Why Are There So Few Good Mesh Skyboxes?

[Ichi Rexen]

3 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Having mod checked off or not checked off is absolutely no protection against a "questionable" viewer -- that makes no sense.

Read what I wrote. I'm saying "no-mod" does not protect you against rogue viewers. I'm not saying "there is protection" against rogue viewers. There isn't. Which is why "no-mod" makes no sense.

I never said it was or wasn't, how about reading what I wrote and have written at least twice and soon to be a third time. Which is : "just giving one reason as to why some people don't do it". Thats it, nothing more, nothing less, I'm not stating that mod or mod is or is not the ultimate super be all protection against cb viewers. It isn't, I know this, I'm aware. I'm not trying to start a thing, offend anyones sensibilities, there is no fire in the room. I repeat, no fire in the room. Calm. Breathe. Relax

[Prokofy Neva]

7 minutes ago, Ichi Rexen said:

I never said it was or wasn't, how about reading what I wrote and have written at least twice and soon to be a third time. Which is : "just giving one reason as to why some people don't do it". Thats it, nothing more, nothing less, I'm not stating that mod or mod is or is not the ultimate super be all protection against cb viewers. It isn't, I know this, I'm aware. I'm not trying to start a thing, offend anyones sensibilities, there is no fire in the room. I repeat, no fire in the room. Calm. Breathe. Relax

It's not about fire or "needing to breathe". It's about science. Again: Having mod checked off or not checked off is absolutely no protection against a "questionable" viewer. SInce I had already explained WHY people do this -- because of a mistaken belief -- there was no need to explain THAT it happens once again without being clear what is NO PROTECTION AGAINST IT. The end.

Edited January 4, 2019 by Prokofy Neva

[Ichi Rexen]

2 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

It's not about fire or "needing to breathe". It's about science. Again: Having mod checked off or not checked off is absolutely no protection against a "questionable" viewer. SInce I had already explained WHY people do this -- because of a mistaken belief -- there was no need to explain THAT it happens once again without being clear what is NO PROTECTION AGAINST IT. The end.

Again your coming at me like thats what I stated. I never stated that. Just simply gave a reason that I knew of as to why people didn't give out mod objects. Nothing more nothing less. Calm down

[Prokofy Neva]

4 minutes ago, Ichi Rexen said:

Again your coming at me like thats what I stated. I never stated that. Just simply gave a reason that I knew of as to why people didn't give out mod objects. Nothing more nothing less. Calm down

Sometimes people need to review their original post to see the problem, so I'll try once again. You responded to my OP with a fragment of the post and your comment:

  22 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

and there is never any reason not to put your creation on mod.

I can give you a reason why some don't...

1. Download questionable viewer

2. Take persons full perm item

3. Import freshly botted item through that persons full perm item

4. Copied item now appears to be created by the person who's full perm item it was imported through as opposed to the person doing the copying

 

So you gave a reason why some don't without explaining that it is not a valid reason, as I did, when I said in my OP the sentence that followed: " It doesn't help preserve your copyright, or I might support it more." That's the problem. The end.

Deep cleansing breaths, Ichi, as you post yet another retort. You're welcome to have the last word. The real point of this post is that there are few good mesh skyboxes and many skyboxes of prim, sculpty and mesh that aren't on mod which makes it hard to optimize them.

 

Edited January 4, 2019 by Prokofy Neva

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

22 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

5. No incentive -- a mesh creator sells mainly avatar outfits and accessories and furniture and can make fortunes on gatchas, so why mess with a skybox which is just harder to make well? Let someone else bother. Or skyboxes in a gatcha as a rare will ensure people play them like rats pulling the pellet levers so keep them rare!

Yes. There should be a law against people not willing to make stuff that I like but they don't have incentive for.

[Prokofy Neva]

Just now, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Yes. There should be a law against people not willing to make stuff that I like but they don't have incentive for.

