Medhue Simoni Posted October 3, 2011 Share Posted October 3, 2011 Great response! I started as just a traditional artist, doing charcoals, and paintings in RL. I got into 3d when I was amazed by the open layout of some games, which is still rare for a game. A couple of these games had editors and I spent a good couple of years making MODs of those games, until i found SL. Although there were many similarities between SL and the games I did MODs for, the prim aspect was that major difference, and the fact that SL is streamed. Once you've actually seen how a real game makes objects, it is extremely easy to see why SL lags so much. I could have done any aspect of creation in SL, but I chose animation because I knew that the skill sets that I would learn would be applicable on almost any platform. Plus, animation is fricken fun. I had played with wing3d and 3ds Max before I ever entered SL, so building with prims was just down right annoying. Hardly worth the time. Sculpts came along, and of course I jumped into wing3d and made a few things, but again, it was time consuming and annoying, all for something that was not all that great. So, I didn't do anything there, cause what is the point if this does not apply to anything outside of SL. As a freelancer and business man, it just did not make sense to waste my time with those. With mesh, now we have something that is actually relevant. I don't feel I'm wasting my time creating objects. If nothing else, just learning is worth it, simply to understand 3d better. Finally, I have something I can expand with, not just pushing some blocks together. Don't get me wrong, prims are awesome for the beginning creators, and even sculpts were a decent learning tool, but only if you have never used a program like 3ds Max. So, my whole point is that, for any1 serious about creation, business, and their future in 3d, it is retarded to keep clinging to sculpties. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rolig Loon Posted October 3, 2011 Share Posted October 3, 2011 OK, so I'm with you, Chosen. I really do see the advantages of mesh, and you're right about the resistance to change being a temporary thing. Does it bother you at all, though, that SL is rapidly drifting toward being a world made by talented 3D designers and losing some of the "Your World ... Your Imagination" feel that it had when we arrived? I count myself very lucky to have come to SL when all we had were prims. They weren't intimidating, and I could feel creative satisfaction making crummy Lego-style stuff. You taught me a lot about texturing, and I have leaned on others to learn how to make sculpties and get Blender's basics under my belt. Still..... If I had been faced with making that huge leap from day one, I might have been too intimidated to start. (Well, maybe not me, but a lot of my newbie contemporaries would have. You see where I'm going.) Does it worry you a little bit that the advance of 3D modelling is spreading a cultural divide of sorts? Separating SL further into creative types and consumers? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Medhue Simoni Posted October 3, 2011 Share Posted October 3, 2011 Much like there are hundreds of full perm sculpty builder kits, there will be hundreds of mesh builder kits. I know alot of people worry about this so called divide, but I think this is just about people's fears, and unwarranted. Not long ago, I helped this newbie girl, even bought her a puppy. The next thing I knew, she was renting a single room apartment and IM'd me to come see the dog house she made for her puppy. I was so proud of her. That is the magic of SL, and that will never go away, as long as we have prims. A friend of mine, who started as a customer and help me with testing stuff, started making things. Then, he saw he needed sculpty packs to make anything he could sell. I kept telling him to start looking at mesh if he really wanted to get serious about creating. He, of course, seemed quite overwhelmed at the idea. Last week he uploaded his first mesh, it was a cup with a bendy straw. To me, SL is now a crash course for anything 3d, well almost. It is like learning in steps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chosen Few Posted October 3, 2011 Share Posted October 3, 2011 Rolig Loon wrote: Does it bother you at all, though, that SL is rapidly drifting toward being a world made by talented 3D designers and losing some of the "Your World ... Your Imagination" feel that it had when we arrived? I see it as just the opposite. What had been a tremendous divide between "the SL artist" and all other 3D artists has now been removed. Medhue's story is a great example of this. He's now able to use his pre-existing skills, after having not been an adopter of SL's previously unique way of doing things. The truth is SL, with all of its proprietary ways, always was purely the domain of only the most exclusive artists in the world. Over the past 8 years, if you could make anything look good in SL, you were one of very few on the planet with that particular skill set. It wasn't something you could come in already knowing how to do. It took months, if not years, of serious practice and self development to get good at it. And man, did we ever get good at it. The visual quality of builds improved at least a hundred fold over the years, while the tools and technology behind creating them remained more or less at a standstill. Pioneering works like Bedazzled's China Town, Chip Midnight's skins, Xenius Revere's baked chapel, and countless others, all served to raise the bar for what was visually possible in SL. Even before mesh and sculpties came on the scene, the "your world" of two or three years ago was very different from the "your world" of six or seven years ago. When sculpties came along, we had these same kinds of discussion about them. "ZOMG! You have to make them in an external modeling progam? No way! No fair! Only very talented established 3D artists will ever be able to do that. The sky is falling. We're all doomed! Cats and dogs living together! Mass hysteria!" But ordinary people did learn to make sculpties. And just like with prims, the builds they made with them were timid at first, but then got markedly better over the following years. Now here we are, at the dawn of a new era with mesh. Except it's really the dawn of an old era. Anyone and everyone can now bring their content into SL, without the monumental learning curve that was previously required. Externally acquired skills are now applicable. The new SL user has never had it so good. The only people whose feathers are rustled are the ones who already have investment in the status quo. They put a LOT of effort into becoming among the elite, the ones who can manage to make decent looking content with SL's bizarre tool set. They don't tend to see themselves as "elite", of course -- they prefer to think of themselves as average people who just happened to stumble across this so-easy-to-use, super-intuitive building system so thoughtfully provided for them. But elite is what they are, nonetheless. For among the millions of 3D artists living on this planet, only a