Rounded Corners - Wouldn't it be lovely ?

I feel your pain, Piggie.

I have visions of things that could be done to the avatar and animation system that would *really* improve the quality of animations in SL. For example, being able to constrain the hand of one avatar to be placed on the shoulder of another avatar.

However, when this kind of thing is implemented, I'll be out of the animation business, because the tools required will be above my patience to bother with. It'll take really committed folks to do them. And, well, I'm pretty committed: I even wrote my own postprocessors to apply convolution filters to bvh files to make them look less robotic, and add repetitive motions like breathing. But, I know I won't be interested in the level of detail that will be required when animating steps up to the next level.

Note that I said "when", not "if". It may not happen in SL, but it will happen. It's just a matter of time.

And the same is true for other kinds of content. New technologies will come along, and many of them will require far more patience, technical ability, and attention to detail than are currently required to make cool stuff in SL. I'll mourn the passing, but I'll also salute the new content.

And I'll sit around with my cronies and say "Remember back when we used to make all that cool stuff? Like that freeblesnapper -- wow, that was the bee's knees, wasn't it? If Prims-R-Us only made stuff like that today!" ... while we sit there actually smelling the coffee, seeing the reflections off the surface, and seeing the swirls of cream as we drop it in, then reaching out to grasp the cup and taking it to our lips and drinking ... actually TO our lips ...

YES, cries the average, barely-skilled resident!

All that means is that if meshes are added, they should be an additional object type (like sculpties).

I can't make sculpties. I could probably learn, but I have no plans to -- life's too short. Regardless, I <3 sculpties!

Sure, in-world tools to edit meshes and/or sculpties would be great. Practical? Idunno -- I think it might be overloading the SL client a bit.

Actually, bevel generally implies a straight cut. I thought that "chamfer" included rounded cuts, but it appears I was wrong.

I think that "rounded corners" is the best term here, unless someone can find a better one.

You think? Something like that would have to be done in runtime, outside the context of the animation itself... probably with an LSL script of a few lines long, no more complex than a poseball script. In fact it'd probably be a slightly tweaked poseball-type script. Nothing near as complex as Franimation or ZHAO.

And if they do that, and nobody else makes a free open source notecard-configurable script for it, I'll do that.

Can you explain what you are doing then? I thought you were describing using sections of the same sculptie to make different parts which were switched on and off by the alpha channel of the texture. That would give a total mesh size for all the frames of 1024 faces. With the method I described the total mesh for the 16 frames is 4096 faces.

Where are you getting the extra faces from? Both are subsetting a complete sculpt map, in pretty much the same way. Or are you assuming that as well as being able to turn parts of the sculpt map on and off you're ALSO using a higher resolution underlying sculpt map? That seems to be cheating to me.

Perhaps it would be good to pull ourselves together a bit here, and hopefully all agree on a few points.

I'll list a few things "I Think" was can all agree on.

1: We'd like SL to look better (even though it looks pretty good now)

2: We'd all like new options/objects/technologies that made it look better.

3: We'd like any new additions to be able to be used by the widest number of people to allow SL to carry on being "constructed" by the masses for the masses. And not seperate into the few who make the "nice/quality" content and the other 95% who (for whatever reasons, be they financial or time or ability) can't.

Can we at least agree on those 3 points?

As much as it saddens me to think so, I am of course aware (and I think we'd be foolish to think otherwise) that there will probably be a handfull of highly skilled and talented creators out there who love things being difficult and would be happy for things to be even more difficult for the average unskilled user to handle, to maintain their money making edge in the world. After all, like in the real world, if everyone can duplicate your work they won't need you anymore.

But that aside, as I say, can we at least agree generally on the 3 points I put earlier?

So when you said it had a "cruft workflow", that meant you liked it? You have strange word usage preferences, my friend. Or how about when you said "Free tools are either too limited to do a good job, or insanely difficult to learn," did the fact that you do actually like Wings just somehow happen to slip your mind for a moment in the midst of composing that (wildly untrue) blanket statement?



So you're automatically dismissing anything that is commercial? Wow. Sorry, but that's absolutely ridiculous.



I'm sorry it "boggles your mind", but everything is relative. If I offered you a brand new Ferrari for $600, I'm pretty sure you'd agree that that would be a pretty good deal. It's not about just the amount. It's about what you get for it. Zbrush is extremely inexpensive for what it is. So is Photoshop, for that matter.

