Why beginners don't learn the basics first?

[Luna Bliss]

1 hour ago, HeathcliffMontague said:

SL building is now sort a "vacation" from Blender. Just so easy in many ways

I still build with prims and sculpts too, I just take care not to use the laggy sculpts and try to repeat textures of lower resolution if possible.

[Violaine Villota]

When it comes to making meshes with a lot of detail versus meshes with low detail but a full materials set of resolution texture (larger than 500x500) including normals and specular maps, which is more taxing or laggy? Or would they be about the same? Is it better to add more detail in the textures or in the mesh itself?

[Kyrah Abattoir]

2 hours ago, Violaine Villota said:

When it comes to making meshes with a lot of detail versus meshes with low detail but a full materials set of resolution texture (larger than 500x500) including normals and specular maps, which is more taxing or laggy? Or would they be about the same? Is it better to add more detail in the textures or in the mesh itself?

The short story is that nothing is ever "free". More details = more data = more work to render said data.

Advantages:

• You can essentially pass a bunch of details to the GPU at a fraction of the cost (Normal maps essentially carry data to tweak/override the surface normal of the object during lighting). It's a purely GPU bound operation and can produce very smooth results that would cost a ton of polygons to replicate.
• Texture wise, the perception of detail for a spec+normal mapped objects, (in the right lighting conditions) is higher than anything you can do with a flat texture, even at equal ram usage (ex: one big 1024x1024diffuse vs 3x512x512diff/norm/spec.

Drawbacks:

• As I said, it has a memory cost but that's something you can mitigate, normal maps can be fairly small and you can use tricks to get more out of less (repeats, non-uniform scaling and  mirroring for instance)
• Those details don't "actually exist" in the object geometry, for some people who don't understand that games can't pump out the amount of geometry of a Pixart movie, that's a drawback, they see poly density as a sign of quality or "work", despite the fact that making an unoptimized mess is a lot quicker (just hit subdivision until blender starts to chug).
• It depends on ALM and lighting and a well paired diff/norm/spec set of textures will look insuffisently shaded and flat to a non-ALM user.

Again, NOTHING is free when it comes to rendering. Every pixel of texture, every vertex, every triangle has a cost in the final scene, there is simply no way around it.

A good game asset is getting the most out with as little as possible.

Edited February 5, 2019 by Kyrah Abattoir

[Luna Bliss]

2 hours ago, Violaine Villota said:

When it comes to making meshes with a lot of detail versus meshes with low detail but a full materials set of resolution texture (larger than 500x500) including normals and specular maps, which is more taxing or laggy? Or would they be about the same? Is it better to add more detail in the textures or in the mesh itself?

Once you play around a bit you'll be able to see what's "good enough" in terms of both optimization and quality. The hard part is making a choice when someone comes along with laggy assets that look so much better due to the high-res or excessive textures and so outsell you or leave you with beans

In some cases I can see why some don't optimize, though in many cases they could do more optimization without sacrificing quality.

[Violaine Villota]

Okay, thanks. I guess I'm going to have to go with a good mixture of both somehow and try to get the poly count as low as I can. I'm pretty much making my wings geared towards people who will be using ALM because it's going to look the best that way and I just don't want to go back to faked iridescence now that the real thing is possible. Maybe I can put one standard size set in there with a faked iridescent shine I guess, though even without that the AO texture would still be comparable to everything else I've seen on the grid.

I also don't think a lot of people know that they can have ALM on with a medium quality setting because at first when I push the slider to the mid level it turns off ALM. But, we can go right back and click it on again and it works.
I understand there are probably a lot of users that still would have trouble running that smoothly but maybe most people would save that setting for photos and stuff anyway and the faked iridescent textures I've made in the past will look strange when backlit anyway.

[animats]

Don't blame creators. Blame Linden Labs. They are the ones who, when they added mesh, didn't add good level of detail generation tools. The decimator in the uploader is a joke, but that's what everyone uses. When you see single triangles at low levels of detail, that's the crap decimator. The one in Blender is much better. The only good thing about the one in the uploader is that, no matter how messed up the geometry, the decimator doesn't crash. The better algorithms tend to dislike bad geometry.

Keep beating on LL on this. We as customers need to be tougher on Linden Labs. They act like they have the right to suck on fixing bugs.

