neon signs

[FadeVibes]

Hello

I tried looking in the web, I didn't find any tutorial about this subject. 

I want to learn to make neon signs or mesh signs ... what the best program for that? and how?

I tried to make it with Inkscape . . but when I Save it as a pic and import it to SL it doesn't look right

[arton Rotaru]

18 minutes ago, FadeVibes said:

I tried looking in the web, I didn't find any tutorial about this subject. 

Hello,

that's kinda strange that you didn't found anything. modeling a neon sign tutorial got me 697.000 hits on google search.

modeling a neon sign tutorial Blender 317.000 hits.

The glowing effect is basically added inworld, by setting the texture fullbright and increasing the glow value.

[FadeVibes]

37 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

Hello,

that's kinda strange that you didn't found anything. modeling a neon sign tutorial got me 697.000 hits on google search.

modeling a neon sign tutorial Blender 317.000 hits.

The glowing effect is basically added inworld, by setting the texture fullbright and increasing the glow value.

yeah but my thing is, how can I upload it to SL?

the Inkscape one said as a PNG ( it doesn't look right  )

[arton Rotaru]

3 minutes ago, FadeVibes said:

yeah but my thing is, how can I upload it to SL?

So, first of all we should try to find out what you are trying to do. Modeling a sign as a mesh, or creating a sign as a texture? A PNG is just a texture, which can work perfectly fine as a neon sign. The texture will have to be saved with an alpha channel (32 bit). I don't know Inkscape, but google returned this on how to safe a PNG with a transparent background.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/336153/how-to-create-a-png-with-transparent-background-in-inkscape

Here is a Photoshop tut about transparency in textures for SL:
http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLPages/EasyAlphas.html

Also important to know is how to eliminate the white halo in textures with transparency.
http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLPages/WhiteHalo.html

If you are going to model the sign as a mesh object, I'd recommend to check out the video tutorials for Blender on youtube.
A basic description of how to upload mesh models into Second Life can be found here:

For a general Second Life Mesh overview, this page has quite soem information:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh

22 minutes ago, FadeVibes said:

the Inkscape one said as a PNG ( it doesn't look right  )

Maybe you can show a screenshot of what you got so far? We would get a better idea of what your are trying to achieve.

[animats]

There are glowing lines as neon signs, and then there's this. It holds up on close examination. You can get right up to the sign and see the tubes and standoffs. The pigeon is animated, too.

This is near Tralala's Diner, at secondlife://PINE%20LAKE/108/85/28

[ChinRey]

4 hours ago, animats said:

There are glowing lines as neon signs, and then there's this. It holds up on close examination. You can get right up to the sign and see the tubes and standoffs.

That seems lovely but...

4 hours ago, animats said:

The pigeon is animated, too.

That' more than could be said about my avatar when I tried to visit. The lag in that sim is epic!

[animats]

8 hours ago, ChinRey said:

That' more than could be said about my avatar when I tried to visit. The lag in that sim is epic!

Hardware upgrade time.

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, animats said:

Hardware upgrade time.

If you say so. You can send me the money for it to my SL account - I think that's the easiest way.

[Chic Aeon]

1 hour ago, animats said:

Hardware upgrade time.

Nope. I went over too and my FPS changed from 107 to 12 (that was NOT a typo).

Edit: to be fair it wasn't JUST the sign, but things got worse the closer I got to the diner. I haven't seen a sim this slow for me in a VERY long time. It reminds me of my old computer LOL.  NOT a good memory. 

 

And to the OP. SINCE the learning curve in Blender is steep and making a neon sign is NOT "making a crate" *wink*.  I suggest working with pings with transparent backgrounds and adding the glow feature inworld.  

Edited February 9, 2018 by Chic Aeon

[OptimoMaximo]

22 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

Nope. I went over too and my FPS changed from 107 to 12 (that was NOT a typo).

Same here. Upon inspection , the region showcases around 19000KTris, 19 milion triangles, of which "only" 1792000 Visible, and i dropped from a steady 95 FPS at Builders Brewery to 23 fps, at high/ultra settings.

And i don't need a hardware upgrade.

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, Chic Aeon said:

Nope. I went over too and my FPS changed from 107 to 12 (that was NOT a typo).

Edit: to be fair it wasn't JUST the sign, but things got worse the closer I got to the diner. I haven't seen a sim this slow for me in a VERY long time. It reminds me of my old computer LOL.  NOT a good memory.

