Head-exploding moments in SL.

Anya Ristow

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The mesh Jonathan avatar is easy, but there seems to be only one (terrible) AO for fat people.
I found an AO that came loaded with a few anims that worked, and I dug through three stores' worth of anims for others, and I came up with enough that I think I can put together a decent set. I plan to put them into the AO I bought, or into an open source one, or write one myself. I just haven't gotten around to it.

When I was last in SL, up to about 2010, there was nothing that I can remember for fat avatars. I tried making a standing anim that keeps my hands out of my hips and it turned out pretty badly. Compared to then, now is golden.
 
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Vaelissa Cortes

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I suspect the no-mod inefficient mesh heads, bodies and clothes are here to stay, whatever anyone thinks about them. These products tap into fairly toxic RL beauty ideals, which isn't a surprise given how lucrative that RL market is. Creators who mine those insecurities in SL will sell stuff, however laggy it is.
I think intentionally trying to mine insecurities is a stretch, and from what I have seen, a significant portion of people with mesh avatars out there are far out of the realm of any sort of typical beauty ideal. People like mesh heads and bodies because they can provide higher levels of details, and of course the compatibility with higher detail skins/makeup/clothes/etc., whatever their intended look may be.

Personally, I just like something I can relate to, or that feels like me, in my case it happens to fit what is considered attractive. Mesh helps achieve the end result I'm after significantly better than sticking with Linden Lab's system body can ever do. This really goes for any look somebody might want.

The real problem here is the creators of these attachments simply don't care about Second Life. They sell the products for the money with no thought to efficiency or the harm their content is doing. They are amature modelers whose motivation for learning to create anything at all was driven solely by creating content for Second Life. The problem with this approach is they entirely skipped the lowest level basics that are absolutely required in any sort of remotely professional environment. Very, very basic things, I cannot emphasize that enough.

What appears to happen then is that they develop egos because they become popular, and become wilfully ignorant, outright refusing to change their provenly bad habits because of some weird stubbornness, and complete inability to understand why what they're doing harmful in the first place, no matter how well and kindly it is explained to them. The up their own backsides ego wins out nearly every single time. I think here is where insecurities might come into play. They were nobodies in RL, and became "big" in SL, and now think they're too important to listen to anyone.

Unless LL intervenes and limits complexity at the creator upload stage, including the texturing, I think we've got a way to go before we reach peak "beauty" in SL. To think, we once complained about bling, invisiprims, full bright and facelights :D
It has been talked about with Linden Lab and is still on the agenda, but they are weirdly reluctant to change and don't want to upset anyone. When asked directly about implementing better ways to moderate content that significantly impacts performance, Oz's response was saying they are trying to find a solution that doesn't impact existing content :banghead:. That... simply cannot be done, and is the whole crux of the issue. I do not expect anything to come of it.

A partly working solution that attempts to address one of the issues was presented to Firestorm, but it was rejected because they appearently did not understand what texture thrashing was. I later saw the dev who responded to that in-world and they were wearing a 400MB+ avatar themselves and I was not the least bit surprised. Penny went on about the same thing with a Catznips dev on the official forum, which ended equally retarded. As abrasive as Niran can seem in threads like this, he is the only one in the public viewer market that actually truly understands the issue and is trying to do something about it.

I really recommend de-rendering avis over a certain complexity and just let them lag each other instead. I set my viewers at 20k and all I see is their names. I'm hoping it helps my PC last a bit longer if it's not trying to render that content all the time.
I set my viewer to derender by triangle count, textures, and complexity all seperately, and it's made a huge difference. It is rare that complexity will derender somebody before the texture and triangle count kick in, especially since complexity itself doesn't properly penalize the true performance killers. It is still a good idea have some sort of complexity limit though since it is the only thing most people can currently do.
 
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EmpressOfCommunism

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That's the thing though. People are learning mesh creation specifically for Secondlife instead of learning universal basics first because in world building tools and sculpts have fallen by the wayside. I feel like some of the issue could be resolved by a new hyper optimized mesh-prim system, but of course we're not going to get that.
 

NeoBokrug Elytis

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What appears to happen then is that they develop egos because they become popular, and become wilfully ignorant, outright refusing to change their provenly bad habits because of some weird stubbornness, and complete inability to understand why what they're doing harmful in the first place, no matter how well and kindly it is explained to them. The up their own backsides ego wins out nearly every single time. I think here is where insecurities might come into play. They were nobodies in RL, and became "big" in SL, and now think they're too important to listen to anyone.

