Who is afraid of mesh?

[Sophia Trefusis]

(Not sure if i should post this here...but its a building topic so..)

How many can use Blender/Maya/other? I cant do it,I confess.

Will mesh sink my buisness? It might.

Will this stop me from creating? It wont.

The truth is mesh is complicated to make and even more troublesome to upload. How do I know? I made a simple mesh and went to a mesh upload spot. Despite me having payment on file and answering that test sucessfully..It still wouldnt allow for an upload.

I predict a long adjustment time for mesh to become widespread.Us "regular" people sure cant use it so far..

Who is afraid of mesh? Let me hear your thoughts about the matter :)

[tako Absent]

I'm more affraid of mess;)

[Sophia Trefusis]

Mess? lolol

I thought i was being clever There is a filmyou know with that title- minus the mesh part.and add a Virginia Woolf.

[Niko Kozower]

I don't understand why anyone would be "afraid" of mesh, its a revolution in Second Life. We havn't had something this "break-through" since sculpties and that was some 5 years ago.

Everyone should look at it as a new begining (although the release was a bit anti-climatic) its going to broaden the horizons greatly and creativity will sky rocket.

Learning however is quite easy. All mesh is is normal modeling, only differance is you have to apply a lose criteria to your work making sure not to go over that 60,000 Poly mark which is quite impossible, unless you have a face or something of that nature.

Anyway that was my two cents.

[Randall Ahren]

Why not wait until some of the major bugs are worked out? It's not pleasant being an unpaid beta tester. Remember the story of the old bull and the young bull. They spotted some cows on a hillside. The youngster says let's run over there and do one of'em. The old bull replies, why don't we walk over there and do'em all?

Save your energy. The market will be there tomorrow.

[Ceera Murakami]

Afraid? No. But I am also not eager to drink the "Mesh is wonderful" Kool-Aid.

I have some tools available to me that can make Mesh objects, and even rigged mesh objects. But I don't know how to use them yet, and haven't had the time to learn how to use them. From my first efforts in that area, I found it far from "Easy". But I also had difficulty making any sculpties more complicated than a simple hard hat with my company logo on it. Making Mesh stuff may be easy for the Blender and Maya gurus that play with that software all the time. It hasn't been at all easy for me to learn.

I love the new 64 M prim limit, and will immediately start using that in my personal work, but won't use them in items for sale until viewers that can properly re-size the larger prims are in common use.

I won't personally create or offer Mesh products for sale until the majority of users can see and use mesh. I would rather not deal with the flood of complaints from people who buy something that looks spiffy in their Mesh viewer, only to find that most of their friends see it as a pile of random prim trash.

I won't personally be purchasing Mesh products until the majority of users can see and use mesh. I would rather not have most of my friends see my mesh stuff as a pile of random prim trash. And I certainly won't be going out in public wearing a mesh dress, knowing that most of the people who look at me will see me as half-naked and with an inner tube stuck to my body, or some similarly foolish or embarrassing look.

I won't personally be purchasing Mesh clothing or Avatars until they overcome the limitations of being unable to adjust the avatar or clothes to fit MY body shape. I am no more inclined to adjust my shape to fit some pair of jeans than I am to cut off my little toe in RL so I can wear a pretty shoe that only comes in a too-narrow size.

Mesh has a great deal of potential, yes. But it also has a long way to go before it will be usable by the majority of residents. Others can enjoy the bleeding edge of this new technology, and can make their own choices about when to make products or buy products that use mesh. My own decision is to wait for the standards to become clear, and best practices to be published, so I don't waste my time and money making stuff badly or making things that people will complain about.

As for "stopping me from creating"? Partially, it has. I don't see much point in making products that Mesh will make obsolete. And I can't tell yet which things that I make will be competitive against Mesh versions (because the traditional way still works better and has a lower prim count), and which ones would be a waste of effort because Mesh can do it far better (because the higher poly count and better detail doesn't come at the cost of insane prim counts). So until I can see what works and what doesn't, my creative work is on hold. I'll tinker with the new toys, as time permits, and look at some things here and there. But even with my building textures, what is the point in making them if they won't work with the new modular mesh walls that everyone demands? I'm quite certain that textures designed to go on normal prims will be worthless on most Mesh products,unless they are nothing more than simple seamless, repeating textures. And the market is already flooded with simple seamless textures.

