Lower land impact on objects in blender?

[xKaylaHallison]

Hey guys, I was just wondering, what are the ways you can lower land impact on objects using blender? I currently use limited dissolve and decimate but was curious if there are any other ways to do it, thanks

[Beq Janus]

There are lots of tools which can be applied in different cases. limited dissolve and decimate are broad brush ways to attack a mesh but you can use dissolve on selected edge rings to reduce complexity locally. 

One of my favourite tricks is selecting alternate edge loops to effectively reduce the number of sides on a cylinder or other curved surface. to do this you select a single edge, then ctrl-alt-select, to select the entire edge ring, then use checker deselect so that only alternate edges are highlighted, then select edge loops (from the select menu), finally dissolve edges. This works on all kinds of surfaces with good quad based edge flow and can be more predictable than an angle based limited dissolve.

https://i.gyazo.com/25947281a775fdcdde74af184dd99f47.mp4

 

The other important thing to do is to remove all hidden faces. This is especially true of lower LODs, once you are moving further from the object the chances of need all the interior faces and any thin edges etc are increasingly unlikely.

Funnily enough I recently published a blog and a video on cleaning up mesh exported from SL using the Firestorm/TPV save as collada option. 

It almost didn't see the light of day, it is a long post and I was not very happy with it, but you may well find a couple of tricks in there.

https://beqsother.blogspot.co.uk/2020/04/cleaning-up-your-act-how-round-trip.html

The video is not a tutorial as such, more a guide to how I work (and the mistakes I make, etc) I chose a particularly clumsy ancient prim build as an example. Not my best but it does show a few techniques that might be useful (and doubtless a few to avoid).

 

 

 

[Chic Aeon]

1 hour ago, xKaylaHallison said:

Hey guys, I was just wondering, what are the ways you can lower land impact on objects using blender? I currently use limited dissolve and decimate but was curious if there are any other ways to do it, thanks

Note too that removing hidden faces can make a really BIG difference in land impact costs as the upload tends to get quite confused. The CLEANER (no pieces jutting into other pieces because "you can't really see that" :D) the better land impact you will get. 

Aside from decimate, dissolve and removing edge loops -- all very handy, I think the BEST WAY is to simple start simply.  If you are looking at tutorials that use sub surf modifiers and very dense mesh (objects made for rendered photos - not games) then DON'T LISTEN. That is not what you need for Second life. And if you do use a sub-surf modifier (set at ONE) the get rid of any extra edge loops that you don't need.  

Try to let design and texture make up for the lack of geometry.  The viewer will be much happier not having to download all that.  LOL.

 

 

[Kyrah Abattoir]

On 5/14/2020 at 10:51 PM, Chic Aeon said:

Try to let design and texture make up for the lack of geometry.  The viewer will be much happier not having to download all that.  LOL.

That being said, there is no such thing as a free lunch and you shouldn't let texture size & count become worse than the original problem.

[xKaylaHallison]

Thank you so much for the replies everyone, I'll try your methods out :)

[vanettda Lassard]

Thanks for this thread. I created my model of a teddy bear and it registered as 30Li! I removed hidden faces and deleted alternate edge loops and the Li lowered to 13--close but no cigar. The model is created with four pieces (head, body, arms, legs) that I exported together. I reread this thread and wondered if these four pieces "jutting into each other" was causing some confusion in the upload? So I uploaded the four pieces separately and reassembled in world THEN linked them together. The result is 4Li. ! Perfect. This was my first organic, non hard surface modeling Ive created. Sure did learn a lot. thanks for your help here! 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

18 minutes ago, vanettda Lassard said:

Thanks for this thread. I created my model of a teddy bear and it registered as 30Li! I removed hidden faces and deleted alternate edge loops and the Li lowered to 13--close but no cigar

The LI will be the highest of three costs: Download (8.052), Physics (29.280), and Server (2), visible on the bottom section of the uploader.

The easiest solution for you would be to go to the Physics tab and pick a cube shape (or any of the available presets), since your model probably doesn't need any more accuracy than that. That would get you to 8 LI, which would then be affected by the actual scale of the object.

The download cost for an object depends on the scale of the object, and the Level Of Detail models used for the object. If the object is small, you need simple LODs for Low/Lowest, as those will have the most impact. If your object was larger, High/Medium would be more important to optimize.