It has been talked about with Linden Lab and is still on the agenda, but they are weirdly reluctant to change and don't want to upset anyone. When asked directly about implementing better ways to moderate content that significantly impacts performance, Oz's response was saying they are trying to find a solution that doesn't impact existing content :banghead:. That... simply cannot be done, and is the whole crux of the issue. I do not expect anything to come of it.
Which is why LL needs to limit avatar attachments based on complexity, triangles and texture memory when Arctan comes out. It's a nerf for sure because there's hardly any limits to attachments right now. But it's long overdue and will nudge creators to learn to make efficient content.

In my experience Oz is selective about impacting existing content, intentionally and unintentionally. Scripts have THE MOST limitations in SL; they breathe life into SL, and make everything you love about SL work. But on many occasions there have been changes to how certain functions and events work. This routinely has broken metric tons of scripted content, and it's never really accounted for other than the blood, sweat, and tears of the coders in SL.

Correct me if I am wrong, but unscripted visual content has never really had any intended changes that have impacted them. Homes, decor, and any object you don't wear has land impact, encouraging creators to create low LI and efficient content for their consumers. Wearable content (attachments) have very few actual limitations, and LI doesn't even matter, so there's no incentive to make optimized wearable content.

I think Oz just needs to do the put limitations on attachments for the greater good of SL as part of Arctan, even if it affects existing content. Without a limit in place, LL is sending the message that creating content like this regularly is okay for everyone. Like I mentioned earlier I know people who make lots of content, and they opt-out of doing optimizations because there's no reason to and it's a waste of time. They're perfectly capable of doing it, but there's no reason or value in doing it.
 

Vaelissa Cortes

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Like I mentioned earlier I know people who make lots of content, and they opt-out of doing optimizations because there's no reason to and it's a waste of time. They're perfectly capable of doing it, but there's no reason or value in doing it.
What boggles my mind is in an overwhelming number of cases, I'd even go so far as to say most content these days, all it would involve to massively optimize their content is tapping a key, scaling a UV up, and either baking at a different resolution, or rescaling the baked image. It doesn't even add anything of effort to the workflow, and much of the time would allow their creations to look more detailed, while using less memory.

You'd think people would like to be able to advertise their items as being efficient and causing less "lag" than the competition, but no :(.

Edit: Actually, I will demonstrate just how quick it really is to do the above.

Video link here

For anyone unsure what is going on, this shows making a UV go from about 1/4th of the texture space, to nearly filling it, and going from 1024x1024 to 256x256, which drops the texture's VRAM usage from 4MBs to 256kb. Since roughly the same amount of pixels are being used for the actual texture on the model, you don't lose any detail, but now you don't have to load a huge amount of blank space into memory along with it, which makes it more efficient.
 
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I think intentionally trying to mine insecurities is a stretch, and from what I have seen, a significant portion of people with mesh avatars out there are far out of the realm of any sort of typical beauty ideal. People like mesh heads and bodies because they can provide higher levels of details, and of course the compatibility with higher detail skins/makeup/clothes/etc., whatever their intended look may be.

Personally, I just like something I can relate to, or that feels like me, in my case it happens to fit what is considered attractive. Mesh helps achieve the end result I'm after significantly better than sticking with Linden Lab's system body can ever do. This really goes for any look somebody might want.
I don't mean that creators are necessarily mining insecurities deliberately, but I can't remember seeing a single female body styled to look like a more realistic or average type of woman's body if that makes sense. If you had a checklist of features that a guy would probably want his SL girlfriend to have, they're all there. I threw my shape on a few demos and I looked like I was either a model or I'd been "sexed up". My look can be sexy when I fancy it, but 99% I'm building, loitering or exploring and none of those call for a supermodel body and I prefer to dress down mostly to avoid that unwanted attention :D I haven't rendered mesh bodies "in the wild" on users for so long, I'm not sure what sliders they're hammering hardest these days.

The real problem here is the creators of these attachments simply don't care about Second Life. They sell the products for the money with no thought to efficiency or the harm their content is doing. They are amature modelers whose motivation for learning to create anything at all was driven solely by creating content for Second Life. The problem with this approach is they entirely skipped the lowest level basics that are absolutely required in any sort of remotely professional environment. Very, very basic things, I cannot emphasize that enough.

What appears to happen then is that they develop egos because they become popular, and become wilfully ignorant, outright refusing to change their provenly bad habits because of some weird stubbornness, and complete inability to understand what they're doing wrong in the first place, no matter how well and kindly it is explained to them. The up their own backsides ego wins out nearly every single time. I think here is where insecurities might come into play. They were nobodies in RL, and became "big" in SL, and now think they're too important to listen to anyone.
Funny I was almost going to say about the amateur/pro thing in my first post and forgot. I think a creator is responsible for the lag they create, even if they're not professionals, they still need a kick up the backside. I'm a beginner at making mesh and I still tried my newbie best to be efficient just to make a few picture frames, I would hate to cause lag when it's been my nemesis in the past.

