BMeshes and SL?

[Amphei Jierdon]

Blender 2.63 provides BMeshes. Does anybody have any experiences, if they upload and work with SL?

[Dilbert Dilweg]

Yes.

I was glad to see it come out and fix a lot of issues when extruding . Dont get deformed vertices next to my extrusions now. wooohoooo!

[Gaia Clary]

bmesh is mostly for modelling. Blender's Collada (currently) reduces the polygons to triangles. So your very best option would be to model with bmeshes and then prepare your model for export by doing the triangulation (or "quadrugulation") by hand or by using blenders tools for this.

However the SL importer will reduce whatever it gets (i.e. quads) to triangles . And i seriously doubt that it is capable to translate polygons of higher edge count.

[Drongle McMahon]

In mine, the exporter reduces ngons to a combination of quads and triangles. The uploader will then triangulate the quads. The results are not always whay you might expect. So, as Gaia says, if you want control over the triangulation, you should do it in Blender before exporting. Otherwise, the BMesh stuff is nice. Especially useful is the dissolve, which allows triangle reduction for LODs while keeping the UV map intact. I haven't got to grips with BSurfaces yet, but that will probably be very useful too.

[Pamela Galli]

Not that I have any idea what a BMesh is but would you say, if it can be avoided, that a very slow learner should just not mess with it at all?

[Drongle McMahon]

Have a look at this demo. Then you can decide for yourself whether it might be worth trying?

[Ashasekayi Ra]

Bmesh is just the new modeling system under the hood. So, it can't be turned off or on. In theory, a person could accidentally make an ngon. But, the tutorial Drongle posted does give a good overview of the system. And really, it is a great system for modelers. It has brought in some much needed tools like dissolve, a *real* knife tool, multiple edge loop deletion, inset faces and on and on. The thing is that you should manually get rid of ngons so that you can control what gets turned into a quad or triangle. 

A great add-on that I found recently is Mesh Lint. It checks your model for ngons, 6-sided poles and other elements that you might not want in a final model. It's been a great help.

Link: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?252575-MeshLint-quot-Like-a-Spell-Checker-for-your-Meshes-quot

[Pamela Galli]

Thanks to you both!

 

Just trying to avoid any more inscrutable error messages that might finally destroy my fragile grasp on sanity.

[Drongle McMahon]

"Just trying to avoid any more inscrutable error messages..."

 Might be better to wait for a bit then. We had two already, as you can see in other threads.

[Dilbert Dilweg]

Here is a good video explanation what Bmesh does to your modeling process

Click on the video that says "Intro To Bmesh"

http://cgcookie.com/blender/cgc-series/interior-3d-architectural-visualization/#header

[Nacy Nightfire]

Asha that's a terrific add-on!  What a timesaver.  Thanks for posting that link.

[Masami Kuramoto]

By the way, Blender's built-in select functions have been improved with BMesh as well. For example, you can find all triangles and n-gons at once using Select --> By Number of Verts, and then setting Number of Vertices = 4 and Type = "Not Equal To".

A function to search for loose vertices and edges is available, too.

[Nacy Nightfire]

Thanks Masami, I didn't notice that feature was inclulded. That's a fantastic addition for easy mesh clean up.  I'm overwhelmed by the goodies in this update.

[Ashasekayi Ra]

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Nacy Nightfire wrote:

Asha that's a terrific add-on!  What a timesaver.  Thanks for posting that link.

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Welcome

@Masami. : Thanks for pointing out that feature.