Mesh

[Moo Spyker]

Just thought i'd share something I wrote up (posted it in a reply somewhere but deserves to be its own post).

This is what I wrote up BEFORE I learned about the prim costs scaling up with size and that LODs all combine into the cost of the prim count... if Linden Labs does mesh right these would be the advantages over Sculpties... Well currently these advantages still apply to small scale items like AV's and accessories and small physical vehicles... (I have other posts about how mesh wont be of much use to me on large scale builds)

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    When Mesh is fully released it will make Sculpties 100% obsolete. No matter what your opinion is its a fact that Mesh is better in every single way then Sculpties. Let me walk you through the details on exactly why that is. Here is a brief lesson about video game graphics in general. Everything you see in here is made up of "Polygons". Prims and Sculpties are all made up of them. Your computer graphics card is what is used to display all of these. The more polygons around you the more work your computer has to do to display them. So the lower the polygons the better and faster your computer can display them. For those who would like to see the polygons in world you can go to your Preferences in the Advanced tab check "Show Advanced Menu" and "Show Developer Menu" save and exit the window and then press Ctrl + Shift + R. It will go into wire frame mode, press it again to exit. You can see all the polygons behind the scenes. A bit more in depth, a Prim, Sculptie and Mesh are made up of polygons. A polygon is made up of 2 or more triangles. A triangle is made up of 3 vertices (vertex). Vertex > Triangle > Polygon > (Prims, Sculpties, Mesh).

    So with Second Life a prim box should have 6 polygons because it has 6 sides however these have 54 polygons because they use 9 polygons per side to work with the prim system such as hollow, taper, cut, etc. With Sculpties every single Sculptie no matter how simple or complex, no matter how large or small, they all have 1024 polygons... This is because they use a 64x64 or proportional texture to use the colors of each pixel as a position for each vertex. So Sculpters, myself included, would simply "hide" unused vertices which works to create nice looking Sculpties but still puts more stress on the graphic card. So say you want to make a complex shape that looks like 2 boxes and save prims so you use Sculpties. Sure you saved on prims on the sim count, but your hurting everyone who views it with the high polygon counts where as with Mesh you could easily make the shape in 12 polygons vs 1024... Do you see already how inferior Sculpties is? http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/535/meshvsculpt.jpg/

    The biggest thing Mesh is introducing is the ability to upload a "physical" model along with the visual model. Here is a example of a physical model http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/88/dropshipcollisionmodeld.jpg/ the blue box is the physical model and the white ship is the visual model. A physical model is what your AV is actually walking on, it is completely unseen. Physical models take up a huge amount of computer processing power. Most people have never noticed that every single Sculptie uses a sphere as its physical model no matter what the shape. So say you had a Sculpted square floor. Behind the scenes the physical model is round so you would fall through the corners of the floor so you basically have to use yet another invisible prim to make the floor solid. They do this to save on computer processing power and simplify the physical model. With Mesh you'll be able to custom fit your physical model to the Mesh which will save a hundred times more on computer processing because on a simple Mesh floor you can have the physical model 1 to 6 polygons instead of a sphere... Second Life also splits up the visual and physical aspects of the Mesh so physically moving vehicles such as cars, airplanes, spaceships can has a super low physical model but a extremely high visual model. Ive seen a 150,000 polygon ship take up only 13 prims physically and was able to be flown. That's equivalent to 150 Sculpties... that's INSANE!

    Another huge thing Mesh has over Scultpies is the ability to upload several LOD's (Level Of Detail) models. What these are is when you set your objects graphic setting to low, medium or high you can have a individual Mesh for each... So on low a wall in a house could be just 1 polygon. On medium it could have the baseboards and trim modeled in. On high you could go as far as to model in cracks or outlet plugs in the wall... This saves so much for people with lower end computers and you have complete control on how each setting looks. On the other hand with Sculpties SL simply reduces that 64x64 texture down so they have less resolution. Which on the lowest setting on most Scultpies I have are not even recognizable...

