changing topography of an Avitar

I have been attempting to create Klingon skull ridges in order to use and possably sell them on SL. however the techniques I have used up to this point dont work. Ive tried creating it in prims but when they attach to "head" they dissapear under the scalp. I have tried makeing a shadow tatoo to make the appearance of ridges, this was way to pitiful to look at. Can anyone advise me on how to change the Forhead Topography so I can acomplish this task?
I am also trying to import a Mesh, however I cannot seem to be able to "export" the file into any type I can use in SL, I cant even "export" it into anything useable by Gimp so I can "reexport" it into a TGA file. Help on both these issues is greatly appreciated.

i would use prims on the head the reason
they are inside the skull is where the attachment
point is. what i do is scale the linkset larger
then edit while attached move it out then
scale it smaller again.
as for the importing and exporting "mesh"
you lost me im not sure what you mean
unless its the clothing/skin template?
you can download that from the dowload
section of the webpage.
-LW

Hi Seamus!

I'm afraid that there is no mesh import/export feature in SL. Everything you see, everywhere, has been built from Prims. There is nothing else. (There are a few scripts floating around that will interpret your mesh as prims; but it's all still prims, and objects made with those scripts are so very prim-heavy that they have limited practical use.)

You can Edit prims that are on your Avatar, though, and place them anywhere you want. So go ahead and attach your head ridges to the Skull (or nose, or chin, or anywhere else on the head.) If you can see even a tiny bit, you can right click, choose Edit from the pie menu, and adjust them so you can see them just fine. If you can't, then the enlarging trick mentioned by Lightwave will also work. (Enlarge them before Wearing them, or just attach a long prim, to use as a handle to click on; anything so you can right click on some part of the linked object.)

Be aware, though, that most hair also uses the various attachment points on the head; so it's possible that the ridges will conflict with someone's Hair. Unless you are making Klingon Hair, too; then you can just assign the points so that they don't conflict.

Also, to the best of my knowledge, the GIMP doesn't do 3D. Does it?

Hope this helps!

Hi Seamus. Welcome to SL.

As others have stated, SL does not import external 3D meshes. Everything you see inworld was built inworld, including all avatars. That in no way means you can't make Klingons though. I've done plenty. Here's an old pic of two I did a while back (but never quite finished), maybe a year and a half ago. You may recognize the one on the right. (Sorry for the small pic, by the way. It's quite old, and I'm not able to get inworld right now to take any better ones.)



Making convincing character avatars takes a lot of time. There's no way around that. For realstic Klingons it's about 90% good, solid texturing, and 10% slider settings. For other types of characters, it can be the other way around. The face on my Seven of Nine avatar, for example, has pretty minimal texturing and only began to really look like her after 3 continuous hours of tweaking the sliders. (Don't get me started on how long the outfit took. It's been 2 years, and I still don't have it quite how I want it.)



Anyway, back to the Klingons. One additional thing besides just the sliders and the texturing that you might want to play with is the bump_head_base.tga file in your SecondLife\character folder on your hard drive. Repainting that map will change where the highs and lows are on the head. There are advantages and disadvantages in doing this, just so you know. The advantage is you can make your ridges "real" instead of just color-painted onto the flat forehead surface. (I put "real" in quotes since it's arguable whether bump mapping can or should be considered as real as actual geometry. It is just an illusion, afterall.) The disadvantages are that people will need to have avatar bumping turned on in their graphic preferences in order to see it (not everyone does), and that the ridges will be permanent as long as the altered file remains in your character folder. So, if you want to be a human again tomorrow instead of a Klingon, you'll need to change the file back or your human av will have ridges too. I'd only alter the file if you're sure the Klingon will be your permanent av.

For slider settings, obviously you want to go as forehead-heavy as possible to start. After that, it's just a question of what type of face you're going for. For my Worf av, for example, all the settings had to be pretty high. Michael Dorn has a huge face. For someone like Gowron on the other hand, you'd want to go with really minimal settings for most of the face sliders. Gowron, as the leader of the Klingons, the "ultimate klingon" if you will, was modeled by the Trek art directors to be pretty exaggerated, even by alien standards. Robert O'Reilly's facial features, though well defined, are pretty compact and centered, making his eyes and head appear unusualy large by proportion. That allowed the makeup artists to really go nuts and make his Klingon head parts gargantuan. Put all that together and you've got the most believable Klingon in all of Trek. Nothing about this guy says "human in a rubber suit". In any case, once again, making it convincing in SL, even for just a generic nameless Klingon, let alone a specific character, will take many hours of very careful texture work, and a ton of slider tweaking to pull it off well.

What you'll end up with in the end if you do it right is something "pretty good". It won't be anywhere near cinematic quality, but you can do it better than most video games do it. Take something like Elite Force, for example. If you stop and look at their Klingons critically, they're really awful. However, within the context of the game, they are certainly convincing enough for you're brain to go "oh, Klingons". So, do the same for SL. Make your Klingon the best and most convincing it can be within the context of SL, even if it's not the greatest Klingon in the history of 3D modeling in general.

Remember, SL, though not a game, does operate like one in the sense that it's a real time 3D application. Just as characters within games never look as good as their counterparts in the in-game cinematics, characters in SL won't look perfect either. Because you are in control though, you can certainly do it better than most game artists (who often aren't allowed to do things as high quality as they'd like), but again, you must keep in mind that all you can ever really do for SL is a "pretty good" approximation of what you're going for, something that works within the context of SL, not something that's gonna be the be-all-end-all of 3D.

I hope that makes sense. The real trick here is to accept that you must operate within the confines of the system, and to challenge yourself to push the boundaries of the system by making the best possible artwork anyone can within those confines.

Good luck with it. I'd love to see what you come up with when you're done.

Hmm how is this supposed to work? I've edited the bump files, basically kept half of it the same and covered the other half with solid black or white - so that I can see the difference, but I don't see any difference when entering the appearance mode in SL. When can I see the effect of chaging this?

Edit: I do have avatar bump and avatar vertex on, and still see no difference

I've been working on this for a short time as well but with no where near the success that Chosen Few has achieved. Because I use other AVs in SL I wouldn't want to change the bump_head_base.tga file around if I could avoid doing so. I must say I'm impressed enough by the picture that if Chosen Few is selling those AVs and clothing I'd certainly buy one. I would like to see more of not only Klingon but Romulan and other Star Trek races available for SL to allow fans to meet in their particular ST forms.

If you ever succeed at this then let me know. My lLingon has a smooth forhead and I need to be ridge for my mate's pleasure.