It's not about people "having" to do anything about what I complain about. It's about seeing what others know -- perhaps they have some good leads, and a few have come from this conversation. I'm *explaining* why creators lack the incentive to make skyboxes, large or small. So that also indicates there might be a MARKET for such skyboxes if some make the effort. What they'd need to hear from signals from the market -- which are impossible to hear through the funnel and noise of the forums, and there are few other indicators except anecdotal experience -- is that a lot of prims is not scary.

That is, if a skybox has to have 100-200-300 LI in it, like an old-school prim or sculpty skybox "now being retired" does -- that's more than fine. Maybe that's not enough. Then go for 500 or 1000 and we'll find bigger lots to put them over.

[Luna Bliss]

23 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

so few of them are mesh, and most are sculpty or even prim

If one wants a "good" nature skybox then in my book it has to have a complex terrain with trails, varying heights of terrain, waterfalls, & streams. This is very difficult to create in mesh, and while I see you say there's a market I'm not sure it would be worth my time (financially) to create them in mesh. To have fun and try to do something artistic, sure, but because it's so time-consuming I can't imagine recouping time spent.

[Prokofy Neva]

2 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

If one wants a "good" nature skybox then in my book it has to have a complex terrain with trails, varying heights of terrain, waterfalls, & streams. This is very difficult to create in mesh, and while I see you say there's a market I'm not sure it would be worth my time (financially) to create them in mesh. To have fun and try to do something artistic, sure, but because it's so time-consuming I can't imagine recouping time spent.

Well, you need not feel any pressure from my quarter.

The bigger question is: what good is mesh, if you can't use it to build the world?

[Fionalein]

23 hours ago, Alyona Su said:

I see and understand your plight, prok. I still say PRIMS FOR THE WIN.

I am serious: I'll take a high-quality prim build over a similar mesh build, even at a *slight* cost of more LI because prims don't have LOD ISSUES. They REZ FASTER (I repeat: quality-built; optimized textures) and they don't LAG the hell out of your computer, no matter how many V-8 engines under the hood.

Just saying.

The trick is to blend the stuff... huge walls should be made of prims wheras minute details can be added with mesh... all huge structures I buildt I mixed together out of tortured prims and mesh items... we always had 1/3 of our prim alotment on reserve at the club back when I managed and constantly rebuildt it...

Edited January 4, 2019 by Fionalein

[Luna Bliss]

2 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Well, you need not feel any pressure from my quarter.

The bigger question is: what good is mesh, if you can't use it to build the world?

Mesh has been a disappointment to many nature builders. If you make it the size needed the LI is just too high  

Even if not especially large the mesh version almost always outweighs the sculpt/prim version in terms of LI.

* talking about complex nature environments

[Luna Bliss]

BTW, I do have a lot of mesh elements in many of my skyboxes -- it's just not practical to make them entirely with mesh.

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

 I'm not sure what the reason is -- perhaps, again, LI count.

Compromises.

Every mesh creator has to decide what to compromise on. Sometimes those decisions will match with your needs. Sometimes they won't.

And sometimes the solution with the best comprises for a situation is a prim. If it's not, don't use it.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

1 hour ago, Luna Bliss said:

Mesh has been a disappointment to many nature builders. If you make it the size needed the LI is just too high  

Even if not especially large the mesh version almost always outweighs the sculpt/prim version in terms of LI.

* talking about complex nature environments

I am 100% certain that the main reason why most of the mesh that seems to cost inconceivable amounts of LI is because nobody makes proper (read: simple) physics shapes for their mesh. Importing a tree? Let's let the importer calculate a mesh shape for it, yeah! Or even better, let's use the model itself as the physics shape, that way it's more accurate!

And the server would scream if it had a mouth.

Keep in mind that all prims are auto-generated mesh as well, even if they don't necessarily use the same LI calculation (unless you set them to Convex). The biggest difference is the simplicity of their physics shape, which avoids lots of little computer pitfalls, like small gaps (complex physics calculations).

