Holes in mesh issue...

[Bea Christenson]

Hi there I am having huge issues with uploading mesh from Maya 2012 to SL

 

-I am creating the mesh, exporting as OBJ, bringing it into Zbrush to make the triangles quads, re-exporting as OBJ, and bringing it back into Maya for rigging.

 

- I have weight painted properly using the correct settings (Smooth bind to Selected joints and UNchecked the remove unused attributes box)

 

- I am exporting to FBX then using Autodesk's FBX to DAE converter. I have changed my export settings; both the Units and Axis Conversion.

Photo: http://gyazo.com/e3e8eac6db8d34ff03bf48bd3abaa290.png?1357944341

 

- I have tried using three different converters from autodesk. 2011, 2012 and 2013. 2011 is the only one I am able to get an upload processed with in SL. 2012 and 2013 both give me errors (material of model is not a subset of reference model).

Though I am ABLE to upload my mesh to SL using the 2011 Converter, it is all kinds of messed up in both the upload window and in world, and disappears completely when worn on my avatar.

Upload window: http://gyazo.com/ec7bf053e765bf71b3bf9f30abb45446.png

In World: http://gyazo.com/64b34f0345a56e17da9535ab29cc42d1.png?1357946182

 

- I checked normals and all the faces are pointed out correctly: http://gyazo.com/4af8a99652bdc14cf6b99cbc65eca136.png?1357944978

I also tried rigging a test dress to make sure I had made no mistakes along the way. I tried to upload a rigged and non rigged version of the rest dress and both came out the same way..

Rigged: http://gyazo.com/9312149c7012a2331d04f5844377cdfd.png

Un-Rigged: http://gyazo.com/1d82be666a238bc3838686c9a2a20c17.png

 

I am at a loss about what I can do to fix this issue. I haven't been able to find anything helpful thus far. I'd appreciate ANY assistance I can get! Thank you!

 

Bea

[Dilbert Dilweg]

The model has about 60,000 too many verticies for a dress lol. You will probably have less problems if you modeled it low poly.. If you have made it solid then there is a good chances your inside faces are overlapping the outside faces. Just a guess

If you want your clothing to be gentle on the end user, then I suggeest reducing the poly count.

 

Would love to see 30 users wearing this rig in one location and see how many is left standing lol

 

[Bea Christenson]

There are a LOT of designers who use high poly counts on attachable items. This skirt is lower poly than some of the things my biz partner puts out, so although it's possible, I doubt that's the reason. As far as being solid, nope, it's just the outer layer right now, and all the faces are in the right direction.

[Drongle McMahon]

There is a hard coded limit of 65536 vertices (per material - due to use of 16-bit vertex list indices). That's how many the upload dialog says you have, but you almost certainly had more and it just stopped when it got the that number. Of course it should give you an error message telling you it's too many, but....

You say you made a quad-based mesh. If that has mostly the usual regular layout, you would expect the number of vertices to be about half the number of triangles, but it isn't. That is most likely because you have not used smoothed shading on your mesh. The SL internal format has to duplicate vertices when they have different normals, as they do when used by triangles that meet at unsmoothed edges. Conversion to smooth shading, in which the normal at a vertex is the same for all the meeting triangles, should drastically reduce your vertex count. It would also remove what I would guess is the reason you have used such a high poly count - to get a smooth appearance despite sharp-edged shading. So you would then be able to reduce both triangles and vertices MUCH more.

In fact (unless BUG1001 has been fixed - no way of telling these days), there is another limit you will run into before you hit 65535 vertices. That is the strange limit on the number of triangles per material to 21844. However, what happens then is that the uploader automatically starts a new material with the same name. So you may not notice until you run out of the 8 allowed materials, reached at 174752 triangles (if you haven't used any up explicitly). Beyond that, you will get holes again because the triangles with extra materials are just discarded.

The fact that other creators use such high poly counts doesn't make it sensible. Although there is no LI-like limit for attachments, that doesn't change the fact that excessive poly counts use excessive viewer graphics capacity, slowing viewer frame rate, and excessive network and asset server resources. There is no reasonable need for such high polycounts if you use smooth shading, which is much more efficient anyway (with limited sharp edges where required), and they are bad for performance.

 

[Drongle McMahon]

Just for fun, here's a picture I made for the jira about the triangle count limit. The left shaws a mesh with more than 174752 triangles, with the resulting holes/ In the middle is part of that mesh in wireframe view. You can see that all the vertices are there and that it's the triangles that are missing. If I am right about your mesh, a wireframe view should reveal missing vertices as well as the missing triangles that needed them. On the right, the secretly added materials in the same mesh are shown up in different colours.

