Right: The same avatar made by Krample selling to VRChat users for $40 and (below) for SL users for L$550 (under $3)
I recently told you about a 3D creator called “Krample”, who has been an SL merchant for many years. Listed in the SL Marketplace as Orange Nova Avatars, he’s now finding far more success selling his avatar content to the VRChat market. That’s partly because the VRChat userbase will pay much more for his avatars — $40 USD, versus a handful of USD in Linden Dollars. But more than that, the switch was motivated by the creation tools VRChat has, versus what Second Life offers — especially as Krample is a professional graphics artist in real life.
“I've been making content in Second Life for the past decade or so,” as Krample told me last month, “but it's increasingly brutal to be working in an engine that's just so… old. Especially ever since I got a day job working in Unreal.” (If you've watched the Super Bowl in recent years, you've probably seen visual effects he helped create.) “[I] get to have a daily reminder about how much better things could be!”
He might not even still be creating SL content, he tells me, but for the pandemic:
“If it hadn't been for COVID keeping me at home,” as he puts it, “it'd be flat out impossible to work on ANY new SL content. My spare time just wouldn't allow it, it'd take me years to finish anything. Several of my SL avatars have taken years to put together, as a matter of fact, just ask any of my disgruntled customers.”
I asked him to compare Second Life and VRChat’s creation tools — and what Linden Lab might do, to catch up:
“The model [for SL and VRChat] is the same. But the engines, and what they let you do, are quite different — so the avatar features in the two engines are very divergent, as is how they look. Whereas SL locks you down to the single shader used for everything, VRChat lets you build your own shaders if you desire – so even just visually, I can easily create much more aesthetically pleasing characters in VRChat, even though the model and textures are the same!"
Creating avatars in SL, versus VRChat
“Take facial animations, for instance. In modern game engines – and VRChat – you have what's known as ‘Morph targets’ or ‘Blendshapes’. It's basically an alternate state of a 3D model, that you can seamlessly morph to.
“So, if you have, say, a neutral face, then you can copy and sculpt a frown on that face, and make that a new blendshape. Then, you may seamlessly blend between the neutral face, to any level of frownyness you'd like.
“Combining multiple blendshapes lets you build expressions – and with a small library of blendshapes for the basic ‘Visemes’, or mouth shapes, for different sound archetypes made when we talk — you can set up a convincing talking system in a day or two.
“However, SL does not have blendshapes. So instead, for my newest, unreleased SL avatar, I've had to do all my facial animations with bones. And it has been grueling: 305 unique animations, just for basic facial customization and expressiveness – weeks of work, for something that could be done in a day or two in VRChat.
Working in Unity vs. the Second Life Engine
“There's countless other things that make creating SL content grueling as well (No custom shaders, no custom armatures, primitive workflows all around), and it's just depressing to even think about starting a new project.
“Whereas working in Unity, which VRChat is based on, has been an absolute delight. Starting from scratch, it took me three days to learn Unity, figure out the VRC SDK, skim through their documentation, and put together my first working avatar in-world. It was an absolute breeze, and wonderful fun to work on!”
What Linden Lab can do to bring Second Life tools up to VRChat/Unity quality
“I don't actually know what they CAN do. They cannot drastically change or alter the engine without breaking old content. They cannot break the old client, because their userbase — which, again, has individuals who probably have spent thousands, if not tens of thousands of USD over many years, on their accounts… Those users would revolt.
“I know that Linden Lab tries – my heart bleeds for all the resources that were thrown into Sansar instead of modernizing SL (Which could have experienced a renaissance in these COVID times, if it was just more state of the art and ready for corporate use).
“But in my eyes, they are shackled by legacy. They're also not going to be able to compete with the visual fidelity and quality level achievable by Unreal Engine 4 or even Unity — gone are the days where you can just develop an impressive render engine in-house.
"But taking a few steps towards streamlining the content creation pipeline would go a long way for me:
If not custom shaders, then at least MORE base shaders to choose from.
if not custom rigs, then at least blendshapes!
Upping vertex weight limits from 4 to 5 would help a lot as well, what with having to skin for both deformation and avatar shape sliders (Fitmesh).
“Then maybe more creators would be able to create products like I do, without having to suffer the hurdles that need to be worked around.”
The paradox here may be that Linden Lab surely knows all this — but also knows that changing any of it would incur drastic risks.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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