I say ‘incomplete.’ Even though the word implies that it falls short of an intended goal, I’ve no idea if the intended goal was to actually… well, mesh with Second Life as it is used. Second Life mesh clothing does not.
Couldbe Yue has a great consumer’s guide to mesh clothing – well worth your time, since there’s a whole bunch of caveats and gotchas.
For my money, chief among the issues is that the clothing can’t be made to fit the avatar. The avatar must be made to fit the clothing.
If you’ve got a female avatar in Second Life, or just one who wears good-looking shoes, the likelihood is that your avatar has ‘size 0’ feet – that is, that the foot-slider is set to zero, out of a possible 101 different settings. Due to the long-standing inability for a wearable to obtain any information about the avatar and limitations in the ability to adjust wearables, size-zero avatar feet were a mostly acceptable compromise – as long as it was just one body-part, though some wouldn’t tolerate even that.
Still and all, many wearables could be resized, or their positions adjusted to accommodate the unique features of an avatar. That is, we could fit wearables to our avatars, rather than having to fit our avatars to the wearables – except in the most extreme circumstances.
Mesh clothing, it appears, doesn’t allow any of that. As such, you’d think a parametric (or volumetric) deformer would be a given; a fundamental leg of the feature, allowing mesh to hang and cling to your avatar, well… not unlike the way clothes actually work. Without it… well, Blue Mars already learned the painful lessons of trying to deal with mesh clothing without this feature, and the results were terrible and frustrating. Once implemented, things turned right around.
A JIRA request for just such a parametric deformer has been considered by the Lab and marked ‘Someday / Maybe’. Now while that isn’t a ‘no’, exactly, it’s very close to one. Essentially it boils down to ‘maybe someday, but maybe never’.
Maybe Second Life rigged mesh clothing was never really intended to be more ‘complete’ than it is now. Either way, it gives the impression of a half-arsed job, with no sign of when the the other half of the arse might arrive.
Yes, it definitely appears strange that the fitting works only partially.
But look at it from the bright side: even this incomplete “auto-fitting” can fit better than some traditional resizable items.
Also, it makes shopping an ‘adventure’ again. The demo-dress from shop x didn’t fit ? Ok, let me check the next shop, maybe there.
At all, I’ll likely not buy mesh-clothing if the creator doesn’t provide a demo
A few things:
1. Its still perfectly viable to make mesh clothing that isn’t rigged, and rely solely on normal attachment points as we have been with sculpties. Doing things this way keeps a lot of crappy things about normal attachment points like having to use 5-6 of them to pull off one article of clothing, but it remains an option. With this the ability to resize mesh is retained.
2. Rigged meshes do follow some deformations of the skeleton. Most things labelled “length” and similar in particular. That article you linked points this out.
The real issue mostly has to do with girth related deformers, but most humanoid avatars are of ideal fitness or close to it, so really, there’s only a small percentage of outliers that a content creator simply cannot make a rigged mesh that can satisify most of their customers.
I know there’s been reports of rigged meshes not fitting avatars that are even slightly more than thin however, but I think until the problem is fixed content creators simply have to do what we’ve always done anyway; size something as best as possible by default, and offer alternate sizes as well (S, M, L, XL..etc.)
3. As the article pointed out too we do have alphas to leverage still as well for minor glitching. Blue Mars didn’t really have this. How skins and clothing were made, packaged and sold was a much more restricted affair.
I don’t think things are nearly as dire as mesh having no future in clothing. There’s a lot of options to work around the issues, not unlike what we deploy presently with sculpties, and there’s a large audience where the issues don’t really reveal themselves with much severity in the first place (those of ideal body types).
Ya, for me, it means I can’t wear mesh clothing. it all appears oversized on me, and that’s on its best days.
I think that practically everyone I know would be one of those outliers – very few people with whom I routinely associate go the idealised Barbie/Ken route. I don’t think things are as dire as mesh having no future in clothing either. What I see is that it is harder on everyone than it demonstrably needs to be, and I’m also interested in whether the omission is one of design, of implementation, or just in error.
It’s joining the windlight as stuff that really never got finished to a usable level. It’s just there to tick off, the excel sheet of features.
You wouldn’t group most Second Life avatars as “Barbie and Ken”? You wouldn’t group your Tateru avatar as “Barbie”?
I ask that in regards to proportion and silhouette, which is all a rigged mesh needs to get right for the most part. If someone’s waist is marginally larger than the mesh creator had in mind; an alpha “fixes” that. Most mesh issues I’ve seen demosntrated have been about a few millimeters of flesh peeking out somewhere; how much of a deal breaker is that really?