[Rolig Loon]

I detest "like" buttons, but if I had one, I'd "like" Ceera's answer.  The best I can offer is a smiley.  Right on, Ceera.  :smileyhappy:

[Void Singer]

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Ceera Murakami wrote:

[...] I won't personally be purchasing Mesh clothing or Avatars until they overcome the limitations of being unable to adjust the avatar or clothes to fit MY body shape. I am no more inclined to adjust my shape to fit some pair of jeans than I am to cut off my little toe in RL so I can wear a pretty shoe that only comes in a too-narrow size. [...]

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this gets a standing ovation from me, and probably anyone else that prefers to have maximum customization available to make something "yours" (fitting with your style etc). it's going to be the hardest limit to mesh use...

the other hard limit is going to be the scriptability of mesh objects, which have many more limitations than normal prim creations. a bit of this can be made up with rigging, but not enough IMO, so highly customizable objects are still going to focus on prims and sculpts.

 

the only scary part I think will be rez time and bandwidth requirements, much like sculpts, if they don't renderfast enough or slow down connections too much there will be a backlash..... and becomes a selling point for simpler prim creations that use all the tricks of the trade to approach the detail of sculpts and now mesh.

 

Ps I'm with Rolig on this one, excellent thoughts Ceera.

[Chronometria]

My fear is that it will drive the common resident  further away from learning to build. I build things and bolt on sculpties or scripts and that suits me fine. However I am always alarmed at the numerous residents i meet who are in awe of my skills because they are fearful to give building a try at all.

LL seems so be catering to the top level of builders with mesh, but the problem is that they are already the top level builders and mesh only benefits them, it doesnt raise anyone up further. The vast majority of builders are now two levels below as opposed to a mere one.

Why is this an issue? Because if very few folks build with mesh, then most folks wont need to upgrade their viewers and thus nobody will buy it or want to wear it. The top builders have skilled themselves out of the market by mastering a technique that nobody really needs. Most people are quite happy with sculpts and would rather LL worked on improving basic building features than add another level of quasi-quantum mumbo jumbo that a tiny percentage will utilise.

The only thing i got excited about was the return of large prims to the grid. That alone is probably making second life a happier place for a huge number of builders. Did it take months of work? No, but it was a simple matter of improvement that brought the greatest results. Majority happiness will prove the point as Mesh simply doesnt catch on.

[Coby Foden]

Why to be afraid of mesh? It's just an additional way to create more enhanced objects to Second Life. It will not kill prims, nor sculpties. Even with some of it's limitations, rigged mesh clothes, such as jackets and long pants, look really great. Finally men can have good realistic looking suits for example, instead of those horrendous painted on the skin ones.

What I don't understand is that some designers say that they will hold back their mesh designs until the majority of people have upgraded their viewers to see mesh properly. Lots of users will wait until there is enough mesh objects to justify the viewer upgrade. By this route everybody is waiting and waiting. :smileytongue:

The best way for all designers is to start selling their mesh designs at once without any further delay, as some have already started to do so. Flood the grid with mesh objects. Then the users who have not yet upgraded their viewers will have a real reason to upgrade theirs too. And so the mesh will start beautifying SL a lot faster than by everybody waiting for the other party to act. :matte-motes-smile:

[Ceera Murakami]

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Coby Foden wrote: What I don't understand is that some designers say that they will hold back their mesh designs until the majority of people have upgraded their viewers to see mesh properly. Lots of users will wait until there is enough mesh objects to justify the viewer upgrade. By this route everybody is waiting and waiting. :smileytongue:

The best way for all designers is to start selling their mesh designs at once without any further delay, as some have already started to do so. Flood the grid with mesh objects. Then the users who have not yet upgraded their viewers will have a real reason to upgrade theirs too. And so the mesh will start beautifying SL a lot faster than by everybody waiting for the other party to act. :matte-motes-smile:

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There will be no lack of early-adopter content creators who will happily flood the grid with mesh products. They are welcome to the headaches and complaints that will accompany their early efforts, and no doubt many of them will secure a nice solid niche for themselves as the best-known maker of one type of mesh item or another.

Most of the people who rushed to learn mesh while it was still in Beta testing were people already highly skilled in the use of tools like Maya, Blender and the like. While a few early adopters were starting from zero, most were already running at full speed as they cranked out their marvels on the test grid's Mesh sims.

Meanwhile, a lot of creators of traditional stuff, like me, had a choice of diving into an area that we knew nothing about, or continuing to work on areas that we knew well and had current business in. Personally, while mesh was in beta, I was more than a little busy with a contract to migrate 8 sims full of content onto OS Grid, building 4 sims in SL, and building 20+ new sims on OS Grid. My time was far more profitably spent doing what I already knew how to do, instead of setting my old skill set aside to learn a completely new and alien skill set.

