Please help me understand Mesh vs Sculpt vs Prim

[Elinah Iredell]

Hi everyone. I still feel confused about which is better mesh or sculptie and where do simple prims and painted on textured clothing still fit into sl?

I notice plants now are made in mesh or sculptie. Which is better ? Which uses less prims and creates less lag? What about for housing?

And for clothes I know sculptie clothes never really caught on Why is mesh better? I notice they do not move and prim clothes do. I think seeing people walking around invisible looks silly . I do not know how I feel about mesh clothing  because of that. Do people still like painted on clothes anymore?

What are the pros and cons of mesh vs sculptie vs prim ? Thanks

 

[Rolig Loon]

As with a lot of design questions, the answer is that a lot depends on personal taste.  Like you, I still avoid a lot of mesh clothing, partly because I don't like having to hide parts of my body with an alpha mask (including thighs that don't deserve to be hidden) and partly because I resent having designers decide what my shape should be.  I like my shape the way I designed it.  But that's all starting to sound like tiresome dinosaur talk, and it says more about me than about mesh.

Anyway....  Sculpties are essentially dead for all applications except when you want a very large sculpted object and want to avoid huge L.I.  Mesh is easier to model with, more efficient to render, and has a lower Land Impact  -- although L.I. is irrelevant for worn items.  You cannot rig a scuplty article of clothing, as you noted, but you can rig mesh so that it follows your body's movements. Mesh looks more natural. Mesh has its own limitations, of course.  It follows your body the way that a wet suit does, not the way that a flexi skirt does.  That means that it doesn't respond to wind, and you can't flounce a mesh skirt by doing a quick turn or hop.  It doesn't have the same flair on a dance floor as a flexi skirt does (OK, personal opinion creeping in again, but it doesn't!)  System clothes -- painted clothing -- continue to have a role, if only because they are easy to make and (if well drawn) can look quite stylish.  I have a couple of favorite pencil dresses that people routinely mistake for mesh because they are beautifully drawn and move like ... well, like they are painted on.

As mesh started to come on the scene, I moved away from making clothing myself, although I have had shops in SL since 2007.  I'm not worried that making mesh clothing is difficult.  It's no harder than all the non-clothing mesh things I make.  It's just that my heart is not in making things that I wouldn't choose to wear, even if other people thought they were terrific.  What I find encouraging is that even though I have not added a new clothing item to my MP store since 2012, my top selling items are still the same flexi nighties I have sold since 2009.  Clearly there's still a market for a filmy nightie with a lacy bodice that swishes when you walk.  So far, I haven't seen mesh do that.  :smileywink:

[Elinah Iredell]

Thanks for your reply. What do you think about all those sculptie plants and trees vs mesh plants and trees? Do sculpties cause more lag than mesh?  Mesh seems to be more expensive . I have also seen sculptie houses and wonder how they compare to mesh. I know that second life is apparently planning a new more advanced version of itself called future life or something like that in 2015 and they claim that the newer mesh will still be used but maybe not other types of things. I wonder if there is any new technology they will come up with for us to learn?

What is rigged mesh? Is that a newer type of mesh? I wonder if they can do something about the invisibility aspect. I do agree also I like to choose my own shape . I hope they can make the size more editable. I would be nice not to have to use an alpa layer  and edit it to fit your exact size. I am glad to know that not everyone is taken with mesh I was feeling behind the times in not having  that much of it,

 I can create textures in photoshop and would love to learn to create mesh things. I think furniture for instance looks very nice in mesh . I  hope it isnt too hard to learn to do . I guess from what you have said it is easier than sculpties

[Rolig Loon]

A sculpty is a special variety of mesh object. It has a fixed number of vertices, so you cannot extrude or remove any. All you can do is shove them around. That restricts how complex your models can be, and means that some kinds of models are impossible.  You can think of a sculpty as an origami-like structure, made from folding a flat rectangular grid.  It was a lovely stop-gap solution in the days before Linden Lab finally made it possible to import true mesh models, but it's much more limiting.  That's the sense in which I meant that it is harder to make things as sculpties.  As I suggested before, sculpties also almost always have a higher land impact than true mesh objects.  Therefore, when you make sculpties you are not only using a method that is restrictive but it costs more in land impact.