There was this one mesh that was basically a series of hollow hexagonal tubes with a small gap between them and using the model as a physics shape. It was about 8 LI at its regular size, but if you scaled it down just right... I think we got it to 517 LI at worst. If the entire mesh was encased with a simple cube as its physics shape, that couldn't have happened. Similarly, I've seen quite a few skyboxes that have a very basic, one-room box shape with no excessive use of mesh, but the LI is still way higher than it should be and I bet it wouldn't be even half if it used a cube with inverted normals (to keep you inside) or just a hollow, reasonably thick 16-face box for its physics.

Edited January 4, 2019 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Alyona Su]

2 hours ago, Fionalein said:

The trick is to blend the stuff... huge walls should be made of prims wheras minute details can be added with mesh... all huge structures I buildt I mixed together out of tortured prims and mesh items... we always had 1/3 of our prim alotment on reserve at the club back when I managed and constantly rebuildt it...

I agree with this. Mesh works best as a "detail add-on". Too many try to create a complete structure (or product) entirely from mesh - which in some cases makes sense, but in too many others does not. I *hate* all-mesh sim builds. Laggy-as-hell (I know: computer lag, but still) - I have to turn off all but basic shaders in places like that. And my system is considerably more powerful than most, I believe. Not a screamin' demon to be sure, but quite capable in its own right and *still* get those jittery movements in all-mesh places. ugh. 😕

[Wulfie Reanimator]

1 hour ago, Alyona Su said:

and *still* get those jittery movements

Avatar movement?

As for framerate issues.. it's hardly the fault of mesh itself. Like I already said, prims are mesh too. It's the amount of it that creators use for the high/highest LODs, even going so far as to reduce the lower LODs in order to be able to put more in the higher LODs, and as a result a lot of people are using LOD factor 4 or higher because otherwise most mesh looks terrible (because of creators).. and they're always rendering absolutely everything at the highest LODs which is not at ALL how you're supposed to handle real-time 3D rendering. What's your LOD factor set to anyway, @Alyona Su?

Edited January 4, 2019 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Alyona Su]

11 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

What's your LOD factor set to anyway, @Alyona Su?

2.0. I *refuse* to set it any higher, except when snapshotting, then I set it right back. It's amazing how much mesh is so poorly made that it crumbles to crap only 10 meters distant.

Oh, and mesh affects frame rate for certain - all your graphics settings to - but the biggest contributor (besides other avies) is Advanced Lighting Model ticked on. I use Graphics Profiles - have a max setting for Snapshotting, a "High" for when I want things to look good when standing still, and medium for when I move around, and a minimum that even has BASIC SHADERS turned off and draw set to 96. (And that's what SL looked like back in 2005!)

The worse culprit among all of them is and always will be the *****e textures people keep putting on all this stuff. But when it comes to mesh versus prims: the comparison is clear and striking. Prims win, hands-down in the "lagginess" department - they are built into the viewer. Mesh is not.

Edited January 4, 2019 by Alyona Su

[Selene Gregoire]

7 hours ago, Ichi Rexen said:

Im aware of everything your saying including the mesh bit. I wasn't trying to make a thing out of it, just giving one reason as to why some people don't do it. 

The problem is, it's not a reason. It's an excuse.

[Codex Alpha]

On 1/3/2019 at 10:26 AM, Prokofy Neva said:

Since I started offering skyboxes about 4 years ago, I have studied this field intensively. And recently I had some days off to spend hours pouring over the MP and visiting all kinds of inworld stores to study this problem again. I am always on the lookout for good skyboxes, but so few of them are mesh, and most are sculpty or even prim -- and that means there are some really bad ones out there.

I'd start making mesh-based skyboxes if I knew what was even in demand. There is no feedback from SL as to what sells, and/or why. I'm stuck in a 'what do I make now?" because at this point have no idea why some items sell well and others do not, so I'm just stabbing in the dark now.

I've got an idea to make a apartment/gallery style building that will fit in the same footprint as a default home, but am unsure what kind of detail I should add... Should I add strange textures and designs into the piece (which might make it too niche), do I add toilets and fancy sinks, or leave all the rooms empty? Add props or leave them out? A lot of work to not know what will be wanted or not.

IMO, buildings and rooms are not searched for as much as avatars and furniture... what do you think?

