DAE transfer via notecard

[DanielRavenNest Noe]

I did a test of transfering the contents of a DAE file via notecard, which works just fine.  In detail:

- Created a simple box with 3ds Max and saved it as a DAE file.

- Copied the contents of that file using Notepad into an SL notecard, and sent the notecard to an alternate account of mine

- My alt logged in, and then copied the notecard contents back to my PC desktop as a .txt file, which I then renamed to .dae extension

- My alt then uploaded the new dae model, and rezzed it just fine, UV map preserved.

This test shows it is possible to sell / transfer models via notecard, so that the person getting the copy can upload a model with themselves as creator.  There are various reasons to do that.

[Drongle McMahon]

Is the limit still 64k? That's a bit low. Might do better with a compressor that uses ascii output. Or you could stitch the text from several notecards, I suppose.

[Honey Puddles]

Hrm... that's an interesting idea.

My first reaction was "OMG that will only work if you want to sell it full permissions".. but I can see now that that is the intention. Very intriguing.

This still doesn't solve a way to programatically change or animate a mesh, like we can with Sculpties. I can think of one project a friend has undertaken, which would hugely benefit from this ability. changing a carried box into a candle, changing the candle into a briefcase, etc. it's for some kind of RP system that doesn't require wearing unwearing of props.. and it's strength is that it can gather UUIDs from a web pull, so new props can be added to the system as needed. Currently the system is limited by how much detail you can get out of one sculpted prim.

That excepted, however, your realization that "there are other ways to transfer a mesh" is pretty cool. This would really only be useful in situations where you were eithre making a full-perms mesh freebie, or making a builders kit... but personally I worry about the need for the builder kit buyer to have their name on every prim. I wish we could more easily teach builders to put ther prims last in linkorder, so that the finished builds would show their names (as intended) but the parts made by others would still show their creators names (as intended).

Being a maker of megaprims, I know that this doesn't actually work, and builders who use kit parts more-often-than-not are generally not the most skilled builders in SL, and may only know HOW to link things, with no idea how to affect ink order.

Cool find on the notecard transfer though.. it would be awesome to fill a builders kit with notecards. hopefully DAE has a note/comment feature, so you can add comments directly to the top of the notecards that explain how to save and reupload them.

[Drongle McMahon]

The big difference from sculpt map kits though is that the recipient still has to pay the mesh upload fee (which we don't know yet) and that the duplicate mesh now appears as a new asset, wasting storage and possibly requiring extra downloads.

[Poenald Palen]

Obvious use: Sell higher poly models that a person will lower poly and texture all their own. It means two things.

 

1. You choose all the physics box, level of detail and so on. So basic performance issues on the sim creators environment are all under thier own control for newer people who log in and don't want to delve into preferences settings for higher performance.

2. Notecards are free and save the seller finding a host and all the issues associated with that.

[Void Singer]

if you can squeeze the data down to 40KiB in text you could actually serve it from within SL as an active downloadable file without ever having to touch an external server.... it'd probably depend on how sensitive to whitespace the importer is.

[Drongle McMahon]

Like all xml, collada files are very wasteful of space and exporters put in a lot of stuff that isn't used by the importer. However, by far the most space in collada files with large numbers of vertices is huge lists of real numbers. In Blender exports, these have 5 decimal places (fixed point). In a Sketchup export, they have 17 significant digits! The scope for truncation and compression here is huge.  All these are converted to 2 bytes for upload.

[DanielRavenNest Noe]

---

Winter Ventura wrote:

That excepted, however, your realization that "there are other ways to transfer a mesh" is pretty cool. This would really only be useful in situations where you were eithre making a full-perms mesh freebie, or making a builders kit...

---

Several other possible uses for this:

(1) You can sell mesh assets *now* in notecard form, rather than wait till it goes live on the main grid.  They can only be built with on the beta grid, for now, but some people may want to start buying parts and texturing them in advance, to have finished products ready.

(2) Take the dae to an outside 3D program and modify it, then re-import.  Useful for people who don't want to create from scratch, but can adjust a pre-made model to their liking.

(3) An in-world mesh editor which edits the notecard, and then you re-import as a final object.

[Ashasekayi Ra]

This is an interesting idea. I wonder how big of a model you could get in one notecard.

[DanielRavenNest Noe]

Not that much will fit in 64K characters, but since its XML, you can spread it across several notecards and paste it together in your PC text editor.

[Ashasekayi Ra]

True. I wouldn't be surprised if someone codes a utility to help out with the task at some point.

[Void Singer]

ps, I take it back, you don't need to squeeze it into 40KiB for LSL-HTTP... just chop it up into 40KiB chunks and additively load it as text until you have the whole thing... it'd be much more efficient if we had a little more control of outgoing headers though

[Pamela Galli]

I am one who would be interested in buying full perm mesh, and while I do want my name on the item sold (otherwise the mesh maker will get all the customer support calls) my primary interest is being able to take something into Blender and tweak it a bit. Otherwise I have something that 1) is not exactly what I want and 2) is exactly like what other ppl are selling.

 

 

[Nasty Annamemnon]

Either that or you just trade protected links on one of the various text file hosters like pastebin.