Windlight is a big enough task as is. To redo the entire avatar on top of that, is asking far too much.

My only fear, since I design and sell clothing in-world, is that all existing clothing textures would suddenly not work anymore. Honestly though, I'd rather redo my (admittedly small) collection for the opportunity for better avatar meshes. Yes, I know new meshes could mean a new sales opportunities, too!

Just Thinking Out Loud: As ponder this, one resolution that comes in mind is that the old meshes aren't removed, and old clothes will still work with old meshes, but people get the option to use the new mesh in the Appearance pane, then they have to buy new clothes. (Wait, if you can select between two meshes in Appearance, why couldn't you select among any number of meshes?! Maybe a hippo mesh could be there. I should stop now).

And you're right, the shoulder area is really wonky, as are the stretched sides of the chest, esp in women. They're not impossible to work with but they should be more refined.

Oryx; I'd recommend removing the mention of the skirt and extra clothing layers, as well as morphs. This allows your issue to be specifically about improving the avatar mesh appearance. As you can see there are JIRA entries for these features already linked to this one.

A more curvier avatar would be nice though. One with normal mapping as well as extra polys would KICK ASS =)

So yes as a shape maker and someone who enjoys styling shapes and creating characters I am all for redesigning the mesh.

Here are the few issues that I would love to change:

• complete removal of redundant sliders that no one uses - like eye pop, crooked smile - just to name the few - no one wants to look like freak really - unless they are new and like to experiment.
• more options for the nose, lips and eyes (nose should have option to make it longer not just fatter and bigger - lips need to have separate options for upper and lower lip currently one is made bigger to the expense of other )
• it is currently almost imposible to make body builder body with current mesh - why is it easy to add fat and not muscle?
• ankles need work - they stick out in some shoes
• breasts get the sharp edge when they are made bigger - smoother mesh perhaps can resolve it
• head shapes where you have more control would also be great

sighs...

my skin now hides what i cant create in the shape, but when the shapes becomes more visible my av looks ugly

More than anything, I really want to see proper feet. With toes. And curvature. I'd also like to see far less limitation in height, in both directions. I want to be able to create a giant without using prims.

Also, I'm against Maddox's suggestion of removing redundant sliders. Less used ones could be hidden, perhaps. BUt removing any functionality at all is a bad idea, because someone, somewhere will want it.

As for windlight looking bad on avatars, I personally disagree. My bodysuit looks awesome at sunset. But if you find yourself notlooking so great, this might be helpful.

http://secondsoigne.wordpress.com/2007/11/25/optimising-windlight-for-avatars/

To be honest, the only good reason I can think of for LL prioritising Windlight over an Avatar overhaul is that Windlight came somewhat out-of-the-box to the devs. (and I concede that is a fairly good reason).

As I mentined elsewhere - might be a good chance to break from the old look without actually BREAKING the old look - have a sub-renderer for handling all the old clothes and mapping them to the new meshes reasonably accurately (it is a bake operation so even if it is CPU expensive, it isn't a constant load). Tweak the lighting for old skins/clothes to resemble pre-WindLight gamma. Old clothes and skins then still work well enough that people's inventories are not obsoleted overnight.

A couple of ideas for the old AVATAR system;

shoulder squareness v slope, chest width, breast pointiness, breast circumference, breast position (different to pertness) arm thickness (in addition to muscle), upper arm muscle, lower arm muscle, mouth openess, eyebrow angle (tilt), knee thickness (too thin if muscle is added to leg)

Ideas for NEW avatar system:

Full RL control anatomy, preloaded body types (eg. Kate Moss, Queen Letifa, Cindy Crawford etc), full muscle control (ie deltoid, abs etc), preloaded natural skins, layered skins (eg for tats, freckles etc), preloaded prim hair, higher quality mesh

Love
Fur Yifu
x

For example, the avatar's eyeballs have a ridiculously high poly count.. All you need to make a convincing eyeball on a real-time character is an 8x8, or even a 6x6, half sphere. But the avatar's eyeball has a whopping 16x13, if I'm counting right. That's around 350-380 or so polygons that could be put to much better use elsewhere.

There are many other examples of such waste. Eliminate the fluff, and there's plenty left over to pump into areas that need more.

What would also be cool is a way of having mesh clothing be adjustable to lay flat against the avatar mesh or go across the high points. For example, if you gots boobies, your top could either be the usual spray-on style or you could loosen it to fill between the biggest part around you (am I making sense???). Or maybe just a way of having another layer of clothes that behave a little like the skirt layer. They could be tight against the avatar or sort of float off of it. The current way of making clothes "looser" just expands them out from some dopey fixed points that make you look like you are wearing balloons.

