Is there anything I can do to reduce the vertices?

[LisaMarie McWinnie]

I made an dress, and it says it have  Triangles: 27.280, Vertices 22.224.

I am having some problems to upload it to SL. When I select the 'Skin weight' option in the upload window I crash.

I am using Blender 2.68a, and to export to DAE I use 'Second Life Rigged' preset. Its been months since I don't have this problem, so I think theres something wrong with the mesh, not with my viewer - the last official one.

For modifiers, I have Armature, Mirror and Subsurf. The subsurf is set to only 1 level, so I don't know what to do now.

[Bhakti Mimulus]

You can attempt retopology, but its hard to do. Or start deleting edges that are not needed to keep your shape..after you ave created your textures.

[LisaMarie McWinnie]

This is the mesh. I think there is many vertices on the top, but I didn't imagined it would be too much. Did I screwed up?

[Gaia Clary]

Hi;

• I think that you can remove every 2nd vertical edge loop of your dress. i guess you even can remove 3 out of 4 vertical edge loops. (select edges with ALT RMB, then 'x' delete Edge Loop).
• You probably use subdivision... You probably don't need it. Your mesh looks already detailed without it
• in addition: The "horizontal" edge loops on the right side... Straighten them out (make them really horizontal, not going up and down as they are now). I believe that your animated dress might later look much better then. And it probably can then be textured more easily...

 

[LisaMarie McWinnie]

Thank you Gaia, you're always great!

I have no exuse for those not straight loops, I kept post-poning it, but I'll fix it now

It actually looks pretty bad without subsurfing, I tried disabling it and it looks more like a mesh that is loading.

Won't it look bad if I took the loops form the front? I will take the edge loops from the back then. Thank you so much, I not even knew you could delete the edge loops!

[Nalates Urriah]

Keep the hi-poly count verion too. It can be used to bake a normap map for use with the low-poly version.

[Coby Foden]

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Nalates Urriah wrote:

Keep the hi-poly count verion too. It can be used to bake a normap map for use with the low-poly version.

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Yes. People should definitely start using this method as we now have the materials in SL. Bake the normal map from the high poly version. Upload the the low poly version to SL, and the normal map too. Apply the normal map in SL to the low poly version. The low poly version will look almost equal to the high poly version when the normal map is applied onto it.

Result: Less lag in SL.  :smileyhappy:

Only side effect is that those who don't have Advanced Lighting Model on will not see the effect of the normal map (nor specular map). But is there any good reason to wait undefined long time "until most users" will be able to use Advanced Lighting Model? My feeling is that a major part of users can use Advanced Lighting model already now.

It would be nice if Linden Lab could release information of what percentage of users keep Advanced Lighting Model on in their viewers. I guess this info is available for them?

[Aquila Kytori]

Hi

Something I only learnt quite recently that you may not have come across is a method of adding an Edge Loop and getting it parallel with one of its neighboring edge  loops.

In this example the new edge loop can be made parallel to a good edge loop and dragged down to the bad edge loop and then the bad edge loop can be deleted.

 

Note in step 5) pressing F will toggle which of the edge loops the new one is parallel with :

[Shrouded Blackheart]

Been doing retopology for 8 years so I'm pretty good at it but i agree it takes time.

 

The best thing you can do is try to keep your poly count down as you go.