It reminds me of the first version of my Coniston/Keswick build. It's an English miners'/workers' village full of little cottages. I wanted to have as much variety and make it as real looking as possible so I used different plaster or brick textures for each and every cottage. I think I even had different conrete textures for each foundation. And as if that wasn't enough, I added half a sim worth of lovely alphablending wheat field. That was a tough lesson to learn and accept and redoing the build took ages. But a builder's gotta do what a builder's gotta do.

Edited February 9, 2018 by ChinRey

[Chic Aeon]

2 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:

Same here. Upon inspection , the region showcases around 19000KTris, 19 milion triangles, of which "only" 1792000 Visible, and i dropped from a steady 95 FPS at Builders Brewery to 23 fps, at high/ultra settings.

And I bet you didn't even get over to the diner which seemed to be in the thick of it all. 

Now -- again to be fair -- you COULD make something like the neon sign shown that would work just fine and be low land impact and not terribly glutty on tris. I didn't inspect THAT once since I could hardly move.

And no, I don't need a hardware upgrade either. LOL. 

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, Chic Aeon said:

And no, I don't need a hardware upgrade either. LOL. 

I do. I would love to have a computer strong enough to handle that sim and I'm sure we all agree I deserve it!

Chin Rey batters her eyes and does everything she can think of to look very, very deserving indeed.

Edited February 9, 2018 by ChinRey

[OptimoMaximo]

54 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

And I bet you didn't even get over to the diner which seemed to be in the thick of it all. 

I went to the diner too, but i stayed steadily at 20/23 fps. But the region details was my first check at the landing point and already 1.8 milion triangles were thrown at my/your viewer, not to mention the number of unique textures

[animats]

All that beautiful detail, held back by the technology.

This is mostly a level of detail problem. You're not seeing an excessive number of triangles at any one time. It's the total scene size that's jamming up the viewer. SL needs server-side generated impostors to keep it from choking on scenes like this.

High Fidelity has server-side mesh and texture compression. They're doing LOD model generation server side. That's the right answer for user-provided content. Not only will users get it wrong, "wrong" varies with the user's hardware and network bandwidth.

 

 

[OptimoMaximo]

5 hours ago, animats said:

This is mostly a level of detail problem. You're not seeing an excessive number of triangles at any one time.

I'm sorry but a scene that shows around 1.8 million triangles within the culling distance/drawing distance definitely IS ans excessive number at one time. That may be true for single player games or these newer platforms where you download the place before you can enter, where realtime environment changes can't happen because you upload your experience/place for others to download and then enjoy. SL is on the opposite side, and rendering something that is constantly updating through the internet has a different load of computational costs.

Plus, the design. An experienced Environment artist know how many polygons are allowed in the polygon budget and should not exceed that, however if the scene has to be very densely item-populated, the culling distance plays a big role. Designing a scene where you will never get to see farther away than X distance is a necessary skill to design packed scenes, and would be useful in SL too if you could force-reduce the drawing distance of incoming visitors, so that they render only at the intended distance, while the culled area beyond that is constantly covered from view

5 hours ago, animats said:

High Fidelity has server-side mesh and texture compression. They're doing LOD model generation server side.

This link you're providing, currently, explains how they're beginning to implement asset compression instead of using the original fbx asset file, for faster load. SL does that on both mesh and textures: collada files get compressed into their own mesh asset file and textures end up being compressed into jpeg2000. The difference is in the involved formats. Further down below they mention LoD creation as one of the anticipated features, and it doesn't even go into detail about any automatic or server side generation. Meaning that they don't have a LoD system in place already, or that they intend to change the current one. I'm more inclined to believe it's the first option, though i don't know.

[ChinRey]

11 hours ago, animats said:

All that beautiful detail, held back by the technology.

Unfortunately yes. It is not and will never be possible to make a dynamic 3D computer simulation with all the details we'd all love it to have. So the great secret to good content creation will always be to make as much as possible out of as little as possible.  That requires a lot of artistic skills and also the willingness to make some really, really tough decisions. I can't remember if I cried when I had to strip down Coniston but I may well.