PS. Right now, I just make stuff I feel like at the time, and throw it up on SL's walls and see what sticks... not a good model for creating stuff though

[Qie Niangao]

I rarely see architecturally imaginative structures anymore of the sort that populated prim-based SL. (I certainly don't mean my own meager attempts from back then.) There was once a steady supply of exciting builds that certainly could be realized in Mesh, but instead we get mostly a slavish devotion to detailed verisimilitude. This ability to replicate is indeed Mesh's metier, but Mesh has been around long enough that we all get it: it makes a bang-on boxcar or whatever. Now, how about some vision?

Slightly more relevant to skyboxes: I recently converted an old high-altitude build platform into a big half-dome alien planet surface that encroaches deeply into a perpetually vacant Linden water sim that a next-sim neighbor has encroached across for many years. The build is stupidly huge and utterly impractical: the scenery turns phantom as it crosses sim borders. But it's surprisingly compelling -- even pretty -- as a distant backdrop. It's forced to use sculpts and prims because the overall shell is megaprim scale, much larger than the maximum Mesh dimensions. To give the terrain more realism I added up-close Mesh details and enclosures, and I overlaid prims and sculpties to break up texture repeats. I guess it's a sorta deconstructed sim-surround. The point, if there is one, is that the different building types have different strengths that can be leveraged together to make stuff that would be impractical with any one of them alone.

[Aethelwine]

22 hours ago, Marianne Little said:

Never did it for me when I rez it?

Maybe it is has been corrected since I bought it? I just rechecked to make sure it wasn't a faulty memory and my feet are still sinking in to the floor. Just a couple of inches but enough to irritate me.

I just went to their redelivery terminal to see if there was an update, but I bought it so long ago it isn't listed and the problem isn't sufficient to bother me enough to contact them about it. I still recommend it as a skybox home though, the fix I needed to do was only for the ground floor and just one prim to add.

Ps Thoroughly agree with Schultz Bros. I love the Roosevelt Skybox they do, a nice homely space and only 27 Li.

Pps: I second Onsu too, I have the Maple skybox out and it makes for a lovely functional small apartment at 45Li

Edited January 5, 2019 by Aethelwine
afterthought & spelling

[Aethelwine]

On 1/4/2019 at 9:05 AM, Ethan Paslong said:

a very modern low impact (including furniture!) by Studio Skye, i think Aethelwine might hint on the same one

 

I was thinking the Parisian and Warehouse, but I like the White Loft too... so much I have all 3 rezzed in different parcels.

Another to mention I used for a long time that is small but not too small and very nice is the Clocktower by Rageworks, only 10 Li, a nice place to set as home with your pose stand and other bits and bobs you want to hand when you rezz in. Just while I was looking at it on Market place I see their NightFall Atelier at 38LI, very nicely detailed room skybox.

Edited January 5, 2019 by Aethelwine
afterthought

[Luna Bliss]

19 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

21 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

Mesh has been a disappointment to many nature builders. If you make it the size needed the LI is just too high  

Even if not especially large the mesh version almost always outweighs the sculpt/prim version in terms of LI.

* talking about complex nature environments

I am 100% certain that the main reason why most of the mesh that seems to cost inconceivable amounts of LI is because nobody makes proper (read: simple) physics shapes for their mesh.

Please test that out and report back.

In other words, do all the work for us ;0

[Aethelwine]

43 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Please test that out and report back.

In other words, do all the work for us ;0

I am thinking of one example from experience that perhaps illustrates an ambiguity in meaning related to this from my experience building roads.

A mesh road corner piece with a barrier around it by Meshlogic would be about 3 or 5 land impact. I can make a similar road piece from a prim with a path cut, hollow cylinder, it will be just 1 Li until you add a material texture to it and it gets counted on same system as mesh where its land impact goes up to over 100 Li. The MeshLogic surface is actually smoother and better for vehicles and tolerates badly lined up joins between pieces much better than the prim built surface. For the prim built surface to escalate so high on Land Impact, I am thinking it must have much more vertices\complexity than the Mesh road has, but it doesn't function so well. Well optimised mesh can be better functionally than prims.

