What is mesh?

[Myra Wildmist]

Hi, I'm reading through a lot of the info about mesh online, now, trying to understand it. I understand the advantages, I think, and how it's created, but, I still have some basic questions?

1. What is mesh?

There's a link here to the wiki, but it really doesn't answer the question:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/What_is_mesh%3F

2. Also, how is mesh different from what we had before?

I know this has probably been discussed to death, so thank you for your patience. All help is greatly appreciated.

 

[Persephone Emerald]

I haven't used mesh myself. I've also read the posts, picked up some free mesh items at Curious Kitties to see how they look with my non-mesh enabled viewer, & watched a couple videos about it on YouTube.

The way I see it, Mesh is like scupties, except much more detailed. It won't make other kinds of prims unusable. It won't make any viewers unusable. Over time it will replace alot of the sculpties people currently use & will make some things in SL look like odd boxes if you don't have a mesh-enabled viewer.

Mesh clothing can look much nicer than system clothing, but since it's a prim, it won't look right on non-standard avatars unless parts of their bodies are hidden with alpha layers.

Mesh can make really good looking items with fewer prims than regular prims & scultpties would use, but it's harder to learn to build with mesh, so initially at least not many builders will be making much with it.

Try searching the forums for "Mesh" threads. That will show you some pictures & more about what it is.

This picture shows how a mesh dress is supposed to look & how it looks on a non-mesh enabled viewer.

 

This shows a mesh mermaid tail on a non-mesh enabled viewer. Notice how an alpha layer hides the legs of my avatar.

[Kris Messmer]

Basic Description

With sculpties you have a certain amount of "points" that you can shape to make an object. Mesh is similar, but you have an unlimited amount of "points". This allows for very accurate and efficent building. You can also upload meshes that take the form of an avatar, i.e you can buy a dress that covers upper body to lower body without it having to be multiple prims in multiple attachment spots.

[DanielRavenNest Noe]

(1) A mesh is a connected set of triangles which can have a texture applied to them.  Everything in SL has always been a mesh.  For example, the avatar body is about 8700 triangles, and a box prim has 108.  What is new is the ability to upload arbitrary mesh shapes with custom texture mapping and physics shape.

(2) Prims have a fixed geometry (how the triangles are connected to each other), and built in controls in the edit window to deform them in various ways.  Sculpts have a fixed number of triangles defined by the sculpt map texture, and a single UV map.  Mesh has a designer selected number of triangles, and up to 8 custom UV maps to apply textures to.

Mesh also can have a custom physics shape, which controls how avatars and objects bump into it, and be attached to avatar bones, so it will bend and move with animations.  Thats how the standard avatar animates - the skin follows the bone motions.  Regular prims and sculpts can be attached, but not bend.

Linksets that contain mesh or objects using the new physics types will have a variable prim cost that roughly accounts for how much load and lag they produce.  Unlike standard prims, size matters! so do a lot of other factors.  Variable prim cost is probably a bigger change for average users than mesh.  A prim has always been 1 prim cost before.

[Nalates Urriah]

I'll give the answer a different twist...

If you press Ctrl-Shift-R, you will see the mesh that makes up SL. Its a toggle so press again to turn it off.

How is the new mesh different than that? It is not. They are the same. What is different is what we can now do with mesh. Prims allow us to move mesh around by scaling, twisting, cutting, and texturing groups of vertices/triangles in collections we know as prims.

Sculpties gave us a way to move individual vertices, but there are lots of restrictions.

The new 'mesh' is about giving us the ability to move individual vertices, change the number of vertices, control the physics shape (the part we bump into), control how we apply up to 8 textures, and use more powerful tools to edit the mesh.

So, mesh as the actual thing is no different than what is already in SL. This new THING, we confusingly call mesh, is about getting the ability to edit the SL mesh at a whole new level of control.

[Myra Wildmist]

Okay, I think I understand it a little better. If I was to look at it architecturally, what we had before were the tools to create structures like the Parhenon or a Frank Lloyd Wright house:

http://www.gowright.org/research/wright-robie-house.html

(FLW, Robie house).

While with "mesh", we'll have the ability to create Frank Gehry buildings



 

Is that about right?

(I only grabbed reusable images for this.)