Mesh LOD problem?

[Torako Haiku]

I made a mesh in Maya, complete with LODs, exported them individually like I'm supposed to, but then when I try to import them into secondlife, they're just... a complete mess! I can't even describe it. I'll upload a screenshot when I get home (I'm typing this from school, which doesn't have secondlife installed!) but with just "it's completely screwed up" to go on, does anyone have any suggestions?

[Drongle McMahon]

Ttwo questions:

[1] Is your model one mesh object or several?

[2] Are the bounding boxes of your LOD meshes the same as the corresponding high LOD meshes?

If it is multiple objects, ending up in SL as a linkset, the LOD meshes can get associated with the wrong high LOD meshes unless they are in the same order in each exported LOD file.

The LOD meshes get stretched or squashed to make their bounding boxes fit those of the high LOD meshes. So if they start out different, the low LOD meshes will be distorted. This is even worse if your objects have different rotations and/or scaling that appear end up in the collada node tags (in Blender, this means Object mode rotations/scaling), as the bouding box is that before these are applied.

Otherwise, I will wait for the pictures....You can get good equal-scale inworld pictures of the LOD meshes by lowering RendeVolumeLODFactor until the LOD switches, although the uploader previews may be enough.

PS. Or is it just the textures that are messed up? The V maps of the LODs have to be consistent to get consistent texturing.

[Torako Haiku]

I just remembered that I have a screenshot of the medium LOD... so here that is, at least.

[Drongle McMahon]

Looks to me like problem [1], multiple mesh objects with the wrong ones being associated across the different LODs. Can you say whether there are multiple objects? (I don't know the Maya terminology - it means things which have different <instance_geometry> tags in the collada file). The uploader just uses the order the meshes appear in the Collada file to decide which goes with which at each LOD. So the order of the objects has to be the same at each LOD. In Blender, you can achieve this by alphabetical ordering of object names and choosing the right export option. I don't know how the order is controlled in Maya. Maybe someone else can tell you.

[Torako Haiku]

yeah, there are. what's the export option in blender? maybe i can find the equivalent in maya...

 

edit: i think i might have done what you said but it still doesn't work...

[Drongle McMahon]

The Blender option is "Sort by Object name". It was put in by the SL Blender gang especially for SL. No idea if the Maya exporter has an equivalent, or some other way of ordering the <geometry> tags in the Collada file. You can look at the files manually. Search for "<geometry" and write down the order of the objects (I am assuming you have given them recognisable names). Then do the same with the files fo the other LODs.

[Torako Haiku]

Where is the blender option? I can't seem to find it. Because, I mean, I have blender, I just don't like it very much... If that's what it takes to make my model export correctly, I'll just import it into blender and export it from there. (Looking at the file, that does seem to be the problem.)

edit: never mind, it was added in 2.64 and i'm running 2.62. i'll install the correct version, that'll probably help.

edit again: it wooooorked!