mesh taking up to many prims

[Jaycee Dover]

is it possible to make a mesh item (a store logo) that wont take up a lot of prims? if so, how? i made a logo but when i go to upload it, land impact is more then 100 prims, and when i made it bigger in world, it went to 500 :S... if it isnt possible, how are 'sculpt maps' made?

[Frawmusl]

Well first off you need to try to make your sign as efficient as possible if you want it to be large, Different sizes effect the LOD at different levels. If you have a large sign then the highest will effect the LOD. With something like 500 Prims your highest LOD is terribly optimized.
I designed this sign to be low impact at any size, Smaller=even lower. Albeit I probably should have made the white transparent at the lowest size

So the LOD starts, Full object all resolution

 

Then we remove the back as people get further away so the medium LOD is a little bit more than half of the faces removed. 

 

The Low/Lowest are both a flat re-unwrapped model of a cube about the size of the sign. So it looks like the sign still from a far distance, but essentially is just a textured cube 

(Probably make all the white transparent would be better!)

 

Thats the way I typically go about a low-impact sign

 

 

Edit: And use a cube for physics, Since its a sign no one should plan to walk all over it. .360 for physics is better than the calculated 4.233 that it adds to my Capone Sign.

[Jaycee Dover]

so how will i go about changing the LOD? i feel like such a noob lol 

[Frawmusl]

Just create duplicates and move them to new layers and edit the model to reduce it. Make sure you have the same amount of materials as the original model. Then export each model individually (Make sure you have on the left side of the export where you save "Selected only" and "apply modifiers") 
Then open the uploader in SL and start with the highest model from file, then rather than generate the next few you can "Upload from file" as a new selection of the dropdown.

[Rhys Goode]

I don't know what you mean by a "logo" here, but I was able to reproduce my whole shop, *my* logo and all, for a LI of 8.  The original had a LI of 52.  My first attempts led to higher LI, but after some learning, I was able to make it quite low.

I have a friend who got disillusioned about mesh after making some modles using google sketch up.  I have never used that tool, but evidently it makes very inefficient meshes, at least with respect to SL.  I have the sense from other discussions, but not the hands on experience, that its is very easy to use other modeling tools that use completly inappropriate vertex counts for SL.

You can find some good info here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Creation_Portal

[Jaycee Dover]

im going to give it a try, don't go to far, still a bit confused (lol)

ryhs do you go through the same process as frawmusl?

thank you both

[Vegro Solari]

One optimization trick I learned (major thanks go out to some of the scientific pioneers of this art, here in the forum, who discovered and explained it) is that when you're uploading the model, your landimpact is going to vary heavily depending on the in-world scale of the object - everyone knows this - but usually not everyone realizes that each of the different LOD levels you can use is going to have a vastly different "weight" in the land impact calculation, again depending on the size of the object! So that means, sometimes the "Low" LOD is the most important, and sometimes it may not even matter at all, and so on, all depending on final object size in-world.

It's good to get your head around that, because that means, depending on your object's intended size, you have to really optimize one specific LOD level for that size of object. That way all your work that Fraw has shown you, is going to have the biggest effect on reducing the LI and you can pretty often even get away with slacking and being pretty quick with all the other LODs. Because maybe in your case, they just don't have that much of an impact.

Example: you can discover that, say, for objects less than 1 meter in size, the dominatingly important LOD to optimize is the Lowest one. Somebody's published all this, with graphs and usage ideas in another post in this very forum, just search for "optimization", and have courage, because it's really not as hard as it looks to use this and get awesome land impact reduction for your creations the smart way.

LindenLab also published info on some of the simple formulas used in SL to see at what distance what LOD model is going to be used. They are all really simple, just based on the size of your mesh object  ("object radius").  For example, the lowest LOD model will appear, according to those 4 formulas, when it's viewed at Radius / 0.03 meters. This is not as big for a sign, just because you probably want your sign nicely visible from all distances (meaning, you need all the LODs), but still, kinda keeping these things in mind lets you decide even better what sort of LOD models you want to use for your object, besides the primary high detail one. Good luck with it!

 

 

[Drongle McMahon]

"Somebody's published all this, with graphs..."

Here.

[Vegro Solari]

Dr. McMahon in the flesh!  Thank you once again for your brill work unravelling these weird meshuploaded mysteries, sir!

Honourary forum doctorate should be the least we could do for you.