Beq Janus has been making improvements to the uploader. Now you can see what it's doing. This is especially useful with physics models, where you can now watch the convex hull decomposition make stupid decisions on where to cut. (It's lore in SL that your physics model should be composed mostly of rectangular solids that don't touch. That's because, if they touch or overlap, the convex hull decomposition cuts them apart, badly. With current Firestorm, you can enlarge the upload window and see this.)

I sometimes build a custom physics model and use that for the lower LODs.

High LOD. About 5,000 triangles per escalator.

Medium, low, and lowest LOD. 127 triangles per escalator. This is also the physics model. Basic, but no holes. The object outline is intact.

Or as you'd see it from distance.  At this size, you barely notice. I had to build and texture two models, but didn't bother to build all five. (4 LODs, one physics.) It's a rideable escalator, so I had to build a good physics model, which I re-used for the lower LODs.

Compare the stock signboard on the right. Totally blanked out. That's the important thing. At low LOD, retain the overall outline of the object. No triangular holes in walls. That's so tacky.

 

[Violaine Villota]

5 minutes ago, animats said:

Keep beating on LL on this. We as customers need to be tougher on Linden Labs. They act like they have the right to suck on fixing bugs.

 

It's 2019 and we still don't have an online DMCA form like literally every other major platform with art being distributed,  and I think it's been a year now since I posted in the forums about it.
I don't think I'm going to hold my breath for things to get fixed...

[animats]

1 minute ago, Violaine Villota said:

I don't think I'm going to hold my breath for things to get fixed...

I keep warning the Lindens, "Spatial OS is coming to make big world systems routine, and they have $500 million, 150 developers, partnerships with Epic and Google, and several shipping games." LL has been able to coast for a long time because they had the only technology that really scaled to a big shared modifiable world. That monopoly is just about over.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

4 hours ago, animats said:

Don't blame creators. Blame Linden Labs. They are the ones who, when they added mesh, didn't add good level of detail generation tools. The decimator in the uploader is a joke, but that's what everyone uses. When you see single triangles at low levels of detail, that's the crap decimator. The one in Blender is much better. The only good thing about the one in the uploader is that, no matter how messed up the geometry, the decimator doesn't crash. The better algorithms tend to dislike bad geometry.

Keep beating on LL on this. We as customers need to be tougher on Linden Labs. They act like they have the right to suck on fixing bugs.

Beq Janus has been making improvements to the uploader. Now you can see what it's doing. This is especially useful with physics models, where you can now watch the convex hull decomposition make stupid decisions on where to cut. (It's lore in SL that your physics model should be composed mostly of rectangular solids that don't touch. That's because, if they touch or overlap, the convex hull decomposition cuts them apart, badly. With current Firestorm, you can enlarge the upload window and see this.)

I sometimes build a custom physics model and use that for the lower LODs.

High LOD. About 5,000 triangles per escalator.

Medium, low, and lowest LOD. 127 triangles per escalator. This is also the physics model. Basic, but no holes. The object outline is intact.

Or as you'd see it from distance.  At this size, you barely notice. I had to build and texture two models, but didn't bother to build all five. (4 LODs, one physics.) It's a rideable escalator, so I had to build a good physics model, which I re-used for the lower LODs.

Compare the stock signboard on the right. Totally blanked out. That's the important thing. At low LOD, retain the overall outline of the object. No triangular holes in walls. That's so tacky.

 

@animats usually I agree with you, but sometimes I just want to slap you so much.

Linden Labs is not responsible for making your content. As much as you hate making lod meshs, that is very much your job as the artist. And I'd wager things could actually have been better if the uploader did not contain a lod generator at all.

That being said. The one thing I can really throw at them is that complexity/LI where designed in a very naive fashion and generally aren't promoting the creation of good content. The two metrics judging completely different things create a massive fracture between content designed to be rezzed and content designed to be worn and there is no reason for that. In addition, LI is the only one that enforces a real "limit" on content, complexity is still a mere "guideline" that begs to be taken in account, but is ultimately ignored by most.

You probably know by now I'm a big supporter of the arctan project, but for it is to be effective, it is going to break a lot of content. If it doesn't? It will be useless.

Edited February 6, 2019 by Kyrah Abattoir

[Motoko Oanomochi]

2 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

@animats usually I agree with you, but sometimes I just want to slap you so much.

