Uploading Mesh Feet 776 LI?

[Zoe Madrigal]

Hello! I'm new to Blender and have created my own feet for my avatar. I have successfully rigged them (I believe) and want to bring them into SL to test.

I go into Build, Upload, Model, Chose .dae of my feet, and then the chaos happens.

My SL crashes, or it allows me to ALMOST upload them.

When it allows me to almost upload them, I name my model, go to Upload options, I choose Include skin weight. I then go back to Physics and lower lowest, low and medium values. When I click calculate weights and fees it tells me my feet of 25,386 verts in Blender (should be about 2 prims in SL) has a LI of 776!!!

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong or how to upload them without lowering the LOD too much as I really like how they look as is.

Thank you in advance!

[Sassy Romano]

Reduce the topology in a major way.  25,000+ vertices for just feet is insane.  The file size will be large which is why it will be taking a long time to upload and appear to crash.

As a good start, make them look great without using the subsurf modifier, which is so often used to take just about any object and spank it to death in an effor to make the item look "nice and smooth and rounded".

[Zoe Madrigal]

Thank you for your reply!

I know it's a lot for feet, I just don't want to undo all the detail spent making them! If that's the only option than of course I'll have no choice. I guess I could reduce down one trial pair and see if it even works in world. =)

 

[Gaia Clary]

Maybe the huge LI in your case might be due to your physics shape. Maybe you just create a simple cube (or even a simple Tetrahedron and use that as physics shape for your feet. That should be more than enough to reduce the physics costs significantly.

As a sidenote: I believe you can get very feet with 10 times less faces...

[jordanit0]

Im not sure where you are getting 25k verts would be about 2 LI 

I just done a test with a 45k vert object the LI was 160 http://gyazo.com/9d2964b219e7bf8a5ae41e3cfffd3f1c

Thats with the uploader doing the LODs 

Im just guessing but you may have some modifiers on your mesh that have not been applied or deleted before upload which is probably doubling or even tripling your vert count.

I agree with the others 25k for feet seems to much. 

[seabird7]

There is also a modifier named 'decimate' which will remove a few verts or most of them, with that you can reduce such a large number by half before even noticing the change in detail. 

 

These are feet, ok, how much past the point of calling them attractive can you really go? I understand you have agonized on each tiny detail but you could accept that model as portfolio art, but not a purposely clever model for Second Life. We work hard to be sensible on the game level. Even if you can upload huge amounts of vertexes, we folk will need to download them back before they begin to rez in our viewer. In a crowded club, feet like like that will stay gray, or perhaps they will stop the room from loading for 40 minutes. 

Just saying you have art, and you have SL art. The latter takes longer but is perhaps the more wonderful for appreciation

 

BTW - these feet are not 'shaded flat' are they? In addition, there is no difference between a subtle textural shadow and a mesh shadow for a 2D monitor from a general point of scrutiny.

 

[Medhue Simoni]

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Zoe Madrigal wrote:

 

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong or how to upload them without lowering the LOD too much as I really like how they look as is.

Thank you in advance!

---

There are 3 major factors that is going to increase you LI. Your total verts is only 1 of the 3. Gaia mentions your physics shape, which should be a simple box for clothing items. The 3rd part is your LODs. Of course, a real modeler would tell you that you need to make all your LODs, but who has time for that? I generally stick to a simple upload process for LODs on clothing items. The highest 2 spots should use the actual mesh. The Low LOD, I generally just make sure the object holds it's overall shape. The lowest LOD will have the most influence on LI, so you can make this whatever you want, to get your LI to be as low as you need it. I'm pretty sure LODs on Avatar clothing works differently than static objects, but this is just how I do it, and I've never had an issue. Essentially, lower the lowest LOD, and you should have a much lower Land Impact.

P. S. I agree with every person that says 25k is far too much for just feet. My whole Lycan avatar, with hair, is only barely more than that.

[Zoe Madrigal]

I have reduced them down to 8,000 verts and now my LI is over 1000.

Rigging them has been successful, I made block feet to test and see if maybe it was the rigging. It's not.

I've lowered the lowest and low down almost all the way for LOD. Even with all of that, the LI is not coming down.

Could tranferring the SL Avatar weight paints to my feet be causing the issue?

[Zoe Madrigal]

Also, I feel I should point out, I'm not talking about how many vertices in SL, I'm talking about Blender. Generally anything under 1000 vertices is half a prim. I've made little knick knacks like candy bowls and tea cups for my kitchen, even my dining room table. All of these were fine. My table was detailed and 13,456 verts in Blender and ended up being 2 prims in SL.

Diving into the world of making things for the avatar seems to complicate things. I followed tutorial videos and did exactly what was instructed to attach them to the avatar and apply weights. Something isn't working and I can't seem to figure it out.

[Sassy Romano]

Re-read what Medue wrote... 3 parts that contribute to LI.  The highest of either of these will be the LI.

Please show a current picture of the upload dialog box with the calculations done, that's all we need to help you, anything else is just wasting time speculating on things.

[Zoe Madrigal]

Ah okay. I'll do that shortly! :matte-motes-big-grin:

[Zoe Madrigal]

 

In Blender it is not 47,000 vertices, so I don't know why it says that on the upload screen. I tried to upload it earlier and it told me 336 LI. I just tried it again to get a screen shot and now it's 438. I'm not doing anything different. Each time, it gives me a different value, all of which are way too much.