I didn't mean to imply that 3D modeling of any kind is truly "easy". There's a hefty learning curve for learning to handle the software, figuring out how best to unwrap and then texture your models, and what to do as you import them to SL.  It's definitely not child's play.  Plan on spending months doing tutorials and making throwaway models before you start feeling comfortable showing your work to anyone else.  On the other hand, once you get the hang of 3D modeling, you'll have a ball.

Lag is a somewhat different topic and it's harder to nail down.  The more complex an object is -- the more vertices it has -- the harder your graphics card has to work to render it.  That's partly why some overly complex mesh objects take forever to rez and why you often see people wandering around with invisible bodies.  Builders have an interesting challenge in trying to create models with the lowest possible L.I. and rendering lag, and still have the greatest detail.  To a degree, the solution lies in making really good textures, so they they provide a lot of the detail and save you from having to do it with extra vertices in the model itself.

Mesh is "rigged" when it is anchored to your avatar's bone structure, so that it moves and bends as your av does.  Learning how to do that is another subset of skills.

Nobody knows what SL 2.0 (the Future, the Afterlife, etc.) is going to look like but it's a good guess that it will be a fun place for creators.  Mesh is here to stay (strictly, it has always been here --- just not importable mesh).

[Amethyst Jetaime]

Actually system or texture clothing is still in demand by people who use mesh body parts and complete mesh bodies, in addition to people who just prefer it.  You will need to make appliers though for this market.  Appliers are scripted objects that put the textures on the mesh bodies.  The scripts to do this are available from the various creators of the bodies and body parts.

[Elinah Iredell]

Thank you now I begin to understand mesh vs sculpty ( not sculptie  I guess I was spelling it wrong) . I seems it is better to invest in mesh plants and trees rather than use sculpty for lag and looks . And now I see why some people are invisible . I wonder how to tell if the mesh clothing  you are interested in will be too complcated ?

Since I do know how to make textures it might be easier to buy the mesh from somebody else and then texture it myself? I think I read you have to have something along with the mesh to have it fit properly still I would like to learn. Is there free  or low cost software I can try ?

 

 

 

[Elinah Iredell]

So that is what all those appliers are for lol thanks for explaining that one to me . I took a break from sl and when I came back all this new stuff was there and I still never understood it. I see stores selling appliers and didnt know why I would need one.

 

I went to one fancy complicated store to try a mesh avatar . It was just confusing so I finally left. I have been experimenting with creating my own skins . The results I think are not too bad.

[Rolig Loon]

One sculpty, two or more sculpties. 

Texturing someone else's models wouldn't be as satisfying for me as texturing something that I made myself, but plenty of people do it.  You can certainly find a lot of texturable full perm models out there to work on.  The thing that would concern me most is that the quality of a texturing job on mesh depends a lot on how well the model was unwrapped. To get the best resolution and the most accurate and pleasing alignment of textures on your final model, you really need to have put some effort into creating good UV maps.  When you buy a texturable model that someone else has created, it should come with its own UV maps.  As far as I know, however, most merchants won't let you see those maps before you buy, so there's no way to tell how well the creator made them.  Frankly, I have never bought a model like that, so I don't know how legitimate a worry it is, but it's something I would think about.

BTW, you cannot modify rigged mesh.  If it doesn't fit, you're stuck.

[Elinah Iredell]

Thanks for the reply. None of what you said makes much sense to me about unwrapping and uv maps and such. I guess I would understand more if I tried to create mesh. It is strange that you cannot look at the finished piece to see how well it was created.

