Mesh house can't walk into door (again)

[Rhiannon Arkin]

I know much talked about but still nothing seems to work. 

 

My house is a big house and i'm just at the beginning of building it. and it has huge barn door sized openings as future doors. But no matter what size, shape of physics i develop as a seperate model, the barn doors are always closed. 

 

When uploading model and physics model it looks ok in the uploader viewer, the physics look correct, even after analyse. and without too. 

But once uploaded. the physics model has always everything closed. so i can't walk into this building. It's nuts. is there an known issue with the uploader? 

when turning on metadata--> physics shapes it looks like default and not like the physics shape i selected (and which appeared correct on the uploader window) . 

 

also, related to that... how do I 'really' get onto the beta grid. it seems to be always inaccessible when i try. ??? 

the attached image shows from top down. 

the mesh uploaded

the physics shape which doesn't work

the uploader window (bot left)

and how it looks in maya. 

 

any help greatly appreciated

 

R.

 

 

[ChinRey]

Did you remember to change the physics shape to "Prim" after you uploaded the mesh?

Also, it's hard to tell from those small images but it seems to me that the physics model you made is smaller than the visual model. That can cause problems sicne the uploader will always scale the physics model to the same overall dimensions as the visual one.

 

I'm not sure why you keep having rpoblems with the beta grid. It is down sometimes but I've even seen that happen once recently.

[Rhiannon Arkin]

I switched it to "prim" but in my last uploads i didn't have that option anymore. strangely. 

I am building the collision object out of cubes, is that an issue ? 

 

[Ivanova Shostakovich]

I always build my physics models from cubes. I save the PHYS dae, and when uploading, I specify the dae file in the upload window, check that it looks ok in preview, and upload it, without doing an analyze.

[Rhiannon Arkin]

that's basically how i do it too. And it worked fine, except that I never managed to get doors/openings working. never yet.

i must be doing something different. 

It looks correct in the uploader preview. But I usually do analyse based on info i found here on the forums. 

Do I have to NAME the phys model in a particular way? 

 

[Drongle McMahon]

Do you have exactly one mesh object in the physics file for each mesh object in the visual mesh file?

It's not clear from you description whether you are using, for physics, a set of cubes stretched/squeezed to fit each wall etc, or whether you are using a simple cube for each of multiple objects comprising your house. (Or whatever else).

If, for example, your visual house model is all one object, but the cubes you made for physics are separate objects, then the uploaded model will just use the first one for the physics of the whole house, after stretching it to fill the bounding box. So that will leave you with an impenetrable block. Unfortunately, the mismatch in the number of objects is not recognised by the uploader. So it will give you the same hull and vertex counts (after Analyze) whether the cubes are separate objects or all combined into one object. If this is the problem, then you just need to combine the set of cube-derived objects into one mesh object (for each object comprising the house).

Alternatively, if your house is multiple objects, and you are using an unedited cube as the physics of each, then for each object, the physics will fill the whole bouding box of that object. Thus if any of the objects is concave, so that the bouding box includes (part of) the interior of the house, then the physics will fill that space.

 

[ChinRey]

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Rhiannon Arkin wrote:

I switched it to "prim" but in my last uploads i didn't have that option anymore. strangely.

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That means the mesh was uploaded with no physics model specified at all. When that happens, the uploader will try to make one but it's not really meant to do that so you end up with a rather inefficient and iprecise convex hull thingy and the prim phsyics model option doesn't exist.

 

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Rhiannon Arkin wrote:

I am building the collision object out of cubes, is that an issue ?

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It's not the most effective method for a build like this but it should be a safe way.

If you make a physics model all from cubes:

• Make sure none of the cubes overlap or even touch each other. Keep very narrow gaps between them.
• Remember to click on the Analyze button
• Before you upload, make sure the number of Hulls (listed right above the upload button) is the same as the number of cubes you used

Edit: Drognle posted his reply while I was reading mine and he has two important questions I forgot about: Are you uploading this as a single mesh or as several ones? And are the cubes you use for physics separate objects in Maya?