What would you do if the plumbing in your house suddenly stopped working? The plumber comes over and says, "It's gonna be $600 to fix all this." Would you really say to him, "$600 is an expensive number. It boggles my mind. Just leave it the way it is. I'm just not gonna shower or take a dump or wash any dishes anymore until I find a free, non-commercial, solution to all this."? I sincerely hope you'd just cough up the money, and get the thing fixed, man.

You might say, "Plumbing is a necessity, and software isn't, so that's not a fair comparsion." But that's exactly my point. When the thing you need or want, whatever it happens to be, becomes more important to you than the money it takes to purchase it, the thing is NEVER expensive.

To me, having good tools to do my job, and to do my hobbies, is far more important than having a few hundred extra dollars in the bank. I'm sorry if you disagree, but really, while money doesn't buy happiness; the things money can be traded for can certainly generate a great deal of happiness. I'd encourage you not to look down your nose so much at things that do cost money. It makes for a much happier existence.




I have no idea how many people have legally purchased the software they use, and how many haven't. All I know is I have. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I give others the benefit of the doubt.

You seem to be implying no one in their right mind would spend money on software. That's an absurd assumption, which is more than a little insulting.



Well, on behalf of the companies I depend on to create good tools, and everyone who works there who depends on sales of those tools to generate their salaries, thank you for not partaking in piracy. However, I'm still bothered by your automatic dismissal of commercial software. Not everything can or should be free, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.



So yeah, like I said, you're going off your own imagination about what it MIGHT be like, nothing more, nothing less.




There you go confusing your own experience for everyone else's again. How many people have you actually taught?



Now I KNOW you've never taught anyone. It's not only reasonable for an intro to any piece of software to take a few hours, it's absolutely the norm. Why do you think every teacher, professor, private tutor, instructional author, and even that Video Professor guy, have a job? It's because most people (and when I say "most people", I really do mean MOST PEOPLE) do require at least a few hours to get comfortable learning to do anything new, especially if it's technical in nature.



Right, all in just a few minutes again. Got it.



Yes and no. As I said, my opinion has changed immensely since Gaia's videos. It's an unusual interface, no question. But it's nowhere near as bad as I'd always thought. It does have a logic to it. It's just not an easy one to uncover. Please don't take this the wrong way, but frankly, if you'd pull your stubborn head out of your ass long enough to just accept a little guidance, I'm sure you'd find exactly the same.




They would if they were learning it the way I teach it. I don't want a student who says "I just want to know how to do ______, and that's that." To those people, I say, "Hire someone to do it for you." I want a student who wants to learn Photoshop itself, so he can make not only signs, but every other thing that might ever cross his mind.



I can't agree with that statement at all. You might not have to understand those things just to use it for one extremely simplistic purpose, but that's not using it effectively.

In any case, the analogy is flawed. Slapping some simple text on a background, and calling it a sign, is in no way comparable to making a 3D model, let alone an odd one like a sculpty. Every literate person in the world knows what it is to put text on a background, so transitioning to do it in a program like Photoshop requires no new abstract thinking. Very, very, very few people, on the other hand, are preconditioned to think about the nature of objects, form, and space, in multiple dimensions, in the manner required to begin 3D modeling for the first time.



It's gotten much better, no question. I still wouldn't call it comparable to commercial programs, though. The same troubles you have with Blender, I have with GIMP. There are certain parts of its logic that just escape me every time. I've never had that problem with ANY commercial raster editor I've ever tried.



Again, watch Gaia's videos. There's nothing wrong with the interface. It's just been badly explained since day one.



It's not about you? Come on, man. Did you or did you not say "sculpties just defeat me", the aforementioned "free tools are either too limited to do a good job, or insanely difficult to learn", and "you can't learn by looking at how they're made"? That was all you, wasn't it? There's not some other Argent Stonecutter on the forum I don't know about, is there?

But whatever, I'll indulge you. If it's really not about you, then tell me, for whom exactly are you speaking? Because I have yet to encounter anyone struggling in the ways you keep implying "most people" do.

The message I'm getting from you is that if anything takes longer than what you perceive to be a few minutes worth of intuition to figure out how to do, you have no interest in doing it. I find that sad.




