More about Mesh.

Well, as you no doubt have seen or heard mesh has begun trials and I have been trying to find some more informative stuff on what it will actually mean to me, and you.

I have read a lot of pretty “wow this is wonderful” stuff, most of it with little concrete info, so it was great to come across Nalates blogpost where he has taken the time to record the conversations at a ‘mesh office hours’. I would suggest you read the whole post if you have time..... or interest....

...if you don’t... here are a few things that cut through the hype. I’ve picked out a few things that might effect my reader...:))


It seems like new avatars, purpose made to replace the SL avatar will not be great shakes. There will not be the possibility of emoting, i.e. no smiles or grimaces, no lip synch or blinking....

The “skeleton”, called rigging will remain the same, so the way an avatar moves will be similar, that is, animations will have to use the same rigging.
“IDestroyed Tomorrow: I’ve read online in several places that there is work being done on custom rigging that does not rely on the default SL avatar skeleton to work. Is this true, and if so when can we expect to see it in action?”
Nyx Linden: it works already! see our walkthrough for uploading a “rigged” mesh. You just have to provide bone weights for each of the vertices
Nyx Linden: sorry I was wrong on that last one – we don’t support custom skeletons yet, you have to use our rig, just not our mesh.
Nyx Linden: adding support for custom skeletons would be nice, but we don’t have any work started on that yet."
(seems like not everyone knows everything.)


Having personally questioned the supposed Mesh Hair Revolution myself and watching Wizzy being abused in comments... it now turns out we were right and mesh hair will be crap.
It will be non flexi... quote “” tx Oh: another question: the positive effect of meshes should be mesh hairs instead of prim hairs. But meshes are not flexible. Do you go to support flexible meshes or at least flexible sculpts?” — Falcon Linden: No, there are no plans to support this in the future and it is extremely unlikely we will support it. However many votes it might get. Flexies are unreasonably expensive. However, you might have more success pushing for proper cloth simulation (it’s already something we’ve thought about, though with no actual plans and almost certainly not in the next year)

No swishy dresses for a while then, for the same reason...

from Liz Venenbaum “ Since I’m tied to a slow internet connection, meshes won’t rez at all, since the viewer uses like 60 connections at once, which drown my network bandwidth…”, this is something which should be sorted out before they go public ... ( and a personal worry I have with future ‘cloud’ computing as I have control over my computer, but not over my ISP.)

there’s also a long legal disclaimer from the Lab on buying meshes and using them in SL.... basically it ends with...”If you are uncertain about your rights in any situation, we suggest that you consult an attorney for legal advice or err on the side of caution and not upload the meshes to Second Life.’

Yeh.. like I’m gonna ring a lawyer before I buy something from the web.... unlikely, I think.


Now, for the simple How to Do IT... Easy style... you can’t get better than Gwyneth...here.

Personally, I am yet to be convinced that mesh will offer a great alternative to sculpties, it may just be an occasional option.... but I hope to be proven wrong.

...and finally... another great post by Nalates... here. He suggests that Open Sim will see mesh before SL .... and, for real mesh enthusiasts the actual cost of uploading mesh to SL will have them turning to OS as a huge mesh sand box.

The costs are still being calculated and I think the Boys will be missing a trick if they don’t earn a few extra bucks on this uploading lark.

Maximize the moneterization as Miso might say (but better...)

:))