Prevent uploader from splitting materials

[Suki Hirano]

Is it possible to prevent mesh uploader from splitting materials if a face reaches a certain triangle count? For example if in Blender I'm supposed to have 3 materials/3 faces, once I upload into SL, it turns into 5 materials/5 faces, because it split some of the original faces into 2.

[arton Rotaru]

A) Keep the triangle count in any material below 21844 Tris.
B) Try exporting as FBX > and convert the FBX to DAE with the Autodesk FBX Converter 2013.3

The split happens with materials which have more than 21844 triangles and the collada exporter writes the geometry into <polylist>. Which is what Blender is doing. While collada exporters from other software export geo in <triangles>. Which is what the FBX converter does.

ETA: The material split may still happen with <triangles> collada files, but at a much higher tri-count.

Edited May 18, 2017 by arton Rotaru

[Suki Hirano]

On 5/18/2017 at 2:27 PM, arton Rotaru said:

A) Keep the triangle count in any material below 21844 Tris.
B) Try exporting as FBX > and convert the FBX to DAE with the Autodesk FBX Converter 2013.3

The split happens with materials which have more than 21844 triangles and the collada exporter writes the geometry into <polylist>. Which is what Blender is doing. While collada exporters from other software export geo in <triangles>. Which is what the FBX converter does.

ETA: The material split may still happen with <triangles> collada files, but at a much higher tri-count.

I just tried uploading a mesh with only 17k triangles TOTAL, with about 6-7 faces. So obviously each face must be below 17k triangles (they're only a few thousand each in reality), but it's still having this annoying material problem. For example if I try to texture face #5, faces 1/3/7 all get textured at the same time, despite them being clearly different faces.

[arton Rotaru]

Hmmm, that sounds more like a problem with the materials names. Can you try to rename all your materials to simple names like Mat1, Mat2, Mat3 etc., without any special characters, or signs, and try uploading the mesh with the official SL viewer?

There has been a bug in the past where the importer truncated material names with spaces, and/or some special characters in it's name. The spaces issue has been fixed though, as well as some of the others like square brakets in the material name.
The problem with that was that the importer truncated the material names at the space, and you easily ended up with the same name for all materials, which showed some similar behavior as what you had described.

If it's not the material names, I'm afraid I'm running out of ideas as well.

 

 

[Suki Hirano]

Just tried changing all mat names to "mat#", and used official viewer to upload, still same issue.

I even used notepad++ to open the .dae and inspected the material names, no special characters or any typos.

This is really starting to get annoying...

[arton Rotaru]

Can you share one of the offending meshes?