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Simon Nolan - 22/May/07 04:46 PM
How about also fully or partially transparent areas in avatar skins, or is that already used for something else? I've never tried uploading a skin with transparent bits to see what would happen. This way I could, say, hide my head for a Headless Horseman avatar without uploading an animation that does weird things to my head, and then having to put that into an animation overrider.
Partial transparency in a skin texture simply allows the base-skin to show through. This means that if you designed yourself a dark-skin in Appearance you could then apply say a white dragon-tattoo, then if you made your skin even darker it would change accordingly.
I think therefore this would be too widely used to be a viable option. Even if you buy a full-skin set, you still have a 'base' skin layer underneath, which is annoying. This proposal to let us change that base-skin to an alpha value, this way when you apply skin textures with alpha values, the invisible parts will be completely invisible. A long time ago I wished to create a T-1000 style avatar with a shiny mesh body. And then I thought to do some avatars along the lines of being semi- or fully transparent.
I just want to get rid of the legs for my av's feet to look right hehe, though since those new feet turned into a whole new prim-avatar I'm onto wanting rid of the whole thing, as lower-detail can mean the avatar sometimes pokes through and may be completely the wrong colour =)
This is exactly the way i want to have it resolved: fully transparent underneath skin - as described by Haravikk. Thanks for reporting this issue!
A long time ago you used to become fully transparent; this was removed because people complained about privacy issues. Though why no one could look at the map or turn on avatar names I don't know.
My request is that they reimplement this so those of us who design non-human avatars don't have to rely on hideously ugly invisiprims to get the job done in hiding pieces. I have to use complex animations in order to get all my robotic avatars small enough to fit. Hmm, it's possible to use animations to hide your avatar anyway. Don't you love things that are removed without anyone thinking what it will do?
Hara, I believe such techiniques have been mentioned on the entry descrition already, and as it says, stuff liek that is less than ideal in many cases, this is a request for non-"hacky" alternatives to such techiniques
lol, I've jsut realized you're the one who made this entry, lol, now stuff makes even less sense for me Xp
"Hmm, it's possible to use animations to hide your avatar anyway."
Well yes, but previously you could become completely invisible. And people freaked out and went nuts complaining about privacy violations, when the minimap still showed little green dots and you could turn avatar names on and still see the user. So instead of just dealing with that, they removed pretty vital functionality from the system and forced us into using gross invisiprims that could be broken on a moment's notice. I'd like to have some checkboxes in appearance to turn off individual limbs/abdomen/chest/head.
And yes, even a fully invisible AV will still be visible via the name plate - removing that feature was silly. Ouch. I'd no idea this used to be something residents could do. That makes it all the more frustrating that we can't do it now.
Toggling visibility of avatar pieces might not work well, as some designers hide don't hide entire parts. Other creators use invisiprims for effects in their world builds, so changing the way they work doesn't seem feasible.
As the title suggests, the best idea might be to simply permit modification of the underlying avatar skin, where an alpha channel would be used to define visibility. This would eliminate the need to use avatar invisiprims, or the need to use tattoos as full-body skins. It would effectively restore the original intended use of the tattoo feature. This has no effect on the "invisible avatar" argument, as anyone can become less visible today using invisiprims, animations, or unlocked cameras. The same work-arounds apply (parcel restriction, highlight transparent, HUD monitors, security bots, etc). Anyone with a custom body skin, robotic, furry, or other unique avatar would benefit greatly from this long-desired addition. :) Good work on this Coadey. The image attachments regarding invisiprims especially are a HUGE help in demonstrating what bad implementation they are. Aside from the fact that their use is technically built on an exploit that could be patched or broken at every release and thus made completely defunct.
Having the ability to make portions of the avatar invisible would be a gigantic help. Got my vote. Now that you keep your stilettos please fix the alpha bug that ruins all my hair styles:)
I just received a msg from an object owned by Coadey Concord asking me to vote here (in the msg it mentions another issue I voted on) eventhough this issue already have my vote for quite a while :/
Please do not completely change the description of an issue, if you have a different implementation idea then you should have posted a separate issue. For now I'm going to incorporate both, however this issue was originally for an alpha slider, allowing us to make the base avatar skin completely invisible. This is an easier implementation, but requires the tattoo layers to still be used for the skin.
If folks still have privacy issues even with nametags enabled, perhaps showing such avatars with "highlight transparent" might be a decent compromise, and an intuitive use of an existing command besides (I remember being surprised that "highlight transparent" didn't work with invisiprims).
I'd just like to note, the ideal solution for this may actually a form of transparency "baking".
Basically, attachments would be able to specify a transparency map, this is a simple 8-bit image describing alpha which will be applied to the avatar. These maps simple specify white as 100% visible, and anything else as partially visible. Since multiple attachments could specify these images, they are combined, essentially the lowest (most transparent value) for a pixel is used. The end result being that if you have two attachments, one removing the left hand, and one removing the right hand, then the combination of the two would remove both hands, but leave the rest of the avatar untouched. This would be done in the same way as regular avatar baking, the result being that a fully-baked avatar would have a 24-bit body texture if no attachments provide transparency maps, or a 32-bit texture if transparency is to be applied to the final baked image. Obviously this is much more complicated than this basic proposal, which seeks to allow the base skin to be removed, at which point tattoos/clothes are used to build the avatar back up again. But is more flexible/useful. I didn't come up with this till after the issue was posted though, but it's worth considering if any Linden does take this onboard at some point =) I don't like the idea of making this an attribute of attachments. It should be a wearable.