 

[Drongle McMahon]

The reason the vertex count is higher is because Blender counts just the nember of different geometric points, while the uploader counts the same geometric point again if it is associated with a different normal, uv coordinate or material. This is an inevitable consequence of the internal data format. The vertex count is more important than the triangle count in determining the download weight (which is the LI in your case). One thing that causes the increase is flat shading, because each vertex has to be repeated with different normals for each adjacent face. For something like this, you should be using smooth shading on nearly all the edges. Not only will that reduce the vertex count directly, but it will allow you to obtain an equally smooth appearance with HUGELY reduced numbers of vertices/triangles in Blender.

Next is a bug that happens when you have more than 21844 triangles. The uploader secretly creates new materials whenever that number is exceeded. That can lead to all kinds of problems, including the interspersion of triangles with different materials and consequent vertex count increases even if the shading is smooth. You should never attempt to upload any mesh with more than 21844 triangle count per material in the uploader. The is FAR too many for a foot anyway.

The other common source of this effect is over-fragmented UV maps.

The download weight is highly dependent on the size of the object. So it is affected by any chages to scaling in Blender and by the Scale setting on the upload options tab. You need to make sure these are correct by checking the dimensions there. If the size there is too big, the low/lowest LOD triangle/vertex counts will be ignored.

 

[Pamela Galli]

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Zoe Madrigal wrote:

Also, I feel I should point out, I'm not talking about how many vertices in SL, I'm talking about Blender. Generally anything under 1000 vertices is half a prim. I've made little knick knacks like candy bowls and tea cups for my kitchen, even my dining room table. All of these were fine. My table was detailed and 13,456 verts in Blender and ended up being 2 prims in SL.

Diving into the world of making things for the avatar seems to complicate things. I followed tutorial videos and did exactly what was instructed to attach them to the avatar and apply weights. Something isn't working and I can't seem to figure it out.

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One thing I have heard and experienced myself many times: SL hates tiny or skinny triangles. I have had some ridiculous LI caused by making something smaller.

[Gaia Clary]

Can it be that your mesh does use flat shading ?

 

That would explain why you want to have so many faces, and why you get such a high "vertex" count in the SL Importer. Maybe you can try out what happens when you set your mesh to smooth shading as indicated in the image.

The button shows up in the tools shelf  when you are in Object mode. And when you are on Blender 2.71 it is in the Tool shelf's Tools tab.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Zoe Madrigal wrote:

 

In Blender it is not 47,000 vertices, so I don't know why it says that on the upload screen. I tried to upload it earlier and it told me 336 LI. I just tried it again to get a screen shot and now it's 438. I'm not doing anything different. Each time, it gives me a different value, all of which are way too much.

 

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In Blender, make sure you check both the Armature, and the Mesh tabs in the export window, down in the lower left hand corner. I would guess you are exporting everything in your scene, which is changing your vertice count.

I would also check the overal size of your model in the upload window, under the Upload options tab. If your model is extremely large when you upload it, it will have a really high LI. You can adjust the overall size in the options under the Upload options tab, or in Blender.

I know your setting in the image is not why you have a high LI, but you are using LOD settings that don't make any sense, other than to try and lower your LI. I'm going to post an image that show how I mostly do my LODs in the upload window. In this example, I really wanted the rifle to hold it's shape, even at the lowest LOD, which is why I kept it so high. I generally don't do this on most mesh, as the lowest LOD only kicks in at distances where you can't see the model well anyways. So, I generally go as low as I can go and still know there is an object there. Also notice in my example, that the Medium LODs are all the same counts as the High LOD. This is because SL's system doesn't save you any LI by lowering the Medium LOD. The other reason is that Medium LOD is the LOD that most people will see when they are around you. Most people will not be close enough to you to ever see the High LOD.

 

Again tho, your biggest issue is your total number of Vertices. You could use the Decimate Modifier to lower your Vert count, and it will not destroy your UV mapping.

[Sassy Romano]

The final answer would be derived from the Options tab of the upload dialog, where it shows the scale.

It's not the LOD, it's not physics so it must be the size of the object.  You could either reduce it in blender to avatar scale or use the scale thing in the options to bring it down but ...

You still have too much topology for just feet!

[Zoe Madrigal]

I have reduced the vert count to 9881 and there are no longer tiny triangles.

The newest issue, is that once I have aligned, rigged and weighted my feet, I export them as a .dae.

When I upload them in SL and wear them, it is acting as if I had the entire skeleton, avatar and feet selected and my avatar turns into a Frankenstein mishap. The feet split my avatar in half and contort it. I have to detach the object and log out to get my avatar to go back to normal.

[Zoe Madrigal]

My feet are exact as far as size since I am modeling them to the avatar I took directly from SL.

[ChinRey]

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Zoe Madrigal wrote:

I know it's a lot for feet, I just don't want to undo all the detail spent making them!

 

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That's what you'll end up with anyway. There is no computer screen in the world with high enough resolution to actually show all those details.

Unless you spend a lot of time zooming in on detailed parts of people's feet of course. But do you really do that? And do I really want to hear the answer to that question? :matte-motes-wink: