How to make a mesh object have lower prims

[strangebeginning]

Hi everyone,

So I've created my first 3d sign (well 3d anything) in blender today for a studio I am opening. I have made the sign just a basic text sign but then extruded the edges to make it 3d. My issue is that the sign I have made has crazy high land impact, 35 Li to be precise.

How on earth do I get that Li down to a sensible amount? It took me a while to manage to make my graphic 3d after having to vector it, so any advice in simple terms would be very much appreciated

[Wulfie Reanimator]

Some reading material:

TLDR: You'll need to simplify your model and its physics shape.

If you want to share the model, I can probably do it for you.

Edited June 7, 2020 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Kyrah Abattoir]

15 hours ago, strangebeginning said:

Hi everyone,

So I've created my first 3d sign (well 3d anything) in blender today for a studio I am opening. I have made the sign just a basic text sign but then extruded the edges to make it 3d. My issue is that the sign I have made has crazy high land impact, 35 Li to be precise.

How on earth do I get that Li down to a sensible amount? It took me a while to manage to make my graphic 3d after having to vector it, so any advice in simple terms would be very much appreciated

Show some wireframe picture?

[Chic Aeon]

First off your text needs to be JOINED so that it is one object.

You can lower the triangle count by using "Limited Dissolve" https://www.google.com/search?q=limiteed+desolve+blender&oq=limiteed+desolve+blender&aqs=chrome..69i57.7295j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

 

Make sure you dissolve  BOTH sides of your sign.  You can do this by looking from top view, selecting VERTICES in wireframe mode. This will normally catch most to all of the vertices. You will still most likely have some divisions on the face of your object but not many. 

 

There is more of course, but a start on how to go about what you need to do. 

BE SURE AND TEST YOU LODS as there are way to many signs out there that cannot be read from a fairly close distance. SO NOT GOOD - LOL.  

 

[strangebeginning]

So this is my screen, which I believe shows the pathway you're on about?

The text is all one conjoined object, as in no separate letters as I imported the whole image in after I had turned it into a .svg file.

https://gyazo.com/06b6b612d76578e07b7db56ca8ecb38d

[strangebeginning]

So I have dissolved both sides and it's taken the Li down but only by 2. 

I take my hat off to anyone that does this frequently, I feel like this is going to be my first and last time attempting this!

[Wulfie Reanimator]

So let's say you have something like this, converted to mesh:

If you extrude the mesh to give it thickness and run Limited Dissolve, it actually does a surprisingly good job, though it breaks some shapes:

Note how the C, O, and D start poking through each other. In this case it could totally be cleaned up by hand.

 

If you have a more elaborate font (as was shown) or otherwise need/want to control the LODs (which is what I'd always recommend), you can instead extrude the mesh and delete the flat faces on the front/back, like this: (Tip: Use "Select Similar" and "Normal")

Now you could start manually selecting and reducing the curved edges. To reduce the amount of clicking, you can use the Face Select mode and Ctrl-Click to make a "path selection" between two points.

Then you can hold Shift-Alt and click twice on the side edges to deselect them. Then, Checker Deselect will remove every other edge from your selection. Then you can Dissolve Edges to remove them without breaking the surface.

It's not as much work as it might seem at first, and it's a process that should work regardless of what kind of font you're dealing with.

 

9 hours ago, strangebeginning said:

So I have dissolved both sides and it's taken the Li down but only by 2. 

It's more likely that the majority of your LI comes from the automatic physics model during upload. Did you read the link I gave you? Can you show the upload window in SL? Export a simple 6-sided cube from Blender and use that as your physics model.

Edited June 8, 2020 by Wulfie Reanimator

[strangebeginning]

2 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

So let's say you have something like this, converted to mesh:

If you extrude the mesh to give it thickness and run Limited Dissolve, it actually does a surprisingly good job, though it breaks some shapes:

Note how the C, O, and D start poking through each other.

 

If you have a more elaborate font (as shown) or otherwise need/want to control the LODs (which is what I'd always recommend), you can instead extrude the mesh and delete the flat faces on the front/back, like this: (Tip: Use "Select Similar" and "Normal")

Now you could start manually selecting and reducing the curved edges. To reduce the amount of clicking, you can use the Face Select mode and Ctrl-Click to make a "path selection" between two points.

Then you can hold Shift-Alt and click twice on the side edges to deselect them. Then, Checker Deselect will remove every other edge from your selection. Then you can Dissolve Edges to remove them without breaking the surface.

It's not as much work as it might seem at first, and it's a process that should work regardless of what kind of font you're dealing with.