Linden Labs is not responsible for making your content. As much as you hate making lod meshs, that is very much your job as the artist. And I'd wager things could actually have been better if the uploader did not contain a lod generator at all.

That being said. The one thing I can really throw at them is that complexity/LI where designed in a very naive fashion and generally aren't promoting the creation of good content. The two metrics judging completely different things create a massive fracture between content designed to be rezzed and content designed to be worn and there is no reason for that. In addition, LI is the only one that enforces a real "limit" on content, complexity is still a mere "guideline" that begs to be taken in account, but is ultimately ignored by most.

You probably know by now I'm a big supporter of the arctan project, but for it is to be effective, it is going to break a lot of content. If it doesn't? It will be useless.

Hello,

Two points I wish to mention : in first Second life is an area of freedom, players have the right to be professional or not and enjoy at the same level Second life. Second point arctan can't break totally actual content, or it is the "end" of Second life, it is a dangerous / ridiculous way. And no arctan will be not a way for some "closed club" to take a sort of revenge. I have great hope arctan will have a formulae as animesh has, but with no 15 prims as basis ,  and with a checkbox to say it is an arctan mesh, as we have for animesh, which is compliant with good practice. It is the best way and more easy to do, so designers can enforce the fact arctan formulae is used on their objects if they created compliant mesh with arctan. Maybe some designers will even upgrade some products. So arctan will go to be a nice commercial way for new design or upgrade, and players will have the choice too. In addition, designers who will go for arctan mesh will show they are not rippers.

Best Regards, Motoko Oanomochi.

 

Edited February 6, 2019 by Motoko Oanomochi

[Kyrah Abattoir]

3 minutes ago, Motoko Oanomochi said:

Hello,

Two points I wish to mention : in first Second life is an area of freedom, players have the right to be professional or not and enjoy at the same level Second life. Second point arctan can't break totally actual content, or it is the "end" of Second life, it is a dangerous / ridiculous way. And no arctan will be not a way for some "closed club" to take a sort of revenge. I have great hope arctan will have a formulae as animesh has, but with no 15 prims as basis ,  and with a checkbox to say it is an arctan mesh, as we have for animesh, which is compliant with good practice. It is the best way and more easy to do, so designers can enforce the fact arctan formulae is used on their objects if they created compliant mesh with arctan. Maybe some designers will even upgrade some products. So arctan will go to be a nice commercial way for new design or upgrade, and players will have the choice too. In addition, designers who will go for arctan mesh will show they are not rippers.

Best Regards, Motoko Oanomochi.

 

My hope for actan is a formula that doesn't feature exploitable loophole anymore, if your item has a high cost to render for the user or for the simulator to simulate, the cost to rez or wear this item should be high, period.

And this is not a war against amateur content creators either, we've all started somewhere. It's a war agains the mindset of "if unsure, cram more polygons/textures on it" and "UV packing and LOD meshs are a waste of my time".

I'm not looking to enact revenge, but If the deterrent to use/create bad content has no "teeth" to speak of, then it will offer no incentive to change anything.

Also to clarify, by "breaking" I mean: "Popular item X has such a high LI/complexity (because it is objectively bad) that it's useless to everyone who bought it." I don't mean actually breaking content.

[Motoko Oanomochi]

30 minutes ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

My hope for actan is a formula that doesn't feature exploitable loophole anymore, if your item has a high cost to render for the user or for the simulator to simulate, the cost to rez or wear this item should be high, period.

And this is not a war against amateur content creators either, we've all started somewhere. It's a war agains the mindset of "if unsure, cram more polygons/textures on it" and "UV packing and LOD meshs are a waste of my time".

I'm not looking to enact revenge, but If the deterrent to use/create bad content has no "teeth" to speak of, then it will offer no incentive to change anything.

Also to clarify, by "breaking" I mean: "Popular item X has such a high LI/complexity (because it is objectively bad) that it's useless to everyone who bought it." I don't mean actually breaking content.

About uvmap, there is a lot of ways, even for real time engine, and packing is not always the best depends the stuff you are doing.

