How to mesh low poly wires, ropes, cords, etc.?

[EllieAnne Silverfall]

I have an item I'm working on that involves a rock wrapped with a few pieces of wire. I used nurbs circle to create my wires pieces and then converted them to mesh. After, I decimated the geometry by hand. No matter what I do, I cannot get a low enough LI upon upload. Help please? I've done cords before, but less circular. I'm about to give up on the wire wrap idea, but it looks better with it. Can anyone assist with tips? Even links to tutorials would be awesome. Thanks!

[Chic Aeon]

55 minutes ago, EllieAnne Silverfall said:

I have an item I'm working on that involves a rock wrapped with a few pieces of wire. I used nurbs circle to create my wires pieces and then converted them to mesh. After, I decimated the geometry by hand. No matter what I do, I cannot get a low enough LI upon upload. Help please? I've done cords before, but less circular. I'm about to give up on the wire wrap idea, but it looks better with it. Can anyone assist with tips? Even links to tutorials would be awesome. Thanks!

Well I swore off the MESH board since I am in 2.79 and may be until I die LOL, but this is a pretty simple question -- although there may be some better answers with pictures that will help you coming along .   

 

When you make your curve you want to keep the resolution very low. You don't need more than six sides for you mesh to look good (smoothed of course).    I have uploaded many items at 1 land impact WITH additional mesh this way.  I do take out a few edgeloops but it is a fairly short process.    I typically DRAW my curve shapes as I am usually making electrical chords and the like but the idea works for all curves I think. 

 

Hope that helps some.  I am not sure where the settings are in the current Blender version

 

[EllieAnne Silverfall]

7 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

Well I swore off the MESH board since I am in 2.79 and may be until I die LOL, but this is a pretty simple question -- although there may be some better answers with pictures that will help you coming along .   

 

When you make your curve you want to keep the resolution very low. You don't need more than six sides for you mesh to look good (smoothed of course).    I have uploaded many items at 1 land impact WITH additional mesh this way.  I do take out a few edgeloops but it is a fairly short process.    I typically DRAW my curve shapes as I am usually making electrical chords and the like but the idea works for all curves I think. 

 

Hope that helps some.  I am not sure where the settings are in the current Blender version

 

This is the item that I'm working on . I took out as much as I possibly could, but even 1 wire is coming out super high LI upon upload to SL. I'm currently on Blender 2.9.1. I'm about to rip my hair out on this one and I really don't want to as I'm already losing hair from having had covid lol (Yes, really). 

Edited March 9, 2021 by EllieAnne Silverfall

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

How big is this in meters?

Do you have any modifiers on, like subdivision surface?

What is that egg thing? Is it exporting as well?

What do things look like when you turn on wireframe view for everything you're exporting?

[Aquila Kytori]

13 hours ago, EllieAnne Silverfall said:

I took out as much as I possibly could, but even 1 wire is coming out super high LI upon upload to SL.

If the single wire is exported as it appears in your screenshot, (a guesstimate of 480 triangles) it should be only the size that effects the LI cost.

Below is a similar object, rezzed inworld and the LI costs (uploaded with default lower LoDs and a triangle for the Physics model) with my avatar for size comparison :

 

 

If your wire is wildly different then check the Triangle counts, Download and Physics costs in the mesh uploader window.

If it looks like the Physics cost is high then export a cube object from Blender and use that for Physics.  Physics tab of the mesh uploader > Step 1  choose the From file option and load up your Cube.dae file.

In the Screenshot below the wire is 480 tris and approximately 6 x 6 x 5m.

 

Also check the costs (weights) when rezzed :

 

If you still cant work out what is causing the high LI cost of the single wire then share your .blend file for others to take a look at.      https://pasteall.org/blend/

 

14 hours ago, EllieAnne Silverfall said:

I'm about to give up on the wire wrap idea, but it looks better with it. Can anyone assist with tips?

As mentioned above, keep the resolution down (6 edges max, 5 or even 4 works sometimes)  and also aim for more edge loops where the curves are tight and less edge loops where the curves are more open :

Edited March 9, 2021 by Aquila Kytori

[Ada Radius]

The only way I've been happy with this kind of build is to make a highly detailed model with the wire or shoelace or whatever, and a low-poly build without the wire, and bake a normal map. Any bits of wire that stick out have to be in the final model, and can still kill the poly count but could work OK for this.  

[Wulfie Reanimator]

If the wire is visually small (either actually small or just far away), you can easily get away with 3-4 sides (smoothed or custom normals), or even a strip of flat plane with a wire texture on it.

15 hours ago, EllieAnne Silverfall said:

No matter what I do, I cannot get a low enough LI upon upload.

You haven't told us what the costs are. There are three different costs: download, physics, and server. It's not unlikely that it's the physics cost that's messing up, rather than the model being "too detailed."

[EllieAnne Silverfall]

14 hours ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

How big is this in meters?

Do you have any modifiers on, like subdivision surface?

What is that egg thing? Is it exporting as well?

What do things look like when you turn on wireframe view for everything you're exporting?

