It never ceases to amaze me how BAD the UV layout for Secondlife is.
Considering this was a program built with the aim of user made content, why everything is laid out in such an obscure and difficult to manage way has always been a source of confusion and frustration to me. (That along with little things they could have done to keep SL looking fresh that needn't have added much in the way of resource strain to existing users, such as newer default mesh support inherent to the program, bmp mapping, stuff like that.)
Today after a long hiatus (Due to computer migration, and multiple windows re-installations, why do these things always work against me! Hah!) I needed to tackle the issue of the alpha's for the new demon avatar, this apparently, was not going to be the easy 5 minuet job it should have been, oh no.
You cannot make the file size small, ergo quick, because if you do, the UV areas between the legs and feet are so close, that the pixel blur makes Secondlife respond (understandably) unreasonably.
This in itself as a UV mapping issue, is not neccessarily a problem in a system where the UV only needs to do one job, but in SL it must be very flexible, and preferably as small as possible most of the time. Sl does not give you that option here, it is even something that could be fixable.
We have the issue in SL, of people expecting one size to fit all av's - though I believe with Mesh people are beginning to realize that is not always practical, it is the desire for consistency that has kept our default SL mesh as it is. But sometimes you -must- fix things in order to facilitate quality in the long term, but then the oversight of such quality draining problems has been a problem with SL for a long time. I imagine over time more and more people are going to move towards new mesh avatars, that can offer better realism and better support for those who create clothing and accessories for them, the Furry community has understood the limitations but more importantly the benefits of moving away from what is there as default for a long time, I think it might be good for everyone else to embrace it too. That said, there is something comforting about the built in meshes, knowing that you can just... Make, and there will be market, a market that no doubt diminishes as transfer to HQ meshes continues, but perhaps this will inspire SL to put in a new default mesh set themselves.