About lod on mesh, the actual formulae is not the best, and so only a new category of mesh , let say "arctan-mesh", as we have "ani-mesh", is the right way to improve in the time the situation. Or Sansar solution is good too. Personnally, I choose automatic lod on my half real time engine. But if arctan changes Li of actual content, the result will be easy to anticipate, lot of players will go away, obviously. Maybe, it is why this project is on the side, I really think it is better to create a new category of mesh.

 

Edited February 6, 2019 by Motoko Oanomochi

[Kyrah Abattoir]

6 minutes ago, Motoko Oanomochi said:

About uvmap, there is a lot of ways, even for real time engine, and packing is not always the best depends the stuff you are doing.

About lod on mesh, the actual formulae is not the best, and so only a new category of mesh , let say "arctan-mesh", as we have "ani-mesh", is the right way to improve in the time the situation. Or Sansar solution is good too. Personnally, I choose automatic lod on my half real time engine.

There is always some sort of packing being done, and yes it is sometimes needed to split across multiple maps for many reason, but there is no excuse for a texture to be 80% unused, it's gonna be loaded in full anyway, so you should use the space or reduce it.

I agree that Animesh's approach is a little better because at the very least you don't get penalized anymore for making mod models, but I don't think it goes far enough.

Sansar is a bad examples as it doesn't use lods at all and all meshs are at full resolution, I believe.

[Motoko Oanomochi]

20 minutes ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

There is always some sort of packing being done, and yes it is sometimes needed to split across multiple maps for many reason, but there is no excuse for a texture to be 80% unused, it's gonna be loaded in full anyway, so you should use the space or reduce it.

I agree that Animesh's approach is a little better because at the very least you don't get penalized anymore for making mod models, but I don't think it goes far enough.

Sansar is a bad examples as it doesn't use lods at all and all meshs are at full resolution, I believe.

Sansar is using an automatic lod system, as example a mesh animated is no longer animated at some distance automatically, idem for lod, I guess they are using something like Simplygon. It is the same way I did in the past on half real time engine too. So, the designers can use their time for design, logical for designers I guess.

Animesh formulea is good enough, I think it because it is easy to keep it in mind when you are doing your stuff. It is easy to implement it on software too It is not perfect but it is always better to use a good enough solution easy to use, than a perfect solution hard to use.

Edited February 6, 2019 by Motoko Oanomochi

[Luna Bliss]

5 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

You probably know by now I'm a big supporter of the arctan project, but for it is to be effective, it is going to break a lot of content. If it doesn't? It will be useless.

I wish somehow those who don't bother to optimize their mesh could know what a mess they might be creating for themselves in the future.

[Motoko Oanomochi]

11 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

I wish somehow those who don't bother to optimize their mesh could know what a mess they might be creating for themselves in the future.

By changing rule, all is possible the worse, the best, but it is the, maybe, rule change that will create the bad or good. If they go for all new arctan-mesh as new opportunity, it is the best.

I am sure, a lot of designers will use the new arctan formulae if it is like animesh formulae. And it will be more easy for beginner too, as it is the subject.

[animats]

9 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

@animats usually I agree with you, but sometimes I just want to slap you so much.

Linden Labs is not responsible for making your content. As much as you hate making lod meshs, that is very much your job as the artist. And I'd wager things could actually have been better if the uploader did not contain a lod generator at all.

There's been progress since the old days of manual LOD generation. Sansar has Simplygon. Unreal Engine 4 has a LOD generator. InstaLOD is available for multiple platforms. The AAA title people are no longer making LOD models by hand except for hero objects. SL is not keeping up.

[Motoko Oanomochi]

14 minutes ago, animats said:

There's been progress since the old days of manual LOD generation. Sansar has Simplygon. Unreal Engine 4 has a LOD generator. InstaLOD is available for multiple platforms. The AAA title people are no longer making LOD models by hand except for hero objects. SL is not keeping up.

It is clear LOD is more on platform side actually, or on 3D software side with automatic or half automatic function to free the designer of this task. Honestly, I prefer develop the function to generate LOD levels than make it manually. To return on the initial subject, automatic or half automatic function means a beginner can focus more on the idea, more of the style, and less on technical aspects. It is good for everybody, but I guess, that makes "nervous" professional who spends time to create lod with hands.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

16 hours ago, Motoko Oanomochi said:

It is clear LOD is more on platform side actually, or on 3D software side with automatic or half automatic function to free the designer of this task. Honestly, I prefer develop the function to generate LOD levels than make it manually. To return on the initial subject, automatic or half automatic function means a beginner can focus more on the idea, more of the style, and less on technical aspects. It is good for everybody, but I guess, that makes "nervous" professional who spends time to create lod with hands.

