted mesh viewer enabled and how long thats going to take is a different story.