I must admit I've not really spoken to any body creators direct but I've certainly noticed the ego/insecurity thing with other mesh makers.
It has been talked about with Linden Lab and is still on the agenda, but they are weirdly reluctant to change and don't want to upset anyone. When asked directly about implementing better ways to moderate content that significantly impacts performance, Oz's response was saying they are trying to find a solution that doesn't impact existing content :banghead:. That... simply cannot be done, and is the whole crux of the issue. I do not expect anything to come of it.

A partly working solution that attempts to address one of the issues was presented to Firestorm, but it was rejected because they appearently did not understand what texture thrashing was, I later saw the dev who responded to that in-world and they were wearing a 400MB+ avatar themselves and I was not the least bit surprised. Penny went on about the same thing with a Catznips dev on the official forum, which ended equally retarded. As abrasive as Niran can seem in threads like this, he is the only one in the public viewer market that actually truly understands the issue and is trying to do something about it.
Yeah, I don't feel like jellydolls has really encouraged anyone to reduce complexity so it feels like it's time to put in limits if nobody can control themselves. Seems nuts that we should need to de-render avis for decent performance - a newbie isn't going to know to do that. Even if a viewer could have some optional settings, you'd think it was understandable that in situations like shopping events, avis might want tools to reduce lag.

I set my viewer to derender by triangle count, textures, and complexity all separately, and it's made a huge difference. It is rare that complexity will derender somebody before the texture and triangle count kick in, especially since complexity itself doesn't properly penalize the true performance killers. It is still a good idea have some sort of complexity limit though since it is the only thing most people can currently do.
Ah, yeah that sounds a lot better! Where abouts could I find those settings? I just looked for a complexity derender in Singularity because I wanted to see if I could do something like jellydolling without a V3 viewer. I might need to switch to Kokua or Firestorm to get the settings your using if they're V3 ones but that's not a problem.
 
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Kamilah Hauptmann

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Bea McMahon

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I can't remember seeing a single female body styled to look like a more realistic or average type of woman's body if that makes sense.
It all depends on where you hang out. I have a nice looking av, but I am no super model - and neither are any of my friends - or the women who hang out where I do. I've been told, more than once, that I have a very girl next door look. If a lot of us look better than we do RL - well, we can fantasize, can't we? Be young and slim again? I know there are folks who really want to look like they do RL - and that is perfectly OK - but not all of us do. And that's okay, too.
I fell in love with mesh clothes when I first got a group gift - a dress that actually fit. I'm short, by sl standards, and most skirts and dresses were longer than the creator intended. Evening gowns went into the floor.
Then I switched to a mesh body, because more and more creators were making solely for mesh bodies. I love it, and would not dream of going back.
I have not switched to a mesh head, primarily because my face does look like a younger me - and I am determined to keep that look. Some day I might decide to do it. No rush.
 
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EmpressOfCommunism

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I tried making Chav's mesh head look weird and she still looks incredibly pretty. I miss the weird shit you could do with system avatars.
I've made a lot of weird ugly avvies with mesh heads, and what I've found works well is using a male head and shape on a female body. I have an ugly androgynous street punk avatar based on a RL friend and it's got a great character distinction. I've made some wonderfully hideous cenobites and goblins with the 6doo fantasy head as well.
 

CronoCloud Creeggan

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maybe i'm just too scared your... everything ... might be tried with the furry community too. So far it was always quick to die when someone tried to cash in hard with unrealistic prices.
No, Furries are notoriously cheap.



I don't know what these creators do (i can only go by what i've gathered from a few friends who got into this "closed human economy" for a while before getting tossed out for selling stuff mod and/or too good for the baseline product)
That makes no sense at all. There is no "closed human economy", one just makes stuff. And one doesn't can't get "tossed out", because only LL can do any tossing out.

The difference between human and furry creators is humans sell their stuff as if no one would buy it, regardless of the fact that they know it will sell like cut bread, furry creators sell their stuff for much less because of that.
Furry creators sell their stuff cheap because furries tend to be techy builder-scripter types themselves. More creators, smaller market. And Furry culture has always been influence by "open source culture" You and I both know that non-humans are heavily represented amongst those who run SL clients on Linux.

someone who believes that everything could be free, someone who does things for free if he can.
We don't live in a post scarcity dreamworld. The Stallmann style FSF vision of how economies should work....can't work in the world we have.