[Bobbie Faulds]

Sounds like you tried The Mesh Project, aka The Shops for your mesh body foray. It's probably the least user friendly mesh body, IMHO, on the grid. Try the demos for Slink, Perfect Body, Kitties Lair body called Lena, and Banned. Much easier to use and more user friendly. All but the Slink are also compatible with a universal applier system by Omega.

Sculpts I basically use for things like rocks. Prim trees can sway in the breeze where the Mesh don't. Mesh is great for tops you want that aren't fitted or pencil skirts and dresses. As a designer, I use sculpts and prims for sleeve and pants cuff attachments to go with the system clothes and appliers. Like a previous poster put, prims can give you flow in a skirt where mesh is static. One thing some designers have done is replaced the ugly glitch pants many gowns/skirts have with a mesh fitted sheath underneath, which works very well. Just depends on your application and what you are trying to achieve.

[ChinRey]

If I can join this thread as late as now...

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Elinah Iredell wrote:

What do you think about all those sculptie plants and trees vs mesh plants and trees?

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The most efficient trees in SL - that is the ones that gives highest possible visual quality with the lowest possible lag and land impact - are neither sculpts nor mesh, they're made from clusters of sprites. Unfortunately this method was never made available to builders and most of the few "Linden Trees" LL made themselves back in 2003 use textures well and truly outdated by today's standards. Even so, the few models that still hold up to today are probably the most common type of trees you see in SL.

As for sculpt vs mesh trees, generally speaking sculpts are more suitable for complex organic shapes like trees. But mesh gives you more control over the shape and texturing and creators like Lilith Heart and Alex Bader have shown that it's perfectly possible to make wonderfully detailed mesh trees with realitvely low land impact. (If you've just returned to SL: land impact is the same as the good old prim count except it gives a more precise calculation of the object's actual load and lag. At the moment both the old prim counting method and the new land impact calculations are used side by side and that causes a lot of confusion.)

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Elinah Iredell wrote:

Mesh seems to be more expensive.

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Well, it's more fashionable :matte-motes-wink:

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Elinah Iredell wrote:

I have also seen sculptie houses and wonder how they compare to mesh.

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Prims are better than sculpts for houses. Or perhaps prims for the main structure and sculpts for the intricate details. Nekka has made some surprisingly good little sculpt cottages but she is in a league of her own when it comes to mastering the technical aspect of sculpt making and she's still really pushing it a bit too far with those houses.

There might be one exception, log cabins. Sculpts may well be the perfect solution for those.

Mesh houses are a bit trickier here. There are mesh houses and then there are mesh houses...

The thing is, mesh puts a lot more responsibility on the builder than prims and sculpts do. Get it right and the result is spectacular, get it wrong and you have a disaster. Not all who think of themselves as mesh makers have been willing and able to learn how to make quality mesh and even those who did had to do lots of less succesful ones during the learning process. The result is that the quality of the mesh houses available today varies tremendously. You have mesh houses that break down into a pile of detached triangles even at mdoerate viewing distances, with walls you can walk halfway through, with floors you sink into, with floor you can't rez objects on and/or with sky high land impact and lag. But there are also solid mesh houses with amazingly low land impact and with lots of the lovely details only mesh can provide.

Even today prim houses by quality builders - people like Eric Linden, Gene Jacobs, Toby Howton, Jamie Parfort, Joan and Harald Nomad just to mention a few - can easily put more than half the mesh houses on the market to shame. Things are changing fast though. The average quality of mesh has taken a quantum leap this year and I believe we still only have seen the start of the mesh revolution.

There are a few threads about mesh houses running at the mesh section of this forum at the moment btw. You may want to take a look at those if you're interested in the topic.

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Elinah Iredell wrote:

I know that second life is apparently planning a new more advanced version of itself called future life or something like that in 2015 and they claim that the newer mesh will still be used but maybe not other types of things.

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That's Ebbe Linden's reply to a question in another thread here and it's really, really worrying but not for the reason you may think. I can't imagine he would have said that without consulting the tech guys at LL first and if they don't know how easy it is to convert prims and sculpts to mesh, we may have some serious problems coming our way...

