Why Are There So Few Good Mesh Skyboxes?

[Prokofy Neva]

On 1/5/2019 at 10:58 AM, Theresa Tennyson said:

Mr. Neva seems to be using the term "skybox" in this thread largely to refer to "a natural environment, including walkable land, that can be put in the air." Which, of course, isn't what the vast majority of people in Second Life think of as a skybox, but it's his thread.

No, dear. A skybox is, er, a box in the sky. But it is also something that creators themselves like Felix (the best in my view) use to describe an item that is landscaped and enclosed or not but meant for the sky. I am looking for both good encloses "boxes for the sky," i.e. houses in the sky AND nature-terrain or landscaped skyboxes -- enclosed or not. The second is more of a challenge obviously. 

No, it's not enough to just buy a terrain and plunk a house on it. For one, very few makers leave a clearing in the nature field/forest for you to put a house. The terrain is too hilly or lumpy to do so sometimes. A few make a point of it but it's a challenge. Just having a globe or dome with sky and clouds isn't enough, either. That is, sure, that will do, and here probably Skye's dome is the best I've seen, but Turnip's dome is very good as well. but that's just a dome. To create a "look," and environment, a landscape such as Felix does takes more. Simply more skill, not necessarily more prims. I just downloaded a prim/sculpty skybox -- a box, for the sky -- for $5 called the Rivendell skybox which is adequate -- if only it were on mod. But like so many attempts, it isn't. 

I love Scarlett's stuff and I didn't know about the Rainforest Retreat -- that's exactly what I was hoping to get from this thread.

Edited January 6, 2019 by Prokofy Neva

[Fionalein]

59 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

No, dear. A skybox is, er, a box in the sky. But it is also something that creators themselves like Felix (the best in my view) use to describe an item that is landscaped and enclosed or not but meant for the sky. I am looking for both good encloses "boxes for the sky," i.e. houses in the sky AND nature-terrain or landscaped skyboxes -- enclosed or not. The second is more of a challenge obviously. 

There are some non enclosed floating island designs out there... if you cannot find one that suits your needs: buy a mesh hill, invert it and glue some fancy but low LI hanging vines to it... It would look pretty awesome to passersby but I can understand not everyone wanting to spend LI on things below the floor.

Edited January 6, 2019 by Fionalein

[Prokofy Neva]

9 hours ago, Fionalein said:

There are some non enclosed floating island designs out there... if you cannot find one that suits your needs: buy a mesh hill, invert it and glue some fancy but low LI hanging vines to it... It would look pretty awesome to passersby but I can understand not everyone wanting to spend LI on things below the floor.

I don't know why people like you think this is a "solution." It's not. Go and look at the "mesh hills" available. Really look at them, go to their store and see them rezzed out or even risk buying them. They simply are terrible. Tacking some vines on to them will not disguise this. 

[Roxy Couturier]

On 1/4/2019 at 12:24 PM, Prokofy Neva said:

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.

I think the problem is, you want someone to make items on the cheap for your specific needs as a landlord that rents skyboxes. After you buy your one item from the creator, how appealing would that build have for the general population?

As a counter-idea, why not hire a builder to build you say 5 or 6 boxes to your specifications. You'd have exactly what you want, be able to offer unique home shells that can only be used on your properties that -only- your properties can provide.

[Qie Niangao]

16 hours ago, Fionalein said:

There are some non enclosed floating island designs out there... if you cannot find one that suits your needs: buy a mesh hill, invert it and glue some fancy but low LI hanging vines to it... It would look pretty awesome to passersby but I can understand not everyone wanting to spend LI on things below the floor.

Hmm. I can't decide what I think about this. I almost always have LI to burn, but I'm skeptical about the value of adding geometry and textures to be rendered from outside a scene that's intended to be out-of-sight, out-of-mind to everybody not inside the set itself.

Do floating islands bring delight to passersby? That's never been my reaction, having seen a variety of elaborate natural and mechanical "excuses" for why all this stuff is suspended miles above the ground. I've never found them compelling, but apparently some folks do.