And I've suggested several times you explore the way I, and countless thousands of others, have managed to tame that hard-to-work with program. Once gain, watch Gaia's videos. If you can't make sculpties competently in Blender after watching all of her material (which, yes, does take a few hours to go through), then the problem is entirely yours.




So it's your contention that if something limited had been put in, you wouldn't right now be complaining about the limitations, and how wrong it is that we can't get a GOOD mesh editor in-world instead of the crappy one LL came up with? Wouldn't the same arguments you raised about free tools not being up to the job now apply for real? And how about all the new bugs that would inevitably be introduced along with such a system (we ARE talking about LL here, after all), how much stomach do you really think you'd have for those?

Actually, maybe I should take that last part back. Wings, which you described as "the best of the bunch" is riddled with bugs, and always has been. So maybe you're OK with that.




Come on. That's an expression, and you know it. Are you really resorting to semantics here? Really? I had had more respect for you than that. I don't mind if you prove me wrong.




You're preaching to the choir on that. That's exactly the argument that I, LL, and many others have used in response to those people. But they stubbornly refuse to listen. Some people just like to complain.

Agreed.



Agreed.



I agree with the spirit of the message, from a "support your fellow man" perspetive. But realistically, I have to acknowledge that it's never going to happen.

Here's why. Statistically, in any human system, 80% of the results tend to be generated by 20% of the people. No one knows why this phenomenon happens; it just does. It permeates across nearly all industries, in all cultures, and in all economic conditions. It's a quirk of sociology that many have observed, but no one has ever been able to explain.

I watched it happen like clockwork in my old marketing business. If I did, say, $500,000 in sales in any given time period, $400,000 of it would come from 1/5 of my sales reps.

I obviously can't know for certain, but I'd wager that the exact same statistic applies in SL. 80% of the content is generated by 20% of the residents. I'd also wager that it's recursive, meaning that of all residents creating actually good content (however you might choose to define "good", 80% of the good content comes from 20% of the good artists. And obviously the good artists are far outnumbered by the mediocre ones and the bad ones.

Add all that up, and I'd estimate that probably 50% of the good content in SL comes from 1% of the population. (If you're wondering, I arrived at that number just by carrying the 80/20 rule forward a couple of recursions. Not a scientific measurement by any stretch, just an educated guess.) That number, if it's accurate (or whatever the real accurate number is if it's not), is going to remain a fixed statistic, no matter what happens with little things like tool availability or technological advances. It's a force of (human) nature, and that's that.

So, while I'm all for making knowledge and tools as accessible to the masses as possible, so that every individual who wants to be in that top 20% can get there, I also recognize the fact that 80% of the people out there will remain relatively unproductive, no matter what. That's not a bad thing or a good thing. It's just the way it is.

I can't because you seem to be making the assumption that SL's primitives are easy to create with.

That's a purely subjective matter, not worth arguing about. What's easy for me may be impossible for you, or vice versa. It's like the silly arguments about whether Macs or PCs are more "intuitive." A tool works for you or it doesn't. It's unwise to assume that you can generalize about whether other people will have the same experience. .... But maybe that's your point?

It's got a crufty workflow if you're using it for sculpties. That doesn't mean its a bad program, it means what you have to do to get sculpties out of it is crufty.

The limitations imposed on Wings by the sculpty workflow aren't the fault of Winogs, they're the fault of the way Sculpties work.
In this context? Editing a sculpted avatar you bought for $0.75, or making something for a video game you're going to give away for free... pretty much. The cheapest commercial software you listed is like three months of my SL budget, when I was putting the most money into SL that I ever put in. It's more than another annual premium account. For the average user, having to buy a $75 program to make or edit doll parts is unreasonable.

If I don't need a Ferrari, and all I need is a pushbike, then I'll pass on the Ferrari and go to the local bike store.

I need working plumbing. I don't need a top of the line graphics program.

And if building stuff in SL takes hundreds of dollars... or even scores of dollars... to get started, more people are going to go "well, I guess I don't need to do that". And that's a problem. That's *the* problem.

