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The Death of Mesh


Lilith Heart
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5,000 US dollars for some autodesk application isn´t exactly "too cheap to fork out". Who makes 5000 dollars a year by SL, additionally to tiers, fees and whatever else? To break even? Do you actually think a professional mmesh tool or mesh imports in general will make things for the average hobbyist creator on whom Linden Lab depends by 95 percent better, easier and more affordable or more lucrative? And actually add a noteworthy amount of "professional" content? I don´t think so.

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We don't know the costs yet, these could be there to create joy when they finally release the new ones? OR, part of an internal bargaining system thing. Overcharge to shock and then fight hard and time stall till you finally make a percieved concesion that is really down to what you really want. I can see it now...it is like Dune, they are all talking in thier heads through the cameras as we folllow them around. Instead of the Spice...it is all about the PRIMS! They want more, everyone wants more! They even hace Prim worms that eat up peoples inventories and swollow up a few lindens now and then in the metaspace. An alt here, a few alts there...their AI bot program ravaged by Spice wor....I mean, the Prim worms! They are allin different camps, all wanting different PE ratios while the iinvestors are worried about another PE ratio! This all leads to different fights....sting even shows up at the office and does the wierd thing with the muscle tension and a radnom scabby homeless guy comes in and laughs with all his biols and such....yeah! Cool! Now, if they start firing sound wave thingies to try and destroy each others work stations...those damn voice gun things are stupid and I am walking out as soon as I see this BS and might even leave my Linden Teady behind... I mean, seriously...what is up with the stupid voice manipulated gun junk in that movie!? And the sounds.....just bad, very bad stuff. Yeah, I am saying dune sucks when they use the stupid sounds to fire...halitosis enhanced, is it? I dont' now. Very much a let down...they couldhave had a cooler way of fighting, even with no weapons...I just can't think of anything...so bring out a giant flame thrower or something...napalm guns? Something man, but silly voice noises....I guess there made thier enemies laugh to death? :( so sad. Could I have doen t beetter? Picture spice worms on fire...I mean, shoulder powered compressed napalm machine guns....yeah, you heard it! Explosive rounds of napalm, machine gun delivered. The feakin guns are melting as they try to take out all the worms and keep all the spice for themselves. All the in fighting? yeah, sting can be engaged in some napalm grenade fighting through some kind of obstacle course style chace...throw ina part where they must work together to take out a worm, then go back to fighting each other to death INSIDE the burning dead and quivering carcass...yeah, the carcas still moves when they stand on nerves and such. So, they get flipped over and then are in a fire burning and only one makes it out to drop and roll in worm guts. I know, I have made this movie more aswome for you all....I will accept no thanks, and will look forward to the directors who can take this free alternate story element. Remember, napalm makes giant animal carnage much more crazy and cinimatic. PYromaniacs, unite for a new scene in Dune!...no...../me listens to crickets chirping.... :o

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I'm really excited about mesh. I want it to work. Prim Equivelant calculations are the most important thing from a creators point of view. It's a make or break thing. If PE is too high everything goes topsy turvy and we won't be able to use mesh fully.

PE is all important. With any luck what we're seeing now on the sandbox mesh sims is a broken, temporary situation that  will be fixed.

 

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I'm rarely 'in world' these days but my interest in SL was partially rekindled by the prospect of experimenting with mesh, however I've also found that the PE calculations are rather high.

If I was a conspiracy theorist, I might conclude that LL has changed it's mind over mesh and has indeed decided to help it 'die' at birth, rather than have to explain it's u-turn...

 

 

 

 

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$5000?  Well, you can go on ebay and get just about any 3d software for less than 400. Cost is not really an issue, if you do make money doing this tho. Plus, there are many independent developers that sell their programs for between $5-$150, and some are real gems. Not to mention that, if you actually contacted these develpers, they would likely make sure that it could export to SL collada files correctly. I've only played with a few of these programs but I was quite impressed.

