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The Importance of Heavy Mesh


Chic Aeon
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It is summer. It is slow. I don't have a full sim to build like last year :D. Yes, a bit bored. 

My projects for the summer are purging my inventory of bad LOD mesh and improving my texturing in Blender Cycles and trying some experimentation. All that is going well.  

This is sort of a "what are you doing today" post but more importantly it REALLY highlights the problems with heavy mesh. Now the folks making this style of mesh (and many of us know who they are) are seemingly doing pretty well sales wise. One never really knows of course, appearances can be deceiving in both virtual and real life. My little town for example has more millionaires than the neighboring "fancy" town and everyone here goes around looking like a farmer or blue collar worker (not meant derogatorily in ANY WAY). I live in leggings and tunics and caftans. Some of us really aren't much into "appearances".

Anyway (see? bored) the POINT of this post is to point out to the folks that don't know  -- WHY their sims are so slow, why they can't move at an event, the whole mess that we have had for awhile now.  This of course follows through to wearable items also. 

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As I was going through my H and G inventory it was sad. I knew it was coming but I was determined to get rid of all the items that fell apart at LOD2. Some of the things I loved (LOVED) and a couple I did let sneak back into inventory. But along the way I now and then looked at the numbers of some items. Not only were the LODs horrible, the vertices were also off the charts. I am actually scared to look at the texture info but will do that after I post my photos. 

A couple of items I really liked but couldn't use and so I decided to make my own version of the object. These weren't "originals" in any way; those of us that peruse the web looking for inspiration see the items that inspired others ALL the time. So I felt OK with making something similar. I am sure there are plenty of other look-alike items on the Marketplace and in stores already. 

I wasn't aiming for super low poly mesh, but "medium". This is actually a bit heavier than I normally make.  Here is my finished item on the beta grid.  1 land impact; I clicked off for a better photo.

stool.thumb.PNG.25420e042f8fae6864fb8d30ac2499a8.PNG

 

And here is the original (with no shot of the original to recognize :D)

5b54fa1f4d34a_originalstool.thumb.PNG.fc6bec8d515309a90b25b55509df08e4.PNG

Note that the original stool (not mine) is 50,000 more triangles.   And the bottom two LODs are zeroed out.   Mine can be seen from halfway across the sim and the legs don't disappear. And we know I seldom make my own LODs and didn't here either. 

So far as textures go, here is my version:

5b54fea5d2b00_stooltextures.thumb.PNG.1a67e46a3ab6d81ec08364c7ef5de914.PNG

One 1024 texture and two materials.

And here is the info on the original.

5b54ff26e7836_originaltexturesnumbers.PNG.799f4992e984255c847ad0b2fcd541c0.PNG

 

The POINT of this is not "oh look at what I made", it is trying to explain to folks that are starting to make mesh, already make mesh but not all that "game asset" in nature, or even the lay folks that want to bother to read the numbers that it really IS JUST AS EASY to make lower poly mesh than the super dense stuff. If you make your own LODs then THAT takes a bit longer, but just paying attention when you upload and NOT cheating with the lower LODs makes a big difference. 

I can honestly say that my version looks much better than the one I was inspired by LOL. So that works too. 

Anyway a refresher course with some photos for those that missed all this when the new Firestorm tools appeared. 

And of course the theme of my title is that the importance of heavy mesh in a platform like SL is to show what NOT to do. Leave all those vertices for renders and make giant posters for you wall :D  -- but they really don't belong here and they don't look any better!

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Chic Aeon
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As I said in another thread, If you have the skill to make the original object, you have the skill to make good LODs.. when I was teaching a flatmate to use blender I got her to make reduced triangle versions of some of my items as her first lesson (manipulating a model, selecting verts or edges and dissolving them).  The only difficult part is getting a feel for how aggressive you can really be for a desired final Li score.

UV mapping and texture painting are way harder.

The issue in SL is that much of the content isn't made by the people selling it, or even made for a real time environment let alone Second life. It's downloaded, tweaked, uploaded and sold. 

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1 hour ago, CoffeeDujour said:

UV mapping and texture painting are way harder.

My favorite part of course. Nodes are much like Windlight!   LOL.  AND I love the puzzle aspect of UVs.  

Generally, on most things I work very hard to make a very low poly model to start with. Many of my items are under 1,000 tris. When I have something heavy like draped fabric I optimize the HIGH poly model a LOT -- AFTER I bake. In most cases the uploader does a fine job with my things. I honestly haven't been able to do any better. 

I know that I make things differently than others and that making your own LODs is the "preferred" answer. I just haven't seen much reason for it in 95% of my items. 

Just my input. 

 

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4 hours ago, Gordon Nadezda said:

Great post. It would be great to see a tutorial on how you achieved such efficiency. 

I think my tutorial days are over.  But, there was NO subsurf modifier applied. The legs were made as curves turned to mesh and I got rid of plenty of unneeded edgeloops before finishing. There are six sides to the edges of the legs which is all you really need to make something that size look round. 

The top of the stool is a rounded cube which is one of the choices of mesh objects -- cut in half and flattened. 

The center part of the stool could have been much more optimized if I would have been willing to "skewer" the cylinder into the seat support but I wanted a nice smooth bake and I really didn't start out trying to make this super low poly. I just looked at the numbers on the original stool AFTER I made mine and went "oh my". Hence this post.

 

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I'll quote (a few quotes actually) an old article that Robert Yang wrote about his frustration with people who make models in the modding community.

https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2012/04/on-joiner-detail-and-greeble.html

Quote

Surface detail is a paradox. It is "necessary" to exist in front of the player, but it exists to be more or less ignored.

"Okay, this wall was competently constructed." And then the player's mind thinks about something more important, like whether a spy is about to stab them in the face.

what frustrates me about the culture at 3D game art communities like Polycount. They model environments and characters as these purely academic exercises detached from how games actually function, framing and composing their environments as flat 2D renders, sculpting intricate nooks into individual bricks: but players will never inspect these bricks, nor will they care about the specular on that trash can model, and shaving 100 polys off that one-use statue prop will almost certainly not impact anything.

Yes, it is understandable -- many are making portfolio pieces and want to demonstrate technique and craft. But as a game maker who makes assets solely to fulfill certain roles in games, part of me also finds it a bit wasteful and perverse, that many of them are making game art that never actually goes into a game, nor fits the real constraints of making a game. (They throw away "scraps" that are miles beyond what I can model!) The models go into engines, but rarely games.

They are making game art that is not game art.

Of course it doesn't entirely apply to SecondLife but some of it does.

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