    Yet another thing Mesh has over Sculpties is how smooth they can look visually. The vertices in a Sculptie are all "snapped" to a 256x256x256 grid when they are uploaded here and do not have any decimal places. Its 256 because it uses the color of the pixels. The color range is 0 to 255. I make large ships and the exteriors are always very bumpy and rough looking because of that limitation. With Mesh I've already seen cars that are mirror smooth because Mesh uses a decimal point system when it places the vertices.

    Last major thing I can think of is Texturing. You will now be able to texture the correct way with Mesh. Since the max upload size currently in SL is 1024x1024 the highest resolution per polygon on a Sculptie is 32x32 pixels because you have no control over the "UV" mapping. UV mapping is basically how the texture is laid on top of the model. With Sculpties you are stuck with the default UV mapping and cannot edit it, instead you have to texture around that limitation which almost always creates a loss in resolution. With Mesh you will be able to apply a 1024x1024 to each polygon if you wish, meaning greater resolution. Here is a visual example http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/535/meshvsculpt.jpg/ as you can see it only takes 3 texture images all compressed into the same texture to make up the Mesh object. While the Sculpted texture needs a instance of every texture laid out again and again over 25 of the original 3 textures had to be duplicated out on the texture because of the lack of UV editing... Not to mention the polygon difference... The end result is visually the EXACT same.... so why use sculpties any more?

Here's a sum up of the FACTS about the pros and cons of each just off the top of my head.

Mesh Pro's:
- Most people who Sculpt already use programs that can do Mesh such as Blender and 3ds Max
- 1 to 64,000 Polygon counts per object = total control
- Ability to make custom physical models
- Physical and visual prim counts split up
- Low end computer friendly with Level Of Detail models
- Better and smoother looking
- Faster building times
- UV mapping

Mesh Con's:
- Higher upload $L costs

Sculptie Pro's:
- People are already used to it
- Low upload $L costs

Sculptie Con's:
- Every sculpt is 1024 polygons
- Sphere physical models
- Lost resolution on low graphic settings
- Slow building times (average sculptie for me takes at least 1-2 hours)
- No UV mapping
- Very graphics card intensive
- Creates tons of computer lag for low end users
- Bumpy on long smooth surfaces

About Me

    I've been using Sculpites ever since they first came out you can see my line of large ships I create have been with Sculpties since SL introduced it so I know a thing or two about them. I've learned all the tricks and techniques to creating with them. Ever since the beginning I have hated the Sculptie system. I've used 3ds Max in RL for 9+ years previous to SL and the way you have to work wit Sculpties is everything wrong about content design for video games. There is no optimization or concern about triangle or polygon counts what so ever. I had to adapt to it to be able to make decent looking stuff in here. With Mesh coming out I am very excited to actually be able to model the REAL way now!

Moo Spyker

[Moo Spyker]

This is what I wrote up BEFORE I learned about the prim costs scaling up with size and that LODs all combine into the cost of the prim count... if Linden Labs does mesh right these would be the advantages over Sculpties... Well currently these advantages still apply to small scale items like AV's and accessories and small physical vehicles... (I have other posts about how mesh wont be of much use to me on large scale builds)

***********************************************************
    When Mesh is fully released it will make Sculpties 100% obsolete. No matter what your opinion is its a fact that Mesh is better in every single way then Sculpties. Let me walk you through the details on exactly why that is. Here is a brief lesson about video game graphics in general. Everything you see in here is made up of "Polygons". Prims and Sculpties are all made up of them. Your computer graphics card is what is used to display all of these. The more polygons around you the more work your computer has to do to display them. So the lower the polygons the better and faster your computer can display them. For those who would like to see the polygons in world you can go to your Preferences in the Advanced tab check "Show Advanced Menu" and "Show Developer Menu" save and exit the window and then press Ctrl + Shift + R. It will go into wire frame mode, press it again to exit. You can see all the polygons behind the scenes. A bit more in depth, a Prim, Sculptie and Mesh are made up of polygons. A polygon is made up of 2 or more triangles. A triangle is made up of 3 vertices (vertex). Vertex > Triangle > Polygon > (Prims, Sculpties, Mesh).

