 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 2 o'clock to 2.30 session of the 2023 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are pleased to introduce the presentation Max, New Free Meshed Up Moddies for OpenSim Avatars. Our speakers are A.I. Austin and Judith Adele, Ada Radius. A.I. Austin is the virtual world's avatar of Austin Tate, Emeritus Professor, A.I.A.I., University of Edinburgh, and coordinator of the virtual University of Edinburgh. Ada is a retired CPA, opera singer, fiber artist, and she is the founder of New Media Arts Incorporated, a 501C3 non-profit charity whose mission is virtual community libraries, arts, and education. Please check out the website at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of this session, and the full schedule of events. The session is being live streamed and recorded, so if you have questions or comments, send tweets to at OpenSimCC with the hashtag pound OSCC23. Welcome everyone. Let's begin the session. Thank you, Lear, and thank you to Avacon for hosting this every year. It's a brilliant idea and still is, has been for years, and I've enjoyed participating. This project is part of the Ruth and Roth project, and Austin's going to go over the history of it in a little bit, so you understand what the context is. I have been working with Kayaker Magic and Owl Eyes for the last couple of years on investigating the character folder XML data files. These are the files and the tables, and I should say XML because that's more of a treat than the table, that define our system avatars. They're closely connected to the way that mesh avatars work in the world. Mike Laurie mentioned in the in the last session that that we were working on developing new ways of putting a different avatar into the viewer. And as sort of a branch of that, I decided to start working on making a new mesh avatar. And this is a draft of it that's got huge problems. The mission of this, there's several missions. One is to make a free open source avatar so that people don't have to steal things. The second one is teaching. I want to be able to have a tool to show other people how to make mesh bodies or to use this on the third one is make this a template. So you could take this avatar and it'll work technically with whatever parameters we end up deciding on, but specifically to the OpenSim Second Life Armature, which is very specific, not like any of the other games, and have it also work with the appearance sliders, which is the booger. So sorry, I shouldn't say booger. But anyway, it's that's that's it. And I'm going to let Austin talk for a while. And yes, we will get the oh, someone already did. Thank you very much, Jupiter. Anyway, Austin's going to talk. Now we're going to have we're going to have Sarah on now. We're going to get to the side. Yeah. Oh, good. Yeah, much like if you're familiar with the Ruth and Roth project at all, you'll know that we have an organization called Oddly Enough Ruth and Roth on GitHub that hosts a number of repos that host the avatars themselves. And we've got a couple of side repos I'll talk about real quick. There's an extras one that has things that are common originally to just Ruth and Roth. I imagine some of those will be useful with Max. The reference repo is probably going to be interesting to archaeologists at some point. We've got a collection of a lot of the files. And most of this is stuff that is collected. Files that may have been hard to find or thought lost or whatever in terms of history. There's a huge directory of files from Lyndon defining, you know, all of this stuff that she's needed to sort out what's what's been going on. We've also got some of the some of the UV templates and things like that in there. The third the third repository that's there that is interesting is is specifically collection of skins, including some of the old Linda Kelly skins. You know, Elliott's and and Robin Woods. Most importantly here, though, is a relatively new repo that's containing all of the max work. We're just getting started with the structure of this. It's going to be very similar to the way we built the Ruth and Roth repos in that. There's a contrib directory underneath that. Those of us who are who are pushing things up into the repo will have a directory and that's pretty much your workspace. The files in the main area of the direct, you know, the top level, such as textures and mesh and whatnot. Those are what we're going to consider the release files. There's not much there right now. The drafts that it is working with, for example, the one she's wearing now is under contrib Ada radius. And at some point when she's happy to tell the world, hey, look at this, we'll we'll move it. As far as as far as other get hubby sorts of things that we do, we are using the issues to track things. We have used the wiki. There's not a whole lot in the max wiki yet, but I think some of our intent is for that to collect more of the documentation sorts of stuff. And PRs, we don't require PRs for people with push access to the repo. Obviously, if you don't have that, that's the only way to get something in. But I think it's something that I wouldn't mind seeing us seeing us use more of particularly enlarge things, you know, if we're going to do a large restructuring of stuff. That's when we've done those in the past. I don't anticipate a lot of restructuring with this stuff. But let's see. Oh, and Discord. We're doing the interactive discussion now. The Ruth and Roth Discord has a specific Max channel. And that's where, you know, discordy type things are happening. And I believe that pretty much covers the structure of what's going on with GitHub. Ada, Austin, and I are administrators for this organization. So if you have any questions or anything, I'm sure Ada probably doesn't want to answer GitHub questions. So Austin and I are available for that if you need it. So anyway, that's it. Take it