Textures not importing when item rigged

[GManB]

I use Maya and in all of the objects I have created and uploaded the textures come with the dae file. I do not have to import them separately and apply to the object. HOWEVER, if I rig a piece of clothing then the textures do not upload into SL. I know they are in the dae file because I can see them in the Mac Finder app just fine when I select the dae file. Is there something I am missing in the upload process?

 

Thanks,

G

[arton Rotaru]

AFAIK this feature of the SL importer is broken for rigged mesh ever since.

[GManB]

2 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

AFAIK this feature of the SL importer is broken for rigged mesh ever since.

Bummer...

 

Please, if someone knows a secret on how to make this work..... !!!!!

G

[Kyrah Abattoir]

Just upload them separately (like... basically everyone?)

[GManB]

7 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

Just upload them separately (like... basically everyone?)

Yeah, I get it. I tend to cut up my models to make many UV shells, make them large, and use UDIMs to get higher resolution. Then spend a lot of time matching the UV shells to minimize the visibility of seams. I know the models load more slowly the first time but it's really not that noticeable. I like the look of high resolution, i.e., not fuzzy up close, textures on the objects I create. For example, on a teak bench swing I made I uses 22 base color textures and 22 normal maps. Yes, a lot of textures but the result, imho, is worth it. Luckily, the swing wasn't rigged so the textures came in with the upload.

I am working on a dinosaur model for a sim now. A large snake-like thing. It's 13 meters long and the model will be life-size. I haven't even calculated how many textures I will need to get the skin and scales to look good all over. Initially, this model will be static, but the sim owner would eventually like it rigged. Thus, my question.

btw, I feel the same about the clothing I am beginning to create. But, I can probably get away with a half dozen or so texture files per garment, so more manageable, but still. It would be so much easier if the textures came in with the object, especially, the normal maps. 

I would appreciate any comments on how I might do things differently as well to streamline my work-flow.

G

[Kyrah Abattoir]

1 hour ago, GManB said:

Yes, a lot of textures but the result, imho, is worth it.

This is unrelated to your question obviously and something no one likes to hear.... But You have to realize that memory doesn't exactly grows on trees.

Performances plummet once a scene doesn't fit into your video card anymore, and craters once the viewer  begins to swap textures in and out of the disk cache because you don't have enough ram to hold it either >_<.

1 hour ago, GManB said:

For example, on a teak bench swing I made I uses 22 base color textures and 22 normal maps. Yes, a lot of textures but the result, imho, is worth it. Luckily, the swing wasn't rigged so the textures came in with the upload.

At 3-4Mb per 1024^2 textures, 44 textures eats 132-176Mb of vram.

You only get 768Mb of texture memory to play with on the official viewer, do the math.

[Vesca Starlight]

I always just upload the model and then the textures separately, more control over how things get uploaded and tends to cause less error so I don't reupload as much. Its a bit more tedious but should help prevent any issues to just do it that way. 

Regarding the usage of textures though please do be mindful that a large number of large textures will absolutely destroy user performance, as someone who until more recently was not on a very good computer I cannot stress this enough. Think of SL more like a game (specifically like PS2/PS3 era) when making things because realistically it lacks many of the features Unity and other game development platforms have regarding optimization so that means users have to optimize their content themselves. Kyrah provided more in depth technical reasons behind it.

[arton Rotaru]

2 hours ago, GManB said:

I would appreciate any comments on how I might do things differently as well to streamline my work-flow.

Every creator likes his creations to be looking as good as possible. Every creator likes high res textures. That's not just you.
However, that's not how game art is made. It's a harsh reality that we have to sacrifice a lot of our hard work, to make our creations work in real time environments.

The art is to make good looking content, with the least amount of resource usage. Excessive usage of resources like such an insane amount of textures on a single model is definitely not good game art. You can't even call something like this game art, because there is no game ever which has a swing bench with 22 hi-res textures on it ever ever ever.

Except Second Life obviously.

Imported with the models are diffuse maps only, no normals, no spec maps. So the auto import feature isn't of much help there anyway.

