Samantha Poindexter

Saffia Widdershins interviewed Qarl about the deformer at SL9B yesterday, and Inara Pey has a four-page transcript.

In particular, I think these bits are relevant to questions people have asked recently on SLU:

__________________
Philip 3:16
For Rosedale so loved the grid, that he rezzed his only begotten Avatar, that whosoever believeth in him shall not crash, but have eternal Second Life.

Jack Abraham

This. This is why I've been waiting for it. Avatar 2.0 is deformable mesh. The petites are already proving the concept can work.

Aribeth Zelin

Actually, being able to make such mods to avies as well as their clothes is exactly what I'm waiting for >.>

__________________
Faerycat Designs In World -Marketplace 1- Marketplace 2

Darien Caldwell

I just found out Metareality had another Interview with Qarl. I will endeavor to glean the important stuff and post here.

__________________
[H]arsh Styles

Darien Caldwell

Of note, Oz Released a new Project Viewer on August 31st, with no explanation.

http://automated-builds-secondlife-c...215/index.html

From the Metareality Podcast on Sept 14th:
Qarl says his part of the work is "Almost nearly done", and that he has "addressed all of Linden Lab's concerns".
He says most of the issues he's seeing reported to the JIRA he believes are "user error" or "expectation error".

The Latest version of the deformer has support for encoding the base shape parameters into the mesh. (big news).
However, He has not created a GUI interface for that, and is expecting TPV developers to do that work.

What that means is, you can create your deformer mesh against any base shape, as the base shape is stored in with the mesh.

So, What is holding this up then?
I guess it's LL and Oz's insistence he doesn't have enough meshes for testing, and the lack of a proper GUI for defining the Base Shape.

Sooo, I guess Qarl is kind of throwing the onus on LL and TPV devs at this point. All up to them now.

Penny Patton

Well, maybe Linden Lab should turn to their internal art department for testing content in that case!

Surely you must have an art department with at least one or two artists capable of handling that, right? How else could you internally test things like critically important features and tools before releasing them to the masses?

Well, it was kinda up to them to deliver working tools from the start. Honestly, they should be bending over backwards to thank all of the community members who paid Qarl to patch up their horrendous mistake.

__________________
The Digital Pasture - SL from a cow's point of view. When the cow is also a designer.

Darien Caldwell

I created a video to test out the latest deformer, using a full body mesh based off the default avatar with LL's default weighting. This configuration should give 100% matching deformation on a per vertex basis.

I made a video of all of the tests (Be sure to watch fullscreen and at high quality for best experience):


Important observations are:

1) Torso Muscles do not deform correctly, getting very bad as they get smaller than 50, and halting any deformation as they go above 50. This is due to a very, very longstanding bug with the avatar appearance system, documented here:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-28308

2) The "Breast Size" slider doesn't seem to exactly follow the viewer avatar's breast morph. The Deformed mesh is quite a bit smaller than the viewer avatar breast at '100'. I'm not sure if this is a bug, or an attempt to 'improve' the quality of the deformation (as that area has problems with deformations due to the poor quality of the morph target).

3) The hands and face of the mesh no longer seem to deform along with the Viewer Avatar. I am wondering if this is due to the fact I deleted the underlying weighting for those areas. I know for sure i've seen the hands move in sync in the past. So this bears further investigation.

Everything else seems pretty nice.

Saint Pipra of Peevington

Thanks for the video. And arg. I'm going to be really, REALLY disappointed if the breast size thing isn't a bug. I would rather have suboptimal deformations of clothing than suboptimal deformations of my body... that's my whole issue with the current iteration of mesh clothes in the first place. :/

Kara Spengler

That is good news as I shuddered at the idea of clothing designers including the parameters in their products. I tend to build outfits from all over: different designers, some female items, some male items. I was even wearing a jacket yesterday made up with bits from 3 or 4 different stores (a lot of sculpties then but they would be mesh now). I am sure none of them would agree on what shape I 'should' have. Not to mention that it would be chaos about those mesh items people have in inventories from designers that leave before the deformer finally arrives.



Yow!

I hope those are fixed! My preferred shape is nowhere NEAR what is expected. Like having the breast slider set to 0 on a female shape. Or all the deformations (face and muscles) I need when using my cougar avatar.

__________________

Nephilaine Protagonist

Thank you for making that video Darien, thats really helpful. Pity about the torso muscles- that is one that has to be worked out before the deformer can really be useful. :/ Torso muscle varies so much from av to av.

__________________

Adeon Writer

It's good that the deformer trips over the >50 torso muscle slider bug, because then it may just finally actually get it fixed in the process.

