Platforms that are not so, well, flat.(live up in the sky)

[Vladamir Bearsfoot]

Where I live I have a 128x128x0.5 mega prim. Sure it covers the space(and air that I walk on), but it leaves me sort of flat. Need some depth. I was thinking of making or buying a bridge, but one problem occurred to me, there is no water to run under it as the land is flat. I took a look around the marketplace to see if there was any nice mesh platforms that have some bumps and such to create some depth and uneveness to jaunt around. I do have the latest version of blender with the stuff for making mesh builds, but still a noob at that and have not had the time. Any suggestions on where or what to shop or such on?:matte-motes-agape:

[hibit Spad]

Try this in blender - 

 

preferences 

addons

search for ant 

(this is a module that will allow you to just create a terrain like grid.)

click on the little box to turn this module on.

now close preferences (you might want to save this)

in object mode hit spacebar  -> add mesh -> terrain.

 

 

you will have a terrain that you can edit, play around with, and bring into SL as a mesh. (though SLs 64m limit on prim size is gonna meani you will have to split it up for you property.)

 

 

[Vladamir Bearsfoot]

That sounds interesting. I will have to give it a try. :matte-motes-big-grin: Any suggestions for learning exactly how to bring something into SL that is a build such as that? I have watched a few vids here and there, imported my sculpt builds with some odd results(even with loss less compression checked). I was watching something yesterday where the person was uploading a model(tweaking physics and such), is that how to load mesh stuff, as a model?:mansad: Feel like such a noob.

[hibit Spad]

For a general list of tutorials check out this page:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Blender

 

in particular you probably want to pay attention to the tutorials on:

 

http://blog.machinimatrix.org

 

at least initially.   

 

specifically how to get a mesh object into SL can be simple.

 

Under file 

select export 

then look for Collada (.dae)

 

you will then have the typical name the file and where do you want it saved to type menu.

 

then using a viewer that is capable of uploading mesh to SL  (phoenix, firestorm, the v3 SL client)  you need to find the option to upload a model.  Unfortunately, different clients put it in different places in the menus.

 

I highly suggest you look at this page about mesh and what it take to upload a mesh to SL:

 

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh

 

 

 

[Persephone Emerald]

I put a couple surrounding sculpted mountain sets on platforms to create the look of terrain. If part of the sculpt sticks up through the platform & part of it is below, you can have rocks with a different texture than your flat ground.

Also, if you taper & squish your platform so that you have 3 sides of the box on one side & one on the other, you can texture the middle part like semi-transparent water & the interior surface like rocks under the water. This would make a shallow, straight canal, though, rather than a natural-looking stream.

[Drongle McMahon]

I hope this will help you see the possibilities and motivate you as you learn from the tutorials. Don't worry if some of is obscure now, it will soon become clear ...

I wondered what a 64x64 ladscape mesh like this would cost in land impact. So I made a version. You have to use triangle-based physics shape (not "Analyze"d") based on the highest detail mesh, and set it to physics shape type "Prim" if you want to walk on it accurately. That means you have to limit the minimum triangle size to avoid huge physics weights. In this model, some of it is flat to reduce triangle count. It could be reduced further to lower the land impact, with consequent loss of detail. This has a land impact of 26. Of course a sculpty would be 1, but it would not have a walkable surface.The river surface is a luxury mesh one, costing 17 mand impact. Slight displacements of the vertices allow the addition of turbulence to the flow of the animated water texture. A single box prim is quite acceptable instesd and would add only 1 to the land impact. In either case, the river and the land are linked with the land as root, and the river s set to physics type "None". The land has four materials to allow different textures as you go down the banks. These could look much better with a bit of effort to make textures that grade into each other at the edges.

I left this in mesh sandbox 3 where you can try walking on it until it gets autoreturned.

 

 

[Vladamir Bearsfoot]

Yeah, was going to have 1 prim water much like you say. I have one that has a script in it for splashing and such a friend gave me. One thing I do not understand, how does the land have four materials for the textures? Thought models would be like scupts in that if you did not add textures to them prior they would get messy like scupts? I really need to learn far much more.

[Drongle McMahon]

Each Blender object becomes one mesh prim when it is imported. (SL calls a linkset an object, which can have one or more prims. So "object" has different meanings in these two contexts). A mesh prim, and so the Blender object it is made from, is allowed to have up to eight diferent materials. You can define these in Blender and assign them to different subsets of the object's faces (not necessarily in one contiguous block). In my picture, the naterials are different colours. Once they are in SL, the set of mesh faces assigned to each material becomes a face in the SL sense, like the six faces of a box prim. It can be selected and textured with different texture, repeats, animations etc.

You have complete control over the way the textures are applied to the faces, by making and manipulating the UV map. This is quite unlike a sculpty where the UV map is predefined, applying equal segments of the texture to each face regardless of its size. This is one of the huge advantages of meshes over textures. Another is the control of physics.collision shape. here is a hack that provides sculpties with multiple faces, but you don't have the control over them that you do with mesh. The sculpty physics shape is fixed and rarely useful, while that of a mesh can be defined precisely in several different ways.