OK my head hurts thinking about this. I'm going to bed now.

Nose - Fix the horrible lines either side.
Hands - Square fingers are not my style, but more importantly for a female av the hands are not very elegant. They seem overly fat (for lack of a better word) and manly.
Feet. Can I have some toes please?

Apart from the fact it is perhaps one of the biggest things to be changed in SL (and would take ages), it would severely break so much content. Skins and clothes would obviously be the most affected - the moment you go changing 3D models, particularly adding or removing polygons, you'll be changing the UV map, so all skins and clothes in SL will no longer look correct, or even appear at all (without a correct UV map, it will be an absolute mess).

Although I completely commend the idea, it may be about time to consider closing this issue as "Won't Finish".

Subdividing certain polygons to add detail and smoothness certainly would not break any existing skins or tattoos. The UV map would be exactly the same.

Example with a simple cylinder:
http://img355.imageshack.us/my.php?image=meshdetailuf5.jpg
With more polygons the mesh looks a lot better, while the same texture still looks exactly the same without any changes to position, rotation, etc.

edit: edited for clarity.

However, there is one possible way this could be implemented. If they were to add a separate mesh, a new one, as an option and not a replacement, then that could possibly work.

That way everyone remains with the old one and can progress to the new one at their own pace, when content becomes available or gets updated to work with this.

Still, I think that's a very far way from being reality, but it's a better, more realistic proposal than updating the current mesh. It would be a very long process; longer than the adoption of sculpted prims have been, for sure. This could also be an excuse to add more attachment points though! (which we desperately need).

Edit: Further to what Kraelen has said, that seems like an interesting idea. If indeed subdividing would not alter the UV Map, it may not break any content at all, or even perhaps improve some.

However, I think the option of a completely new mesh would be better overall. If it allows more/better options for clothes etc. in addition to looking better then people will flock to it.

my suggestion would be to create a new mesh/skeleton/weighting/UV map and link it to the existing skeletal architecture. this is possible and would allow backward compatibility with old content, because animations could be played on the new mesh, and textures could simply be cross-baked to the new layout without major issues, IMHO

We need an avatar with a consistent density in UVmapping. * No stretch, at all *. There are plenty of good programs to make a good UV unmapping !!
We need the avatar to have 2 arms, 2 feet textured, instead of the current mirrored arms and feet.
We need the deformation joints to work as expected in a character , meaning, no visible stretch when rotating ( I think particularly of the inner top tigh )
We need to access the normal mapping, so that we can make smooth or more complex shapes without increasing the poly count.
We need toe fingers.
The foot needs a complete redo, like it is now, its a sort of little box with angles, not a foot
I think we need more texture definition too, while keeping the load on bandwith acceptable. I guess a supplementary 1 Mb would not hurt too much.

I am making a living from my clothing and skins designs. I fully understand that a new avatar would mean...that I would have to redo everything from scratch. I have the strong feeling that the AV hasn't been improved because of the fear to break entire sectors of the clohting, appearence and animation economy, I can't believe its because no one thought of it in LL offices ! So I presume allowing the new avatar as an option, the old one beeing still accessible to everyone, would make things smooth for everyone, both designers and users.

I am totally convinced that without this major change, people will get bored of their apparence one day or another, when they see what exists besides SL as 3D characters, including realtime ones.
I would link this problem with the urgent need of allowing mesh import and further refining the rendering engine, particulalry allowing the use of complex shaders with maps for normals, specularity, bump, diffuse... and also dynamic reflections. Most recent video cards know how to handle this now.

I truely hope this dream will come true, some day, and that we will have a new graphic potential that can compete with the current state of 3D realtime rendering technology

It is higher resolution than what is needed, but that can be altered easily. The mesh also covers both female and male shapes, with no pre-defined gender models. The only seriously difficult part would be supporting either the old texture mapping AND the new OR providing a free conversion/conversion service of clothes to the new mapping. There are programs that can do this; Blender has the capability to map a texture under one UV mapping to another on the same mesh. If we organized, we could do it, even if it was only the designers providing new versions of previously purchased skins/clothes. It would take FOREVER though, perhaps months, to check and process everyone.

I understand providing BOTH mappings would be quite a revamp of the source. However, it would be worth it because the current mesh is...well, poorly designed. I mean, WHY are our hands thick as sausages? Why do our feet have no definition, just what is clearly an extruded rectangle that has been smoothed? Why is the polygon density around the front of the neck grossly excessive while the crotch and thighs are terribly low-resolution? And what is up with the UGLY edge loops on the legs; seriously.

