Properly layering meshed clothes
tracked
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Ah, the good old days of texture-only clothing, before even we had sculpties! In those days, we could mix and match all possible layers of clothing from any combination of content creators,
and it would always work
.Well, it was also a pretty ugly world back then.
Today, we have a gazillion mesh clothing. However, mixing and matching them is really, really an art — not even content from the
same
creator will correctly "fit". That is, if you wish to wear your favourite T-shirt with your favourite black lather jacket... it won't fit. Things will always "stick out". Current-generation mesh body HUDs can turn specific parts of the avatar mesh invisible — which goes a long way to make badly-rigged and/or older meshes to "fit" — but, of course, that works only on the body
. There is no way to get the shirt to "play nice" with the jacket — especially if they come from different creators. But, as said, even the same
creator will very likely not bother to make all their clothes "compatible" with each other. It's much nicer to sell mega-fatpacks and give up on your "other" content.One curious fashion side-effect was the adoption of crop tops, very short shirts, knotted shirts, etc., since you can hardly expect your "normal" shirt/top to play nicely with your favourite jeans. Belly-button piercings also became more popular. And some clever creators updated their ancient texture-clothing — especially tops and tight-fitted pants/leggings — simply because these will
always
fit under a jacket or coat or anything, being directly BOMed. I thought that this was simply one of those "unsolvable" problems, as it would be
most unlikely
for all
content creators to agree to a set of "guidelines" for clothing to fit together. Therefore, I never considered asking for such a feature — it would be impossible to implement in practice.Then I saw this video:
Just... wow!
All right, all right, I
know
that this is Sansar in 2022, and not
Second Life; the rendering engine is completely different and absolutely unrelated. But...We all know what the former Sansar & High Fidelity teams have done to the
SL
rendering engine: in a word, magic
.What exactly would be required to change the SL rendering engine to do exactly the same? The video shows some limitations — clothing is not "infinitely" stretchable there. But even a little bit helps. In fact, just that fantastic "merging" feature, where only the "outer" mesh is kept, while the "inner" mesh does
not
stick out — that would go a loooooooooooong way to fix all
our mix'n'matching troubles!Please... work on this! 🥺🙏
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Christi Maeterlinck
Yes indeed: wow! Yes please for SL as well!
Tayln Osbourne
A quick and dirty way I could see this being partially solved is a way to inflate/deflate vertices proportionally. It's not outright Marvelous Designer simulation like Sansar does, but it doesn't rely on proprietary software either.
Drake1 Nightfire
Doesnt that all depend on the mesh creator? If I make a jacket that is very thin, any shirt will clip through it. You have to design it with the space to layer clothing under it. Not sure what LL can do to change that.
Unless I am very mistaken, the clothing for Sansar was all made by LL. This is the same issue with textures in SL. if you use 2048s on every aspect of your creations it will lag out most PCs. you have to optimize things.
Anna Salyx
Drake1 Nightfire
I think the general idea here might less about making mesh "stretchable" and more about a "baked mesh" if you will. With textures, the layer order makes a difference. Lower layers are obscured by higher layers unless there are cutouts that allow the underlying texture to peek through. The final texture bake shows only what you'd logically see based on applied order.
The same thing might be able to be done with mesh as well. The "lower level" the attachment in the stack the more obscured something might be by an attachment added later. The rendering bake could take into account vertices that would logically be hidden behind a layer and simply not render them. Think of it as an souped up auto-alpha system in a manner of speaking: clipping would cease to be an issue.
Is it doable? Sure, anything is doable in theory. Is it practically doable? That's the bigger question for bigger minds to figure out. But idea is a good one in the big brainstorming sense.
animats Resident
Wow. I had no idea Sansar had a clothing system that good. I thought you had to go to Marvelous Designer or Clo to get that. Roblox has a clothing system that gets layering right, but it's not subtle - everything looks like a puffy jacket.
Thern Lorefield
animats Resident Yes, it is MD clothing. Even back then Sansar allowed for MD clothing. (Not all clothing on Sansar is MD though.)
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Thern Lorefield Oh! So how exactly was Marvelous Designer integrated into Sansar? I never used it, of course (I'm not filthy rich 😂), but I erroneously thought that it was a standalone product...?
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Thern Lorefield Ok, I admit, I'm confused.
When talking about Marvelous Designer or Clo 3D to design clothes, obviously you can do all sort of tricks shown in the movie — that's not a problem, that's exactly what those tools were designed for.
