PRIM-O-MESH

[Chic Aeon]

This isn't a discussion on whether prims to mesh is a "good" thing - LOL. I do understand that the topology isn't all that great. I does lower prims however so it can be handy in that way.

I have been using it mostly to port older prim builds over to another not so techie grid :D. Much of the time it works quite well. But I wanted to mention a few things for folks that might be interested in the process and haven't tried it.

Items export unlinked so come in as a linkset.

Smaller prims sometimes fall apart; presumably the importer (or exporter) has issues with different sizes of prims). So houses (minus thin window panes) do well while some other items may not.

The mapping sometimes get confused. And oftentimes (with prims, not mesh exported) the faces are not accessable. So a cube say can sometime act as one material face rather than six (which sort of makes sense). Sometimes a cube shape isn't really editable at all via the texture menu; you change things and the corresponding faces do not do what is asked. Have no clue why that will happen on some prims and not on "identical" neighboring ones; assume it is a bug.

It works SWIMMINGLY on mesh -- if you have somehow lost your original DAE file or (like me) have so many you are not sure just which one was the best or last - LOL.

There have been long (and nasty) discussions on other forums whether prim - O - mesh (that exported through third party viewers) is "real" mesh or not.

Personally I don't consider it real mesh :D. Of course it IS mesh; a PRIM is mesh. But it lack some to many of the good qualities that mesh can provide. Still, in a pinch when you want something fast, it is good to have the option.

Just a report while I was thinking about it.

 

 

[MIstahMoose]

If we wanna get reeeealllll technical, them everything you see on screen is mesh~ Though I am not sure the program converting in world mesh to out of world is s good thing. IE buy something full perm get the dae and redistribute it.. Other than that I enjoyed reading your thoughts and notes

[Aquila Kytori]

Hi

A couple of weeks ago , for an earlier thread, using the Singularity viewer I tried exporting a 10meter prim cube from SL in .dae and then in .obj format. When opened in Blender there were some very important differences. So i expect the differences carry over to when importing into different world

 I repost the results again here :

First the .dae cube exported from SL and imported into blender

 

and the .obj cube :

 

 

[Pamela Galli]

It is mostly useful when I am, say, making mesh stairs to go in a prim house and I want the stairs to fit exactly, so I import a mesh version of the surrounding prim walls and floors.

[Chic Aeon]

Yes, knew some of that . BTW Firestorm does a MUCH better job than Singularity and will export the textures for you into the same folder which helps a lot.
 

I found NO issues at all with either viewer when exporting MESH, only with prim builds.

 

Apparently legacy prims were made with all those tris in order to help with lighting effects (not sure whether that was ambient light, cast light or both).

I have always saved as a DAE file so the issues I found seem to be different that yours -- interesting.

You can of course go in and clean up the file but I don't know many that do and honestly that takes lots of time -- more than building from scratch I would think. ONE thing export is handy for is when you do need something a certain size. Then you can export your prim build and use that as a model for your "original mesh" build *wink*.