There is one crucial difference between Coniston and Pine Lake though. Coniston is at a very public location on mainland and crisscrossed by roads and waterways. It gets a lot of visitors of all kinds and it's my responsibiity to make sure it's enjoyable to everybody in SL, not just to myself. Pine Lake is an isolated sim in the middle of nowhere. The owner has no such responsibilites and should feel free to keep it only for the few with high enough hardware specs and lag tolerance.

Every time a topic like this comes up, I have to mention Vintage Village at Verdigris. It's an old build made with the limits of prims and sculpts with only a few meshes added recently and it's amazingly low lag. Yet visually it can hold its own against even the most elaborate modern mesh builds. The reason is that Oriolus Oliva, the creator and owner, is a professional RL artist with tons of artistic skills, talent and experience. If anybody knows how to make the most of what they've got, he does. I strongly recommend everybody who want to learn how to build efficiently for SL to got here and study his work in detail, especially the clever use and reuse of simple low resolution textures.

Edited February 10, 2018 by ChinRey

[animats]

Consiton is a nice build.

What's becoming clear here is that SL is way behind in automated level of detail handling. That's needed to reduce the level of user work required. It takes too much effort to do it right. It's hard to find even furniture in SL with decent LOD models. SL looks great if you do it right. But doing it right is hard is time-consuming. And the tools for doing it in Blender suck.

SL foliage is way behind modern standards. Today, everybody uses Speedtree or something like it. That does automatic level of detail and fractal plant generation (every one is different) out of the box.  So your outdoor scenes look good with no effort. Here's another tool used with Unity to generate good foliage. Sinespace uses that, I think. A good natural-world generator makes empty land look good. It also encourages people to make better builds. LL ought to get some good foliage system into SL and use it to cover their abandoned land.

Here's a discussion of Sansar vs High Fidelity. He stresses the importance of both making it look really good and making it profitable for artists.

It's easier to modernize the technology than to acquire the user base.

[ChinRey]

14 hours ago, animats said:

What's becoming clear here is that SL is way behind in automated level of detail handling. That's needed to reduce the level of user work required. It takes too much effort to do it right. It's hard to find even furniture in SL with decent LOD models. SL looks great if you do it right. But doing it right is hard is time-consuming. And the tools for doing it in Blender suck.

You have a lot of good points there but there is more to it than that, much much more. I was going to write a long rant here but it's past midnight where I live right now so I better not. Maybe tomorrow but if you're lucky I've forgotten it by then.

But I have to point out that those two essential features you are listing, efficient LoD handling and procedural onject generation are completely missing from HiGh Difelity and Sansar too and there doesn't seem to be much chance we'll ever get them there.

Now, I'm going to be very rude here now, but I really, really mean it: The developers who are working on High Fidelity and Sansar are the same developer who all but ruined Second Life through ignorance, sloppiness, short sightedness and general poor craftmanship. I can see no sign that they have learned from their mistakes so they keep repeating them. They may have added some new shinies yes but there are also obvious gaping holes in the build - holes that can't be excused by them being so new - and I think we can all see clear signs of serious weaknesses in their underlying structures too. Second Life is currently in the hands of a very competent repair crew. I find it hard to imagine that any of those three is going to become the virtual reality of the future but if one of them is, Second Life is by far the one with the best chance.

Edited February 11, 2018 by ChinRey

[animats]

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

Second Life is currently in the hands of a very competent repair crew. I find it hard to imagine that any of those three is going to become the virtual reality of the future but if one of them is, Second Life is by far the one with the best chance.

Thanks. It's good to know that someone thinks the maintenance team is competent. That inspires me to keep plugging on fixing region crossings, and getting LL to fix their side.

SL needs automatic management of scene complexity more than Sansar does. Sansar has high-paid artists making ad content to promote movies. SL doesn't. SL needs to not choke on unoptimized content. There's been tons of progress on this in recent years. It's not necessary to re-invent the wheel, just use available technology.

[arton Rotaru]

So what is the conclusion of all the currently, and in the forseeable future, non existing technologies in Second Life? Continuing creating content with crappy LODs, because of it takes too much effort to do it right?

On none of my objects I ever used an automated polygon reducer. It's all done by hand. It doesn't take that much effort either. And most of my builder buddies do the same.
The main reason why people arent't doing proper LODs is because of the land impact they can safe by zeroing out LODs (low land impact = selling point). In conjunction with non default viewer settings, it's an easy way out for many indeed.

Edited February 11, 2018 by arton Rotaru