Mesh Surfaces

[Phil Deakins]

A quick question:-

Sculpties have only one textureable surface so, if different textures are needed on different sides, they need to be baked into a single texture outside SL. Is mesh the same, or does it behave like,say, a standard prim cube where a different texture and colour can be applied inworld to each side?

 

[Coby Foden]

Any mesh object can have up to eight separately textureable faces. The textureable faces are defined in the mesh creation program.

[Sassy Romano]

Mesh polygons are grouped into materials, SL mesh objects can have up to 8 materials. How those materials are defined is entirely up to the modeling as to which polygons are grouped and there can still be one baked texture while also maintaining the ability to change specific "faces"

[Phil Deakins]

Thank you both very much. It was just a curiosity of mine.

 

[Johan Laurasia]

What Sassy said is incorrect.  An object can have thousands of faces, it's just that each face must be associated with one of 8 different materials.

[arton Rotaru]

She wrote "faces" in quotes, to make clear it's "texturable faces", like in SL prim faces. You are refering faces to polygons, which non of the ladies did here actually.

[Johan Laurasia]

What you're saying makes no sense.  She's talking about faces, I'm talking about faces.  SL faces are only "different" from mesh in as much that each prim "face" in SL has it's own set of vertices so one can texture faces individually from within the SL environment, otherwise, SL prims and mesh objects are identical.  Making the statement "texturable faces" is not correct terminology for what's being discussed, which is what's called materials.  Properly stated.  The question should be how many materials can a mesh object have.  And, as was stated, the answer is 8.  A mesh object can have 10,000 faces, all of which can be set to one of 8 materials.  To make the statement "8 texturable faces" is just flat out wrong.

People confuse textures and materials.  Textures are but one component of a material.  A material can be a simple color, or a texture.  A material can also contain a specular map, and a bump map.

Textures and materials are different things, that's why they have different names, and refering to a material as a texturable face is incorrect no matter how you slice it.

[Pamela Galli]

The meaning of the word "face" depends on context.

Another meaning for face is the part of your body with eyes, mouth, and nose.

Also, the direction you are looking towards is the direction you face.

To face someone is to confront; to face something is to accept the reality of.

In geometry,  objects have vertices, edges, and faces.

IN SECOND LIFE, historically, a face is a separately texturable surface -- eg a cube has six faces.  

Face it.

 

 

[arton Rotaru]

I don't have the time to discuss something like this in length, so I leave you with this link:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Face

And that's the reason why the term "faces" came up here at all.

I'm pretty sure we are all aware of what a face is.

[Gaia Clary]

When mesh was finally released we tried in the mesh meeting to get a better name for "faces" to avoid this ambiguity. But the term "Prim Face" (short form: "Face") was already introduced into the system since a long time and it was just not possible to get this replaced by anything else. That is why LindenLab has kept the term "face" instead.

However, using the term "texture face" seems to be overall accepted here. I personally use "texture face" and "model face" to separate the two meanings.

[RipleyVonD]

"Material face" sounds right to me, and what I would of suggested if I had been present in that meeting. 

[Perrie Juran]

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RipleyVonD wrote:

"Material face" sounds right to me, and what I would of suggested if I had been present in that meeting. 

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While all "materials" are textures, are all textures used on MESH materials?

 

(got to love the semantics)

[Johan Laurasia]

All materials are not textures.....

1) All materials are comprised of a series of one or more of what is called a shader.

2) One type if shader is called a difuse shader... this refers to the color of the material.

3) A difuse shader can be either one solid color, like red, green, yellow, bright orange or dark green, or, it can be a bit mapped image like a photograph, typically refered to as a "texture", or a series of colors like a bitmapped image created with a paint program, again generally referred to as a texture.

3) Other types of shaders within SL are specular (often refered to as gloss or glossy) and bump map.

4) Other shaders include glass, ambient occlusion, translucent, transparent, sub-surface scattering, emission (light source), anisotropic, refraction, etc.  

These shaders can be mixed together using a mix shader as well.  All the shaders used add up to what's refered to as a material.  So, you see, I can have a glossy red face that has no texture applied to it, yet it's still a material, (and it has no texture).

 

[Johan Laurasia]

Yeah... I know the multiple meanings of the word face, and specifically, within the realm of 3D rendered objects, the word "face" refers to the area within 3 or more verticies.  Never the material applied to it.

Are we officially "facing off" here?