Edited January 26, 2021 by arton Rotaru

[Tonk Tomcat]

True, a good creator will optimize polygon count and minimize texture usage as low as possible and still showing a decent amount of details. A simple furniture with 22 textures is a huge overkill and if you want to use it for more than just taking a picture and put it back in inventory, then optimize it. Nobody has to zoom close to anything and still be able to see every scratch in the material. If you want to have this, do a movie with a close up zoom, but don't put it in a multiplayer game like sl.

[GManB]

Don't get me wrong, I really admire the creators that can get good looking artifacts with a low poly count and few textures targeting general use cases. The two pieces I mention were requests from the customer for that level of detail.

OTOH, I could possibly learn some more about how to get good detail while keeping the uv shells small and contained in one texture file. Given the 1K texture size limit in SL I find that with even the sharpest textures I can make the uv shells need to be fairly large to get the sharpness I prefer in the final object.

I was unaware that the standard viewer limited use of vmem. 768Mb (less than 100 MB) seems awfully low given the average vmem available on commodity gpus. Any idea why?

I am new to the 3d modeling world but my experience so far via instruction videos is that 2k textures are minimum today with most creators pushing 4K and above. Yes, there is always downward pressure on resource consumption and, of course, the gratuitous squandering of resources should be avoided.

G

[Wulfie Reanimator]

1 hour ago, GManB said:

I was unaware that the standard viewer limited use of vmem. 768Mb (less than 100 MB) seems awfully low given the average vmem available on commodity gpus. Any idea why?

I am new to the 3d modeling world but my experience so far via instruction videos is that 2k textures are minimum today with most creators pushing 4K and above. Yes, there is always downward pressure on resource consumption and, of course, the gratuitous squandering of resources should be avoided.

They meant MB, not Mb. Regardless, if your object takes up 20% of that on it's own, that's never a good thing. Other things exists in the world, and unfortunately they're not much more conservative than you.

As for the tutorials you're watching, they're for actual renders, as in static content (images/video). They're not for real-time rendering, such as games.

And while it's true that modern games do use high resolution textures, they are used either sparingly with alternative low-res versions, or with specific intent. (Texture atlasses especially.)

Second life is neither modern nor does it handle texture memory well. You have to take into consideration the context of the tutorials you're watching. General modeling tutorials don't teach you how to make good game assets.

Edited January 27, 2021 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Vesca Starlight]

1 hour ago, GManB said:

I was unaware that the standard viewer limited use of vmem. 768Mb (less than 100 MB) seems awfully low given the average vmem available on commodity gpus. Any idea why?

Put simply, SL is old. If I recall correctly Second Life originated from the late 90's to early 2000's and while its grown and adapted to changing times quite well all things considered it predates a lot which is why we don't see full usage of all CPU cores or heavy usage of your GPU at all (in fact most if not all load is on CPU). 

Why they don't just change it is a lot of the base code is essentially "here be dragons" code where the people who did it originally are no longer with LL. Any changes have to be made with extreme care not to break everything else or at least anything major enough to case a mass disruption, or for said change to be important enough to justify a disruption (like AWS and the land issues since they started doing it). I may have some details wrong but so far that is my understanding of why they don't just slap new features or changes in all the time.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

1 hour ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

And while it's true that modern games do use high resolution textures, they are used either sparingly with alternative low-res versions, or with specific intent. (Texture atlasses especially.)

They also do a lot of manual culling, such as unloading floors above & below you, a lot of games also use different assets for cutscenes, and once your brain was imprinted with those details you don't notice when they are missing in 90% of the game.

[GManB]

1 hour ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

And while it's true that modern games do use high resolution textures, they are used sparingly with alternative low-res versions.

I agree. The dinosaur model I am building will be for educational purposes. The sim will contain accurate representations of the flora and fauna of a particular time period. Everything not a specimen, e.g., sidewalks and benches, will be textured conservatively and with parsimonious use of resources as is typical in games. The specimens need to have higher resolution because students will be inspecting them closely (or, at least, that is the hope as we attempt to use SL for educational purposes). 

G

[Kyrah Abattoir]

1 minute ago, RyokoTensaki said:

Put simply, SL is old. If I recall correctly Second Life originated from the late 90's to early 2000's and while its grown and adapted to changing times quite well all things considered it predates a lot which is why we don't see full usage of all CPU cores or heavy usage of your GPU at all (in fact most if not all load is on CPU).