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Elinah Iredell wrote:

What is rigged mesh? Is that a newer type of mesh? I wonder if they can do something about the invisibility aspect. I do agree also I like to choose my own shape . I hope they can make the size more editable. I would be nice not to have to use an alpa layer  and edit it to fit your exact size.

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I think others have already given better replies to that than I can. I'll just add some boring technical bits:

Regular mesh is stiff and inflexible, more like armor than clothing. There is no way to make it follow your body movements or body shape (mesh can be resized but not reshaped). The only solution is to hide parts of the actual avatar, make the mesh clothes specifically for a few standardized body shapes and try to make the stiffness as unnoticeable as possible. Sometimes this works amazingly well but not always.

There isn't really much difference between mesh and sculpts for that kind of clothing. I think the reason it's nearly always done with mesh is that mesh was the most marketable option when this idea first came along.

Rigged mesh, liquid mesh and fitted mesh are meshes attached to and following some of the key points ("collision bones") of the avatar with the mesh between those points flowing relatively freely. The mesh doesn't follow the avatar shape closely enough though so we still have to hide parts of the avatar with alphas to keep it from poking through the clothes.

"Rigged mesh" and "liquid mesh" were the names given to this technique by two different people (or groups of people? - can't remember) who hacked the mesh system independently of each other to make it work. "Fitted mesh" is the name LL gave it when they finally decided to make it an official part of SL.

Recently full body - or nearly full body fitted mesh avatar has come quite a bit of a fad. Since makers of wearable itmes don't have to worry too much about land impact, these are made from tremendously inefficient mesh and it doens't take many of them in a sim to lag it down significantly.

Linden Labs have also made their own clumsy range of mesh bodies and are handing them out to newcomers - as if those poor guys haven't been humiliated enough already.

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Elinah Iredell wrote:

I am glad to know that not everyone is taken with mesh I was feeling behind the times in not having  that much of it,

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Well, I first came to SL just before the mesh revolution started to pick up speed so maybe it should have been natural for me to focus on mesh. Fortunately I ran across Aley (you may know her better as Arcadia Asylum) very early and she told me in no uncertain terms that the trick to good building is to use all available materials and tools, not just one. Oh, and of course, twisting prims in SL is far more fun than moving mesh vertices in Blender...

 

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Elinah Iredell wrote:

I can create textures in photoshop

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There will always be a need for good textures.

The texture scene has changed a lot though. The number of free textures available to everybody is constantly growing for a start. I'm not talking about pirate copies here (althoguh that is still a huge problem) but genuine public domain ones made and/or uploaded by people who for various reasons have chosen to give them away to the public. Many of these textures are really good too and it's much harder for a texture maker to succeed commercially today.

Color inflated texture packages are probably more of a problem than they used to be. (Color inflation is when you take one basic texture, add different simple tintings to it and sell it as a set hoping the buyer won't realize such basic recoloring is better done from a single texture in-world. It should not be confused with the similar looking packages where the makers has made the effort to create nuances not achievable with in-world tinting.)

The kind of texture builders need has changed of course. Mesh allows us to create far more details as geometry so things like wall textures with windows painted on them are out.

The introduction of different surface effect maps, normal maps, specular maps and AO maps and the slow but continuous improvements in virtual world shading techniques will probably revolutionize texturing in the months and years to come. We're only just seeing the beginning of that.

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Elinah Iredell wrote:

I think furniture for instance looks very nice in mesh . I  hope it isnt too hard to learn to do . I guess from what you have said it is easier than sculpties

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The situation for mesh furniture is very similar to mesh houses but it might have come a bit further up the road. Not long ago people were oohing and aahing about the amazing one prim wonders of mesh furniture some makers produced even though they cost you an arm and a leg, broke down into a heap of triangles when seen from halfway across the room and probably weren't any better than the sculpties they were supposed to replace anyway. People seem to expect a lot more these days.