Mesh vs Sculpty- Is it worth it?

[Pinky Vought]

I've just learned how to create and upload a mesh object. Up until now I've only made sculpties and I wanted to learn the difference.

I happened to be building a house and decided to make a sculpt toilet. It came out okay, and then the tank, flush handle, lid and seat are all additional prims. I wanted to see if I could make the bowl and tank together as one mesh item, and I did. I was pleased with the level of detail and ability to add the texture in blender. I was not expecting the prim count though. The toilet bowl and tank togther as a mesh turned out to be 11 prims, without the other parts.

I did some reading on this and the only suggestion I seem to find is to make the item with less detail to lower the prim count. So...that puts me back to sculpty then, doesn't it? If I'm losing the detail anyway, I might as well lose the prim count too and go back to 1 prim parts. Am I missing something here, or do I have it figured out?

Also, is there a way to make a sculpty bake with better quality? Do more lights help? Should I google a tutorial because it's too complicated to explain here, or am I asking too much of sculpty ability?

I can definately see the benefit of mesh for clothing, shoes etc, but is it really worth it for rezzed items?

Thanks for your opinions,

Pinky

[Cathy Foil]

I am sure you could probably get the mesh toilet down to 1 prim cost or 1 LI. 

Since toilets are generally indoor items and not seen from far away just in the lowest LOD make the toilet out of a few cubes.  One cube for the bowl.  One cube for the tank and one cube for the seat.

I loved sculpties and knew all the tricks and techniques.  Best part sculpties kept people from ripping mesh out of games and such.  If you knew what you were doing sculpties could be very effecient by using smaller scultpie maps.  Everyone always complained about sculpties using 1024 vertices for every sculptie.  This is actually not true.  If you use an 8 pixel by 8 pixel sculptie map you only use 16 vertices.  The rest are not rendered and are discarded by the viewer.  Maximum sculptie map size you ever need is 64 by 64 pixels which is only 12KB.  Compare that to mesh which can be up to 8MB and up to 65,536 vertices.  It is way easier to cause lag with mesh than with sculpties.

Don't get me wrong I will take mesh over sculpties any day as far as ease to create with.

What sculpties are best at now are for really really big things that are bigger than 64 meters.  Other than that mesh is the way to go as far as I can see.

Hope that helps.
Cathy

[Dora Gustafson]

One important aspect of using sculpties is that the land impact will increase when the 'new LI algoritm' is used
When it is not used any sculpty is one prim and cost one LI which can be an advantage

Here you can see when when the 'New algoritm' is used

:smileysurprised::smileyvery-happy:

 

[Drongle McMahon]

ETA: Sorry CF, meant to reply to OP

Without seeing the details of your LOD models, it is difficult to respond. However, I am confident in speculating that your high LI is at least parly because you have not yet learned the principles of mesh optimisation. Once these are learned, most people find they can make things with much better detail and texturing with mesh, for the same LI. There are a few exceptions, such as large unwalkable landscaping, but a toilet seems very unlikely to be one. If you give us a picture of your toilet, I would have a go at making a low LI version for you, to illustrate what can be done, as I did with a bed some time ago. Some clues are given in this old thread.

As a side note, it is not really meaningful to compare the file sizes of sculpt maps and collada files. Collada is XML, which is extremely inefficient in terms of data/space ratio, and can vary hugely for the same model depending on details such as name lengths and significant digits used in numerical values. The collada isn't even used to upload the model to SL, let alone to download it. Both instead use a much more efficient internal binary format, which is further compressed before transmission. However, it is still true that mesh do require more data, but not so much more as you imply.

Also, thanks for making the point about small sculpt maps using fewer vertices. These were  brought in at the same time as oblong maps, which provide even more advantages. It is a pity that so few sculpties seem to make useof  these improvements, and the older, less efficient sculpties remain so widespread.

 

[Pussycat Catnap]

While it is true that mesh has added a lot of ripped content into SL - that is content ripped from places outside of SL. Places such as those that sell 3D models.

The problem exists in reverse for Sculpty. The entire detail of your sculpty model is given to everyone who sees it in SL - unencrypted and uncompressed. I won't say where... but it is very easy to discover... and simply by seeing a sculpty object in SL, any other SL user can steal a fullperm of it with any viewer. They don't have to edit it... it just has to load on the their screen.

Mesh by contrast... is useless for this same thing - and what they get by seeing a mesh object with a normal viewer is something not retranslatable.

So if your work involves actual artistry in a 3d modeling application - you're a lot better off uploading it as a mesh than as a sculpty.