[Johan Laurasia]

Gaia, I see where you're coming from, but alot of people here in SL are newbs to 3D modeling, you one of the biggest educators and contributors here most certainly know that.  I think teaching is wonderful too which is why I pitch in whenever I can, but you certainly can see that it's confusing and misleading to refer to materials as "texture faces".  Also, as far as SL lingo goes... when specular and bump maps were introduced, Linden Lab themselves call it "Second Life Materials".

Years ago, when I first started, I had a difficult time understanding the difference between textures and materials, and I think if we're educating people, we should be using the proper terminology.  That's all.

[Perrie Juran]

Thanks....that is why I posed it as a question. 

 

[Gaia Clary]

Texture Face was the compromise that we found way before materials have even been in our thoughts. And you know that it is quiet difficult to get rid off a once established term

Having said this, yes i agree that Material Face nowadays sounds like a better choice.

[Johan Laurasia]

Heh, perhaps the reason I'm pushing my point is tied to being used to conventional terms!

[Pamela Galli]

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Johan Laurasia wrote:

Heh, perhaps the reason I'm pushing my point is tied to being used to conventional terms!

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Third graders are taught vertex, edge, and face as geomtric terms. This is not new information. In SL, we have specialized terminology for various things, including "face", as you have been told and given links to.  You can use whatever terminology that suits you but in this thread the correct terminology has been used.

[Phil Deakins]

Regardless of the correct terminolgy for face/side/surface and texture/material, my question was answered, and I thank you all for posting. I'd been wondering what the effective differences were between sculpties and mesh, and that question occured to me.

[Gaia Clary]

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Johan Laurasia wrote:

Heh, perhaps the reason I'm pushing my point is tied to being used to conventional terms!

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Johan, i am all with you. It would be great when conventions could be used as much as possible. I remember this thread where i initially proposed to use the term "surface":

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Changing-the-SL-notation-from-quot-Face-quot-to-quot-Surface/td-p/894903

But nowadays i would accept to use the term material face (or material) because now we actually have materials which was not the case when the discussion popped up first in 2011. But then we also have to clearly describe to the newbies what "material" has to do with "face" and "surface" and "side" and "texture"  :matte-motes-evil:

well, however we look at it, it seems to need a bit of knowledge and some more user manuals...

[Medhue Simoni]

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RipleyVonD wrote:

"Material face" sounds right to me, and what I would of suggested if I had been present in that meeting. 

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I like Prim Face, but I do think Mat Face would be a more descriptive name.

Not that I think LL is wrong to call it a face, but in these instances, they really should get feedback from us. I remember when LL was doing the age restriction on sims. They wanted to call the Adult sims AO, for Adult Oriented. I was irrate about it, as they literally implemented it without any feedback. It's bad enough SL AOs, or Animation Overrides, could be mistaken for Ambient Occlusion, but then we had LL making it even more confusing with Adult Oriented. Where did they even come up with that label? It made no sense, especially since their are already age restriction labels that are very standardized.

[Johan Laurasia]

Right, the thing about confusion towards newbies was my whole point, thanks.

[Johan Laurasia]

Well, thrird grade for me was 1971/1972, and believe me vertex, edge and face weren't taught in geometry.  We used pencil and paper and the only terms we worked with were point, line, curve and graph (what can be called a face today in 3D modeling was simply referred to as area in graphing).  Maybe today third graders are taught basic 3D modeling terminology, but in my day, they most certainly were not.  Secondly, with nearly 8 years in SL, I don't need you to quote me what proper terminology is, I probably have much more time in SL than you.  My point was about clearing up confusion between textures, faces, and materials, especially amongst newbies.  When I see this forum, I see this confustion all the time.  I don't "use terminology as I "see fit", I use terminology that's accepted convention within the world of 3D modeling.  I understand that SL has it's own terminology, and I think it goes back to the days before mesh and sculpted prims when the only option was in-world building with SL prims.  I think LL wanted to simplify 3D modeling and perhaps though using non-standard industry terms would make things easy for the non-professional.  "Phantom" properties of a prim is a good example, the industry calls it no-clipping, but phantom is a good description of what the function does.  However, over time, things have changed, and it would be in everyone's best interest if we moved towards more standard terminology since content creation is using traditional modeling tools now.

The fact that there are so many questions about this stuff within this forum drives home the fact that SL's differing terminology is at least part of the reason some people are confused.

[Pamela Galli]

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Johan Laurasia wrote:

 with nearly 8 years in SL, I don't need you to quote me what proper terminology is

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Now that's what I call irony.