__________________
My mobile client puts the thread title at the top of my posts. I don't do it on purpose.

Maggiedoll Alter

Is the base shape something that has to be actually specified on upload, or is it something that could be included in the .dae file?

Darien Caldwell

I think trying to include it in the .dae would be adding a lot of unnecessary complexity. No 3D programs currently do that, so it would require custom plugins for every app.

It's far simpler to specify the XML shape file you used at the time of upload, there's already a myriad of programs to generate/read those, and of course the viewer itself can generate an XML from any shape.

The way I would expect the UI to be is how it is now, but with a 3rd radio button: [ ] Default Male [ ] Default Female [ ]Other (specify)

Penny Patton

I wish I still had that kind of optimism with regards to SL. LL seems perfectly happy to let critical issues go unfixed, no matter how much they stack up.

Kara Spengler

Of course, you have the problem in trying to specify parameters that you may not know the parameters used on your shape. Like if you purchased it and it was no-mod and/or no-copy.

Samantha Poindexter

Meanwhile, over on the JIRA, Qarl has confirmed that this is, indeed, a bug. So that much is good, or at least beats the alternative.

Saint Pipra of Peevington

Hurrah! Thank you for sharing that, too.

Kara Spengler

Any idea when this is coming? I can not stand when a clothing store converts to mesh now because I know nothing will fit me (female stuff assumes the wrong shape and the smallest male equivalents are ludicrously big).

Darien Caldwell

So Today the latest build of the deformer project was posted to the JIRA:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/S...comment-350678

Thist latest contains the code I wrote for supporting custom base shapes for the deformation. You can still use Default Male, or Default Female, but now have the option to specify your archetype.xml file for whatever shape you built against.

This code needs testing. There is already a potential issue with this and Qarl's code that has come to light. I discuss it in the lengthy comment here:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/S...comment-349573

Basically, as Qarl's code stands, bone lenghts are not take into account when creating the base shape to deform against. This was fine when only the 'standard shape' was being used. As all bones were at their defaults. But now that isn't necessarily the case.

It would be good to see some use-cases that explore this problem to see how much of an issue it is.

As I mentioned in the JIRA post, a potential workaround would be to 'normalize' the bone lenghts of your shape when designing against a particular shape. By normalize, i mean set the bone-specific sliders to their neutral defaults (these are listed in the comment). Then in-world the already-present bone deforming would take effect when worn.

In the meantime, I'll keep working with Oz to see what possible courses of action we can take to alleviate this issue.

Da5id Weatherwax

It's no big deal to say "bones at default lengths" is a requirement for the base shape. Possibly scan the specified xml file on open and flag an error if they are not the default lengths? In a future iteration you could always add the ability to take the lengths into account and remove that sanity check but it looks to me like the fastest route to release would be to explicitly declare a base shape with stretched or moved bones invalid and trap it so one cannot be used by mistake.

Argent Stonecutter

If you can't have stretched or moved bones how will you do petites and animals?

__________________
Argent Stonecutter -- Skyhook Station -- Coonspiracy Store

"And now I'm going to show you something really cool."


The previous is a cybernetic datum published - in direct contravention of DoD Regulation #229RR3X3 - as being conducive to the physical, psychological and/or social well-being of the population.

Darien Caldwell

I think anything with moved joints has always been beyond the scope. but it would be good for someone making petite stuff to try. Maybe i'm wrong.

As far as 'not having stretched bones', you can. Just you have to do that stretching in-world with the sliders, not during creation. This isn't set though, as I said we are exploring other options.

BTW, the old Character->Character Tests->Appearance to XML" menu option has been moved in the deformer viewer. For now (pending approval), it's under Advanced->Export appearance as XML.

Aki Shichiroji

As far as I can tell, based on an unreleased human-sized garment i uploaded while wearing an avatar with bone offsets, the garment will deform based on the worn base shape shape, rather than the bone offsets & visual shape of the non-standard avatar being worn. Basically the clothing reacts similarly to existing non-deformer mesh clothing uploaded with no bone offsets; it looks crunched down. The only difference is adjusting non-bone-length-related sliders does deform the mesh. You'll see the belly enlarging if you change the belly on your system shape, for instance. Or love handles, musculature, etc.

I only started playing around with this tonight, but bone offset issues aside, i don't see a lot of clipping or abnormal movement of verts so far. It'll be interesting to see how this develops.

Siggy

I thought this thing was for Second Life......

__________________
And as it was in the beginning, so too shall it be in the end. That bullshit is bullshit, it just goes by different names.

Kara Spengler

Hey!

That is one of my HUGE gripes about existing 'clothing' that is out there and probably my biggest hope for the deformer. I keep that slider set really low in order to have a more androgynous avatar.