I attempted to export only the wire to see. the egg thing is a smoothed rock, yes it will be exporting as well, but I'm not worried about that right now. That exports without issue. IT's the wires I'm having issues with. No, I am not using modifiers. We're talking smallish.  

Edited March 9, 2021 by EllieAnne Silverfall

[EllieAnne Silverfall]

5 hours ago, Aquila Kytori said:

If the single wire is exported as it appears in your screenshot, (a guesstimate of 480 triangles) it should be only the size that effects the LI cost.

Below is a similar object, rezzed inworld and the LI costs (uploaded with default lower LoDs and a triangle for the Physics model) with my avatar for size comparison :

 

 

If your wire is wildly different then check the Triangle counts, Download and Physics costs in the mesh uploader window.

If it looks like the Physics cost is high then export a cube object from Blender and use that for Physics.  Physics tab of the mesh uploader > Step 1  choose the From file option and load up your Cube.dae file.

In the Screenshot below the wire is 480 tris and approximately 6 x 6 x 5m.

 

Also check the costs (weights) when rezzed :

 

If you still cant work out what is causing the high LI cost of the single wire then share your .blend file for others to take a look at.      https://pasteall.org/blend/

 

As mentioned above, keep the resolution down (6 edges max, 5 or even 4 works sometimes)  and also aim for more edge loops where the curves are tight and less edge loops where the curves are more open :

I've got it down to 4 edge loops. for the length. The item is maybe 1/8 meter total. My triangles are not high but normally I can reduce for the lower LODs, but it won't. No modifiers were used.  Here's some pics of upload and relative size. 

[EllieAnne Silverfall]

3 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

If the wire is visually small (either actually small or just far away), you can easily get away with 3-4 sides (smoothed or custom normals), or even a strip of flat plane with a wire texture on it.

You haven't told us what the costs are. There are three different costs: download, physics, and server. It's not unlikely that it's the physics cost that's messing up, rather than the model being "too detailed."

I lowered the details as much as possible. It seems to be the physics. The lowers LODs won't reduce

Edited March 9, 2021 by EllieAnne Silverfall

[Wulfie Reanimator]

1 hour ago, EllieAnne Silverfall said:

I lowered the details as much as possible. It seems to be the physics. The lowers LODs won't reduce

Download: 9.637 and Physics: 9.240. The final land impact will be the highest value, but in this case both values are almost equal so you have two problems.

Physics are very easy to fix for an object that doesn't need a distinct physics shape. Export a regular cube and select that in the "Physics" tab of the uploader.

The download cost is high because every Level Of Detail is set to the same model. The uploader will penalize LODs with an inappropriate amount of detail. Small objects will be penalized for having lots of detail in the Low/Lowest levels. I can't say exactly why it won't accept your lowered values, but I would never recommend using the Generate option in the uploader anyway. You're much better off creating the lower LODs in Blender and exporting them separately to be selected in the uploader.

Edited March 9, 2021 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Aquila Kytori]

As Wulfie suggested use a cube of any size for Physics ( the Uploader will automatically resize it ti fit your model).

If this doesn't also solve the Auto Generated LoDs (all the same triangle counts) then in Blender, Object mode, make a copy, (Shift + D), and Apply all Transforms to this copy, (with model selected Ctrl +A to open Apply menu and choose the All Transforms option. Export and check the numbers in the uploader.

If this hasn't changed anything then best is you share your .blend file by uploading it to this Blender file sharing site  https://pasteall.org/blend/

Then post the new URL for some-one here to check it out for you.

Edited March 9, 2021 by Aquila Kytori

[EllieAnne Silverfall]

13 minutes ago, Aquila Kytori said:

As Wulfie suggested use a cube of any size for Physics ( the Uploader will automatically resize it ti fit your model).

If this doesn't also solve the Auto Generated LoDs (all the same triangle counts) then in Blender, Object mode, make a copy, (Shift + D), and Apply all Transforms to this copy, (with model selected Ctrl +A to open Apply menu and choose the All Transforms option. Export and check the numbers in the uploader.

If this hasn't changed anything then best is you share your .blend file by uploading it to this Blender file sharing site  https://pasteall.org/blend/

Then post the new URL for some-one here to check it out for you.

I always click all transforms and fix my origin before exporting, but I will give it another go. I never thought of a cube for physics - GREAT TIP!

[Kyrah Abattoir]

This might not work for you depending of the textures but here is an ultra low poly option:

And here the same but with tweaked vertex normals:

Edited March 10, 2021 by Kyrah Abattoir
more pix

[EllieAnne Silverfall]

23 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

This might not work for you depending of the textures but here is an ultra low poly option:

And here the same but with tweaked vertex normals:

I think I'm going to give this a try, thank you! I tried just using a deep normal map on the rock, but even on ultra, it still looked flat. 

[EllieAnne Silverfall]

On 3/10/2021 at 10:43 AM, Kyrah Abattoir said:

This might not work for you depending of the textures but here is an ultra low poly option:

And here the same but with tweaked vertex normals:

Bless you!!!
I was finally able to upload at a low LI it using this technique.