"Second Layer" of Attatchments

Many of us have Furries for Avatars, and many furry forms have attatchments for hands and legs/feet (paws), hair, face, etc. Unfortunately, these attatchments take up the only spots available (paws on hands, for example). It would be nice that we could be able to attatch objects on attatchments (wear items on worn items). Like armor and weapons.

To be able to hold a sword with a paw easily without:
a) copying the paw (if allowed!) and
b) copying the other object (if allowed!) and
c) editing/unlinking/adjusting/relinking both things together as one attatchment, then
d) swapping original paw with new paw-with-object.

The function could be called "Wear with.." or something to that effect.

hmm.. i think i'm kinda of rambling.. but i hope i got the idea accross fairly coherently, hehe

No no, you weren’t rambling… it’s a valid point, and not only for the furry’s and ppl who wear armor or other complete Avie costumes. Even us average avatars get fed up with the lack of attachment points…. Nothing like having to attach something to your jaw so that it’s “kinda” around your neck… but just not quite…. There is a lack of good points of attachment. I would love to see something done to fix this lil inconvenience. Only thing I dread seeing if they do add more….. is double the amount of bling that ppl seem to wear now My eyes… I can’t see from the glittering!!

... or just plain over-bling

Then in Graphics or Advanced Graphics (wherever more appropriate) there should be a Bling Level underneath Avatar Detail from Off to Maximum Bling where the slider would maybe adjust the glitter length and/or shining brightness (it'd probably be best if it adjusted both at the same time in a balanced way).

Add a "palm" attach point.

That might work for hands/paws, but what about other points like head, feet etc. You'd need to almost double the attatchment points if you want, say, paws with objects, two necklaces, even an extra layer of clothing like a mage's robe, or hat on a head of special hairstyle (or furstyle). As "Wear" will directly attatch to the last point it was put or a default point (Right Hand tends to be a default point for many things).. "Wear with.." would consolidate all 'doubled body points' and put the object *with* the currently worn attatchment rather than replacing it, thus creating the 'second layer.'

You would just replace the 'first layer' attatchment again using "Wear.." as normal, and replace the 'second layer' attatchment with "Wear with.."

Of course for the really detailed, you could add more body points for individual fingers, toes, (for rings?), tailbone (to especially attatch tails), Left Gluteus and Right Gluteus (Buttcheeks! for 'personal' tattoos?, or multiple tails on odd/mythical creatures?, arrow shafts for comic relief?)

Therein may arise the problem of the over-bling from some people. That would be compensated with a Bling Display Slider (from Off to Maximum), for the viewing agents to control how much they will allow a mega-blinged avatar to blind them. B)

I'm fairly new, so I don't know if this is a controversal topic or not.

Whats wrong with the idea of having full control over the avatar? The model and the texture.

Or am I missing an important furry meme that it has to be a costume? =)

ROFLMAO - Wow, I walked into an area the other day and saw some people that had just too much bling. I mean it was just waaaaaay too much bling. If I had that slider I could of kept them from embarassing themselves

Most of the higher-quality furry avatars are a careful balancing act of linked prim sets and custom textures. A designer who spent hours and hours trying to design and texture a realistic muzzle on their fox avatar, for example, probably would not want someone parading around with a distorted copy, where the end-user botched an attempt at modifying it. Others would see it, and assume the original artist did sloppy work.

Some avatar vendors do offer modifyable versions of their avatars, as do some clothing vendors who usually sell no-mod items. One usually pays a higher price for the option to customize.

The default LL Avatar form can only be customized just so far. To get a furry, or to create some clothing items like armor, you have to sculpt collections of prims and tack them on to a modified avatar base.

Getting back to the topic at paw, I fully agree. Some of the full-prim avatars, be they furries or robots or whatever, use just about every attachment point available. I have a really cute chibi-fox avatar. But in that form I can't wear any jewelry or carry any item, because the paws, forearms, head, face, neck, feet... etc. are all 'in use'.

I would hate to see it mis-used for excessive bling, but a few more points to attach to would be welcome indeed.

