What is mesh best for??

[GG Deezul]

I have an old wall with a vine growing on it and looks very realistic in blender - but as a mesh in SL it is 100 prims and still does not look as good as the Blender object!! It also falls  apart terribly when you zoom out just like a sculpt version.

I could create the same thing in SL on a  single flat prim with a nice texture and it will still look better than it does when I try to import it as Mesh. Is there a benefit to use mesh to achieve the same the result as a sculpt but with far more prims now?

How is it possible to use mesh as an avatar when it is not as detailed? I guess I don't know what mesh is meant for.





[Relapse Gauntley]

I made this complaint back in the beta-grid. For architecture, it's absolute crap. It needs a major deduction cost on Prim Equiv's.

[arton Rotaru]

Since october last year, I haven't build anything with prims or sculpts. To me Mesh is pretty much the choice for almost everything I make. I made a mesh house which is almost 40 prims lower than the similar looking prim/sculpt house. And it's more than 20000 triangles less to render, than the prim house. I made a fairly detailed car, which is 48 PE. Thats more than the usual 32 prims sculpt vehicles, but I think I have a couple more details and good LODs as well. And it's 17000 triangles in high LODs and 630 tris in lowest LODs. Compared to 32 *2048 = 65536 triangles for a sculpt vehicle. Which is still 2304 tris in lowest LODs. (To make a rough comparison)

I made a Rifle which is 3 PE. Hard to make that with 3 sculpts or prims with similar LOD behaviour.

I made a few other thing as well which are lower, or similar in PE than the sculpt builds I made. I made a fulI sim terrain mesh (256x256m) with exact physics with a dirt track on it which is 59 PE. I know people who made awesome looking stuff with a fairly low PE also.
With avatars you haven't even that big PE problem, because, as you know, when worn, it doesn't count against the land.

 

Just to show some mesh examples, a few pics. All objects are scripted:

Most of my builds could be even lower in PE, but I don't want to have them look like crap in lower LODs. So I make the LODs in a way I'm happy with the look of them, rather than an ultimate low PE.

The Car is 48 PE, and it still looks like a car in lowest LODs.

 

52 PE Mesh House (The prim house is 90 prims. It had painted windows to save prims (alpha sorting), sculpted one prim strairs with working physics to save the transparent prim to walk the stairs etc... So it wasn't a prim wasting build already.)

 

The Rifle is 3 PE now, the image was taken a while ago when PE was even higher than today..

 

My inflatable mesh mattress is only 1 PE.

[Mikki Miles]

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arton Rotaru wrote:

The Car is 48 PE, and it still looks like a car in lowest LODs.

 

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und das seh ich erst jetzt - mit Kölner Kennzeichen ;-)

[arton Rotaru]

Jups, du weißt doch,  Kölner sind überall! :smileyhappy:

Yup, as you know, Cologners are everywhere! :smileyhappy:

[Jusden Jonstone]

Mesh also seems to have great potential for avatar clothing, attachments and possibly in the future in skeletal animations and other future mesh features or functionality roll out the opportunities where mesh will thrive will become more clear. Also as some time passes and people learn to model mesh efficiently for SL purposes more widespread use and adoption of mesh will occur along with more people moving to fully mesh capable viewers. Unfortunately TPV's are needing to develop an open source mesh upload code solution to allow mesh upload in TPV's since LL official viewers rely on Havok Physics Engine proprietary code to handle mesh upload which LL cannot release freely to open source devs. Fortunately there are open source and TPV developers working to implement a solution to allow mesh upload in TPV's and some good progress is being made. Upon arrival of fully functional mesh rendering and mesh upload TPV's I believe mesh may become more widely used. Also as prim equivalence or land impact gets more settled and people start to grasp it more the uses will become more apparent. 

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

CRAP! Once again I have my brain up my rear end.... trying and trying to keep my mesh car under 32 for physical purposes.....Well Thanks for posting this, I'll still aim at 32... but it's good to know you can go over that....

 

And my answer to the original question on this thread: everything..yes everything. In some cases using prims or sculpts instead of meshes will result in lower prim values, but always at a tremedous rendering cost. And as is shown above, when you set your models up the right way there really is no alternative to mesh concerning detail. That 4WD could be 32 prims and still look far better than any sculpted one, especially at lower LODs. This is my own experience aswell.

[arton Rotaru]

Only the Physics Weight has to be <= 32 for making it physical. Download and Server weight can be way higher. But be aware of the additional penalty for objects being physical. They will increase their physics weight, which can jump quite high. Higher than it's download, or server weight. Unfortunately, the Viewer only shows the 'non physical' physics weight, even when the object IS physical. So keep an eye on Land Impact when your vehicles are physical. It's not a problem for cars, but larger vehicles like boats might have a problem with it. Take a look at the wiki, where it says : "NEW An additional factor has been added...." http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Mesh_physics.

Though, since we have a script function to change the physics shape to None by script, it is possible to work around that additional penalty. (Sadly, the function is currently bugged)

About the car above. Yes it could be even lower than 48. Though, I wanted to keep all the details, and I like nice looking LODs, too. The time I made this, during mesh beta, it had a Land Impact of 27 in the beginning :matte-motes-big-grin:. Then the Land Impact calculation began to change frequently, and it went to 46, 55, 159, 105, and 71. Which was the final count for it. The reduction from 71 to 48 required some serious work from my side. So, I'm quite happy with 48, with all the details I kept (ladderframe, dampers, leafsprings, exhaust underneath, modeled instruments, the spare wheel, the jerry cans on the roofrack etc...) , and it's LoD behavior.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

I did a quick test yesterday and scaled my currently unfinished model worth 24 prims up to 190, it could still be set to physical. But then again the physical model is very very basic, I'll do some small tests with it and see what happens...

btw, I don't feel much for setting the physical shape to "none" for a vehicle, it would work for the wheels though I suppose.

[arton Rotaru]

Yep, it depends on the physics shape complexity. I have a boat that is currently 71 in download weight, and 14 in physics weight. When I set it physical, the physics weight jumps to 80. This will not prevent it from being physical, though it is possible that something on the parcel will be autoreturned due to the higher land impact now.

So, I will set parts of it to physics type None by script, right before it goes physical, untill I reach a physics weight of 71 at least.

[Da5id Weatherwax]

Scaling up the model as a whole will often reduce the physics component of the cost anyway - bigger tris in the physics mesh give the physics engine much less of a headache than smaller ones do. That's why the uploader is set with a fairly aggressive limit for when it considers a tri to be degenerate (red dots on upload preview and upload fails) placing a practical limit on the minimum thickness of a mesh wall, for example. I've gotten around this by actually making the wall thicker "physically" than it appears to be - Nobody is going to notice that their av is actually colliding with the wall a few inches before they visually appear to

[Drongle McMahon]

"placing a practical limit on the minimum thickness of a mesh wall"

However, for a triangle-based wall, you don't need the edges anyway. Just use two flat planes. :matte-motes-grin:

In fact you can get away with one, most of the time.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Drongle McMahon wrote:

 

In fact you can get away with one, most of the time.

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That's how I would do it yes, if people don't notice they collide a couple of inches outside of the wall, they won't notice colliding an inch inside of it either, a simple wall would be two triangles then, one with a door six and one with a window you can jump through would have eight..