My experience and example contradicts Wulfie's assertion once the playing field is leveled when the same land impact accounting is considered, the prim is only lower land impact (with worse physics) before materials are added. But to be fair I am talking about a tortured prim, not standard ones they were. So not so much a contradiction as a clarification\consideration for the discussion.

Edited January 5, 2019 by Aethelwine
addition

[Prokofy Neva]

16 hours ago, entity0x said:

I'd start making mesh-based skyboxes if I knew what was even in demand. There is no feedback from SL as to what sells, and/or why. I'm stuck in a 'what do I make now?" because at this point have no idea why some items sell well and others do not, so I'm just stabbing in the dark now.

I've got an idea to make a apartment/gallery style building that will fit in the same footprint as a default home, but am unsure what kind of detail I should add... Should I add strange textures and designs into the piece (which might make it too niche), do I add toilets and fancy sinks, or leave all the rooms empty? Add props or leave them out? A lot of work to not know what will be wanted or not.

IMO, buildings and rooms are not searched for as much as avatars and furniture... what do you think?

PS. Right now, I just make stuff I feel like at the time, and throw it up on SL's walls and see what sticks... not a good model for creating stuff though

I totally agree -- the market is so hard to build for because it has no free press, no feedback, which is the only way that free enterprise can function. It starts with uncertainty or even fear of mentioning even positively certain companies on the forums -- but more to the point, the inability to criticize companies or call them out for shoddy building or fraud because of rules -- which removes not only an important deterrent of crime (which is why all online worlds suffer so) but an important feedback mechanism. Of course, without an independent judiciary, you can't function, either, to investigate and prosecute fraud or even libel properly. SL is a very imperfect system.

But even a simple form of reporting we had years ago was withdrawn needlessly -- figures each month for how many people spent more than one Linden dollar, arranged in categories, i.e. 25L, 100L all the way to 5000L plus. This was important. Because while you could see that, say, there were 60,000 people who spent more than a dollar, only a group of say, 4000, spent the equivalent of say, US $25, such as to buy a 4096 lot on an island or pay ment on the Mainland and buy a house. That mean you were chasing a very tiny market. Seeing these numbers, I could easily determine that it was folly for me to buy more islands and try to compete for this tiny pool of people willing to spend $25 US. That is, I'd have to have capital enough to create my own market with heavy advertising, loss leaders, etc.

If you have the patience of Job, you can sit on the MP and keep refreshing the page and you will see the things people buy. True, there's a lot of human and animal bits and fat lady avatars and whatnot that don't give you enough information except the obvious. But stick with it and you see what people buy, which is not only the most famous brands and the most expensive items but a lot of tacky stuff which bewilders you. Why? Well, as they say, there's no accounting for taste. But sometimes prims are the issue.

I think the market for skyboxes is not large not because people don't use skyboxes -- they do -- but because they let rental agents buy them because they find them either costly, or confusing to try to put up in the air (although changing one number on the XYZ axis on the rezzer or the entire item is enough to do that, many don't know this trick or are afraid of it). 

[Prokofy Neva]

5 hours ago, Aethelwine said:

Maybe it is has been corrected since I bought it? I just rechecked to make sure it wasn't a faulty memory and my feet are still sinking in to the floor. Just a couple of inches but enough to irritate me.

I just went to their redelivery terminal to see if there was an update, but I bought it so long ago it isn't listed and the problem isn't sufficient to bother me enough to contact them about it. I still recommend it as a skybox home though, the fix I needed to do was only for the ground floor and just one prim to add.

Ps Thoroughly agree with Schultz Bros. I love the Roosevelt Skybox they do, a nice homely space and only 27 Li.

Pps: I second Onsu too, I have the Maple skybox out and it makes for a lovely functional small apartment at 45Li

That "feet sinking through the floor" thing can be a function of what kind of shoes/boots you have on. I don't know why. Maybe there are invisible prims on some of them. But I sometimes add a floorboard on 100% transparent so I can walk without feeling I'm sunk to my ankles. Other people might be put up in the air, however.