Linden Lab, whom have recently rediscovered the beauty of blogging about developments have unveiled a gem of a post today:
Making Mesh Garments Fit Better
This could be pretty damn epic, although the proof will be in the pudding. In unveiling this project viewer Linden Lab have decided to go beyond the controversial Liquid Mesh solution and Qarl’s Mesh Deformer Project and release their own solution. The blog post explains that there are problems with getting Mesh clothing to fit the various shapes of Second Life avatars, as opposed to system clothing which just simply fits. In the blog post LL discuss how users have so far been addressing the issue :
“Users have developed two approaches to address these problems:
- Rigging garments to the “collision bones” of the avatar skeleton (often marketed as “Liquid Mesh”). This works in current Viewers for some body parts, but there are some avatar shape parameters that do not have corresponding collision bones, so garments do not adapt to fit everywhere on the body.
- The “Mesh Deformer” project added code to the Viewer to dynamically compute how to modify each garment shape by looking at how the vertices of the avatar were changed from that of the female and male base shapes.
The Linden Lab development team has studied both approaches, and compared their effectiveness, maintainability, and performance. Neither approach completely eliminates the occasional need for an alpha clothing layer to prevent small parts of the avatar skin from appearing through garments, but both work quite well at resizing garments so that they fit the avatar and move naturally with it. While the collision bones method requires the creator to do some additional rigging, we have decided that because it leverages more of the existing avatar shape system it is likely to be the more maintainable solution and to perform better for a wider range of users.”
However don’t get too excited just yet, this project is far from complete and things could change that make your efforts creating a ton of clothing here, pretty redundant.
The blog post explains (this is important people):
“At this time, the new skeleton should be considered provisional and subject to change; we do not yet recommend selling or buying garments rigged to it. Since we may find reasons to improve it during this testing process, and any change to the collision bones will likely break garments rigged before the change, we want to make sure that we have a set of bones that we can all live with into the indefinite future before it is widely used.”
So really, don’t go crazy, but most certainly do try this out because this is something that could be extremely useful in terms of Mesh clothing creation in Second Life.
So how do you find out more about this, well the wiki has a page: Mesh/Rigging Fitted Mesh. This has a download link to a fitted mesh skeleton, this is an important step because that skeleton on the Wiki has more collision bones than the original skeleton. The additional collision bones are:
- BUTT
- LEFT_PEC
- RIGHT_PEC
- LEFT_HANDLE
- RIGHT_HANDLE
Now bear in mind that the top three are affected by avatar physics, not sure if that will make much difference. Now I’m not sure what this will mean for the likes of Avastar and the avatar.workbench that a lot of people base their work on, we’ll have to wait and see.
To download the Fitted Mesh Project Viewer go to the alternate viewers download page: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Alternate_Viewers