I think the ideal solution would be to simply allow multiple attachments per point, and have a hard limit on the total number of attachments (e.g 20).

To reduce confusion, the dialogues would be "Add to" to add an attachment, and Replace, which allows you to replace an object on an attachment point. My first thought for replace was to have only the occupied points in the menu, but it might be easier just to have them all, if there is nothing to replace then just add the item with no complaints.

Really you don't actually wear that many attachments, at least I don't, most of my attachments are a part of my avvy, or are held.

I think HUD points should remain 1 item only though.

You know, perhaps the problem is the avatar. SL avatars are basically human-centric and it is tough to do non-human avatars. The solution could be the introduction of the non-human avatar. The difference is that the avatar has sliders that go far beyond human normal and the shapes of the various body parts can be changed into different shapes like prims. For example you want a robot hand you can change the fingers into cubes or a paw can use balls maybe. I like the way Poser does it by having morph targets and sliders that allow you to make furry faces, fangs, claws etc.

Bling is nothing more than particles so if you're worried about seeing too many particles you can always turn down the number of particles you see...

I do however love the idea of more attachement points!

Well, that would suck for me as one of my attatchments is called Aurora Wings which is also particles.. it's a beautiful attatchment, it's set to turn on only when in flying mode..

Particles only affect the client so if I turn down the particles on my machine it only affects me. Particles are not particularly lag inducing unles you are on a marginal machine so bling isn't itself a major problem. What is usually the culprit is the person overblinged is wearing "hoochie" hair made of countless twisted toruses and jewelry made with hundreds of prims. I came across a hairdoo that actually caused my machine to freeze up when I tried to look at it. I have a high performance duel core computer and video card and I was surprised as heck.

O^O

*Looks left, then right, while twisting a curly ringlet with one finger*

Er... Not me, I hope? (Doubt it, as we have never to my knowledge met in SL).

Hmmm. That makes me seriously wonder about the effect of some of my prettier hairstyles that I have purchased. I know they are made of a lot of prims... I flew into a laggy sandbox once, and someone commented that 'something had suddenly increased lag'. Concerned, I tried removing my hair, and on that occasion, it didn't seem to be the culprit. At least, when I asked, no one said it helped, and the sim remained laggy after I removed the hair. Besides, they said in that case it was something that was repeating regularly, on the hour, like some sort of scripted scanner on a timer. (And no, it wasn't the server backup sweeps.)

Still, you gotta wonder how much strain a head full of pretty prim hair could put on a system. Or other things that attach to an avatar, but use lots of prims. What's the best way to check that?

No, not you at all but a friend who actually makes hair herself. She does not make hair using a lot of twisted toruses herself but she had recently bought one that was full of them and when she came over to my land and I tried to look at her hair, my framerate dropped from 35 fps to 1fps. She changed her hair to one of her styles and everything returned to normal. She commented that one of her customers had mentioned that they loved her hair because it was on of the few that didn't lag her badly. Seems there may be some truth to that cuz it ground my superwhamadyne computer to a halt like a Commodore 64 trying to run Doom3.

One way to check is go into an empty sim and detach everything. Note your framerates before and after. Put you items back on and look closely at it with the camera and if you see a significant drop then you know you might have a problem. Try again in a semi crowded sim and see if it causes a significant drop as well.

Thanks. I just ask because two of my three favorite hairstyles are curly prim hair, and the third, by the same vendor, is straight but also has a fair number of prims in it. But all three hairstyles are from a pretty major Creator in SL, and I've never heard anyone complain about that maker's hair.

I'll check that the next time I get in-world, both in my standard furry forms and as a Human (which I rarely use). Unfortunately, my frame rate usually sucks, because I have a system that only barely has enough power in the video card area to run SL in the first place. Then again, I don't seem to notice much difference when I change forms, and some of my furry forms don't bother with extra hair at all. I would imagine if it was particularly an issue, it would drag me to a complete stand-still.

