Mesh Contemplation

Ever since I start SL, I've been playing with the avatar mesh. I have done some complaining about it, but it's no small task what they've done. I can not imagine having to make a character mesh with both male and female parts that play nice together. Let alone keeping vert numbering straight for morphs. Egads!

I really want to do something about it and I have been in my own personal way. The really big thing being waxing the provided model. Cleaning up the 3d model, turning some edges to get rid of shading errors, and completely welding the UVs.

By simply welding the UVs, the file size of the OBJ file is greatly reduced. I knew it would affect file size, but it was far more than I was expecting. I've also noticed that the mirrored shading around the wrist is fixed by simply welding the UVs, which is something that I have been known to fight with.

There are other little things that I've done for my personal working avatar mesh. I delete the inside of the mouth and sometimes I delete the ears. I've also been known to delete the right arm and right foot because I don't always need them.

Since I did Bend This (TBN), I've been getting a bit more ambitious. The problem that I've been having is that the mesh doesn't always play nice with mesh smoothing algorithms. And I really need smooth renders for TBN. It becomes a choice between blocky normal renders with un-mesh-smoothed default or having awlful pinching in certain areas.

So far the only area that I've seriously tackled is the buttocks of the female default. This being one of the worst pinching areas I have ever seen. I deleted the buttocks and completely rebuilt them. The butt now plays fairly nice with mesh smoothing. I don't know if the UVs are 100%, but they are close enough for texture work (I'll get anal with the exact numbers later).

I now have a female butt that I'm happy with... for texture work... honest.

The other day I tried tackling where the bicep meets the deltoid. I *might* be able to fix it. The real problem that I'm running into is the UV seam. I want to completely rebuild the topology like I did with the butt, but the UV seam is way too close. I'm not sure if I can rebuild enough of the topology for non-pinching without crossing the UV seam. Egads.

If anybody has any ideas for the front of the shoulder, please let me know.

I'm also thinking about working the female sternum a bit. Just a touch of flattening because the hills there seriously show up in normal renders.

Maybe starter loops for the patella, quads, and the calves.

My goal right now is to get a much cleaner mesh for texture work and texture work only. As long as the UV chunks and the seams between them remain largely the same, it should be all good.

Beyond that, I'm not sure how far I'm willing to go.

If you have anything at all, I'm all ears. Anything that you have done to the mesh for your own work that you are willing to share. Anything that you would like to see done with these regards (shading errors, topology).

All ears.

I sorta followed that, but I have a question about what you're doing. Can it be applied to any of the texturing we do for the existing avatar mesh?

Abu, you're definitely my favorite masochist! I meant that in the best possible way, I swear. Your penchant for tedious problem solving is amazing. My hat's off to you.

I've been meaning for a while now to bring the avatar mesh into Mudbox, and do a lot of the same kind of fixing you've been doing. That was actually one of the primary reasons I decided to get Mudbox in the first place. But I haven't yet made the time to get started. When I've got some progress to report, I'll make sure to let you know, and perhaps we can compare notes.

In the mean time, keep up the good work!

Govindira, the short answer is yes. As long as you respect the UV seams, you can do pretty much whatever you want. You will probably have to tweak the inner UVs a bit and watch the interpolation between the tris, but that's really not that much to worry about.

I once heard a story of fellow masochist that morphed the female and male avatars vert-by-vert. Makes my toes curl thinking about it. Heh.

Please take this discussion to the new **adult** grid.

I'm so frustrated. The more I work, the more I want to do.

I'm seriously considering rebuilding the whole thing from scratch, then hacking the LLM and XML files. I've already started the preliminary research and I'm starting to understand how it's all put together. Make some dev tools and do some other stuff by hand. Just compeletly replace the entire package. Then do my best to keep morph targets and UV backwards compatible.

Somebody talk some sense into me.

I got some really bad RL times coming up, so I'm tossing this out there just to show what can be done.

- This is *only* the lower body. Legs, no upper.

- Scale is on the bigger side because I like to work big when dealing with these kinds of things.

- I'm not sure about the rotation.

- Tried to stay faithful to the original UV, but may require a modicum of tweakage.

- For texture purposes only.



Give that a few interations of mesh smoothing and peep the buttocks. Do the same with the provided default and compare.

You can think of this as a proof of concept, or you can think of it as a show of force. We do have the ability to fix a great deal of the avatar ourselves. It's all right there in the character folder. Personally, honestly, I really wasn't sure if this was possible until Zora and Zee did their thing. Because of the morph targets, I've started looking harder and closer, and it is indeed all there.

I am inclined to do it all myself and I have already started the preliminaries. But my RL is gonna suck soon and I will have to focus on other things for a bit. One thing I'm gonna do is sell some stuff that I've made for pocket change (every little bit helps).

User created indeed. Rock the avatar!

*laughs* It really didn't take long at all. I just snapped the verts from the female mesh to the corresponding verts on the male mesh. The whole process took maybe an hour and I'm sure I've made that back many times over not having to prep two different baking setups or constantly hide one mesh and unhide another. But yeah, I hear ya about what a monumental job it would have been to build the original master mesh and all the morph targets. I wouldn't have touched that job for anything.

I really don't have any advice to offer about the shoulder and side of the neck. The mismatch of UV scale along that part of the side seam is so bad there's not much you can do with it. Even if you redo the UVs it'll revert right back to awfulness as soon as you bake it back to the original. I've never bothered to rebuild the av model. I just use meshsmooth and custom UVs and then fix results by hand in Photoshop when I need to.

Chosen, I'd love to know what kind of results you're able to get with Mudbox. I downloaded the demo about two months ago hoping to flesh out some more detailed av models for baking but didn't have much time to play with it before my 30 days were up.

I really want to do this. Not fix the avatar for a better SL experience, but for my own satisfaction. This is what I do. Once I want to do something, I do it. It might take some time, but I'll get there eventually. I'm a pitbull that just won't - can't - let go.

One thing that truly vexes me is the breaking of existing content. We get threads on occassion about this (one very recently). You know, fixing the mirrored arm thing.

As a compromise, I'm thinking of hacking the skirt mesh. This will give me some measure of satisfaction and won't break existing content for skirts. Simple mesh with simple UVs. No big deal.

This is the direction that I will be headed in for awhile.