[Rhiannon Arkin]

I have not considered the amount of cubes vs the amount of objects. 

but

I tend to combine logical groups of objects into one mesh (combined). so this house is 3 mesh objects uploaded as one dae file. 

The physics layers is a number of cubes, which do intersect and are then combined to one mesh and exported / uploaded in one dae file. 

So i think here is clearly something i didn't pay attention to. 

Are you suggesting that the phys mesh should also consist of 3 mesh objects as the house does? 

[ChinRey]

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Rhiannon Arkin wrote:

Are you suggesting that the phys mesh should also consist of 3 mesh objects as the house does? 

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Yes, one physics model for each mesh. You can sometimes use a single physics model for an entire multi-mesh model but there are so many pitfalls and rarely anything to gain from it so I suggests you don't.

I don't know how to specify which physics model goes with which mesh since I never upload multiple meshes in one go myself (I always prefer to assemble in-world) but I'm sure Drongle will post the answer soon.

[Drongle McMahon]

The "correct" way to make sure the physics objects are associated with the right visual objects is by means of the object naming scheme described here (NOTE) in the "Uploading your own LOD files" section. Basically, each object in the physics file should have the name* of the corresponding object in the high-LOD mesh file, with the addition of the suffix "_PHYS".

It used to be done differently. Originally it was done by the order of the objects in the two files. Also, there was then added some code that sorts the objects by name. I think this is supposed to be before the associations are set up. So it should be done on the basis of alphabetical ordering of the names, even if they aren't in the right order. The uploader is supposed to fall back to the old method if the naming convention isn't used, but the last time I tried it (a long time ago) this fall-back was not reliable. So you are definately advised to use the naming convention. (See also the ImporterLegacyMatching note on the cited KB page).

*Avoid spaces in object (and material) names - there is now some code that should deal with names with spaces, but I haven't tested it (Blender exporter replaces spaces with underscores).

NOTE: The KB page still taks about file names instead of object names. That is completely wrong. The file names are irrelevant. It is the object names that have to use the naming convention. (Does anyone know how to persuade them, to correct this? I pointed it out in the comment over a year ago!!!!).

[Anna Nova]

also, related to that... how do I 'really' get onto the beta grid. it seems to be always inaccessible when i try. ??? 

 

Just a thought.  You HAVE raised a ticket to get your account set up on Beta, haven't you?  There is still, as far as I know, a bug, and new users of Beta don't get access unless they ask for it.  The error message looks like it is inaccessible.

 

[Rhiannon Arkin]

Hi 

I did manage to log into the beta grid yesterday. yay. seems it's a spotty grid. 

However, other then standing at the welcome station i didn't quite know what to do there. need to find some sort of sandbox i guess. but it worked. so i'll explore. 

thanks 

R.

 

[Rhiannon Arkin]

Thanks. yes. i think that is what happened. 
I wasn't aware I need to make a phys object for each of my objects within an dae file. I thought the one phys object I assign to the upload is the phys object for the whole collection. So while the phys object might have worked for one of the meshes, the other two meshes default to convex hull and closed the door again. 

So it seems that I will end up with as many phys objects as I have meshes within one building. seems like a waste in a way, because now i need to have overlapping phys objects on top of each other. Because I need to have separate meshes for logical (texture) groups of the building. 

I was successful in creating the door after using the naming convention correctly and upload each mesh individually with it's own phys model. 

So thanks for all the help so far. 

R.

 

[ChinRey]

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Rhiannon Arkin wrote:

However, other then standing at the welcome station i didn't quite know what to do there. need to find some sort of sandbox i guess.

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Open the big map and search for Mesh and/or for Sandbox.

[Drongle McMahon]

"I need to have separate meshes for logical (texture) groups of the building. "

Do you need more than eight? You can use up to eight different materials in each mesh object, which can be independently textured.The materials don't have to be continuous. They can be spread over many discontinuous patches of the mesh surface.

In fact you can now upload objects with more than eight material, but then the uploader arbitrarily splits it into multiple objecs, each with eight or less materials. I don't recommend this, as there are some nasty side effects. Better to break the model up yourself so that the results are predictable.

