One-Texture Environment in Unreal / Modular Textures in Realtime 3D Art

[animats]

9 hours ago, ChinRey said:

A better LoD model generator for the uploader, better handling of bump maps/normal maps, impostors, those would all be great to have of course but as Patch said, we all have to work within the limits of what we have.

It's in the uploader. The one in Firestorm could be enhanced beyond what LL offers. Or, more easily, some Python tools in Blender which do the things needed to prep a mesh for SL. Select the main mesh, and generate LOD2, LOD1, and LOD0 automatically. Blender's existing mesh reduction tools are better than the uploader. Generating impostors semi-automatically in Blender is possible, too; Blender can do an orthographic projection to generate a flat picture.

Do this once in code, and thousands of objects can get better. Do it by hand, and it will never get done. I don't blame creators for bad low-LOD models. Creators who follow the LL instructions will get crappy low-LOD models as the triangle-discarder bashes them to fit. When you see a really crappy low-LOD model, the creator probably read the instructions and followed them.

I'm not really a mesh guy; my background is in physics engines and networking, which is why I mostly work on region crossings. Anybody into mesh reduction?

[Klytyna]

1 hour ago, animats said:

I'm not really a mesh guy; my background is in physics engines and networking, which is why I mostly work on region crossings. Anybody into mesh reduction?

Since you ask, yes...

Pretty much everyone who's told you that automated LoD generation really really sucks...
 

[animats]

7 hours ago, Klytyna said:

Pretty much everyone who's told you that automated LoD generation really really sucks...

Well, the usual "can't do" person has been heard from. Anyone else?

I'm not even talking about the latest and greatest LOD techniques. Just basic billboard impostors as lowest-LOD models would be a big win. This is Game Developer 101, not rocket science. Add the ability to display a billboard impostor (a set of flat pictures, only one of which is shown depending on the viewpoint) and have the uploader create that as the lowest level LOD model. That alone would make SL backgrounds look much better. Low LI, but something reasonable to look at in the distance.

SL needs this more than games, because models tend to have too much detail.

[Callum Meriman]

On 6/28/2018 at 10:14 AM, Patch Linden said:

Sorry, I can't be every where at once?   There are volumes of information out there that no one person can keep up with.  As I said, we can not use Firestorm, so I'm not sure that it's fair I should have specific interest prior to now without it being called out at me.  I can only grow and gain knowledge when someone calls it out to me or I stumble upon it myself.

As a former content creator myself, I get it.  All of it. 

Sorry for being snippy. As you say, you spend your day on much bigger things that we have little awareness of.

As residents, there really are a growing number of us fighting the good fight to stop this:

[Klytyna]

20 minutes ago, animats said:

Just basic billboard impostors as lowest-LOD models would be a big win. This is Game Developer 101, not rocket science. Add the ability to display a billboard impostor (a set of flat pictures, only one of which is shown depending on the viewpoint) and have the uploader create that as the lowest level LOD model.

You just don't bloody listen do you...

You openly admit that what you know about making 3d models can be written in letters 3 ft high on the back of a torn postage stamp, then when modelmakers tell you your auto-lod /auto-imposter scheme is impractical because this isn't a 30 gb fixed content preinstalled before you ever run the client  for the game, you stick your fingers in your ears and go lalalalala.

How in hell is an uploader going to generate billboard imposters of a mesh if the mesh isn't uploaded with a single never changing texture...

Let me put it in terms even you can understand...

"Animats: Gawd dang it, my red white n blue Murican house just turned commie red when i moved more than *cough* meters away from it, who made the billboard imposters a different color to what i hand painted it this morning after i bought it, gawd danged 3d model making commies nay sayers!"

SL = Non static content... There's no way to program the uploader to psychically prediect what colour an end user will repaint their house or car or anti-messiah-noob assault droid, and automatically render imposters for it with textures that haven't even been made yet let alone uploaded to SL.
 