What I want to know is why does this issue have a priority of "Normal"? This is pretty effing critical as far as content creation goes. I think the screenshots above show exactly why. Any avatar that requires invisiprims results in broken graphics, and it's pretty difficult to ignore. For years now this has pretty much crippled any attempts to create avatars that deviate from a symmetrical human body shape, and many talented content creators do not even attempt to do something utilizing invisiprims because they're a terrible work-around that often cause more problems than they solve. Yes, you can also use animations to hide body parts, but that is still an unnecessary work around, and a work around with it's own difficulties and problems.
Another thought on this alpha channel layer idea, a problem actually. The SL avatar only has one arm as far as texturing is concerned. I'd really hate to be limited to being required to make either both arms transparent, or visible, and in exactly the same way. We'd be stuck back with the invisiprim workaround for people who wanted one mechanical arm or something like that. Really, this ties in with the idea that SL needs a brand new av mesh (or rather, a set of av meshes to allow for a variety of bodytypes that cannot, as we've seen for years now, be achieved by distorting a single mesh), with a different texturing setup that allows all body parts to be individually textured, and we need different mapping layers. We need a skin layer, a tattoo layer, the multiple clothing layers, and in addition to those we need the alpha channel, and a layer for specular maps and other effects maps. The problems with the avatar mesh are long-standing. There have actually been some changes to the mesh, minor ones, but thin male avatars didn't used to have such obvious axe-handle shoulderblades.
I would love to see a new mesh, and new clothing layers too. Jackets and shirts should both be able to be loose, so you can wear a loose jacket over a T-shirt. For females, the shirt layer should be able to separate from the cleavage. There shouldn't be a gap in the skirt layer around the waist. There needs to be a floating layer for the upper body, for capes, and the jacket layer should be contiguous with the skirt layer rather than the pants layer. @Torley Linden
Is there any reason why we can't :- 1) Change the texture on the base skin layer? 2) Apply a 32bit alpha texture to the base skin layer? 3) Apply a special invisible texture to any clothing layer? (see below) The tattoo layer is currently being used as a replacment for the skin layer in at least 95% of SL residents. So why not let us apply a custom texture to the skin layer too? It will remove one texture from most avatars, and let the tattoo layer be used for tattos! If we could apply a 100% alpha texture to the default skin layer we we not need invisible prims to hide body parts in cool avatars. As a 100% alpha texture will only hide the surface it is applied to there will be no more distortion of other objects behind it. ( as shown in the photos above) Wouldnt it be simple to provide a texture that will make anything it is applied to invisible. Not like the invisi-prim-texture currently in use, but like setting 100% alpha on a prim. So a shoe maker can give us a pair of socks that make our feet invisible for high heal shoes, but it will only effect the avatar/object the texture is on. Avatars have layers of textures, so if the top one has this new invisible texture, all the layers under it are also invisible. It could be as simple as using 255,255,255 colour with 0 Alpha or some other combiantion to tell the viewer not to dender that spot on the texture. Darling. I can't believe I'm agreeing with darling on something but I actually agree, we need the ability to apply full alpha textures to the base layer for an avatar (or object) although I think there woiuld have to be some way to have a safeguard to prevent people having just a full alpha avatar since while fully invisible avatars would be cool (even if you can still see their name-tag) tjhere's all sorts of issues with that.
@Torley This and the extra layers for tattoos and such is probably the the highest priority in terms of avatar development in my opinion and I think all of us are getting frustrated by LL's ignoring our reasonable and repeated requests for this feature. I doupt this will be implimented until VWR-27 is fixed, 1-bit alpha in base textures as descrived by Uchi Desmoulins as referenced by Tofu Linden in VWR-27, as seen in VWR-6713 may be the best bet for this type of thing, as most only want to cut away a hard section anyway and don't want levels of transparency that would cause strange overlap with avatars, wow that would be scary to see a JIRA saying (transparent textures overlap avatars).
1-bit alphas would be fine. So would cutting away parts of the avatar mesh. Come on, this is a very popular option, and far more critical than the "Normal" priority assigned to it. As I believe I stated before, this is pretty much on par with not being able to apply skins to avatars in the way it limits content creators, and invisiprims as they currently exist are an unforgivably bad kludge.
This Jira issue is over a year old, and has over 200 votes. It's one of the most requested options I've ever seen in SL, and yet, as far as I know, the only explanation ever given for the option to hide the avatar mesh was removed in the first place was the ignorant fear that people would make invisible avatars and sneak around undetected. They can already walk around invisible, in fact they are so invisible with invisi-prims that not even 'view transparent' can see them. However with this it could, and thus would be less invisible, and use less prims and probably be less laggy (because we don't have to render as many prims).
Closing as won't fix for now. We're open to a patch if someone from open source wants to take it on.
One of our main questions is: is allowing truly invisible avs something the SL community wants? Rx can't answer this question, and it sounds like there are good cases to be made. We'd recommend this if there was dev time available and the community team vets it. 258 votes, this is one of the most-voted on issues in the JIRA, and you have to ask if it's something the SL community wants?
The ability to make correct, human-looking shoes and high heels without needing invisiprims: is that something the SL community wants? The extensive non-human avatars that comprise the majority of the SL userbase. Furries, nekos, animals, robots, non-anthropomorphic avatars that look CORRECT, and don't rely on an exploit to utilize; is this something that the SL community wants? You are seriously kidding me, right? I'm not sure an issue with as many votes as this should just be closed!
Completely invisible avatars isn't the aim of this, and 100% alpha avatars aren't truly invisible anyway as the name tag will still be there, and the avatar should still be clickable. The aim is to allow us to remove the avatar and use tattoo layers to define which parts are visible so that we can remove parts of the avatar we don't want. In my case I have a full-prim avatar so yes, a 100% invisible avatar would be great, as I can them slim down my design rather than having it enlarged to cover up the avatar underneath.
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New Feature
Reopened
Normal
Ability to add alpha to base avatar skin