Another thing to keep in mind is that it is "just" for textures, and while it can be enlarged on 3rd party viewers, you can never allocate the full amount of onboard vram because you also need it for other things, like geometry.

[GManB]

4 minutes ago, RyokoTensaki said:

Put simply, SL is old. If I recall correctly Second Life originated from the late 90's to early 2000's and while its grown and adapted to changing times quite well all things considered it predates a lot which is why we don't see full usage of all CPU cores or heavy usage of your GPU at all (in fact most if not all load is on CPU). 

Why they don't just change it is a lot of the base code is essentially "here be dragons" code where the people who did it originally are no longer with LL. Any changes have to be made with extreme care not to break everything else or at least anything major enough to case a mass disruption, or for said change to be important enough to justify a disruption (like AWS and the land issues since they started doing it). I may have some details wrong but so far that is my understanding of why they don't just slap new features or changes in all the time.

Yup. Products don't improve unless customers demand better by either pushing limits or simply going elsewhere. XR (X Reality, new-ish term that attempts to encompass all the various realities, VR, AR, CR, etc)  will play, imho, a huge role in humankind in the not too distant future. One of the groups with which I am working is trying to use SL for educational purposes. (see Science Circle) So, there are demands on the platforms that provide any form of XR. Older platforms like SL can come along or not. Tech waits for no platform.

 

G

[Kyrah Abattoir]

25 minutes ago, GManB said:

Tech waits for no platform.

But the platform IS the tech, there is a reason why no one is currently doing what SL is doing, and that all those that tried have failed.not your desires for it to just swallow anything you throw at it.

The reason no company has pushed LL into irrelevance is that what LL has done is both insane, unique and extremely complex to design and maintain, as a result, it also moves very slowly.

But blaming the tools doesn't lead us anywhere.

[Vesca Starlight]

25 minutes ago, GManB said:

Older platforms like SL can come along or not. Tech waits for no platform.

I'm going to be honest as someone checking into other platforms myself as well, platforms like VRChat actually limit how much stuff you can upload (vert counts/etc) and if your avatar isn't optimized its classified as "very poor" and not rendered by most people unless by choice. The concept that tech companies will magically improve the capabilities of software to the point optimization isn't needed by the creator is a fallacy, to at least some degree even with Unity and other big name modern dev platforms you do still need to optimize things yourself. 

[GManB]

32 minutes ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

But the platform IS the tech, there is a reason why no one is currently doing what SL is doing, and that all those that tried have failed.not your desires for it to just swallow anything you throw at it.

The reason no company has pushed LL into irrelevance is that what LL has done is both insane, unique and extremely complex to design and maintain, as a result, it also moves very slowly.

But blaming the tools doesn't lead us anywhere.

I am not blaming SL/LL at all. I love the platform and want it to move forward.

https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/14711/453245/venture-capital-in-xr-silicon-valley-vcs-weigh-in-on-where-they-see-traction

Tons of VC money going into XR (especially eSports, e.g., Zwift got a almost half a BILLION dollars last Sep).

The primary differences, I think, between all those other XR systems are that in SL/LL the users create most of the artifacts ourselves and there is a thriving marketplace to motivate internal innovation. But, I feel that once the outside world starts to understand that uniqueness and the external biz model we'll get competition; which, to date, as mentioned above, is pretty lame. However, with motivation the competition will improve and likely be able to start from cleaner architectures and (potentially) code bases.

G

[Kyrah Abattoir]

On 1/27/2021 at 8:22 PM, Wulfie Reanimator said:

They meant MB, not Mb.

I never know which one to use because we use "octets" here.

  

On 1/27/2021 at 11:19 PM, GManB said:

But, I feel that once the outside world starts to understand that uniqueness and the external biz model we'll get competition; which, to date, as mentioned above, is pretty lame.

The problem is that anytime they go see their engineers and show them secondlife they end up going like "why does this even work?", the original people at Linden Lab were extremely proficient technically.

Philip Rosedale was RealNetworks's former CTO, so someone extremely competent at the time when it comes to streaming tech, and I can only assume he brought in the very best with him when this all began.

These are people who literally added scripting to SL "over a weekend".

I'm not trying to deify those people or anything, but this is very different from the SecondLife we have today, and from any company with the funds to pursue this type of venture.

Edited January 29, 2021 by Kyrah Abattoir