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ChinRey
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39 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

You're almost tempting me to learn mesh.

Oh but this is a sculpt, or two sculpts rather. If I had done it as mesh, the land impact would have been astronomical which is a bit of a paradox since the actual load would have been significantly lower.

You can have as many flat plants as you like on a sculpt of course but the maximum number of three dimensional plants (in its simplest form - two crossed sheets) is 1024 and that is only possible with a very regular pattern. So I added a second sculpt to break up the pattern, doubling the land impact but also the number of plants.

Alpha sorting is indeed a nightmare and really, something like this can only be done with alpha masking, again paradoxally, increasing the LI by lowering the actual load.

Edited by ChinRey
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2 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Oh but this is a sculpt, or two sculpts rather.

Okay, I'm not gonna learn mesh!

The sculpltie I made was a fairly random set of folds in a sheet, so as to avoid the appearance of regularity. Wheat is sorta one dimensional to begin with, so criss-crossing wasn't necessary other than to make the stalks visible from any angle. I was rather pleased with the result, as I was renting a spot with a prim limit of 15 at the time.

;-).

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14 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Wheat is sorta one dimensional to begin with

Wheat is also hopeless when it comes to alphas. You just can't use alpha masking and you need high density. If you want a good wheat field, you have to accept lots of lag and alpha issues. But at least the alpha bugs don't seem to eat the corn.

It's the same with the Woodbury grass texture everybody and their uncle use and of course, AM Radio's neat two color trick straws. You just can't have details as fine as that with alpha masking. :(

 

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11 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

AM Radio's neat two color trick straws.

I love AM's wheat. I'd noticed the color shift with viewing distance almost immediately after first visiting The Far Away and was intrigued. It took a few minutes to figure out how it worked and a few hours to replicate the effect. It's a wonderful example of turning lemons (decimation) in to lemonade (distance/angle related color shifts).

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On 11/7/2017 at 10:12 AM, ChinRey said:

Oh but this is a sculpt, or two sculpts rather. If I had done it as mesh, the land impact would have been astronomical which is a bit of a paradox since the actual load would have been significantly lower. [...]

Would it, though? I imagine there's some "wasted geometry" in a sculpt, so maybe that's some additional rendering load compared to a mesh, but otherwise shouldn't they render the same once the viewer has decoded the sculptmap? And the sculpt shouldn't really be more to download because it seems unlikely that a sculptmap is bloated enough to make up for the model metadata and other overhead in a mesh download -- and it sure feels as if each mesh downloads separately even if they share the same model, unlike sculpties that share a sculptmap.

Of course, mesh can have multiple faces with separate UV maps, so the texture information can be smaller and more efficient than sculpties, and I imagine that can simplify rendering as well as download -- but only if that feature is used, and used appropriately.

But I expect I'm missing something. I've never been able to sustain enough interest in 3D modeling to remember basic Blender more than a month at a time, even, but somehow I wonder if sculpts aren't getting a bad break in the press.

Edited by Qie Niangao
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9 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Would it, though? I imagine there's some "wasted geometry" in a sculpt, so maybe that's some additional rendering load compared to a mesh, but otherwise shouldn't they render the same once the viewer has decoded the sculptmap?

They should, yes, but they don't. I have tested it and there is a difference between the frame rate you get with a sculpt and with a mesh with exactly the same geometry. It is very small but it is measurable. Eliminate the wasted geometry from the mesh and you get a significant difference.

 

9 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

And the sculpt shouldn't really be more to download because it seems unlikely that a sculptmap is bloated enough to make up for the model metadata and other overhead in a mesh download

Initial load for a well made sculptmap should actually be much faster than for a mesh but it is the other way round and that is hard to explain. It is partly because the sculpt needs more preprocessing of course but on Open sim at least there is also a huge difference in download speed. The only possible explanation I can come up with is that the delivery system for mesh assets is more efficient than the old UUID based system used for sculpts. That is a rather worrying theory since everything else use the same system as sculpt maps, mesh assets is the only asset that is different there.

I haven't tested download speed directly in SL but it's worth noticing that oversampled sculpt maps - with 4096 or more pixels rather than the correct 1024 or less - are considerably slower to load and more prone to load failure than properly made ones (that's especially unfortunate since at least three of the most popular sculpt creator tools, Prim Generator, Wings3D and Tatara all generate oversampled maps). This has to have something to do with the downloading, not the way the viewer processes the sculpts. We know of course that the viewer's sculpt handling code is bad, really bad. But it can't possibly be so bad it chokes on something as elementary as oversampled maps. Or can it?

 

9 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

and it sure feels as if each mesh downloads separately even if they share the same model, unlike sculpties that share a sculptmap.

It's the same for sculpts and meshes, they are both made from not one, but two assets.

I'm not sure about the terminology so I'm making up a few names here but there is a "mesh asset" which is the equivalent to the sculpt map. It's the 3Dmodel exactly as it was originally uploaded (without any textures it may have been uploaded with - those are separate assets) and just like the sculpt map, it is usually downloaded once and reused. (However,  every mesh in the scene is reloaded when you move from one sim to another. Probably from cache rather than from server but you can sometimes see how meshes vanish briefly when you cross a sim border and this reloading also causes quite a lot of render failures. I think it's only meshes tht behave this way, but I'm not sure.)

Then there is the "prim property asset" which has all the data you can modify in the edit window plus those prim properties that can only be changed by scripts. It's the same for all three kinds of objects - prims, sculpts and mesh (sculpts and meshes even have the prim torture data bits) - and it is unique for each and every instance of an object.

---

With all that being said, I do believe sculpts still has a place in Second Life. Done correctly and used in the right place, the extra load is minute compared to optimized mesh and a good sculptie may well be more render efficient than the poorly optimized mesh we usually see in SL. When I build I keep returning to what Aley told me when I was a newbie and asked how she could make all those lovely items with such low prim counts: you have to use all the tools and methods available.

Edited by ChinRey
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I have to correct myself:

On 7.11.2017 at 4:12 PM, ChinRey said:

the maximum number of three dimensional plants (in its simplest form - two crossed sheets) is 1024

I think I have found a method to get even more 3D plants from a single sculpt, maybe as many as 8192. But I'm not sure if it will work and as much as I love math, just thinking about that puzzle is enough to make my head spin. Is there a mathematician in the house?

I did however manage to improve the look of the individual plants by doubling the number of planes for each. Here is the orignal:

FernField1024_001.jpg.0597200527b4f4c6ee5613ab28357a9d.jpg

 

The new version has plants looking like this:

FernField1024_002.jpg.767c9ea79e2b0b9973910e4eba70dcbd.jpg

 

I also finished the map I was supposed to work on, with "only" 320 plants but in a much more irregular and useable pattern.

Now it's time to get all my plant fields up on MP and watch as Second Life fills up with vegetation lusher and denser than anything ever seen before. :)

I wonder if we could persuade Linden Lab to fill up some of the abandoned mainland this way. That would be one of the most cost effective ways to improve the overall looks of SL ever.

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