What I generally do, actually, is paint the outside of a sky dome full alpha so it's easier to cam in and out without any barrier; enclosed skyboxes get a simple texture over anything that should cast shadows (walls, roofs) with alpha holes to let Windlight in through the windows.

[Luna Bliss]

12 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Go and look at the "mesh hills" available. Really look at them, go to their store and see them rezzed out or even risk buying them. They simply are terrible.

What is it you don't like about the mesh hills you've viewed?

[Prokofy Neva]

6 hours ago, Roxy Couturier said:

I think the problem is, you want someone to make items on the cheap for your specific needs as a landlord that rents skyboxes. After you buy your one item from the creator, how appealing would that build have for the general population?

As a counter-idea, why not hire a builder to build you say 5 or 6 boxes to your specifications. You'd have exactly what you want, be able to offer unique home shells that can only be used on your properties that -only- your properties can provide.

Whenever someone criticizes anything about SL, there's always this sneering, suspicious swipe at the critic with the false belief that they must want something for free or cheap of they have some selfish ulterior motive.

Why can't you just accept that I've called out a myth about mesh -- it's not low prim -- and called for examples of good mesh -- there aren't many, due to lack of incentive? There's nothing untrue about these two statements, and they're not about me, they are about the state of reality. Lindens introduced mesh with big fanfare, killing off many prim and sculpty craftsmen's businesses, to my regret, and yet what we get isn't for living (skyboxes) or building out the world (nature). That's important to realize and contemplate.

There's absolutely no basis for the notion that I need skyboxes on the cheap -- ask the makers of skyboxes how much I've spent on their wares. I spend thousands of Lindens on skyboxes. If there is a good skybox that meets all the criteria, I might spend $1500 or $2000 per unit but at least I'll be spending $500-750 which isn't exactly cheap. BTW, in the old days, some house makers used to insist that landlords buy a bulk package of no-copy houses or pay more for a license to use multiple copies, because they hated the idea that not an end-user but a landlord would rent out their houses. After awhile, all those creators who did this dropped that silly idea. Why? Their products are too breakable and have too many problems rezzing to fit land, especially mainland, that they can't afford to have not be copyable. And they saw that far from decreasing their sales, a landlord's display of their house helped sales, as tenants saw the houses, then bought them themselves, to put on land that they bought -- a goodly percentage of renters go on to buy their own land.

And why wouldn't something appealing to a landlord -- who has a feel for what people like -- be appealing to the general population who, after all, are represented among renters? That isn't logical. Again, what's operative here is only a viciousness that starts with your belief that landlords must be evil, rapacious capitalist slum lords who try to get everything on the cheap and bilk their customers. So do examine that prejudice, because it's not true. Mainland landlords are nearly extinct due to the cost and the losses.

As for hiring builders, if you look through all my properties, you'll see I've done exactly that, especially when I need a sim-wide build. So again, it's a red herring to invoke this idea that I, as that supposedly greedy, grasping slumlord, want to avoid paying people. I do pay them. Lots. But why haven't I done this lately? I'll tell you: the cost cannot be recouped when you have low-priced rentals on the Mainland. You can't do this as a charity -- although I do parts of my holdings as non-profit land preserves with interesting builds and activities. You have to pay LL tier, and that cost has to be met.

Another problem I've found over the years is that builders want to keep their IP, understandably, and won't turn over the object to you, so you run the risk of losing that build if it accidentally returns. Some do; some don't. Some intend to, forget, then leave SL and you can't reach them again. That's why I have "prim drift" on some very old builds -- I can't fix them. There are more losses that you realize in this business. Why do they want to keep their IP if it is a custom build? Because the going rates for builders are still not at RL level, and a Mainland rentals agent couldn't pay RL costs anyway, so they want the ability to re-sell at least their textures if not the build. Understood. But then you are left with a liability -- losing the build.

[Prokofy Neva]

6 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

What is it you don't like about the mesh hills you've viewed?

