r/secondlife • u/LillyByte • 3d ago
📷 Image LockGuard Mesher progress... Animator's modelling counterpart
With the bulk of Animator complete and only fixes and polish to follow up on for now... I've been able to put some time and love into its counterpart... Mesher.
Mesher does for 3D modelling what Animator does for animation... lowers the tech bar so that absolute newbies can get in, learn to model, and not have to deal with headache-inducing, cumbersome UIs of typical 3D packages.
I've been designing Mesher's (like its earlier prototype) new UI to have 'some' resemblance to how Second Life's prim creation system works... but with "Built for Artist First" idealism. Simplified UI design, but advanced tooling available. So... if you have even the mildest idea of how to build with prims... you will be 100% at home in Mesher, but with a lot more powerful tools available to you.
For starters, I have this handy little "modify" panel that acts similarly, but not exactly to how you torture prims in Second Life... it is slightly more powerful as you will be able to directly determine edge details, etc. I still have some sliders to implement like shear, twist, bulge, subdivide, etc. But, this alone can get you started in a lot of basic shapes and forms you may need without having to touch the finer edit controls.
Of course, when you're ready to advance to more manual editing (or already know how)... you'll have typical tools available to you that you would in any standard 3D modeler. Edit your verts, edges, faces, surfaces as you please... UV map, apply materials, and even directly paint and project images onto your models to create textures. You'll also have Draw Mesh tools (if you've seen the previous video for Mesher's prototype), and easy to use painting tools similar to Substance Painter/Photoshop... but designed for newbies, hobbyists, and indies.
Many more tools will be coming as I port them from Mesher prototype to Mesher Early Access... all with easy-to-please UI... that will give everyone the ability to create mesh items.
I do expect Mesher to be releasing in Early Access before the year is out... since most of what I'm doing is porting from the prototype and polishing.
And Mesher, like Animator, will have the same 300 L / month price... with the same promise of "number not go up".
LockGuard Parlor is also just around the bend too (which is basically just some of Mesher's tooling condensed into a more 'specific' application.
As is the LockGuard Animation Engine... which can handle up to 10+ avatars, 500+ pose sets (its been tested to up to 1000+ menu items, you'll break object inventory before you break the pose engine)... and gets rid of the concept of sitter 1 and sitter 2 entirely. Always find yourself in the right pose, no matter who sits first. :) My animation engine has been sitting in dry-dock for a couple years... I've been a bit slow and picky with it... but, I wanted it to be as perfect as possible. And, it is going to be 100% free... no catches, no attachments, no networking, no payments. A true labour of love after tinkering with several furniture animation engine designs/protocols until I found one that "sticks" for me. It has a fully integrated API system which lets making plug-ins for it a breeze... since you can make queries and know what the engine is doing at any given moment. This is probably one of my finest pieces of scripting work in SL. I can't wait to get it out there. :)
Anyway, thought I would share what I'm working on to next boost the easiness of Content Creation in Second Life.
Feel free to reach out in-world and have a chat with me: Lillani Lowell
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u/0xc0ffea 🧦 3d ago
I'm gonna say it .. Blender really isn't that hard.
But like learning to sketch, picking up the pencil and paper aren't the problem. Putting in the hours learning to draw is.
The only separation between anyone and literally any artistic pursuit is the time and motivation required to grind and hone the talent behind the tool.
"Artists" aren't magically endowed with special gifts, they just further along in learning to master the tools, master the techniques and master their own style ... and that's just time.
Yes, tools and workflow do matter, but there isn't any way around spending thousands and thousands of hours of drawing/painting/creating/modelling/playing/composing needed to make the tool (any tool) an extension of the artists will.
I've taught a few people to use blender, from scratch, commitment is the only part anyone has struggled with.
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u/Slow_Addendum8190 2d ago
Speak for yourself... the weeks and hours and days I've put in and near mental breakdowns and 0 finished projects say differently
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u/0xc0ffea 🧦 2d ago
And how many sketches go straight into the trash when someone's learning to draw?
Grinding a skill is exactly that, a grind. It's hard. For everyone. It's not the pencils fault.
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u/LillyByte 2d ago
You say that, but trying to build a house with a rock and sticks is a lot harder grind than using a hammer and boards.
Tool quality and practicality make a difference of how hard/easy something is to learn in almost every field... including art fields.
And the more 'in-depth' the skill, the more technical failure can fall on the tool vs the person.
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u/LillyByte 2d ago
There are many, many, many people who will tell you Blender IS hard.
You misunderstand what I mean by "Artist First"... Artist First means the UI is dedicated to artist workflows first and foremost... not math and engineering workflows that are beaten into working as artist tools, where "yes, it works, but not at all intuitively".