    So with Second Life a prim box should have 6 polygons because it has 6 sides however these have 54 polygons because they use 9 polygons per side to work with the prim system such as hollow, taper, cut, etc. With Sculpties every single Sculptie no matter how simple or complex, no matter how large or small, they all have 1024 polygons... This is because they use a 64x64 or proportional texture to use the colors of each pixel as a position for each vertex. So Sculpters, myself included, would simply "hide" unused vertices which works to create nice looking Sculpties but still puts more stress on the graphic card. So say you want to make a complex shape that looks like 2 boxes and save prims so you use Sculpties. Sure you saved on prims on the sim count, but your hurting everyone who views it with the high polygon counts where as with Mesh you could easily make the shape in 12 polygons vs 1024... Do you see already how inferior Sculpties is? http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/535/meshvsculpt.jpg/

    The biggest thing Mesh is introducing is the ability to upload a "physical" model along with the visual model. Here is a example of a physical model http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/88/dropshipcollisionmodeld.jpg/ the blue box is the physical model and the white ship is the visual model. A physical model is what your AV is actually walking on, it is completely unseen. Physical models take up a huge amount of computer processing power. Most people have never noticed that every single Sculptie uses a sphere as its physical model no matter what the shape. So say you had a Sculpted square floor. Behind the scenes the physical model is round so you would fall through the corners of the floor so you basically have to use yet another invisible prim to make the floor solid. They do this to save on computer processing power and simplify the physical model. With Mesh you'll be able to custom fit your physical model to the Mesh which will save a hundred times more on computer processing because on a simple Mesh floor you can have the physical model 1 to 6 polygons instead of a sphere... Second Life also splits up the visual and physical aspects of the Mesh so physically moving vehicles such as cars, airplanes, spaceships can has a super low physical model but a extremely high visual model. Ive seen a 150,000 polygon ship take up only 13 prims physically and was able to be flown. That's equivalent to 150 Sculpties... that's INSANE!

    Another huge thing Mesh has over Scultpies is the ability to upload several LOD's (Level Of Detail) models. What these are is when you set your objects graphic setting to low, medium or high you can have a individual Mesh for each... So on low a wall in a house could be just 1 polygon. On medium it could have the baseboards and trim modeled in. On high you could go as far as to model in cracks or outlet plugs in the wall... This saves so much for people with lower end computers and you have complete control on how each setting looks. On the other hand with Sculpties SL simply reduces that 64x64 texture down so they have less resolution. Which on the lowest setting on most Scultpies I have are not even recognizable...

    Yet another thing Mesh has over Sculpties is how smooth they can look visually. The vertices in a Sculptie are all "snapped" to a 256x256x256 grid when they are uploaded here and do not have any decimal places. Its 256 because it uses the color of the pixels. The color range is 0 to 255. I make large ships and the exteriors are always very bumpy and rough looking because of that limitation. With Mesh I've already seen cars that are mirror smooth because Mesh uses a decimal point system when it places the vertices.

    Last major thing I can think of is Texturing. You will now be able to texture the correct way with Mesh. Since the max upload size currently in SL is 1024x1024 the highest resolution per polygon on a Sculptie is 32x32 pixels because you have no control over the "UV" mapping. UV mapping is basically how the texture is laid on top of the model. With Sculpties you are stuck with the default UV mapping and cannot edit it, instead you have to texture around that limitation which almost always creates a loss in resolution. With Mesh you will be able to apply a 1024x1024 to each polygon if you wish, meaning greater resolution. Here is a visual example http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/535/meshvsculpt.jpg/ as you can see it only takes 3 texture images all compressed into the same texture to make up the Mesh object. While the Sculpted texture needs a instance of every texture laid out again and again over 25 of the original 3 textures had to be duplicated out on the texture because of the lack of UV editing... Not to mention the polygon difference... The end result is visually the EXACT same.... so why use sculpties any more?

