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Optimised vehicle meshes: an observation


arabellajones
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Some very well-known, prolific, vehicle brands in SL include some older mesh models which are poorly optimised for SL, and look to be imported 3D models. It may be the tech change over the last few years of SL, but I was working on one modifiable model, working out a new paint scheme for it, and there were faces which would be invisible allocated to tiny, detailed, meshes of things such as bolt heads.

I ended up making my own wheels, dropping the total LI by 20% and with the LOD not collapsing into visibly triangular wheels.

They also managed to look like the wheels that the 1955 original used.

I also took the chance to set up the materials to work well with EEP lighting. A lot of things use the option for none/low/medium/high specularity, and that fails badly with EEP.

A recent product from the same brand shows a lot of the same problems.

 

I'll not be selling the final model I made, though it would be OK for me to sell the wheels I made. All my mesh and textures. As it is, I wonder why I bothered, when I see the money the rubbish is selling for. Thanks to the Lindens for the work they have done on improving region crossings, but how much has been lost through poorly optimised meshes?

 

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4 minutes ago, arabellajones said:

As it is, I wonder why I bothered, when I see the money the rubbish is selling for.

This part goes a long way into every single niche, not just vehicles. From avatars, through clothing to vehicles and buildings, it appears that the least time spent optimizing things the more they sell and a are appreciated, spitting products at machine-gun rates seems more important to consumers. 

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I've been trying to convince wheel builders to make wheels that don't disappear at distance. Glad you're doing it.

This is the problem.

truckwheelproblem.thumb.jpg.7b59de158d94f2204b1861efc417bf5e.jpg

Nice truck, bad wheels. This is with normal Firestorm viewer settings. The wheels disappear long before the body does.

These are wheels purchased by the truck builder, not created by them. A few people in SL make most of the wheels.

wheelshi.thumb.jpg.c6a693eac666beba81356d1b6b500d28.jpg

Some wheels. From left to right, two motorcycle wheels, 1 LI, truck wheel LOD demo, 3 LI, complex wheel, 6 LI.


wheelslo2.jpg.409565f260c74ee74380fd23790b6d64.jpg

Same wheels at lowest LOD.

The motorcycle wheels have terrible lowest LODs. The wheels at the right are a proof of concept demo of mine. They have a lowest LOD which is a flat picture of the wheel pasted onto a cylinder. So they look OK at distance. I didn't have the Blender meshes for the wheels to integrate this properly into the wheel, so this is just a demo with an extra prim linked on for the lowest LOD.

This is basic impostoring. I encourage wheel builders to do that. If someone would like to replace those motorcycle wheels with something properly impostered, please contact me. Thanks.

 

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2 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

@animatsConsidered using alpha masking? it shouldn't affect the full version of the wheel, but then on the lowest lod you'd be able to use just two planes back to back.

I don't have the Blender models for those motorcycle wheels, so I can't just fix this.

Wheels are a specialized business in SL. There are people with whole stores full of wheels. Most of them don't look very good at lowest LOD. Or they have too high an LI. I don't want to be in the wheel biz. I just want to buy some better wheels, under the usual "full perm but don't sell them individually" terms for SL auto parts.

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5 hours ago, animats said:

I just want to buy some better wheels, under the usual "full perm but don't sell them individually" terms for SL auto parts.

The question is how much people would be willing to pay for quality. I've been thinking of makign some wheels myself but this isn't part of my regular product range and I have to reasonably sure I can get a decent pay for the time I spend making them. Depending on how big a market it is, that may well mean more than L$ 1,000 and certainly a few hundred L$.

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Don't forget that textures have their own LOD system, so if you have a logical face for the tyre-tread and another for the hub and tyre side the auto-generated mipmaps are used, don't waste pixels in the rendering, and would work pretty well on a cylinder as a low-LOD model. For the Lowest-LOD a cube may be enough, Low-LOD, 8 or 12 sides, High and Medium could use the same model, since even Medium is only seen pretty close, so it doesn't add much to LI

It can pay off to use a normal map for some of the detail, and there is a way in Blender of generating a normal map from a SuperHigh-LOD model

The auto-generation sucks. For this picture, I compared a stock truck with a version I modded to use my own mesh container and wheels. I also adjusted the size to a smaller scale, though for things like SLRR we're stuck with being hugely over-scale.

Bad LOD example_001.png

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2 hours ago, ChinRey said:

The question is how much people would be willing to pay for quality. I've been thinking of makign some wheels myself but this isn't part of my regular product range and I have to reasonably sure I can get a decent pay for the time I spend making them. Depending on how big a market it is, that may well mean more than L$ 1,000 and certainly a few hundred L$.

Not quite the same thing, but some of the vehicle scripting packages are getting up to L$4000, though that can include free updates. One is version n in the marketplace, was version n+1Beta about 4 years ago, and I am not sure what upgrades it's had since, except it's out of beta.

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I figured I might as well show the whole vehicle, the original rather sub-optimal mesh, and the version with a lot of invisible-parts removed and with my wheels which are closer to the original.

James Dean bought this auto on the 21st September 1955 and crashed on the 30th September 1955. The third photo is a 1950 Ford Tudor, the sort of car he crashed into. With EEP and the right materials settings you can get something close to all that chrome plate.

1775397351_LittleBastard_001.png.7558e07947d46174dd7493b2502e710c.png237091716_LittleBastard_002.png.9901d5cb9bc11bbca0cc8dd843b14bbd.png

Ford_Tudor.jpg.144cb36bc2e5545b6adc4d1f8f4b91f6.jpg

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