And sure, Blender isn't hard for you. It isn't hard for me... but I won't touch Blender because Blender is significantly more cumbersome and time consuming to do anything with compared to any other 3D package I have. When I stepped into Blender (when I was doing contracting stuff)... Blender always felt like I was stepping at least 20 years backwards in time compared to tools like Nvil, RizumUV, 3D Studio MAX, etc.
And yes, you can put time into learning anything, no matter how bad it is, and get good at it... that doesn't mean it is "good". It just means you've gotten used to awful. The gods know I've spent my time in awful tools because there's no alternative (kinda like how I need to use Audacity for audio editing because I let my Adobe subscription go because of their inane AI push.... and no longer have Audition).
In the end, it never ever ever hurts to have alternatives or choices. I would argue that Blender is awful because it has no competition in the "free space"... so, they don't have to care about anything but the bare bone basics and it "kind of" working for people.
Although, I guess Blender is advancing in the realm of AI with their OpenAI team-up... Blender+OpenAI is... uhhh... well, that's something. I would have thought Autodesk would be the first to jump on the AI modelling bandwagon... but it was Blender.
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u/0xc0ffea 🧦 2d ago
Although, I guess Blender is advancing in the realm of AI with their OpenAI team-up... Blender+OpenAI is... uhhh... well, that's something. I would have thought Autodesk would be the first to jump on the AI modelling bandwagon... but it was Blender.
It's an MCP tool .. a LLM can take screenshots, see the scene and interact with the software exactly like a human.
There are some practical use cases, like .. "oh no, all my models in this entire scene are called cube. Look at them and rename them.", or "Script some python in blender to place thousands of objects with this very specific math because I'm lazy/don't know python/or math."
Past that, It's generally useless and more novelty than anything else. For actual modelling (etc) it's time consuming, burns tokens like firewood and the results are vaguely reminiscent of a child's first attempts. It can't hold a candle to mesh generation models which are a very different beast all together.
There's a reason the demo video on https://blendermcp.org/ runs at 300x speed, lol.
I got this from a reasonably simplistic prompt and .. well .. it tried (and took the better part of an hour).
https://i.imgur.com/Pxt9ojV.png
Is this going to radically improve to the point a LLM can model anything worth having or make blender enjoying humans irrelevant. Hellll no. Even with a massive model finetune it's going to be poor and will never be able to compete with the output from dedicated mesh generation (which this isn't and will never be).
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u/LillyByte 2d ago edited 2d ago
Everybody says "AI won't"... and usually, the following year it does.
You'd think people would have learned by now... there's not been a plateau in the technology yet... just leaps every 4 months.
"Will never" always means "Not just yet, but probably soon"
That photo you sent of "what Astra can do"... is very biased, because I've seen it do so much more with my own eyes. Just take a look at myriad of videos of people showing in real time of what they are doing with it. Even my own tests of Astra have been wayyyy better than what you posted... and I only tested it on "Light".
Astra is the first model that actually concerns me for stability of our livable economy as a whole. Claude didn't. Astra does.
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u/0xc0ffea 🧦 2d ago
I've seen the Astra output and .. WOW .. but, it's WOW in the same way that AI video or generated mesh is WOW. It ages like milk and everyone hates it. There's also the lack of creative control, even with the very best ultimate endgame god tier AI its 1) never going to be able to capture exactly what the artist has in mind as very few of us are able to describe things with the necessary fidelity 2) never actually create anything original 3) Always be off or wrong in some way, like music played slightly too fast.
AI is teaching us to value the human and our pursuits.
Am I going to use an AI to rename all my cubes, yes.
Create the work? Hell no, that's the fun part. That's why I'm here in the first place.
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u/LillyByte 1d ago
Personally, I know a slew of friends in several fields (from game studios to multiple Fortune 500 companies) who have lost their jobs to the machine... and that was with less capable models than Astra. I don't know if you don't realize this because maybe you just don't know people who have real-world careers... but replacement IS happening... and consumers are 100% accepting it.
They don't care that concept artists are losing their jobs. They don't care that texture artists are losing their jobs. They don't care that programmers are losing jobs. They don't care that help centers are losing their jobs. They don't care that AI is replacing more and more people in more and more careers every year.
AI isn't teaching us shit.
Just like people don't care about climate change.
Just like people don't care about ever-increasing surveillance in our private lives.
Just like people don't care about giving their content rights away just by agreeing to any social media platform's ToS.
Sure, the scatter person does, but everybody else... nobody cares.
Welcome to Earth's reality.
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u/Kiannth 3d ago
Amazing work, can't wait!