Here's a sum up of the FACTS about the pros and cons of each just off the top of my head.

Mesh Pro's:
- Most people who Sculpt already use programs that can do Mesh such as Blender and 3ds Max
- 1 to 64,000 Polygon counts per object = total control
- Ability to make custom physical models
- Physical and visual prim counts split up
- Low end computer friendly with Level Of Detail models
- Better and smoother looking
- Faster building times
- UV mapping

Mesh Con's:
- Higher upload $L costs

Sculptie Pro's:
- People are already used to it
- Low upload $L costs

Sculptie Con's:
- Every sculpt is 1024 polygons
- Sphere physical models
- Lost resolution on low graphic settings
- Slow building times (average sculptie for me takes at least 1-2 hours)
- No UV mapping
- Very graphics card intensive
- Creates tons of computer lag for low end users
- Bumpy on long smooth surfaces

About Me

    I've been using Sculpites ever since they first came out you can see my line of large ships I create have been with Sculpties since SL introduced it so I know a thing or two about them. I've learned all the tricks and techniques to creating with them. Ever since the beginning I have hated the Sculptie system. I've used 3ds Max in RL for 9+ years previous to SL and the way you have to work wit Sculpties is everything wrong about content design for video games. There is no optimization or concern about triangle or polygon counts what so ever. I had to adapt to it to be able to make decent looking stuff in here. With Mesh coming out I am very excited to actually be able to model the REAL way now!

Moo Spyker

[Pussycat Catnap Member]

Sculpty: 1 prim to use, 10L to upload. Well done canhave solid LOD.

Mesh: lots of prims, more than using regular prims sometimes, who knows how much to upload.

Land: limited supply. Only have so many prims.

- Sculpty wins.

[HD Pomeray Honored Resident]

That was a nice summation and I totally agree with everything you said including the intro as to the scaling issues.   One other thing you could add to your "Mesh Pros" list is the ability to Rig a mesh.  

[HD Pomeray Honored Resident]

I don't think the jury is out on that yet .... Well crafted Meshes are coming our way and we'll see how they stack up in link sets.... 

On the other hand...  Poorly crafted, stand alone meshes.... I agree ... Sculpties will win there....

So... choose your weapon wisely.  

[Gaia Clary Advisor]

Although i am completely pro mesh, i still have an eye on Sculpted prims ;-) So i would like to mention some properties of sculptied prims which should not be overlooked:

1. Sculpted prims face counts range from 16 quads up to 1024 quads. So it is no longer true, that sculpties "always" consume 1024 faces. This has changed when oblongs where introduced.
2. Collapsed vertices on sculpties are removed from the mesh before it gets into the renderer. Hence collapsed vertices are effectively not processed, hence they do not realy waste render costs.
3. Since sculpted prims have a fixed UV-map the actual amount of data that needs to be transfered from LL to your viewer is by far smaller than what needs to be transfered for meshes.
4. Creating a mesh needs a lot more skills than creating a sculpted prim.
5. Creating the different LOD's for meshes is some work if you want to make it optimal. Of course there are some automated or at least half automated tools around which help to create LOD's... but you must take care of them by yourself. Only in rare cases the automatic LOD generator in the Mesh importer creates acceptable results.
6. Having the "possibility" to create your own UV-map comes with the "necessity" to actually do that. And sometimes it is not as straight forward to get a good UV-map, as you might think.