A sizable amount of furry heads are 100+ prims, so hair that's hovering around that total isn't really an issue to most of the people I know. I don't really notice a difference between wearing and not wearing my head for instance, and it's 117 prims (head + hair). But on this topic of extra attachments in the same spot, I WOULD like to have my hair attached to my skull, rather than my mouth. >.>;

Perhaps there should be an option "on wear" or "on attach to" to auto-link objects that are assigned to the same spot into a temporary object that we can't transfer unless we're the creator of both objects.



I believe what Xavier was getting at with the full control over the avatar deal, was why can't we just upload whatever kind of avatar we happen to create outside of SL. I would love this, utterly. I could use a real 3d graphics program to make a more realistic avatar than prims allow (the possibilities with CSG alone... x.x ). But there-in lies the problem, when is too much detail too much? Too many polygons and an avatar would be a lag-fest in its own right (forget attachments and bling). If they limited the detail to something reasonable (600ish polygons?) there's still other issues like where do attachment points go? What happens to all the animations that are based on a human skeletal structure? What happens if someone makes a better human skeletal structure with fine motor control (I can see it now, all the n00bs running around giving the one finger salute >.>; )?

The upsides are obvious. We can finally make a properly articulated mermaid avatar, or dragon avatar (no offense to Daryth Kennedy, they are great dragons), or add a tail for furry avatars (amongst other things that require detail (faces people! Get your minds out of the gutter!)). But the immediate downside is the sheer logistics of putting it into action. After that's out of the way you have to deal with things like obsolete equipment, skins, and animations. And that's why we probably won't ever get custom avatars.



Addendum: To my suggestion to auto-link objects:
I'd also like it if there was a means of saving the positioning of an object when you change its attachment point. For instance, I recently unlinked my hair from my head so I could alter my hair style (and also alter my hair itself so I could wear hats without prims sticking out of the top of it), but I would have liked to reattach my hair to another spot on my head without having to reposition it to look like it did. Just take it off my skull attach point, mount it on my... ear we'll say, and it looks exactly the same. This would help in the case that auto-linking isn't feasable because I gave my friend a pair of shades today which were nose mounted, but so was his head.

With the exception of some species (Cetaceans [whales], Pinnipeds [seals/sea lions], Insects, Spiders, etc.) most animals used for avatars have the same basic symmetrical body design as a human.

A basic head (with a pair of ears, a pair of eyes, a nose, a mouth) mounted on a spine, a pair of forelimbs (or a quad of forelimbs for anthropomorph birds, dragons, demons, and angels, etc. to include wings) , a pair of hindlimbs, a tail (yes, even humans have a tail.. it's a short stub at the base of the spine called the 'tailbone' or the coccyx; though a true tail is 'kinda like an extention of the spine'). Therefore, it shouldn't be too much of a problem to use a basic human template to anthropomorph into custom avatars. All attatchment and pose/animation points would remain the same, just be proportionately different.

Think of DaVinci's famous picture of a man standing inside the five-pointed star. Now visually replace that man with nearly any mammal or bird or mythical creature, and you see what i mean. Heck, with enough creativity, the above noted exceptions could fit in anyway.

i am not agains adding more attachment points, i am at the contrary totally agains increasing the number of attachment you can wear simultaneously, it will just make the graphic lag problem deeper

i dont want to critic hair designers and avatar makers, but most should follow a crash course on "making 3D aimed for real time rendering" aka making models for games.

For example these haircuts made of tousand toriii twisted, just a head having as many polygons as the first level of doom 3 , monsters included ...

A lot of it has to do with the type of prim as well, tortured toruses (there's a limerick there somewhere) seem to take a large amount of client-side processor to render. I made the mistake of making a lion mane with a large number of toruses (about 80 or so) and while my megalotron machine was able to handle it just fine, I noticed a large number of people suddenly disappearing along with screams of lagging pain in the area where I was at (and that was without being attached to the AV). I've also noticed that friends of mine who have those beautifully curly locks also tend to be more succeptible to lag. Tack on a large amount of bling and an animation overrider with a large number high bandwith poses and you're destined for trouble. So in short, I don't think being able to add additional attachments will pose a problem since the problems are already there, and the great balls of glitter can't get much worse as it is.