Nothing prevents clothes creators to use that as base for their designs in Second Life. The result is just a rigged mesh — no issues there.
For those who cannot afford the prices charged by any of these popular clothes modelling tools, there is always MakeHuman, which has been around since when Second Life was in Alpha testing 😉 MakeHuman, despite its name, includes full support for clothes, hair, and even for body morphing (enabling those pesky sliders in Appearance Mode to do something useful!).
That's cool, sure, if you're a clothes designer looking for a tool to design clothes.
My original feature request, however, was
not
to request something for designers
; they already have their favourite graphics pipelines, all fine-tuned to deliver clothes-on-demand as fast as they can.It was something that I
presumed
that Sansar supported, which is what the video is allegedly
showing — namely, a way for end-users
(people like yours truly) to wear two 'incompatible' sets of clothing together, and make the 'outer' mesh (say, a jacket) cull the 'inner' mesh (say, a T-shirt).The special effects shown on the Sansar video are cool, but not
really
required, from the perspective of the end-user: I just want an easy way to properly layer meshed clothing together — wearing it from inventory — equivalent
to how pre-mesh clothing worked: textures would be baked together in a specific order, whatever is alpha shows through to the layer beneath, and the resulting
texture is then baked on top of the avatar's skin (the 'bottom layer', if you wish).Gwyneth Llewelyn
I'm well aware that meshes are substantially more complex than plain 2D textures! Nevertheless, slicing and dicing meshes, and figuring out what to show and what to hide, are part of the daily chores of the SL Viewer. Just think of what actually happens if you suddenly step on top of a phantom (i.e., non-physical) mesh: your avatar, with all its attachments, will be neatly sliced by the surface of that mesh, no matter how complex it might look like! So,
obviously
, the rendering engine has some pretty advanced abilities to properly 'subtract' one mesh from another — even when, say, both are moving independently, as it happens, for example, when walking on a mesh-based river (or lava stream, or whatever): on every frame, the renderer will just display the part of the avatar's combined
mesh (i.e., with all its attachments) above
the surface of the phantom river-mesh (making it partially transparent, to look more realistic, is just incidental).So, essentially, my point is not to ask for a complete clothing designing system inside the SL viewer (of course that would be just
awesome
, but that's science-fiction, not reality). I just want to have the ability to identify, on my outfit, which meshes are layered on top of others, and get the renderer just show the outermost meshes, when it is supposed to obscure whatever is beneath.Consider also how this would make avatar mesh HUDs much simpler, since these would not need to have those advanced tricks to selectively make parts of the mesh invisible. Another nice side-effect is that many clothes would work
universally
on all
avatar body meshes, without the need for manual adjustments on the HUD. There would be obvious cases where this would not work, of course, but I would imagine that clothes designers would really
appreciate the ability to go back to the good old days when mesh clothing would (almost) universally fit, without the need of creating different versions for different body types...Granted, that's a different issue. I'd be more than happy if my jacket could cover the T-shirt worn beneath, or that I could avoid issues wearing a long top over a pair of jeans, with the confidence that nothing would ever 'stick out' unrealistically again...
Spidey Linden
tracked
Issue tracked. We have no estimate when it may be implemented. Please see future updates here.
Elora Lunasea
Excellent idea. I was just talking about this problem recently. I have a massive inventory of clothing and enjoy creating my own looks from both old, new and a mush mash of creators. It's always problematic unless I'm using a BOM item such as leggings or shirts. Finding a way to solve this would be a huge plus.
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Indeed — I'm so sorry now that, when I did my Great Inventory Purge a couple of years ago, essentially getting rid of all non-mesh clothing, I didn't know what the future would bring 🤣 15+ years of accumulating what I
thought
to be 'rubbish' clothing, all going into trash/bin and disappearing forever... just a few have survived... oh well, most of them had rather ugly, low-rez textures anyway.But I would love that the current-generation clothes designers would still keep around their BOM-ready models, possibly updating their textures, and offer them separately. A few do, and I'm eternally grateful to them.
Also consider the purpose of
lingerie
. Mesh lingerie is essentially useless for wearing under
mesh clothes — it will almost invariably 'stick out' at some place or another. Lingerie, in SL, is just another clothing 'style'. You might
be able to wear a bra and a skirt/pair of jeans as a 'fashion' choice. But the original purpose
of lingerie in SL (namely, keeping the 'naughty bits' safely out of sight) has been lost — you simply can't use it under
mesh clothing. I have just a tiny number of reasonably good-looking, texture-only sets, a few of which can actually work that way...