No, I'm implying that most people are going to look at what it takes to make sculpties in SL, and say "I don't need to spend six hundred dollars to do this".
I'm going off over 30 years of professional experience in a huge variety of areas of the computer industry.
It's not, again, about me. I have tools that work for me. But it took me a lot more effort than I would expect anyone who wasn't absolutely DRIVEN to start with to pick up. I'm not driven enough to take another dive into Blender.
The average person in SL isn't interested in becoming a category expert, they're interested in solving a problem. Most of the time, it doesn't take more than sitting down with a well designed program, often a free one, usually an inexpensive one, and spending a little while doing it. It works. It doesn't make you happy. But it works. And now you have another person who's *interested* in Second Life, and wants to do something cool in it. Give them Blender, and... gah.
Um, here I am, with a sculpted object I bought. It's the head of a fox avatar. I want to lengthen the muzzle. With prims, I open up the editor and move some prims around. With sculpties, what can I do?

* Rip the texture to disk, and fire up Wings. I can do that, but it's unethical.

* Try and duplicate the mesh *absolutely precisely* in a 3d tool, outside the game, by eye. I can make something that's "close enough" for a plywood head, that's not hard, but to actually have something useful? It has to be absolutely precise or the existing texture won't work.

* Put up with looking like everyone else.

I challenge you to actually achieve the second option above, for any complex sculpt.
Yep. Because having it in-world, as a real-time interactive application that works on existing content, would make it a better tool than a far superior out-of-world editor.
Yeh, I know what "half the community means". It means "lots of people". I don't think it's "lots of people" who give a damn about 20 megabyte downloads any more. I don't even see many people complaining about the Mac downloads any more, and they're MUCH bigger than the Windows ones. The size of the client is a non-issue, and whether you take "half the community" complaining about it as "50%", "5%" or even "50 ppm" you're exaggerating.

Well, they are easy to make SOMETHING with.

Within 5 mins (or less) I could show and make understand someone who has never used SL before how to make a ball, a wall a hollow box and stretch it into various sizes and apply a texture.

Ok, no great work of art but they could then happily go off and it's not without possibility that just using those basic building blocks they could knock up a very very basic house, even if it meant no door.

I'd say the learning curve to produce SOMETHING is very low if there is someone to show you.

I'd think this is one of the easier things to understand.
Tier, Renting/Buying land, what a sim is, opening boxes you buy (not wearing them!) changing your skin etc etc, I'd say were all harder to grasp that stretching a few basic shape prims about.

Well of course it depends on your definition of "easy". But I think most people would agree that there are certain things that could never be created with primitives, not realistically anyway. So that's not really subjective, it's fact.

Primitives are like lego. Perhaps if you only like making old houses and kitchen tables then you may never feel limited by the prim. But if you want to make something more natural and organic then you're quickly going to realize how difficult prims are to use.

Try spending several hours trying to persuade a bunch of spheres to take the form of a horse and then you may see what I mean when I say primitives aren't easy to use.

A racehorse owner hires a biologist, a chemist, and a physicist to improve the performance of his stock. Months later, he returns.

First the chemist says, "I have devised a new, undetectable drug that will improve the acceleration of your horses by 20%, admittedly while decreasing their lifespan by approximately the same amount."

The biologist says, "I can't help you at the moment, but I have devised a selective breeding program which should ensure that you have a stable full of winners to pass on to your children."

The physicist turns around from his blackboard, raises one finger, and says, "Consider a spherical horse..."

Yes, and that's the illusion of the prim. They give you the impression that you can make things quickly. But how long are you going to be happy with boxes or spheres?

Go try make a realistic dolphin with your easy primitves and you'll quickly realize just how useless and slow they are. Somebody with a mesh modeling tool could throw out a realistic dolphin in a fraction of the time.

Even with simple things like houses they're slow when compared to meshes. After using something like Sketchup for a few weeks you would never want to touch the prim ever again.

It'll never sell!

I see a subtle difference between HOW to use the tools and WHAT you can do with them. It IS easy to rezz a sphere and to manipulate it. It is also easy to create a lot of things with prims. Now when it comes to quality, things tend to get very personal... There have been so many ways to do artwork (and what else are we talking about here?) so that you can not simply say "making a horse out of spheres is hard to do" compared to what is it hard ?... Sure if you compare with reality, it IS hard to make a horse out of spheres (while not impossible!!!). But honestly creating a "realistic" horse with any other tool needs a few skills beyond the ability to handle the tools, no ? And honestly i am sure that a good artist could make a stunning horse out of spheres, even out of cubes

LOL.... Point taken. It does depend on what you are trying to build, true. Having never wanted to build a horse during my three years on SL, I will gleefully concede that prims are not the best medium. We could get into a lovely argument about what percentage of the objects in SL would be almost impossible to make if you were stuck with prims and the native building tools, but I don't think there's enough data to make it an intelligent argument. I suspect, though, that there are a lot of people in SL -- maybe a majority, I don't know -- who are not truly worried about not being able to make a horse.

