Character Modelers

[GPNMilano]

Success! It worked!

Except it's not aligned with the Avie that great (my bad mesh making, heheheheh). But that was too cool to click on my "Box" and see the Avatar suddenly wearing what I made!

Wooo Hoooo!

I smell a tutorial on it's way!

Congrats Andy. Hope your skinning looked better than mine did lol. Matching up new clothing to the avatar's going to be difficult because the seams for the arms, need to match the seams on the hand meshes for the avatar. Without access to the actual avatar mesh and the biped from Cyan it'll be difficult to get the skinning and the mesh itself perfectly lined up. But any progress forward is always good.

[Wamduskasapa]

Great Job Andy, Maybe now we will see some ethnic clothing.

May I put in my request for a set of Buckskins, Moccasins, Buffalo Bone Choker and Breastplate with a braided hairdo, including one or 2 Eagle feathers..

[andylegate]

I can impart on how it's done here basically:

This is just the clothing mesh. If you want it to move around with the Avatar, you'll have to get into linking things to the bones and pivot points, and that's outside of my post for now.

However, you need 3 Dummy boxes labled "High", "Med" and "Low"
Each box should have the following components attached: Morph Layer and Morph Sequence. You should have both the Morph A and B meshes listed in the Morph Layer, and you need a Morph Layer for each Mesh (IE Head, torso, Feet, Legs, etc). You have a Morph Sequence for each Morph Layer. Use your High Mesh as the Neutral Mesh here too.

Link the Morph A meshes to the High box, but leave the Morph B mesh linked to the scene root.

Now you'll need another Dummy Box that you simply call "Male" (if I have not mentioned this already, you need to do all of this over again for the Female version of clothes, and your box in that case will be called Female). This box is where you attach ALL of the Avatar Clothing components to. The utils for this component are pretty self explanitory, however, as GPNMilano pointed out, you have to select the Material here, and it needs to be the Plasma Clothing material, not the Plasma Standard material.

On you animated meshes (in other words the meshes that are NOT your morph A and B) you need to attach the Snap To component to each mesh. You also need to have Low Med High Xref's and that's what you apply the Smooth Base to (does that help with you're problem you said you had GPNMilano?).

That's about it. Oh yah, you have to export this as part of the GlobalClothing Age. You can't stick this in your Age. So you'll be adding prp's to the GlobalClothing Age. Not hard to do, just make sure you name your prp's something distictive, but also one has to be Male and one Female (even if your clothing is something that is unisex, you must have a Male and a Female version).

[diafero]

Wow, great work, andy! Any sreenshots?

Of course, for distribution, we have the usual issues here - either the clothing has to be distributed by one central package, or we need a coordination for the page numbers and names of the fan-made cloths. And the actual name of the clothing also has to be unique, IIRC?

[GPNMilano]

Wow, great work, andy! Any sreenshots?

Of course, for distribution, we have the usual issues here - either the clothing has to be distributed by one central package, or we need a coordination for the page numbers and names of the fan-made cloths. And the actual name of the clothing also has to be unique, IIRC?

I've been thinking about this for some time. What I've come up with is to create a public repository somewhere where people register their page number they're uploading, similar to how we register age sequences, only with this it will be page numbers. UAM can pull these pages from a repository and generate the .age file itself from that list of registered page numbers. As far as if the clothing name has to be unique. Yes. Yes it does. Along with a few other things within the clothing. Howveer it won't break the Uru install, rather, say you want a t-shirt. and you don't make your clothing names unique. The old t-shirts for example will then no longer be available, instead you'll get duplicates in the closet of your clothing items. But as I don't see many of us doing clohting right off the bat it should be safe. At the same time whoever is in charge of keeping the page-list and repository straight can check the files as they come in to ensure that they're not going to break the closet before adding it to the UAM list for download.

[Paradox]

If they are open to the idea, I think it would be good for the UAM folk to handle packaging the clothing. The last thing most of us want is a dat folder filled with 50 new clothing files, for 50 new shirt designs.

Some way of exporting a PRP with a "reserved" page number, uploading it somewhere, extracting those clothing meshes/textures/assets, and merging them into a larger collection would be highly beneficial here. Yet another way that Cyan's system is highly flexible, but clearly not designed for a lot of people making a lot of content.

[diafero]

I envisioned a simple wiki page for people to register, just like the sequence prefix, which works great. UAM is mostly a dump downloader now, so having it create age files would kind-of break out of its scope.

If they are open to the idea, I think it would be good for the UAM folk to handle packaging the clothing. The last thing most of us want is a dat folder filled with 50 new clothing files, for 50 new shirt designs.

What's the issue with 50 clothing prps? As far as I know, the engine hardly cares about how many files the objects are spread, so performance and memory usage should be approixmately equal. I think presenting such a huge amount of cloths in the closet would be the bigger problem

[Paradox]

I envisioned a simple wiki page for people to register, just like the sequence prefix, which works great. UAM is mostly a dump downloader now, so having it create age files would kind-of break out of its scope.

If they are open to the idea, I think it would be good for the UAM folk to handle packaging the clothing. The last thing most of us want is a dat folder filled with 50 new clothing files, for 50 new shirt designs.

What's the issue with 50 clothing prps? As far as I know, the engine hardly cares about how many files the objects are spread, so performance and memory usage should be approixmately equal. I think presenting such a huge amount of cloths in the closet would be the bigger problem

In PotS, you're limited to around 240 pages per Age. MOUL bumps that up to 16000+.

However, more practically, some people just like organisation and efficiency rather than uncontrolled chaos in their ./dat folders

[GPNMilano]

I don't like the idea of fifty prps for the closet for the exact reason that Paradox pointed out. Orginization and space. As we move forward and are able to build things more rapidly with both plugins, eventually we're going to have to look at client side space as an issue. My own personal install of Uru is well over 5 gigs right now. That doesn't seem like alot but i also don't have most fan ages installed. I'm very picky about the fan ages I download. I know some of us have all of them, some have known, and some select what they consider the best of the best. As time goes on though, we're eventually going to start running out of room to put stuff, as more people build less pretty ages and more complicated ages.

[diafero]

My big Uru Installation must have something around 7-8GB, with more than half of the fan ages and everything Drizzle converts. But saving the cloths in different prps does not save much space, it's just the prp header that is duplicated. Much more could be saved if fan ages had compressed vertices and smaller textures (I found 512x512 uncompressed textures in some fan-ages - no wonder the texture files grow up to 150MiB).

So, really, this is not about hard disc space. I don't know how hard it is to write a prp-fie merger, but from what I know about prp. And since the clothing seems to be matched by name only, that should be doable. Though I'm not convinced it outweighs the work to put into it.
A propos matching, those clothing items saved in the vault, do they save the page the clothing is on or something like that?