In my Blender picture, the materials have been given the different colours you can see. In the inworld picture, you can see the different textures on these areas. In this case, a single UV mapping was done for the whole mesh, and all the textures are simple tileable ones (two from the library - the gravel is my own). A more sophisticated version would use different UV mappings for each of the materials, and the textures would be especially made to merge smoothly into each other along the borders where the faces meet.

here is the UV map. It's a;most a simple top-down projection of the mesh, but not quite. That stretches the texures badly over steep slopes, as with SL terrain. Instead it was made by using the simple "Unwrap" option after pressing "U", and then just adjusting the edge vertices to sit on the edges of the map rectangle. This gives a better eveness of spread of texture over the meash faces with less stretching.

[Vladamir Bearsfoot]

Still tinkering around a little, getting used to the controls once more(keep messing up what button did what, lol). I added the terrain key as stated above which does give a auto terrain in. I worked it a bit to level it down a little, but having some issues figuring out how big it really is. I did set the size in meters but it is telling me that it is smaller than what a 64 meters as allowable. Suppose that does not matter to much as I can fiddle with its size. I would figure that I want to keep it square so I can set it to my sim size. Will the terrain size(using the terrain that is) make it more than what you had it for prims Drongle?

[Vladamir Bearsfoot]

Added the terrain, fiddled with it. Anyway to level it simply?

[Vladamir Bearsfoot]

Did the tutorial and went into beta to test it out some. I can't seem to get the land physics right(I am walking several feet about the actual plane of the object). Don't quite understand it even though I have watched some of the videos that explain how to get the physics right.:mansad:

[Drongle McMahon]

Not sure I follow you questions exactly, but .... you can't make a mesh bigger than 64m in any dimension. You can make bigger sculpties if you use a megaprim, but then you can't resize it. Terrain mapping of a whole sim is something completely different. If toy are waking above the surface (of a mesh) then either you have the wrong physics shape type (features tab of edit dialog) - it shouls be "Prim", and/or you have not made the physics shape correctly. The important point there are (1) it must be using the high LOD mesh. (2) it must be triangle-based - do not click the "Analyze" button. (3) the physics mesh and the visual mesh must have the same bounding box with thw same relationship to the surface. The last (3) is automatic if you use the same mesh for the visual and physics meshes (1). If (3) is not satisfied, the physics mesh will be stretched (or squeezed) until the bouding boxes are the same. That could result in a displacement of the walable surface. 

[Vladamir Bearsfoot]

Well, when I made the terrain in Blender I did not really do to much to it. I did not even stick it in a bounding box.(do know how to do that, did not know that would matter there though). Is the physics shape something that I work in Blender when I am tinkering, or is it when I am uploading it into SL? When uploading I guess then I need to pop LOD in there and not let it sit to the settings that are already there?

[Drongle McMahon]

If you use the high-LOD mesh as the physics shape (select it in the dropdown at the top of the physics tab) and do not click the Analyze button, you will get a triangle based physics shape that will automatically match the visual mesh, and they will have the same bounding box. That is the only kind of physics shape that will work for walking on. You need to change the physics shape type of the rezzed mesh to "Prim" to activate it. By default it is "Convex hull" which will leave you floating above the surface. That settting is on the Features tab of the Edit dialog.

If you make the mesh so that at 64x64m it has triangles where any dimension is less than 2m, or if you have too many larger triangles, you are likely to find that the physics weight is bigger than the download weight. In that case, the land impact will be the physics weight. It can get very large very quickly. Remember - for triangle based physics shapes, small triangles are bad news.

If you are making a 64x64 landscape segment, you really don't need to bother about the lower LODs at all. At that size, they will be ignored in the download weight calculation and will only ever be visible if you are more than 256m from the center and have draw distance set higher than that. Leave the default ones.

You don't make the bounding box. It is an automatic consequence of your geometry. It is the smallest box aligned with x, y and z axes that can fit around your mesh. There is a bounding box display mode in Blender (2.49b, at least). You can see it in SL as the translucent box that surrounds your mesh when you select Stretch on the edit dialog. There is also an option in the Develop menu -> Render Metadata -> Bounding boxes, that shows all the bounding boxes, but that can be a bit overwhelming.

[Vladamir Bearsfoot]

Extremely confused. I did the tutorial to load mesh, went to the beta site(in SL). When I try to do so in normal SL, it is telling me that I do not have the rights to upload mesh models. Have I missed something?

[Drongle McMahon]

You need payment information on file too. If you already have that and have done the tutorial/quiz, and you still can't upload mesh, then I think you have to submit a support ticket.

[Vladamir Bearsfoot]

Support ticket I guess then. See what happens I guess.

[Drongle McMahon]

Oh, I forgot this - you have to do the tutorial/quiz separately on Agni and Aditi. There are links to both on this wiki page.

[Vladamir Bearsfoot]

No, I only did the one. Sorry for being awol for so long. Still have to do that. Question, do you think that it would be easier making the landscape from a grid as opposed to using the landscape mesh as mentioned somewhere above? I am thinking that would probably would be simpler as there would be less triangles and the model would be far less complicated. 

 

Also, is it possible to load textures into Blender so that you can texture your model?(guessing that somewhere it is possible to do so, just have not had the time to fiddle about lately)