What I meant by “outliers” are people who make really petite or obese avatars where portions of how generally big and wide this area of the body is compared to that area of the body changes around drasticly. Flat-chested women, beer bellied guys, etc. Yeah, current rigged meshes will probably suck for that due to it being smarter for content creators to target ideal shapes, but those kinds of bodies really are outliers.
I’m not downplaying the issue, there needs to be deforming for rigged attachments, but in the meantime it isn’t a waste of time for content creators to try and succeed in satisfying a lot of customers all at once.
The only thing that prevents me personally from wearing mesh clothing is the fact 3.0 is buggy so I know adoption is hung up due to that. Once I’m comfortable most people won’t see me naked, sure I’ll wear mesh. And no I won’t mind if the creator assumed my avatar wasn’t obese or anorexic because my avatar actually never is. It won’t be a deal breaker for me if a pair of rigged pants is 2 inches off my avatars waist size and I have to either wear an alpha or tweak my shape a bit. Bonus points to the store owner if the rigged pants came in 2-3 different sizes to minimize how much conforming I’d have to do if any.
Mesh like all things in Second Life will never be perfect and free of tinkering with before selling or giving to someone. It really is a legitimate issue that the tinkering for the most part can’t happen also on the customers end of things, but again..nothin’ new with Second Life. If we never get mesh clothing deformers its going to be up to the content creators to offer smart approximation and variety as always.
I would have thought this limitation could have been worked around by creators by offering, say, a dozen of variants of their products – so that products fit major shapes. Yes, I’m aware shapes are many many more than that, but I thought this could work anyway.
” I don’t think things are as dire as mesh having no future in clothing either” – well, it almost looks like that to me according to this article.
There are third-party tools for programmes such as Poser which automate this sort of modification. The first version of Wardrobe Wizard depended on several Poser features which are not in Second Life.
1: Full scripting access to the figure shape. (Whether Python is a better scripting language than LSL might be debatable.)
2: Built-in tools for Mesh modification.
3: Unlimited User Access to Mesh Data.
I can’t see it being done with the current DRM built into Second Life. And the way LSL works, I’m not sure the Server/Viewer split can cope with it, or whether the quantities of data can be managed,
A possibility would be the splitting of an SL Shape into the “face” and the “body”. If we could preserve the settings for the face, while loading a new shape for the body, it would go a long way to preserving a sense of identity.
(After the business with Display Names, one might suspect that the Labs just don’t get it, when it comes to virtual identities.)
I offer my clothes with two fittings, female and a male due to the ring difference between male/female avatars. You can download a demo, and if it does not suit you then i’m afraid i can’t help you, at least not right now. But that does not mean there is no future for it, the feed back and love i have gotten about my clothing has filled me with lots of confidence to continue exploring and finding ways to create stuff that even Marrianne could wear comfortably. I think mesh content creators are working hard to do the best they can with whats on offer.
I don’t think that clothing was actually something that was high on the LL agenda when they were developing mesh. I suspect they thought it would be rezzable objects and other wearables that would be the most popular. Certainly rezzables would have been if it hadn’t been for the new way of calculating a more realistic bandwidth usage for the items.
If I understand the basic concepts of mesh clothing, at the moment the items are rigged (which usually only refers to animating the bones but for sl purposes involves mapping the clothes to the bones), whereas what we need is skinning – which is where the item is mapped to the avatar mesh itself.
I don’t see it happening and I don’t know if I’d spend the effort on it if I were LL. Mesh has so many limitations (not the least that you either end up semi invisible or naked to people without a mesh enabled viewer and the mesh objects look terrible) that it’s probably not worth it. Mesh requires LL to have more control over how SL is seen by people than they would ever want to have. The naked problem will always be with us, as anyone can log in with any viewer they want. It will be a cheap and easy way for the lads to have some stickyhanded fun.
What I can see them doing as a roundabout way of making mesh more acceptable by applying the new land impact calcs to everything. That makes rezzable mesh competitive with sculpts and will hopefully move people away from them. That will involve blowing people’s prim limits on land though and probably giving untold angst to those types of heavily laden avs that used to bring sims temporarily to their knees when the av tp’d in somewhere. So the chances of that are probably remote too.
All up, it was a great idea, poorly thought through and applied and it’s not going to be the game changer that was hoped for.
I would not say that there is “no future”, but commercial textile importers will probably realise that importing rigged and textured objects alone won´t do the job and start with returning to what they ever did: Combinations of formats, alpha/glitch layers, resizer scripts and so on. Maybe some will import complete, custom avatars for their line of products, or maybe the industry will negotiate on some certain types of “standard” avatars for which imports will be rigged by everyone. We´ll see if something like this can be a success in SL. I already have seen some obviously Blue Mars stuff on the marketplace. The importers don´t even bother to exchange the ugly Blue Mars/Frenzoo avatars by something SL-like in their advertisement graphics.