I just wish i was a professional 3d modeller.... all the brands i'd kill.
Really? You think you could design mesh bodies for female HUMAN avatars? Clothing? Hair? Jewelry? Shoes? You've got little familiarity with human female avatar fashion and culture.
Niran is claiming to have some serious... issues, which makes him/her tick a little bit different than your average John Doe. Which those issues are, is quite obvious when scanning his blog for it.
Autistic spectrum?

I just found an AO that ships No Modify.
Oh? You can't pull the animations out of it and put them into a HUDDLE or something?

I just found a store with the doors locked to group only.
head explodes

SL partner is my RL hubbie, who was seriously ill in hospital awaiting a triple bypass.
I wasn't sleeping too well between work & hospital each day, so I was enjoying dressing him up in a red union suit & putting him on our porch in a rocking chair, while looking for a banjo for him to play.
Hope your hubbie fully recovers from the bypass and take care of yourself too.

I think Oz just needs to do the put limitations on attachments for the greater good of SL as part of Arctan, even if it affects existing content. Without a limit in place, LL is sending the message that creating content like this regularly is okay for everyone. Like I mentioned earlier I know people who make lots of content, and they opt-out of doing optimizations because there's no reason to and it's a waste of time. They're perfectly capable of doing it, but there's no reason or value in doing it.
I would agree for the most part.

I don't mean that creators are necessarily mining insecurities deliberately, but I can't remember seeing a single female body styled to look like a more realistic or average type of woman's body if that makes sense. If you had a checklist of features that a guy would probably want his SL girlfriend to have, they're all there.
That is due to the shapes used. You can look more realistic with mesh bodies, you just have to tweak the shapes. The old standard body with it's bends and angles looked more imperfect.

I threw my shape on a few demos and I looked like I was either a model or I'd been "sexed up".
Yeah, if you use your "looks good with a system body" shape, it will look more "perfected" with a mesh body. As I said, you can tweak it and look more realistic

It all depends on where you hang out. I have a nice looking av, but I am no super model - and neither are any of my friends - or the women who hang out where I do.
I have a nice looking av, while I wouldn't call my avatar a model now, she does have the "fashion flickr/blogger look"

I have not switched to a mesh head, primarily because my face does look like a younger me - and I am determined to keep that look. Some day I might decide to do it. No rush.
You can keep your look with a bento mesh head, they conform to the sliders. Bento mesh head me, looks like pre-any-mesh-head me only better.
 

Kamilah Hauptmann

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Oh? You can't pull the animations out of it and put them into a HUDDLE or something?
I was, but I wasn't able to put anything in, or modify the ZHAO driver notecard. I have a pile of special animations I wanted to put in and tweak the thing around. I could have put them into a blank ZHAO but I found something else to use instead.
 
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It all depends on where you hang out. I have a nice looking av, but I am no super model - and neither are any of my friends - or the women who hang out where I do. I've been told, more than once, that I have a very girl next door look. If a lot of us look better than we do RL - well, we can fantasize, can't we? Be young and slim again? I know there are folks who really want to look like they do RL - and that is perfectly OK - but not all of us do. And that's okay, too.
I fell in love with mesh clothes when I first got a group gift - a dress that actually fit. I'm short, by sl standards, and most skirts and dresses were longer than the creator intended. Evening gowns went into the floor.
Then I switched to a mesh body, because more and more creators were making solely for mesh bodies. I love it, and would not dream of going back.
I have not switched to a mesh head, primarily because my face does look like a younger me - and I am determined to keep that look. Some day I might decide to do it. No rush.
I do get that there are some mesh avis that aren't supermodels, it's more that the bodies are totally not my thing. No mod on a body is a no go, the HUDs drive me insane, I'm trying to reduce my complexity below 20k consistently and I don't have time or desire to replace inventory. I am literally about as incompatible as I could be ;) There are some bodies/heads that might suit me a bit in terms of making up a new kitty hybrid avi and keeping my complexity a bit lower, but the human side of things is just not something I'd use with Ailsa.
 
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That is due to the shapes used. You can look more realistic with mesh bodies, you just have to tweak the shapes. The old standard body with it's bends and angles looked more imperfect.

Yeah, if you use your "looks good with a system body" shape, it will look more "perfected" with a mesh body. As I said, you can tweak it and look more realistic
I did try a bit of shape tweaking to see what it was going to do, same as I try the shapes demos come with for a different starting point. It's a while since I tried the last demo, but I do mess around with demos to see what their limits are. I have just never looked at a demo and felt I'd ever use it.