 

[Pinky Vought]

You all led me to new directions and I learned more, thank you. My toilet bowl and tank together is now at 1 LI, and also textured nicely. Woohoo.

[Medhue Simoni]

What nobody has mentioned yet is SL faces. With mesh, you can create different SL faces on your mesh. As efficiency goes, this can be good or bad, but from a creator's standpoint, it's extremely important.

 

I'll also point out that we can talk about this, that, and whatever, technically, but this doesn't mean that what we say computes in SL. Yes, somethings are technically true, and undeniable. That said, neither we, nor LL know exactly why something work better than other things, or can explain why. What I'm talking about is the obvious observation that sculpties rez slower. Maybe these are just the higher resolution sculpties. That might very well be the case. What this slower rezzing shows, is that sculpties have to go thru more processes to create the object in world, or some process along the way is slower.

For me, it's about utility. I'm not talking prim count, cause, for the most part, it's not an issue with things I make. I'm talking about how the object functions. A scupty is like a prim. All the same features of a prim are in a sculpty. 1 of those features is the ability to drop the object and make it delete. So, when I need this feature, I use a sculpty. Other than that, I use a mesh.

[Drongle McMahon]

"the ability to drop the object and make it delete"

Can you explain that in a little more detail? I'm not sure what you mean. Technically, in the code, mesh and sculpty objects are just other kind of prim (class llVolume). In fact mesh is more-or-less a kind of sculpty with a different way of specifying the geometry. So what is the functionality that you are telling us is missing here? The main difference between mesh and sculpties that I see is the ability to switch the geometry of an existing object with a sculpty (by updating the sculpt map), which you can't do with a mesh. Is that what you are referring to?

[Medhue Simoni]

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Drongle McMahon wrote:

"the ability to drop the object and make it delete"

Can you explain that in a little more detail? I'm not sure what you mean. Technically, in the code, mesh and sculpty objects are just other kind of prim (class llVolume). In fact mesh is more-or-less a kind of sculpty with a different way of specifying the geometry. So what is the functionality that you are telling us is missing here? The main difference between mesh and sculpties that I see is the ability to switch the geometry of an existing object with a sculpty (by updating the sculpt map), which you can't do with a mesh. Is that what you are referring to?

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As I said, it has to do with the ability to drop the item, and make it delete upon dropping it. When mesh development was finally finishing up, I was working on a combat system. In that combat system, we created a food and eating system, to increase your health. So, for instance, I made an apple tree, which has apples in them. You click the apple, and an apple is sent to your inventory. You wear the apple and click it to eat it. After 4 clicks, the apple has no more to give, so you rightclick on the apple and choose Drop. The apple drops from your hand, and will delete from inworld, and from your inventory. This can not been done using meshes. It was a clean way for us to keep user's inventories clean, and not have empty food cluttering up inventories. We can't us mesh items to do this tho. I even asked Nix at 1 of the mesh meetings. I had just made a zombie AO, and included my combat system with the AO. I showed Nix how my new wonderful mesh brain, that I was eating, would not drop and delete. It would just drop to the ground. Nix said this could not be changed.

[Drongle McMahon]

Interesting. I wonder why it can't delete itself. Presumably an LSL limitation. Do you know if it's an LSL function that fails on meshes only? or an event? or a state change?

By the way, you shouldn't really eat zombie brains!

ETA: No. I see it's not LSL, but that the menu-initiated dropping of mesh is blocked. Did Nyx explain why?

[arton Rotaru]

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Drongle McMahon wrote:

 

ETA: No. I see it's not LSL, but that the menu-initiated dropping of mesh is blocked. Did Nyx explain why?

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http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Archive/2012-02-13

Hehe, look who was attendant at that meeting also. :matte-motes-wink-tongue:

[Drongle McMahon]

Hmm. No real explanation. You would think I would have remembered the zombie brain though! :matte-motes-sour:

[Medhue Simoni]

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arton Rotaru wrote:

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Drongle McMahon wrote:

 

ETA: No. I see it's not LSL, but that the menu-initiated dropping of mesh is blocked. Did Nyx explain why?

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http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Archive/2012-02-13

Hehe, look who was attendant at that meeting also. :matte-motes-wink-tongue:

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Good catch! From the conversation it sounds like it can't even be dropped. Obviously, I've not tried since.

 

It too bad too, cause I was going to break the food meshes up into bite size parts and make them disappear after you take each bite. It would have been cool. This is far too costly and complex for sculpties. With mesh, it's a simple boolean cut out..