I agree.

But from a small hut to a 300m tower block the "lego" prims do a pretty good job for many

As you say, the more "organic" shapes are not easy with prims, of course.

I suppose I'm saying that for most people they can have SOME initial (or even long term depending on what they like making) sucess with basic prim shapes, and hopefully this initial sucess in making what some would conside basic items will lead some into more advanced areas.

If prims did not exist and the 1st thing you needed to learn was a 3D package and sculpties then SL would be a very different place.

Are we talking Blue Mars here?

I suppose it's becasue pretty much all other games (dare we call it that) are made by highly skilled people (or teams of people) so the whole software world is open to those people.

It's just nice to have just the 1 tiny corner of the software world open to the rest of us

That's my one and only issue with this whole debate.

Very please, more and more enhancements to every aspect of SL, I want more and more eye candy and more features and funtionality, but please don't leave the "normal person" out in the cold. So that in another 5 years time, almost nothing is made by residents anymore and we live in a "profersionally built" world, with just the same high quality items scattered all over the world.

From what's available on a 128 x 128 map - the lossless size seems a reasonable assumption for the maximum map size for any given technique. It's a bit one sided to suggest using this size would be cheating, when adding an alpha channel to a 256 x 256 texture is a comparable number of bits.

Aha! From horses to dolphins. I never wanted to make one of those either.

On the other hand, I find that houses are quite easy to make with prims and the basic SL tools. I have no idea how easy or hard they might be with Sketchup, but I don't really see much reason to find out since I have a perfectly good tool set already. Again, I think the tool you choose for a great many tasks is a subjective matter. If you have lots of experience with Sketchup and find it easy to use for making houses, then by all means, use it. Just don't try to tell me that SL's tools aren't easy for me to use. I've been doing it happily for almost three years.

I'm sorry, I still don't get what you're getting at. I'm assuming that the actual usable resolution of the map remains 16x16 or 32x32, depending on LoD, and you are hiding all but a portion of the map either with "cuts" or the alpha texture.

Ponder.

Are you saying "OK, when you reduce the visible area of the prim using cuts, you're going to change the LoD calculations"?

How would you want to avoid to see people who just can "make more out of the tools" ? Put anything on the field, let it be broken like hell or easy to use or versatile whatever or free for usage. I am pretty sure that always there will be some very few people who will take the chance and find ways to create something unpredictable/stunning/unique/better than average and again will take the leads. You can not keep them out of your way and you should not be afraid of them... And if SL will look very unique in 5 years, then something must have gone very wrong in the market...

I remember there was this chinese millionaere who wanted to flood the markets with 10L$ items and there was big frustration amongst all of my friends. But what happened ? Did anything happen at all ? The markets still are there and versatile.They are just all getting better by time... And the 10L$ high quality stuff isn't there or at least i have not realised where it is.

I think the price or complexity of the tools is a secondary problem compared to the lack of skills and the need of learning before getting success... Someone told me once something like "art is 90% mastering the tools and 10% genius" and the rest is practicing, practicing and practicing...

With a 64 x 64 map you could use cuts of:

Start U, End U, Start V, End V
0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 0.5
0.0, 0.5, 0.5, 1.0
05, 1.0, 0.0, 0.5
0.5, 1.0, 0.5, 1.0

So the sculptie generator can be passed 4 different 32 x 32 sub-maps. Normal LOD calculations apply from there so we get a max faces of 16 x 16 per sub map.

As any part of the map can then be rendered as a seperate sculptie, it allows other tricks such as switchable resolution sculpties, so the 128 x 128 map could be rendered as one sculptie or 4 sculpties, for 32 x 32 or 64 x 64 faces. Or even two for 44 x 92.. ( a 64 x 128 map gives a 22 x 46 sculptie).

Then there's things like greek columns that could have broken ends by changes in the V (profile) cuts.