[Callum Meriman]

2 hours ago, Klytyna said:

There's no way to program the uploader to psychically prediect what colour an end user will repaint their house or car or anti-messiah-noob assault droid, and automatically render imposters for it with textures that haven't even been made yet let alone uploaded to SL.

Well, we could leverage the Bakes-On-Mesh system to create eight dynamic baked imposters each time the object changes.

(Before you bite my ears off, that is a joke)

[ChinRey]

9 hours ago, Callum Meriman said:

As residents, there really are a growing number of us fighting the good fight to stop this:

 

Patch kind'a answered that in his first post here:

On 27.6.2018 at 4:36 PM, Patch Linden said:

I tell my creators to build to the lowest common denominator and upload all LOD's on most things we do because the majority of Second Life users have what we refer to as 0 spec hardware.  Those are the pc's or laptops that have very weak integrated graphics that can't manage to render anything non-collapsed over 1.0 on a good day without suffering through 3 FPS and then normally would  only being able to see collapsed content, which is something in many cases we can not afford.

This is exactly what I meant by being late to the party of course. Imagine if a Linden had said something like that back when the RenderVolumeLODFactor nonsense started. Just a single little official statement from LL would have saved us all so much headache and frustration and made SL a much better place. That didn't happen and the result is that the misinformation has been allowed to fester for a decade.

So, LL is aware of the problem but unfortuantely they are not aware of the solutions. What they do - as Ancient Mole described - is essentially to hardcode bloated LoD into the content itself. That doesn't help of course, it just masks the most obvious symtpom.

I'm sure I wasn't the only one here to be shocked to learn that Patch was completely ignorant about the research done and posted about by forumites. I do not think it is possible to make good mesh without some essential information that can be found in the mesh fourm and only in the mesh forum. I did actually take it for granted that the Moles had some basic understanding of mesh optimization and phased acordingly. If I had known they didn't, I would at least have tried to be a bit more diplomatic about it and I'm really sorry I misunderstood the situation there.

But what's done, is done. It's all up to Patch and the Moles now. Either they dig trenches and try to defend a hopeless position or they swallow their pride, face the facts and accept help from the people who actually can help. In either case, there's nothing we can do about it until they respond.

This thread should probably be in Guiness as the fastest derail ever. It only took less than three hours and one reply to take it off course and even the OP jumped at it.

How about going back to the original topic? It's certainly both interesting and important. We can't make anything like that room in SL of course. We'd need PBR for that and I doubt that even Unity/Sansar style "PBR Light" would be enough.

We do have some basic surface effects though. I've been playing around with them every now and then: using a single low res texture (in the literal meaning of the word), trying to see how much variety it is possible to get out of it and I've been amazed by the results.

How about making it a challenge to everybody? I have to sit this one out myself since I'm on vacation with limited computer access right now but I'd love to see what creative solutons others can come up with!

Edited June 29, 2018 by ChinRey

[OptimoMaximo]

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

How about making it a challenge to everybody?

This method requires overlapping UVs to work and map meshes to the right places on the texture. Lightmapping is out of question because we can't have a second UV for the baked lighting, so byebye AO because of the overlapping on the main UVSet (UE4 does a lightmap UV set for you under the hood upon import). It can be a good excercise, but for the majority of content on commercial scale, that won't work. Customers want AO on the model, since the viewer delivers a faint occlusion which is quite taxing per se, and to make it work well it needs shadows turned on all the time.

[Pixels Sideways]

On 6/27/2018 at 5:17 PM, Ancient Mole said:

Hey! I´m Ancient Mole, the creator of the Crystal Fortress.

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I´d love to give you guys some more information if you got questions about how I or my Mole family do things!

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Byesers for now

Thanks for sharing this.  

BTW, I snuck into your house.  Totes love this room -- and the the animated background.  I hope you are okay.  It appears you may have been eaten by a shark.