Me, I  bought my 3ds Max years, and years ago, but never learned it until now. I'm just lucky it is still usable. Of course I plan on updating it, but not until I'm certain that it is worth the extra time and money.

If some1 can figure out how to create a decent product in SL, and make decent money at it, they can easily learn the basics of any professional 3d software. Learning how to use the software is only 1 step up in learning equivalence. Really, you are just learning how to manipulate the verts, and then learning how to make the UV maps. With avatars, you learn how to rig. The learning curve is not that steap. You are learning about the same amount that it took to learn SL, lol.

Is the PE killing mesh? You bet it is. But ...... I'm waiting. It seems to get worse everytime I check. I don't envy the pour souls who have the task of setting the levels. I fear that we are not being told the whole story. Plus, these limits make everything so much more complex that few new creators will venture down the mesh road. Heck, I doubt any cad designers or architects will be rushing to mod their builds for SL.

Plus, it is unknowable what affects all these limits will bring. The more complex you make the system, the more unknowable the results will be.

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Maybe not at your home but here buying "used" software is illegal. I know that for sure when it comes to Autodesk softare because  u register it on your name and thats it. Think i remember even Microsoft started to do that with windows long ago but i lost track.

Mesh can be great for alot things but more ingame building tools would help new people just to start without go outside learn and buy another tool then import to see it´s ugly and again.... I guess we all started to build with a box, remodelled, added another one....

I doubt that someone new to SL starts with building meshes ?!?

If the primcount stay this high meshes are even useless for clothes because then Sim-Owners won´t allow you to come because of the high rendercost your avata has. Allready have this with some peoples hair and boots and ....

Monti

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Monti Messmer wrote:

If the primcount stay this high meshes are even useless for clothes because then Sim-Owners won´t allow you to come because of the high rendercost your avata has. Allready have this with some peoples hair and boots and ....

This somehow implies that rendercosts would go down when LL would decide to lower PE ;-) Of course this is not true, but ...

As far as i can tell, even high PE meshes can be much less resource taking than comparable Sculpty/Prim builds with much less PE. So an avatar who wears mesh clothes may in fact use significantly less resources although it wears significantly more Prims compared to an equal looking sculpty clothes set...

What i do not at all understand is the reasoning about upload fees and PE. Well, we can talk as much as we want, but it appears to me that we better should find out:

 

  1. How does LL want us to use meshes
  2. Where does LL want us to use meshes
  3. Why does LL want us to use meshes.

     

    If we know that (and currently we are just deducing from what we see and guessing and believing), then we can ask:

     

  4. How does LL's intention relate to LL's pricing ?

Maybe answering these questions can shed some light on what is going on here ;-) But i am afraid that we are supposed to swim in unknown waters and find our own pathes through it. And LL probably will have to check if their pricing does realy get us where they want us to go.

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Monti Messmer wrote:

Maybe not at your home but here buying "used" software is illegal. I know that for sure when it comes to Autodesk softare because  u register it on your name and thats it. Think i remember even Microsoft started to do that with windows long ago but i lost track.


And why would the software be used? Most on ebay are not used. For the most part, the people selling them are authorized dealers or the person never registered the product, or they would not be selling it. Being that the sellers have extremely high merchant ratings with thousands of sales, I'd venture to say it is safe to buy from them.

 

 

 

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Monti Messmer wrote:

Maybe not at your home but here buying "used" software is illegal. I know that for sure when it comes to Autodesk softare because  u register it on your name and thats it. Think i remember even Microsoft started to do that with windows long ago but i lost track.

Autodesk claimed that it was illegal, but a judge disagreed with them.

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Thank you for the info Drongle unfortunately I tried the trees on bug fixed Sandbox 21 and got pretty much the same crazy  high PE numbers.

Three sculpties each having 2048 tri polygons .... the mesh equivalent at full size ( 64m )  is over 500 prims.

500 prims for the same number of tri polygons as 3 sculpties .... that makes large mesh items completely unworkable and mesh is as good as dead if it stays anywhere near this number.

If mesh PE was twice as expensive as sculpties ... ok .. we could handle that .... but 500 to 3, forget it !

 

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Just in case I sound like some crazy person who only wants to make 64m trees ... perhaps I should clarify. 

I'm generally concerned about the PE for big items .... whether they are trees, waterfalls, castles, houses, whatever .

Even 30m trees are coming out at 100's of prims. Compared to the sculpty equivalent ... which would be 3 or 4 prims ... how can mesh help make the SL world look better under these circumstances.

Virtual worlds should be grand, magnificent, dreamy places.

Sure some things are small but some things should be big and if those items are crippled by massive PE the world will be less for that.

And the idea that I should cut up a lovely efficient single skin object into some silly jigsaw to improve the PE makes me feel quite ill.

In any game engine ... continuous, single skin objects are preferred and more efficient as there are no hidden or overlapping polygons that need to be calculated and culled.

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"...and the idea that I should cut up a lovely efficient single skin object into some silly jigsaw to improve the PE makes me feel quite ill."

Quite right. I did this with a couple of things to test the concept and reassembling them is a real pain.

The waterfall is a great example. Potentially mesh is very good for big waterfall, as you can get around the texture tiling reverting to 1x1 for animated textures by using stacked UV maps, and you can use multiple materials to permute the orientation of the texture to avoid tiling artefacts without using more textures. As you say, this is is going to be excluded by high PE.

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I think that marketing prims instead of land would be nice (within certain limits to prevent rich people from totally bogging down sim resources and ruining the experience for others), but I see a wholly different problem with high mesh PE:

the density of parcels with mesh builds would simply bottom out. Take the small 134 prim tree mentioned earlier. It could hardly fit on a 512, rendering it pretty much empty. So if you want anything at all on your land, you have to use prims and sculpts. If you do NOT want anything at all on your parcel, no matter how big, use mesh.

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I can't speak on any software but as far as any Autodesk product, it is illegal to resale it to another party. What they sell you is a license to use it for a certain period of time depending on what type of seat you buy. At my company I own several licenses for some very high priced pieces of software including Esprit, Mastercam, and Maya with Maya by far being the cheapest, and next to my Thermwood 3 and 5 axis machines the software I own is the most expensive part of my business.

Maya unlike Esprit and Mastercam uses no dongle. I really think they should it would reduce so many problems and probably make the software in the end cheaper to people who actually buy licenses. There are many different options on the seat you buy if you speak with a representative of the company, but ultimately whatever seat you buy only allows you to use it for the time allotted and not to transfer it. And it goes a little further in that on my seat we have a special plug-in made by Autodesk for me to export .stl files as that is what I use in Esprit and Mastercam, I am not allowed to output .stl files as lets say a service to people that dont have .stl export, as my seat is the only one to be able to use that feature. How they would catch you I'm not sure unless you were like that guy selling on ebay, but none the less that is restrictions they have in place.

I cannot comment on weather the seller on ebay is actually an authorized reseller, i kind of find that hard to believe in that it's at minimum 3500$ less than actual price he should have had to pay to Autodesk. Could be trying to offer student pricing to non-students not sure but a call to Autodesk to find out if the person is authorized will revel the truth for sure and I would not purchase a product like that without that phone call.

[edited] sorry to be off topic some :D

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stick with open source. The people that use open source software can fix issues with it (well, advanced users at least). And you can try to get your developer friends (like me) to work on issues in open source software too

By the way, Blender 2.5 has an option to use the maya command set, including the camera controls I think. you can choose default or maya on the splash screen

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Im with you all.

Prim cost is raised to the sky in the latest days/weeks.

I was able to upload my mesh with a cost of 30 prims at 64 meters, now is 75 at 13 meters n_n.

I know the prim cost wasnt finished, but increase the prim cost about x3 or x4 isnt really to give some "retouchs" to prim cost.

Lets continue doing impossible sculpts, yay!...

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