1) Fix AV height.
Present height in real world scaling of meters vs. the idiotic "%" offered in the sliders. Currently the AVs run 7'-8' tall, reducing the available landspace by as much as 25% ((assuming a 6' tall male as average.))
This makes regions proportionally LESS than 200 meters square (vs. the advertised 256m) since everyone builds to fit 'giant' avatars. This will make SL a larger and more compelling space.

2) Focus on Faces, Facial animation/expressions and prepare for close ups.
The face is the window to the soul and emotion. Focus on making faces more realistic and variable, as well as animatable. As technology advances haptics and cameras will be able to read emotion, expression and perhaps other things. The AVs should have this 'networking' built in and the ability for artists to craft facial 'gestures' and expression like poses for the body should be a priority, including high end lip synch.

3) Non-human AVs
The day of primitar animals should be over. Provide several articulate AV meshes for bipeds, quadrupeds, anthropomorphic and others (aliens). Currently SL only offers human meshes, and this should change. It will both save in the long run on prims and provide a much better enviornment for people who want to play these things. (I am not one, but it would be nice to have a realistic horse in the world.)

Illumine

I agree with the comments above about female chest anatomy. The breasts are not lumps that start at the collarbone. They are discrete glands of fat and tissue. Furthermore, the area between the breasts is grotesquely caved in instead of indicating a sternum. This is one of the biggest motivators for using a facelight, since the light hides this defect. If the Lab is willing to allow people the option to turn off facelights, perhaps it could also consider addressing some of the reasons why people use them?

There are some other areas that have also been mentioned that I would also like addressed.

Hands: either an improved mesh that doesn't look like all the avatars have a painful case of water retention or hand sliders that would allow for more detailed shape creation.

Feet: the addition of an arch slider and toe definition slider (you wouldn't necessarily need to create individual toes, but better shaping would be greatly appreciated).

The crotch and rear: more polygons in the crotch and rear area, as well as a complete resculpting. For one thing, women don't have "nothing down there". They have a pubic bone. Another issue that seems to be polygon-related is that many poses and animations cause horrible distortion in the thigh, rear and crotch area. Finally, the buttocks on the current avatars (male and female) start a few inches higher than you would actually find on most humans, and they start too high regardless of slider setting.

Face - nose: you can't currently control the length or relative position of the nose. It is also very difficult to create a male avatar with a straight nose. Sliders to address these issues would be greatly appreciated, given how much the nose affects appearance and how many people have long noses in real life.

Face - mouth: I would like to see individual fullness/fatness sliders for the upper and lower lips, as well as a "bow shape" option for the top lip.

Face - jaw: tying the jaw shape to overall head shape makes it very difficult to create a realistic head shape and jaw line on the same avatar. Adding a handful of sliders for the jaw to control shape would do much to promote facial diversity.

Face - information hierarchy: when you look at the textures for the head, as much space is granted to the ears as is granted to the entire eyes, nose and mouth area. A full remapping of just the head would allow for more details in the important areas like the eye area. Perhaps allowing this improvement to coexist with current skins could be accommodated by a checkbox in the skin editing/creation window?

Male shoulders: the start and end points for shoulder width are unrealistic, to put it mildly. Zero on the shoulder slider doesn't go to wimpy, it goes to the thin side of average, and I don't think I've seen anyone in real life with the sort of shoulders you get at 30 on that slider.

Clothing control: there needs to be a fabric stretch option for the chest and buttocks for all clothing layers that cover either the chest or buttocks. With the exception of certain cuts of fetish clothing, fabric does not weld itself to skin at the sternum and between the buttocks. It stretches between the high points of the breasts, pectorals and buttocks.

I also agree with many other suggestions presented in this forum: presenting height in actual measurements is a good one (although I would submit that the reason for the giant avatars is that it is easiest to create a proportionate avatar at the larger heights), and the addition of alternate base avatars is another good one. Finally, I would also like to see the ability to create new facial expressions. Some of the current ones cause my avatar's eyeballs and teeth to poke through the skin, and the ability to replace them would be wonderful.

Addendum: Default bump maps. I have noticed that a lot of the "harsh shadows" in Second Life look like the bump/shading maps that come with the programs. It would be a relatively easy fix to refine these files.

In order to ensure clothing continues to work on all meshes, meshes would need to use the same UV mapping. However, given that custom meshes will ever be a possibility, this would be up to the specific mesh artist if they simply wish to use their own UV mapping and upload their own specially mapped skins/clothing. Obviously this wouldn't fly for market sales, but for people wishing to make their own avatar, it would be fine.

I agree that the mesh is long overdue for a update, but a choice to keep the legacy mesh needs to be available.
Look at how many people complained their avatars looked different when Windlight was released - and that was only a change of lighting.

Let them opt out, and then once they see the newer, better content going around, they'll switch the mesh or buy a new one, if they wish to.