away, Austin. Thank you. So as Ada and Seria have explained, we're using the Ruth and Roth GitHub organization as a kind of a basis for this because we've already got a community there. People who've been working on the previous open source mesh avatars, the female Ruth too, and the male Roth too. So I'm just going to very quickly run through a couple of things that we've got in our organization and the way it's operating. Because we're wanting to use that as the model for how we expect to release and support Max in future. So let me just go through it, but I'm going to do it quite quickly. And there's quite a lot of detail on the slides deliberately, but we've put all this information into a couple of blog posts. And the URL is on the screen now. And I'm going to mention it again when we get to the end. So first of all, let me just say a little bit about the timeline. We've been going at this for quite a while, right back to 2017 when Shin Injin produced the original body that we're now using for Ruth too. And then shortly afterwards for the male Roth too. Fred Bekozen, some of you will know him as Ferd in World Ferd Fredericks. He's been really very supportive of this whole thing. And he initially created the GitHub organization that we're now using as a way of making sure that we had longevity and it wasn't in individuals own repositories. They're welcome to take clones of the repository, but we're wanted one that could be run by administrators where the administrator could change over time as people's interest comes and goes and as people come in and out of the organization. We'll say something right at the end about the contributors. You'll see it's quite a list. So as Siri mentioned, we've already set up the max repository there, although it's pretty outline at the moment. It's meant to give us the framework for anybody to be able to put contributions in and discuss those contributions and let people take the bodies, take the hood that Siri's already created now. Some of us have got the avatar in world just like you can see Ada's version 1.9 there with the hood and we can use it and we can change the skins, animate it in various ways. So it's worth starting to look at it now because the feedback is what's driving the issues. Ada in particular at the moment because she's working on the body model is able to use. As well as that, we've got quite a bit of organization within the group for the resources we have and the social media we use. So Siri's already mentioned that. So I'm not going to go over the social media on Discord in particular and the issues in GitHub. We also have groups within Second Life and within OpenSim that you can join and watch what's going on there and get announcements. And we have facilities within Second Life on the SL Marketplace and in OpenSim on a region that currently is run by Siri on one of the servers there that lets us put out the boxes and make sure people can take pre-prepared versions in world as well as uploading them themselves. We have a testing region. It's on OS Grid and it's called Roof and Roth. And this region, as well as the boxes and facilities for landmarks and so on for various places where clothing can be found, it has a particular testing area. And you can see that in the bottom right of the image. It's got a whole load of pose stands and animation facilities that we can use to test all the ways in which the avatars respond to various animations, various mouth movements and so on. So that gives ADA and others who are working on the shapes and the models, some of the feedback that's needed to get these right. In some cases, it's quite demanding circumstances where the bodies are put into contorted but still legitimate human shapes. I mentioned that we have facilities in Second Life for box distributions. So this is the Second Life one on the left and the Roof and Roth Island on the right. OK, so I'm going to hand back to Ada now and she can take over and explain a little bit about what we're doing technically with the mesh and with the testing she's doing. One huge difference between Max and Ruth and Roth is that Shin and Shin's beautiful models were designed in ZBrush and they were not designed toward the Second Life open sim UV maps or the armature. So the team of us and there were quite a few of us working on it pretty much mushed it into what it needed to be to work in Second Life and open sim and as many, many, many people have told us it never quite perfectly worked in Dublin. So the difference with Max is that I've started several drafts now. The draft I'm wearing is completely different than the one that Siri is wearing and I'm saying maybe I should go back to that one. But anyway, are built specifically to our armature. If you look at my feet here, I have modeled toes but the foot is quite and there's a problem with the UV vertex waiting on the back of the heel. I know not that one. But one thing that's remarkable about it compared to most other mesh feet, especially the ones built for specific shoes, is that it's a lot smaller. And the reason for that is the structure of the armature and we're stuck with that armature unless we want to make a specific armature for a specific grid. But pretty much if everyone has to use the same character folder where the armature definitions are in order to see each other correctly. So that's what I'm working with the default armature and that has driven the size of my hands and the size of my feet. So I look like I've got bigger hands than my feet and that's because that's the way the Linden lab people designed that armature back then. And they've made a few changes to it since 2005, but not a lot of things mostly. What else can I say technically? We've talked a lot about it. If you go to the Discord group, Ruth and Roth, this is where I say, hey, I uploaded something and then over at the GitHub under issues, you can see all the things that we found wrong with it, which