You are of course right, meshes give us all sorts of benefits and freedom. But with freedom comes responsibility. So we get much more tasks on our desk before we can publish a (suitable) mesh object.And after having worked with meshes for quite a while i still see that making Sculpted Prims takes much less steps and needs much less skills, compared to mesh weaving.

From the current experience i hear and read during the last few weeks, i learn that (currently) meshes are well suited for small up to mid range (below 10 meter) objects and attachments. Large objects are excluded because of the high PE. I do not know why it is so. But thats how it is. So people who want to make large objects, are (currently) not very happy with mesh. All others are quite happy (or could be).

[Mylar]

I really don't think mesh will make sculpties obsolete, any more than sculpties made prims obsolete. each has strengths and weaknesses. It's down to prims vs detail vs skill, and using the strengths of each. I still use the kani avatar, which is made entirely of prims, and still looks better than most of the avatars made from sculpties. In fact that's one of the strengths of the kani avi; the individual parts can be modded. This won't be the case with mesh avatars.

[Moo Spyker]

Just FYI I work with mesh and sculpties in 3ds Max. (which in my opinion is a very simple to learn program, took me 2-3 months to master everything I need to know)

1. Last I heard it is proportional and always equals out to 1024 polygons like 32x32, 16x64, 8x128, 2x256. I never knew it could be anything else.

2. Never knew that nice.

3. That is true but with both it only occurs once while it is downloading. Which the texture sizes themselves can be made 4 times smaller because your able to overlap UV's on faces like in my picture example I showed. So with a sculpt to get the same resolution as its mesh counterpart could be something like 1024x1024 for the sculpt texture verses maybe even as low as 256x256 for the mesh texture. The end result would be the same resolution on the model but a 16 times smaller texture size in the download... So in the end its still a huge benefit to mesh over sculpties...

4. For me this is not true AT ALL... Sculpties are such a pain in the ass to work with. The way I make them they require planning to lay out properly to guess how many faces to "hide" and guessing out how many parts the sculptie will have. You are limited to start with a plane, cylinder, or sphere, or similar shapes with a fixed polygon and vertex count. You cannot use a single tool such as extrude, weld, anything or the UV map will get screwed up and will not be able to upload. You are not able to delete lines or vertices or add anymore... Where as mesh you can put a box down and begin extruding, welding vertices, creating and deleting lines, vertices, anything and everything and have a load of tools at your disposal (depending on what program you work with) The average sculptie I make takes anywhere between 1 to 4 hours.... with mesh I can pump high quality items out that look better then sculpties in a quarter of the time. The advantages of mesh over sculptie are endless in my experience...

5. This is also not true... The SL uploader generates out all your LOD levels its only an option to make the manually which there again is way more control over sculpties... Scultpies are just reduced in the texture size so you have no control over what they will look like. My sculpted ships viewed on the lowest object setting are not recognizable at all...

6. I don't really understand that at all because even sculpties you have to map out and lay out your textures on top of the sculptie. You still have to do that in 3d or 2d but its the same thing you can see how I had to duplicate and paste the textures over the sculptie. Mesh is more complex in the sense that you can UV map and unwrap the textures on individual faces of the mesh and scale and position them independently, but there is still the complexity with the sculpties as well...

I'm not trying to sound like I know everything but from my experience all the points you made mesh still has them beat. =P

[Moo Spyker]

I agree with that but LL seems to have other things to say. In a test I linked a mesh with a sculpted linkset and the sculpties were then treated as if they were mesh in terms of PE counts and increased the prim count significiantly...

[Mylar]

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Moo Spyker wrote:

I agree with that but LL seems to have other things to say. In a test I linked a mesh with a sculpted linkset and the sculpties were then treated as if they were mesh in terms of PE counts and increased the prim count significiantly...

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*very* useful bit of information to have, thank you.

[Drongle McMahon Advisor]

Try linking your mesh to a 0.6 x 0.6 x 0.6 hollow torus with four turns, a bit of profile cut and a touch of shear and taper