That makes sense, however I don't want to delete the faces as I feel like that will make my sign look weird? I would like it to look like blocked out letters, for exaple here is a sign I have had for a while from a store and I was hoping to be able to make my sign look similar to this with a much lower Li.

https://gyazo.com/cc8d68fca4044b70d14255b0195ed98b

[Wulfie Reanimator]

8 minutes ago, strangebeginning said:

That makes sense, however I don't want to delete the faces as I feel like that will make my sign look weird? I would like it to look like blocked out letters, for exaple here is a sign I have had for a while from a store and I was hoping to be able to make my sign look similar to this with a much lower Li.

https://gyazo.com/cc8d68fca4044b70d14255b0195ed98b

You would, of course, add the front/back faces back after you're done reducing the curved surfaces. Removing them is necessary to make the simplification a much less painful process, because the edges on the front would make selection and dissolving very impractical. This is what would happen:

On the left, I removed every other edge. This didn't actually reduce the topology because you'll get the real triangulated faces back after you upload it to SL, which would result in a mesh that looks like the one on the right. Nothing changed.

Manually simplifying the front face would be pointless because it's all flat. You can simply select the outer edge and press F to fill in the face:

This will also get triangulated during the upload process, but that's fine. It's a flat, static face, so the result does not matter.

Edited June 7, 2020 by Wulfie Reanimator

[strangebeginning]

Oh okay, that makes more sense. Sorry this is my first time using anything like this, last rookie question though. How would I add the faces back in after?

[OptimoMaximo]

1 hour ago, strangebeginning said:

Oh okay, that makes more sense. Sorry this is my first time using anything like this, last rookie question though. How would I add the faces back in after?

 

1 hour ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Manually simplifying the front face would be pointless because it's all flat. You can simply select the outer edge and press F to fill in the face:

 

[Kyrah Abattoir]

Wulfie's example is excellent.

But the bottom line is that how simple or complex the process of making your mesh was has nothing to do with the actual object's complexity.

That's all down to the triangle count of the final object.

A lot of procedural tools, such at text, and curves focus on precision rather than optimal use of geometry, gotta keep in mind that optimized game models are not the sole purpose of Blender many people use it for architectural visualisation, 3D printing, still renders and film making.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

4 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

That's all down to the triangle count of the final object.

Definitely this, but it has some nuances.

• The LODs need to have "the right amount" of triangles proportionally to the object's size. (This is usually the root cause of high land impact.)
• The physics shape definitely wants few triangles, but the overall shape also matters. (Certain gaps or long/thin triangles can skyrocket physics weight.)

With some patience it's even possible to get some text down to 1 LI. The limited edges can even add a nice stylistic effect. When it gets tricky to figure out what to take out for the LODs, I like to triangulate the faces to see where the "small areas" are. If I see a thin triangle, I look to see if I can slide any of the edges around to get rid of it.

1 LI at slightly over 2.5 x 0.5 meters. (1220, 408, 256, 24 triangles)

I also found it extremely useful to use vertex groups to define important edges that shouldn't be dissolved. With them, you can use checker-deselect and then also deselect the important edges. For example.

Edited June 8, 2020 by Wulfie Reanimator

[ChinRey]

A sign like this is where an impostor can be really useful.

An impostor is simply a texture with a picture of the sign used as a LoD model. You can even use the same texture for the full model too if you do it right.

Here's a sign I made for a club a few years ago:

Triangle counts are:

Untextured:

The low and lowest LoD models look like this(!):

Just a flat sheet plus one extra triangle to define the thickness of the sign. But add this texture:

and the low/lowest looks like this:

I cuold probably have gotten away with an impostor for the mid model too here but that wasn't necessary since 5 LI was more than low enough in this case.

For physics, simply use a cube or even a single triangle for a sign like this. It's not as if people are going to walk in between the letters, is it?

 

Edit: Looking at that old mesh now is a bit embarrasing. I really should have gone for an impostor for the mid LoD too and that isn't even the biggest mistake I made. But oh well, it was a rush job and there wasn't much money in it either.

Edited June 8, 2020 by ChinRey

[Kyrah Abattoir]

It's a cool example but a 1024x1024 impostor? really?

[ChinRey]

4 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

It's a cool example but a 1024x1024 impostor? really?

Yes. That's what I meant when I said:

On 6/8/2020 at 5:16 AM, ChinRey said:

... and that isn't even the biggest mistake I made. But oh well, it was a rush job and there wasn't much money in it either.

/me blushes.

The sign was only up for a few months anyway. It's a club that is redeisgned from scratch at least twice a year. Oh, and the incarnation that particular sign was made for consisted mainly of Apple Fall and Cory Edo meshes. It's not as if a single 1024 is going to make much difference to a scene featuring the works of the two laggiest HG mesh makers in SL.

Oh, and I have to point out that the texture wasn't only for the impostor, it's also used by the full model....

...

With all those poor excuses out of the way, do as I say, not as I do in this case. 512x256 would probably be the right resolution for this texture, possibly 256x256 and certainly not higher than 512x512.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

24 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Oh, and I have to point out that the texture wasn't only for the impostor, it's also used by the full model....

That's also a nice trick!