1. Ugly -- the terrain looks like a$$ up close, and even from a distance is blurry. That can't be fixed. Again, look through them, and you will see if you are honest. Sculpties often have weird texture distortions that are never fixable. Mesh often looks blurry. Prims can look *too* photo-real. I often wish there was a substance like playdoh in SL that I could mold by clicking, the way you can terraform SL land. JVTEK enables you to do something almost like that with a device that creates sculpties perfectly matched to the contours of your land which you can texture. So I do those. But it is time-consuming and expensive (you have to keep uploading the sculpties) to do a whole sim. Imagine if a product enabled terraforming as you go, like SL land.

2. Too high-prim -- the lowest I have is 20, and the highest 37 or more or even 130 for a whole island. Expanding them not only makes their ugly textures look worse -- it considerably adds to their LI. The best terrain makers like Skye tell you to put out their landscaping components in multiple copies rather than trying to big up one copy, as you will use less prims.

3. Not on mod -- I can't try to change the ugly textures.

4. Hard to get kits to look good. If you aren't a builder and buy a kit because you can't build -- the world is made up of all kinds of skills and it is not a requirement to "learn Blender" like it isn't to "learn Russian" -- then it STILL doesn't look good because your hand-eye coordination or sense of decor are still amateurish. It's hard to line up all these little corners and what-not sometimes to make them as good-looking as the creator can. 

5. Hard to get terrain from different makers to look seamless -- yes, you can use various little terrain patches and such but they never look perfect.

Even so, I've bought a few of these here and there and I've now narrowed down to Skye landscaping for my next project; as I said on this current one, I was very happy with FelixvonKotwitz Alter and Leo. 

Take a look here.

 

Edited January 7, 2019 by Prokofy Neva

[Selene Gregoire]

Asking for perfection in an imperfect world...

Quote

“One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesn't exist.....Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist” 
― Stephen Hawking

Even if he was wrong about everything else, he was 100% correct about this. 

[Luna Bliss]

On ‎1‎/‎7‎/‎2019 at 10:51 AM, Prokofy Neva said:

On ‎1‎/‎7‎/‎2019 at 10:23 AM, Luna Bliss said:

What is it you don't like about the mesh hills you've viewed?

1. Ugly -- the terrain looks like a$$ up close, and even from a distance is blurry. That can't be fixed. Again, look through them, and you will see if you are honest. Sculpties often have weird texture distortions that are never fixable. Mesh often looks blurry. Prims can look *too* photo-real. I often wish there was a substance like playdoh in SL that I could mold by clicking, the way you can terraform SL land. JVTEK enables you to do something almost like that with a device that creates sculpties perfectly matched to the contours of your land which you can texture. So I do those. But it is time-consuming and expensive (you have to keep uploading the sculpties) to do a whole sim. Imagine if a product enabled terraforming as you go, like SL land.

2. Too high-prim -- the lowest I have is 20, and the highest 37 or more or even 130 for a whole island. Expanding them not only makes their ugly textures look worse -- it considerably adds to their LI. The best terrain makers like Skye tell you to put out their landscaping components in multiple copies rather than trying to big up one copy, as you will use less prims.

3. Not on mod -- I can't try to change the ugly textures.

4. Hard to get kits to look good. If you aren't a builder and buy a kit because you can't build -- the world is made up of all kinds of skills and it is not a requirement to "learn Blender" like it isn't to "learn Russian" -- then it STILL doesn't look good because your hand-eye coordination or sense of decor are still amateurish. It's hard to line up all these little corners and what-not sometimes to make them as good-looking as the creator can. 

5. Hard to get terrain from different makers to look seamless -- yes, you can use various little terrain patches and such but they never look perfect.

Thanks for the feedback, yeah you've outlined all the problems with mesh terrain. How I wish we had terrain like the 'playdough' you described...I think it's called voxel terrain, and they had it in Sansar for awhile. Anyway, would love that in SL though I can't imagine anything like it being here, but I can sculpt like that in VR with Medium & take my creations to my Oculus home I decorate: