General mesh importing questions

[zoxysim]

Hello,

I am a total noob to SL and I have some questions about importing from Blender to SL. Right now, I have created a few canvas paintings. Any canvas I have that is black, it uploads fine to SL. If I have a gold textured frame, the texture does not import into SL only the photo I painted is on the canvas. I have purchased many gold decor items from many people and their gold texture items are perfect and I was just wondering how can I get my gold textures to show up in SL. When I texture the frame in world, it only shows like a yellow color and not a true gold color.

Secondly, I use firestorm viewer and I can see my meshes & textures in the Build>Upload>Mesh screen but when I use SL viewer I can not see my mesh or textures even when it is uploaded the same way and I have all green check marks and textures clicked. When I upload in SL through the SL viewer, it uploads with no texture but in the Firestorm viewer it uploads fine. I guess, I am wondering how can I import meshes where it looks the same no matter the viewer? I would like the quality to be the same across the board.

Photo for reference

 

Thank you all so much for your help ❤️

Edited December 6, 2021 by zoxysim

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, zoxysim said:

When I texture the frame in world, it only shows like a yellow color and not a true gold color.

I'm not sure if I understand your description right but this seems to be a problem with multiple UV maps.

I only have Blender 2.79 installed on this computer and the UI layout is a bit different in later versions but look for the list of UV maps:

If there is more than one item on that list, there's your problem.

 

2 hours ago, zoxysim said:

Secondly, I use firestorm viewer and I can see my meshes & textures in the Build>Upload>Mesh screen but when I use SL viewer I can not see my mesh or textures even when it is uploaded the same way and I have all green check marks and textures clicked. When I upload in SL through the SL viewer, it uploads with no texture but in the Firestorm viewer it uploads fine. I guess, I am wondering how can I import meshes where it looks the same no matter the viewer? I would like the quality to be the same across the board.

You don't want to upload the textures with the mesh for this in any case, it's just a waste of assets space and L$. Make one mesh frame - or one for each format (that is width-to-height ratio and/or frame-to-overall width ratio) and reuse it/them for all your pictures.

While I'm at it and since a picture frame like this is such an excellent first mesh project for beginners, this is how you do it (Yes, I see you know much of it already but this post will be read by other beginners too) :

Make the frame with two materials (shown in different colors here) and with 26 tris - no more and no less:

Then simplify it by deleting most of the tris from the frame, keeping only the ones facing frontwards and one single tri on the side to define the depth. Move the canvas to be flush with the front of the frame:

This model has 11 tris.

When you upload, select the first model for high, the second for low, "Use model above" for mid and lowest, and use either a cube or a singløe triangle for the physics model.

This is the only way to make and upload such a picture frame. Anything you do differently from this is wrong, except:

• You may want to use smooth normals for the frame (but probably not since it tends to only blur the contours
• You may add a few extra vertices to the frame for the high (and possibly mid) LoD models if - and only if - you want to give it a battered and twisted look. That's a rather special case though.

For UV mapping, the canvas simply fills up the whole map:

For the frame I recmmend you stack the sides on top of each other like this:

This gives you the maximum use of the available texture space and it works brilliantly both for both tiled (which you should use here) and baked (which you shouldn't but oh well) textures.

Edited December 6, 2021 by ChinRey

[zoxysim]

Thank You Chin so much for replying and for the help! This was great information, I am going to follow your instructions step by step in blender now and see if I can get this right haha

[zoxysim]

What do you mean when you say "tris"?

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, zoxysim said:

What do you mean when you say "tris"?

Short answer:

Tris is short for "triangles".

Every single tri and vertice takes time to render so we want to keep the number of them as low as possible (but not lower). We don't usually count the vertices since the numbers of them and tris tend to follow each other closely and the tris are the ones that are easiest to keep track of.

---

Long answer:

I suppose you know that a mesh surface is made from polygons (called "polys") stretched between points (called "vertices"). Take this simple bent pipe for example:

If you look at it in edit mode in Blender (btw, it's in edit mode, not object mode you do the main part of the job in Blender or Maya), you'll see the polys and vertices:

In this case all the polys are quadrangles (called ... you guessed it: "quads") because those are usually the ones that are easiest to work with for us humans. They can be a bit awkward for computers though so for virtual worlds, games and other applications where we need fast rendering we only use tris:

Usually we don't have to worry about this. The uploader does the triangulation for us and it does the job more efficiently than Blender. But there are some cases the uploader can't handle well and some it can't handle at all. Take this quad for example:

Should it be split this way

or that way?

The computer doesn't know so there's a fifty-fifty chance it gets it wrong and when it does, we have to triangulate manually.

Also, the uploader can't handle concave polys, that is polys with angles pointing inward, such as this one:

Those too have to be split before they are uploaded.

[ChinRey]

On 12/6/2021 at 5:11 AM, ChinRey said:

You don't want to upload the textures with the mesh for this in any case, it's just a waste of assets space and L$. Make one mesh frame - or one for each format (that is width-to-height ratio and/or frame-to-overall width ratio) and reuse it/them for all your pictures.

I completely forgot to mention back then that usually you don't need a mesh at all for a simple picture frame. Just use a tapered prim cube instead:

I've marked the two sets of parameters that need to be tweaked.

• Size sets the... well obviously. Z is the thickness, X and Y the dimensions.
• The taper values determine the width of the frame.

It' not quite as detailed as a mesh frame can be but you have to look very closely to spot the difference and if people do that, maybe it's better if the pay attention to the actual picture instead.

Edited December 9, 2021 by ChinRey

[zoxysim]

Thank you so much for your help, I am sending virtual hugs your way ❤️

Here is a screenshot of the frames I made in world and they are 2 land impacts.

 

[zoxysim]

Hello,

 

So I posted the photo above on how I made the frames in world and then applied the texture. Everything was working well until I made my 3rd frame. When everything rezzes in world, my painting texture (photo) is gray. Not the frame texture but the photo in the middle. What does this mean? Again, thank you so very much for the help. I have learned a lot with your help ❤️

 

[arton Rotaru]

17 hours ago, zoxysim said:

Hello,

 

So I posted the photo above on how I made the frames in world and then applied the texture. Everything was working well until I made my 3rd frame. When everything rezzes in world, my painting texture (photo) is gray. Not the frame texture but the photo in the middle. What does this mean? Again, thank you so very much for the help. I have learned a lot with your help ❤️

 

Usually this happens when the texture is just a local texture instead of a regular uploaded texture.

Edited December 14, 2021 by arton Rotaru

[zoxysim]

Thank you so much, I uploaded the photo as a texture and this worked like a charm! Again thank you so so so much ❤️