Anyway, Blue Mars never took off and never will take off as a “world”, it has been downgraded to a tabloid 3D cartoon fashion show meanwhile. Which might be of some interest for a few, but is not of any interest for enough people to cover Linden Lab dimensioned cost and expenses.
@Ezra My avatar’s small-busted and a little muffin-topped. I have enough trouble getting non-mesh-clothing that looks good, actually.
When I first heard about meshes and how they can be much more detailed and still use less prims than sculpties I was like \o/ YAY! \o/. Thought about new prettier vehicles and buildings … not at all about clothes.
Maybe I’m still too oldschool, still prefer to wear layered clothing most of the time and use prims only for skirts, flared trouser legs and accessoires. But our avies are just too sensitive to the slightest change in size of the clothing. Even careful editing often ends in frustration when you try to fit a belt to your hip. Some designers must have had latinas in mind when they decided this or that belt, skirt, whatever won’t go any smaller. Hey fashion designers, wake up!!! We’re not all like J-Lo (In fact I’d kill myself if I had to carry around so much fat).
So the more petite and not too curvacious among us were at the lower end of food chain already with prim clothes. And it won’t get better with mesh!
Mesh spelles Mess!
Size1 has big hole in your clothes. In size 2, I take two steps and the clothes one.
As prices start at 249 Linden I demand better for that price. Personally, I wait with MESH something years or so.
Made a blogpost about MESH September 20
I’m not so sure Linden lab ever intended mesh to be used as “clothing” for avatars. As general prim creations (rezzed on floor, vehicles, avatar attachment accessories) perhaps – but not as actual clothing.
I will never, ever by mesh clothing anything – for this reason alone.
A full avatar or furniture or a vehicle or something? MAYBE. Mesh isn;t truly vetted out on the grid yet. I’ll stick with prims and sculpties for now.
While mesh was made less usable for clothing with LL’s decision to not apply shape morphs to rigged attachments (and I still don’t know if I buy the explanation on JIRA why), the rezzed mesh application was made unappealing because of Prim Equivalence calculations, especially the totally whacked “streaming cost” formula. Trust it to LL to steal defeat from the jaws of victory.
@Tateru: My avie also has small bewbies, and just enough tushie to define it well. I have very carefully diddled with my proportions (waist length, etc.) to make myself proportionally petite and pretty. Very few clothing designers make clothing needing attachments that work for me but those who do get all my clothing business.
I know, I know… I am not your “average” female avatar but I have size zero tootsies and like how I look. I would also enjoy mesh clothing if I didn’t need to alter my shape and/or if most people could see it. I think for now, mesh (as I know it) is better suited things you don’t wear even though the earliest video promotions of mesh featured flowing gowns, etc..
Besides, mesh *anything* is way overpriced.
What good is a sexy flowing gown if the girlie shape wearing it stinks?
@Couldbe: If clothing was not at the *top* of LL’s agenda for mesh, they need to get out into SL even more than I thought (if that is possible).
Its non-sense to say that mesh wasn’t intended for clothing. I think folks are taking snapshots of flesh peeking through a dress and running wild with it.
Who says content creators can only offer one size and expect it to fit all?
Who says every article of clothing has to be skin-tight and sensitive to exactly where each individual size slider is set to anyway?
Who says mesh can’t be mixed and matched based on what it does well and doesn’t do well? Why can’t clothing layers continue to be best for skin-tight, and a rigged mesh best for fabric with depth such as loose slacks or the flowing skirt of an evening gown?
There really are legitimate problems being expressed that hopefully someday having rigged attachments deform with appearance sliders will fix, but all the folks proclaiming so boldly they’ll never wear mesh clothing based on the most outlying of addressable and avoidable problems is silly.
Second Life hasn’t suddenly become devoid of looser garments, hard surfaced ones like armor, and etc. I agree with the sentiment that rigged mesh is “incomplete” and may always be incomplete, but how perfect were we expecting it? I think its a -good- thing that if its fallen short anywhere, its fallen short at being a replacement for clothing layers. If anyone’s chief complaint is that millimeters of flesh are peeking through a mesh skirt and its too much trouble to have to use an alpha layer or change shape to resolve that, then alright that sucks but I believe expectations have to be managed somewhat before resolving “I’ll never wear mesh”.
[...] Nino of Dwell On It linked to Satiated Desires’ post, A consumer’s guide to Second Life mesh. This is a must [...]