Not really, I'd want nothing more than spending less time on the boring aspects of modeling. I've tried a bunch of automatic lod solutions, and some of them do a pretty good job but i tend to prefer using them in a "semi automatic" fashion. Where I'll do a rough "by hand" simplification pass and remove things that I don't want the generator to worry about.

Most garments for instance, do not benefit from having "backfaces" outside of the highest lod because you won't be zoomed in close enough to notice its absence, but if you leave them in, a lod generator will dutifully try to preserve them at the expense of the outside surfaces.

I don't think it's so much that "professionals" are "nervous" about some of the gritty work being automated. But it is frustrating to see how much SL suffers from bad modeling practices when the experience could be so much better for the end user.

Modeling is something you only get better at through practice, a lot of it. And the same way students aren't given calculators until they learned basic calculus, you shouldn't rely on a tool to do something because you are bad at it or don't know how to do it, but because it saves you time from a process that you have assimilated and understand.

Making your own lod models teaches you a lot more than just being a manual decimator. It teaches you how to determinate what is important and what is not. It tells you what defines your model, what identifies it visually vs what is a pointless detail. It teaches you how to make your future models better.

[Motoko Oanomochi]

1 hour ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

Not really, I'd want nothing more than spending less time on the boring aspects of modeling. I've tried a bunch of automatic lod solutions, and some of them do a pretty good job but i tend to prefer using them in a "semi automatic" fashion. Where I'll do a rough "by hand" simplification pass and remove things that I don't want the generator to worry about.

Most garments for instance, do not benefit from having "backfaces" outside of the highest lod because you won't be zoomed in close enough to notice its absence, but if you leave them in, a lod generator will dutifully try to preserve them at the expense of the outside surfaces.

I don't think it's so much that "professionals" are "nervous" about some of the gritty work being automated. But it is frustrating to see how much SL suffers from bad modeling practices when the experience could be so much better for the end user.

Modeling is something you only get better at through practice, a lot of it. And the same way students aren't given calculators until they learned basic calculus, you shouldn't rely on a tool to do something because you are bad at it or don't know how to do it, but because it saves you time from a process that you have assimilated and understand.

Making your own lod models teaches you a lot more than just being a manual decimator. It teaches you how to determinate what is important and what is not. It tells you what defines your model, what identifies it visually vs what is a pointless detail. It teaches you how to make your future models better.

There are two categories of polygon optimizers : generalist and dedicated. Obviously, it is complicated to make a perfect optimizer for all 3D stuffs, but there are dedicated optimizers or at least we can create it. I prefer a beginner using an optimizer than a beginner who will renounce because hand optimization is really complicated sometime.

 

[ChinRey]

On 2/6/2019 at 9:49 PM, Motoko Oanomochi said:

To return on the initial subject, automatic or half automatic function means a beginner can focus more on the idea, more of the style, and less on technical aspects. It is good for everybody, but I guess, that makes "nervous" professional who spends time to create lod with hands.

I would be all for autmoatic LoD generation if it could be done well. But all LL gave us easy access to, was a 15 years old student project specially made for making quick-and-dirty LoD models on the fly and not suitable - and never intended - for pre-generated models.

Even if we do use more appropriate external tools to autogenerate LoD models, there still isn't one that can really match the human eye and mind. They may work for a regular Unity or UE4 based game but Second Life is far more vulnerable to poor LoD models for three reasons. One is of course that the land impact system is made to dicourage good LoD, another is that an SL scene is always far more complex than a typical game scene so optimisation in general becomes far more vital.

The third problem is that we can't directly control the LoD swap distances in SL. Those LoD models never kick in when they ought to and that causes a lot of extra complications, and it's something no algorithm I'm aware of even tries to take into account. Why should they? It's not as if anybody in their right mind would even think of creating a dynamic mesh based 3D environment with rigidly fixed LoD swap distances, is it?