[Chic Aeon]

To go along with Drongel's linkset physics explaination.

 

I made a tutorial awhile back that is VISUAL. It took me years (literally) to get what he was trying to tell us, so while it IS very simple to do, some of us seem to have an issue understanding the words (like me). 

 

So here is a short text tutorial with screenshots. That might make things more clear. 

 

https://plus.google.com/100190052320604204973/posts/UetRXE8UFRr

[Rhiannon Arkin]

I will explore this material solution a bit more. 

I dont think i will need 8 materials. My current way of splitting a mesh into meshes is based on uv space, or better said, based on how much of texture info i can fit into a 1k image. Another thought is transparency needs, so i keep transparent, or alpha blended items separate from meshes i wouldnt need alphas for. I am still exploring the art of packing as much data into a texture file as possible. 

So it sounds i might be able to make one mesh with only one phys object but still have my split intom3 textures. 

Very cool

R.

 

[Drongle McMahon]

Also, when you have multiple materials, the UV mapping of each can ovelap. They don't interfere because each becomes a "face" in SL, with a different texture applied. So the UV map of each material can fill the whole UV unit square. That means you can have more texture pixels per unit of surface area, improving the texture resolution over what you can achieve if you cram all the surface into one UV map.

[ChinRey]

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Rhiannon Arkin wrote:

I am still exploring the art of packing as much data into a texture file as possible.

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Ummm... I know Chic is going to protest but this is a greenhouse and since you also have a thread about lag elsewhere in the forums, do you really need unique detailed texturing for each and every square inch of surface? How about a single low resolution tileable texture for all the window panes and another one for the framework? Or are you going to add some shading that forces you to use a laggier and more time consuming solution?

[Drongle McMahon]

Oh, but all the moss and algae and cobwebs and snail tracks ... :matte-motes-smile:

[Aquila Kytori]

 

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Drongle wrote

Also, when you have multiple materials, the UV mapping of each can ovelap. They don't interfere because each becomes a "face" in SL, with a different texture applied. So the UV map of each material can fill the whole UV unit square. That means you can have more texture pixels per unit of surface area, improving the texture resolution over what you can achieve if you cram all the surface into one UV map.

 

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Just to  try and illustrate what Drongle said:

 

and next with each material using the full UV space:

 

[Chic Aeon]

Actually I am not going to protest about the texture. Even if BAKING the texture (you cannot overlap all the textures like in Aquila's lovely explaination when you are baking textures to a single texture plane (like a 512 or 1024) you could easily get all the wood onto one 1024 texture. You would need to bake at a high resolution for it to work but I have been very successful with that lately with much more complex items.

 

The glass could easily be a tiling texture. In fact I think tht works best in almost all instances. 

 

There are TONS of tricks that can be used as you learn, but it takes awhile. So doing the best you can as you learn is a good goal.  I am going to assume that you don't intend to bake your textures and plan to use tiling (at least that seems to be what everyone is expecting LOL) and that's a very good place to start. 

 

 

 

 

[Rhiannon Arkin]

That's kinda what I'm doing. So far it's been two textures for the house. I can compress it even more, the glass will be just 2 or maybe 3 variations, each very small, the wood as you say all fits into one texture. there will be some wall structure and some addtional things that all together will fit into another texture. 

I wasn't planning on baking textures for this one. We'll see. 

[Chic Aeon]

Just wanted to note that you make the clearest explainations with the prettiest pictures .    

[Chic Aeon]

Before I head off to my late starting day, I had a question which I am unclear on.

 

Would there be a "server load" advanatage to stacking the UV map all onto one texture plane rather than making them nice and neat in the manter you would for baking?  This of course if you planned to use tiling textures for the materials.   Does mapping to a 512 when you aren't going to bake make a difference than mapping to a 1024 or 2048?     

 

Obviously uploaded texture size makes a big difference. Since it has been about four years since I mapped for tiling textures (Cloud Party) it isn't something I think about. Just curious. 

 

Thanks.