As I said before, I don't want to deal with the inevitable complaints from Residents whose expectations for mesh products are impossible to achieve because of mesh's current limitations, or because too few of their friends use a mesh-capable Viewer. If someone else wants to blaze the trail with a machete and fight the wild tigers, I am content to let them do so, and follow after them in my motor car when the road has been paved and the area is more civilized.

[Siddean Munro]

Actually the beta was not full of 3D pros and those that weren't pro didn't have all that time to hit the ground running with their wondrous creations. The beta period had a few regular people desperately trying to figure it out as we went along, dealing with endless bugs, crashy viewers, crashy test sims, login issues, changing parameters, and the weight of trying to learn new software, new workflows, glossaries of unfamiliar terminology, while trying to keep the main business afloat, knowing you *should* be learning blender, but not wanting to waste days of productive time on something that wouldn't work anyway, and your time would be better spent making something for your business, oh and the deadline keeps getting pushed so there's no hurry anyway.

 

Mesh isn't something to be afraid of, the bugs will be worked out, and the fact that there hasn't been a flood of new mesh products to the main grid should tell you that many of us are still figuring it out. The most frustrating thing now are the doom and gloomers refusing to see this as an amazing opportunity to bring SL into this decade, into the mainstream. No, they're all about hanging onto legacy viewers and refusing to budge their hip sliders. They are the ones nerfing it, not LL

[DogWomble Dollinger]

"I think Mesh wont take off unliess your a die hard betamax video cassette user, there are to many restrictions"

I'm not sure yet that this will be the case.  I haven't played around with mesh yet myself - the types of things I build I don't think will benefit yet.

But I expect things to improve over time.  It may be somwhat restricted now, but given improvements over time, this may not always be the case.  Only time will tell.

[Mira Kamiguwa]

For me mesh is the next step for sl catching upto the standard of graphics you will find in most commercial games.  Final fantasy, Oblivion, far cry are all some great examples of what can be done with mesh.  I find people in sl spend most of their time complaining about the new ideas developers are working on.   Things like the UI is too hard to use.  Its like when windows XP was released people hated it because it didnt feel the same as windows 98.

Sculpting in mesh isnt hard.  Its actually far easier than using sculpties,  why you might ask?  Because the majority of people who develop games are using mesh.  Maya, Blender, 3d max, zbrush, mudbox were all designed for mesh builders not sculpty making.  I'm in the blender group and the majority of questions people ask can be found by reading a book or searching online, I learned all I know from studying books.  No ones forcing anyone to use mesh or even buy mesh but its the next step in second life evolusion,  its not going aways and will become the standard tool for most 3d builders.        

[Josh Susanto]

Mesh will reach a pattern of logical modes of use only after people have become disgusted with all the ways that it fails them and decide to continue using only for things that warrant its use.

I can probably wait about that long before I start tinkering with mesh.

[Coby Foden]

With mesh it is possible to make more realistic clothes. Finally it is possible to make nice tight miniskirts without the horrible prim or sculpty between the legs, which never worked well. :smileytongue:

Here's one quick sample of rigged miniskirt what I made (non textured, just coloured).

[Gator Peterman]

Funny you mentioned Betamax, exactly my thoughts.

Perhaps LL can set up a 'Zindra'  for mesh devotees...

[Matt Kuroda]

I still don't know what to think about mesh yet. I do know it is good to embrace change. Although I say Second Life is becoming less like "Second Life" and more like "M.I.T. Tech School Graduates Resume Builder"

 

What I mean is this was suppose to be a user created World.... Not a 3d graphics major created World.

 

 

[Matt Kuroda]

On a side note, who has 3 grand to spend on software just to build mesh?

[Void Singer]

there are at least 3 different completely free programs that can build mesh, sketchup, wings, and blender

[Coby Foden]

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Matt Kuroda wrote:

I still don't know what to think about mesh yet. I do know it is good to embrace change. Although I say Second Life is becoming less like "Second Life" and more like "M.I.T. Tech School Graduates Resume Builder"

 What I mean is this was suppose to be a user created World.... Not a 3d graphics major created World. 

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Mesh is not going to make prims nor sculpties obsolete. Prims are still the best and easy way make many things, sculpties will have their uses too. And meshes will have their uses. The creator just uses the method what is best for the task at hand.

SL is still user created world. Mesh is not going to change that. To create mesh there are excellent free programs available, no need to spend thousands on commercial software. Blender (free) is a great tool for creating mesh objects. The user interface is daunting at first but it is learnable. And there are tons excellent free tutorials available.