 

Edited February 7, 2019 by ChinRey

[OptimoMaximo]

13 hours ago, ChinRey said:

an SL scene is always far more complex than a typical game scene so optimisation in general becomes far more vital

This is not always the case, but i can agree on the fact that the current status and the available assets contribute to make your statement true

13 hours ago, ChinRey said:

It's not as if anybody in their right mind would even think of creating a dynamic mesh based 3D environment with rigidly fixed LoD swap distances, is it?

Indeed, game engines such as Unity and UE4 have an interface to declare what the distance from the camera needs to be for each LoD to kick in, not to mention that they can be custom models that don't even need to be derived from the LoD0 model or that have to have the same materials subset. If i wanted to set a sphere as LoD0, a prism as LoD1 and a Cube as LoD2, there's nothing that keeps me from doing that. Not optimal but it can be done.

 

On 2/6/2019 at 9:24 PM, animats said:

SL is not keeping up

SL can't keep up with these standards change because of its internal architecture. Changing that would mean either break existing content, or add more code to differentiate between a legacy item and a new item. It's been stated countless times by now, by the firestorm devs present here on the forum, that there isn't much wiggle room left to have the CPU's running a SL viewer to handle more than what they currently do.

On 2/6/2019 at 2:54 PM, Motoko Oanomochi said:

I have great hope arctan will have a formulae as animesh has, but with no 15 prims as basis ,  and with a checkbox to say it is an arctan mesh, as we have for animesh, which is compliant with good practice.

This statement has nothing to do with what arctan project aims to handle. It's not a new item class or such, it's a formula to update/upgrade/improve the items costs calculations to be set in place of the current LI and Avatar Rendering Cost formulae. Therefore it will be applied as a global and it has no connection whatsoever to specific items, or the technique such items underwent during their creation.

The same moment that LL deployed mesh as a new asset item to SL, the game changed. A substantial difference was set in place between the "before" and "after", which is the custom geometry. Whereas in the "before" SL had a set of pre-made meshes to work with, with their own LoD and texture system, the "after" required a higher skillset, a higher standard (the LoD auto generator...) and more control, in which the previous mindset for which the platform was intended to deliver an artist-free-from-optimization-worries environment had to fall. So, i stand by the thread title, for the beginners have to learn the basics of 3D modeling for SL-contemporary game environments, in which LoDs were to be made by hand and texture memory was a concern.

Edited February 8, 2019 by OptimoMaximo
typos, of course

[Motoko Oanomochi]

2 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:

This is not always the case, but i can agree on the fact that the current status and the available assets contribute to make your statement true

Indeed, game engines such as Unity and UE4 have an interface to declare what the distance from the camera needs to be for each LoD to kick in, not to mention that they can be custom models that don't even need to be derived from the LoD0 model or that have to have the same materials subset. If i wanted to set a sphere as LoD0, a prism as LoD1 and a Cube as LoD2, there's nothing that keeps me from doing that. Not optimal but it can be done.

 

SL can't keep up with these standards change because of its internal architecture. Changing that would mean either break existing content, or add more code to differentiate between a legacy item and a new item. It's been stated countless times by now, by the firestorm devs present here on the forum, that there isn't much wiggle room left to have the CPU's running a SL viewer to handle more than what they currently do.

This statement has nothing to do with what arctan project aims to handle. It's not a new item class or such, it's a formula to update/upgrade/improve the items costs calculations to be set in place of the current LI and Avatar Rendering Cost formulae. Therefore it will be applied as a global and it has no connection whatsoever to specific items, or the technique such items underwent during their creation.

The same moment that LL deployed mesh as a new asset item to SL, the game changed. A substantial difference was set in place between the "before" and "after", which is the custom geometry. Whereas in the "before" SL had a set of pre-made meshes to work with, with their own LoD and texture system, the "after" required a higher skillset, a higher standard (the LoD auto generator...) and more control, in which the previous mindset for which the platform was intended to deliver an artist-free-from-optimization-worries environment had to fall. So, i stand by the thread title, for the beginners have to learn the basics of 3D modeling for SL-contemporary game environments, in which LoDs were to be made by hand and texture memory was a concern.

Hello,

I can understand the "religion" of lod by hand by the "closed club", despite this I prefer the way where beginners keep high the joy to build on Second life, and even if hand lod made is maybe better than automatic or half automatic system, it is obvious a part of the joy to be Second life is build. I understand this "religion" is mainly a "business" to promote them self and disqualify others. Bad trick, but it is a personal point of view. At least it is a trick largely used now.

