Model appears bloated or abnormally resized when uploaded

[Ronie5ive]

Greetings, my models have appeared very extruded when being uploaded to SL. Below is a before and after (in SL) screenshot of one model. Also, if I upload the model when very large, I can't scale it down in SL though I can scale it up. Any help? Thanks!

 

[arton Rotaru]

The minimum size of object size in SL is 1 cm on each dimension. That's true for mesh as well. It looks like this phone is made of separate meshes. Each button will be streched to at least 1 cm in x,y,z. The easiest way to fix this is to join all mesh patrs into one mesh before uploading it. The other way would be to add invisible geometry to the parts, so that the bounding box of each would be at least 1 cm in each dimension. But joining them would be my prefered action on something like this.

 

[Chic Aeon]

Along with the previous answer, unless you are planning on having the buttons be "pushable" and have scripts (that seems pretty far-fetched to me as we have BIG hands for those little buttons) then you will also get a much better LI when uploading items as JOINED. You may need to look up how to have a variety of materials (textures) on one mesh. It is a skill that is very good to know in SL. The maximum materials per object in SL is 8.

 

 

[Cathy Foil]

If you really want to make your buttons individual objects in SL and want them to appear smaller than 1cm what you need to do is add some triangle geometry to your mesh away from the mesh and give the triangles a different texture.  Then in SL just make the triangles invisible.  This will make your buttons bigger overall but appear to be smaller than 1cm.

Hope that helps.
Cathy

[Drongle McMahon]

Or maybe just bury most of them inside the handset?

[Ronie5ive]

Thanks for your replies. I'm used Google Sketchup to create the mesh and then exported it to a COLLADA (.dae) file. I've read elsewhere that using the "Triangulate All Faces" export option in Sketchup would help but not for me. I even imported this into 3DS Max and tried to join all meshes as Arton suggested and havent had any luck. I'll keep trying

[arton Rotaru]

Sketchup isn't really a good choice to model game assets with. I haven't used it myself yet, but I hear alot of nasty things about it. Like that Sketchup splits the model into seperate pieces when exporting, depending on the materials applied and so on.

My advice would be to skip Sketchup entirely, and model in 3ds Max. instead

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

You have an expensive gem like 3ds Max available and still choose a free turd like Sketchup? That really baffles me.

I've looked at some Sketchup models, exported as dae, they are almost unusable. Sketchup seems to produce separated geometry and doubled geometry (front and back). Building in Sketchup and fixing such a model takes a lot longer than building it from scratch in 3ds Max.

 

Now if for some reason you really want to edit the Sketchup model in 3ds Max,

turn on backface culling (object or layer properties),

select and delete all "backsides",

select one of the remaining objects in the scene,

click "Attach" in the rollout on the right of the screen and pick all the other pieces,

go to sub-object mode,

select all vertices,

weld them together (use a really small threshold, maybe as small as 0)

go to utilities (the hammer on the upper right of your screen) and reset XForm

 

[Ronie5ive]

Thanks for the info Kwakkelde. You're completely right. Sketchup has been a pain lately for this reason. I usually use it only to grab models out of the 3d warehouse which most have ended up looking like the bloated image above in SL. 3ds is the way to go.