Now that I think of it, this bug should stop you running into the 65536 limit, because it makes the new materials before you can ever reach that, before you get to 50k triangles. So it looks like they must have fixed it. There is a test in the code that should detect the 65536 limit on vertices, and that should be intercepted and give an error message, but maybe they just let in stop adding vertices and let the upload continue.

I'm off to see if the bug was fixed .... will report here...... no. it's still there in the release viewer.

That's odd. The 65536 shouldn't apply if the bug is still there. The test mesh I just uploaded had 308495 vertices! (It's so many because of the material fragmentation you see in the right picture. Each geometric vertex gets duplicated in the list for deveral different materials.)

What viewer are you using?

[Bea Christenson]

I was using the latest SL viewer 3.4.3.268262. This is my first real experience with mesh, and I'm following the directions given to me by a few different people. I was told to import an obj file to Zbrush, and use qRemesher to change the target poly count. 20-30ish for simpler items and 40ish for complex items, never going over 60 (default is 15). I'm not sure how this correlates to SL, or how many polys it's converting it to. I changed mine to 22 I believe, and it seems strange to me that my partner can upload items that he's upped to 40 with no issues. If my problems were because of too many polys, wouldn't others I know, who are selling high poly items also have this issue?

[Drongle McMahon]

It's not too many polys. It's too many vertices, and that's because the shading is not smooth. As I don't know your software, I can't tell you how to make it smooth shaded, but I would guess the option must be there somewhere. Your upload dialog says it's 50k triangles. If you have only quads, that would be 25k, but everything is converted to triangles for upload. I would still consider that excessive for just one garment (think of it as 25 sculpties - it's about that much load on the gpu), but it shouldn't be too many to get uploaded (although bad for performance).

However, I have to admit some uncertainty. Having read the source code, I don't know any way the vertex count can reach 65536 without the extra-material thing being triggered first, unless they changed something. I suggest you try two things. First the smooth shading, if you can find out how. That is the best solution. Then, just reducing the poly count until it stops below 65536. Best thing would be to do both.

If you want to check objects for triangle count, you can use Develop->Show Info->Render Info. When you select an object, the number of ktri and kverts (k=1000) shown near the bottom tell you how many triangles are being rendered for the selected object(s).It will depend on the LOD you are seeing, which depend how far away you are. Close up it will be the triangle count of the high LOD mesh. If nothing is selected, it will tell you the counts for the whole scene. The absolut limit on triangles is 174752. After that you should always get holes.

[Gaia Clary]

I experienced a few situations where i ended up seeing holes in the mesh. These issues occured at different times and with different viewer versions. And i was always using the current Beta viewer from Linden Labs.

But of course it can be something completely different in your case. Or even what i have seen no longer happens because bugs have been fixed in the mean time (or new bugs have been introduced, who knows).

 

For rigged and static meshes:

More than 8 materials in one object

Only the first(?) 8 materials where taken into account. All faces on other materials would not show up in SL. Neither when rezzed nor when worn.

Duplicate faces

When parts of the mesh where duplicated at exactly the same location, then the SL importer sometimes seems to do funny thing.

Very small faces

When a mesh contains locations made of very tiny faces then sometimes the importer only imports part of the mesh.

 

For rigged meshes only

Extra bones

When the rigged mesh contains more bones than are supported by SL and some of the mesh vertices have been weighted only to these extra bones, then the corresponding faces can be seen when rezzed, but they disappear when worn.

Too many weights on faces

When a rigged mesh contains vertices which have been weighted to more then 4 bones, the importer behaves unpredictable.

Zero weighted Vertices

When a rigged mesh contains vertices which have ALL weights set to zero, the corresponding faces are not shown.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

What might be causing your issue is your polycount in combination with a bad connection. You could try resetting your router.

Also, I agree with Dilbert completely. Whether or not it's causing this particular issue, your polycount is nothing short of insane for a dress. You can make things that look just as nice or maybe even nicer with far less geometry. LL likes your avatar draw weight under 40 000. I'm sure this dress alone is good for a couple of 100 000. A nice looking dress can be,  I don't know, 1500? You can check inworld by selecting your worn item (it's rigged so edit something else then click the worn dress) then in the edit menu click "more". The magic number is the display weight.

I also don't understand your export to zbrush to quadrify the mesh. If you model in Maya, the easiest way is using quads. Then there's nothing to convert.