All I am saying is : you are a beginner, you enjoy MD, you enjoy Sketchup, you like build in world build and convert it in mesh, go for it and keep high your joy, and be sure there are tools to make 95% to 100% of the optimization made by the "closed club" manually. I say to beginner enjoy your Second life, enjoy to build, enjoy your design and don't listen the pseudo professional giving pseudo lesson. They always patronize for advertisement purpose never to completely help beginners, sometime it is partial, atomised help, yes, it is called make the buzz for advertisement purpose mainly and in second for help, but is it true help ? I struggle to see it.

I wish to say in addition, a lot of beginners build for them self, they hurt nobody, they pay their sims or lands, they have a perfect right to enjoy without to be pratonized and yes at first they do mistake, and yes they ask for help, and yes they will listen more or less people with more experience. They have this right on Second life, because it is the nature of Second life. Tolerance is the key word. And patience when you want really to help beginners.

Now, I always refuse to help beginner who is a ripper, who mainly tries to have help only to know how upload stuff from 3D marketplace. Unfortunately, there are yet a lot of rippers.

About arctan, I mentioned what I wished not what it will be, of course.

Best Regards, Motoko Oanomochi.

 

Edited February 8, 2019 by Motoko Oanomochi

[OptimoMaximo]

4 minutes ago, Motoko Oanomochi said:

I can understand the "religion" of lod by hand by the "closed club",

Call it religion if you like so, but certainly these "patronizers" aren't in the "closed club". If you ever participated in a Content Creators Group meeting, every single one that promoted good practices were shunned aside, myself included, to listen to and implement the craziest/laziest of the requests, for instance the animesh limit raised from 50K polygon to 100K limit due to the continuous whining of certain individuals (who were claiming "unlimited polys" at some point), while the "closed club" members (and i know in specific who you are referring to) were advocating for the initial limit to be fairly good and sufficient. 

13 minutes ago, Motoko Oanomochi said:

I struggle to see it.

Yes, i very much realize that. As i said, the moment that mesh went live on SL, the game changed. It might be true that people can keep enjoying building and creating, as you say they harm no one on the land they pay for, but the problem sits elsewhere. Let alone the rippers, but the marketplace is full of semi-sculpted models that, in the end, harm everyone bogging down sims where the owner placed such bought content. Why? Because "everyone does it and i have to too or i won't sell" basing off beginners (and ripped) content that was uploaded and merchandised as-is from whatever rendering application. And if you run into a game-grade asset, chances are that you will find comments like "it needs more work on the mesh. Looks like a video-game model". As if it would be a problem to subdivide that same mesh, slap a displacement map onto it and have it "more worked".

[Motoko Oanomochi]

5 minutes ago, OptimoMaximo said:

Call it religion if you like so, but certainly these "patronizers" aren't in the "closed club". If you ever participated in a Content Creators Group meeting, every single one that promoted good practices were shunned aside, myself included, to listen to and implement the craziest/laziest of the requests, for instance the animesh limit raised from 50K polygon to 100K limit due to the continuous whining of certain individuals (who were claiming "unlimited polys" at some point), while the "closed club" members (and i know in specific who you are referring to) were advocating for the initial limit to be fairly good and sufficient. 

Yes, i very much realize that. As i said, the moment that mesh went live on SL, the game changed. It might be true that people can keep enjoying building and creating, as you say they harm no one on the land they pay for, but the problem sits elsewhere. Let alone the rippers, but the marketplace is full of semi-sculpted models that, in the end, harm everyone bogging down sims where the owner placed such bought content. Why? Because "everyone does it and i have to too or i won't sell" basing off beginners (and ripped) content that was uploaded and merchandised as-is from whatever rendering application. And if you run into a game-grade asset, chances are that you will find comments like "it needs more work on the mesh. Looks like a video-game model". As if it would be a problem to subdivide that same mesh, slap a displacement map onto it and have it "more worked".

I agree with you, I have no issue I hope you know, just I think deeply Second life is by nature an open space for creativity. And beginners are very welcome here. I agree 100000 polygons is ridiculous high level on Second life, it is even the case on Sansar more or less.

 

Edited February 8, 2019 by Motoko Oanomochi