right now is a huge list. And to answer Lisa's comment earlier, yes, one of the problems is that the original Second Life avatar is not particularly ethnically diverse. I've also gotten a lot of feedback from the trans community. They'd like to have an avatar that can be morphed into more androgynous kinds of shapes and viewpoints. What I'm building here, instead of two separate models, one for male and one for female, is one mesh that can morph into either one in the blend files. It won't be able to do it in world, but it will be able to in the blend files if I get my way. And so that's part of it. I think that's all I've got. And it's time for questions if anyone has any. Yeah, we're just going to finish up, Ada, with a list of the people who've been involved there as folks will be able to see. Oh, those are people. It's quite a lot of people who've been involved with the Ruth and Roth side of things and already coming in on the contributors to Max. As we've all said, we really encourage you to join us, come and help. It's meant to be a community effort. We just happened to be taking the lead at the moment, but we want everybody to feel it's something that might be able to be useful in their projects. Thank you, yes. Project, no one person can do this. I could do anything with the avatars. I can pretty much build any armature needed. I've done work with Unreal and Unity and all the others. And there are changes we could make to the viewer, and it's not even that difficult to do it. We can, I demoed this last year when I gave everybody pencil necks at the at the OSCC in my viewer only. So, oh, Maxine's already in Unity. Thank you. I didn't know that. Anyway, so if we could change at least the armature a little bit, that would help. One thing that we've got that nobody else has is the appearance sliders. And people like the appearance sliders to be able to customize and make a unique avatar for themselves. So that's very high on my list to make that possible. It is also the most difficult thing to make possible. And we did eventually get something we were mostly happy with with Ruth. I'm trying to do better than that for Max. We'll see how that goes. Mouth movement with voice. Yes, we will be able to, if voice is still around, we will be able to make gestures that can work with talk. It'll work okay. Yes, entirely with open source tools. Does it really? I haven't tried it yet. One of the reasons why I can't do this all by myself is I would never have time to do all the testing that Austin does. Ah, Max is not as sexy as Ruth because Shin Injin is entirely male. I worked with him for a couple of years there. I know he spent months just on her hips. And the eyes have problems. And so I'm not trying to make a sexy avatar. I'm trying to make a template so that somebody else, if they want a sexy avatar, if you want boobs out to your elbows and all that, you can do it. I'll make that possible for you. One problem, this is a technical issue with the eyes, is that the position of the MI bones, for those of you who do any rigging, is fixed in the code. It's not defined in the XML data in the character folder. This is something that Tom Ernst discovered last year, a couple of months ago. So those points in space where the, yeah, they're totally off now. And the reason for that is because it's been hard for me to predict. I know exactly what to do in Blender to get them to line up to the way it is expressed in the code. But when I get in world, the way that the default shape is on, anyway, I haven't solved that problem yet. On 1.1, I think it's working better, which Siri is wearing. Yeah, that is working better on that one. So what I did was I, when I had problems with the mouth, I said, well, I'll just start over on the whole head. And I don't think I should have done that. I'll probably go back and put the current mouth, the mouth, the inside, it's called the mouth bag, the piece of mesh that stretches from the lips to the back of the throat around the teeth, is better in the one I'm wearing, and the eyes are the better in the one that Siri is wearing. So, and this is typical for, if we were all working on it, if we had a team of 10 people working on this, which we have done in the past, then someone would solve one problem, and then we'd all add it to our version of it and move on. Replaceable feet for cross-dressers. Why would a, I've talked to a lot of cross-dressers. What do you mean by replace? I do want this working with the appearance sliders. Yes, it is. Because I'm distributing the blend files, you can take the blend files and rip them apart and see how they work. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yes, flat, medium, and high heel. Yes, the medium and high heel feet already exist on the Ruth avatar, and they were not designed by Shin, so we can use them for Max, and we'll use them. I might have to do a little adjusting at the ankle, as all. And this, the foot that I'm wearing now, and that Siri is wearing now, which you can't see it on the boots, is poseable, and you can make a high heel pose from it. It'll be a CC by 4.0 licensing, so people can use it pretty much for whatever you want. We would appreciate people contributing their developments back to the team, but you don't have to. Right, that's what I did with the Ruth 2 flat feet. Thank you for such a great session, and for such wonderful information. Thank you, Lear. As a reminder to our audience, you will want to check out theconference.opensimulator.org to see what is coming on the conference schedule. You won't want to miss our next session, which will begin at 3.30 p.m., 2.30 p.m., after a break. Yeah, I'm reading, and it is entitled... It is not entitled that, so the next session is going to be fantastic. Join us, it's going to be on this wonderful collection, and check out the OSCC23 poster expo. For more information, they have a fantastic booth with exhibits for you to enjoy. Thank you.