very small handful have managed to do anything of note in SL. (Selective memory is a wonderful thing, isn't it? Never mind the fact that this thing that is "so easy to use" took you months to figure out. Yeah, it's super intuitive. Right.) The fact is prim building is WAY harder than mesh modeling. Ditto for sculpties. If someone is capable enough to be good at building with prims and/or sculpties, oh the wonders they could accomplish when handed the open ended freedom of traditional 3D modeling, as long as they're willing to dive into it. But habits can be hard to break. As Agent K so well put it, "People are dumb, panicky animals, and you know it." It's just easier for some to play Chicken Little than it is to actually look at the truth of things. If there is a "divide" to be found, it's not between the "talented 3D designers" and the laymen. No such distinction need exist. It's between the open minded and the stubborn, the willing and the unwilling, the eager and the fearful. As for "my world, my imagination", I can say I've long been imagining what my SL could be if I could only bring in my mesh models. But that's all it was, my imagination. It certainly wasn't my world. My SL world was prims for the first four years or so. It was prims and sculpties after that. I got damned good at using those media, but they were never ever what I really wanted them to be. Now I can do a whole lot more, and that's wonderful. (Now just give me a proper material shader system, and a better lighting engine, and I'll really be happy.) I do find myself with a brand new problem, though, and that is where to begin. There's so much I want to do, and I've finally got so much freedom to do it, it's hard to know what project to start with, and even harder to plan what to do with any particular one. I'll give you an example. A few days ago, I decided to rebuild my Klingon Bird of Prey, as a mesh model. I began with the exact same technique I'd used when I started the original prim version all those years ago, just in Maya this time instead of in SL. I grabbed my orthographic diagrams, and arranged them on a set of intersecting planes, to give me a scaffold of sorts, to build on top of. But then I froze. All I could think was, "Uh, now what? Where do I start? How exactly do I want to approach this? " See, for the prim version, there had been only one practical way to proceed. Rough out the basic design with as few prims as possible, and then use the textures to fill in the details. That's it. But with mesh, there are a hundred different possible directions I could go. Should I apply the same basic principle, just model the flat surfaces, and just use my same existing textures to hint at the details? Or now that it's feasible to do something more geometrically complex, should I actually model details like the wing feathers and the various pipes and such that run along the fuselage? If I do the latter, at what point do I decide any particular detail is too fine to bother modeling, and let the texturing take over? Most importantly, why should any of this even be a big deal? I've done this a thousand times for other platforms, after all. So, why should the fact that this is for SL be throwing me for such a loop? I've been going over and over the build in my mind all week, and I'm no closer to laying down the first polygon. Apparently, without ever realizing it, I've set up a divide of my own, right in my own head, and I've spent the last seven years reenforcing it. If a build is for SL, approach it this way, and if it's for anything else, approach it that way. That segregation is hard to let go of. Where I've been used to SL's constraints so rigidly guiding my hand, I've now all of a sudden got so much freedom, I'm just not sure how to handle it. It's a truly bizarre feeling. I'll get pat it sooner or later, of course, but it's gonna take a while. I'm curious, anyone else having the same problem? Rolig Loon wrote: Does it worry you a little bit that the advance of 3D modelling is spreading a cultural divide of sorts? Separating SL further into creative types and consumers? That kind of divide is absolutely necessary for a healthy and vibrant society. We need creators and consumers, both. There's nothing wrong with that. I can't agree, however, that the advance of 3D modeling is responsible for spreading the divide in any way. I'd argue just the opposite. The more tools are available, the more opportunity there is for people to create. The doorways to becoming a content creator in SL are now open wider than they ever have been. It's fer easier to become a creator now than ever before. The real reason the divide appears to be widening is nothing more than natural progression. As time goes on with any technology, the ratio of creators to consumers always goes down. That's not because there are less creators. Usually, there are more. It's just that the rest of the world arrives, too, and most of them have no interest in creating. The pool gets diluted (as it should). In the early days of SL, everyone was a creator. The ratio of creator to consumer was 1:1. Eight years later, we've got more creators than ever, but we also have countless millions of consumers. The ratio has gotten lower, even though the total amount is higher. This same pattern has been true of nearly every technological genre you could think of. The first person to eat cooked food was the person who first discovered fire. Now we all eat cooked food, but not all of us actively cook. The first people to look at photographs were the first users of the camera. Now everyone in the world looks at photography every day, but not everyone is a photographer. The first people to watch movies were the people who pioneered the film industry. Now we all watch movies, but relatively few of us make them. The first users of the Internet were all programmers and designers. Now everyone uses the Internet, but most people don't create much of anything with it (besides tweets and Facebook status updates). Early adopters are primarily creators, always. Consumers arrive later. SL is no different. The divide you speak of was always destined to happen. The state of available 3D modeling tools has nothing to do with it. As time goes on, the audience gets bigger. It's worth keeping in mind that not everyone takes "your world, your imagination" to mean "I get to make stuff". For a great many people, it means "I get to buy stuff" or "I get to hang out with my friends" or "I get to watch stuff happen" or what have you. People like you and me, who tend to think always about creativity first, are relatively rare. In SL, we found a place to congregate, which made it easy to believe our own culture was the only one. But it's not. There are many others, just as vital, just as valid. We don't lose anything in now being surrounded by that. Those of us who are wise will recognize that we're enriched by it. It's also worth noting that the ratio, although it has gone down, is still nowhere near realistic levels. A disproportionately large portion of SL users are creators. Most of the "ordinary" world still hasn't found SL yet. When they do (and they will), the ratio will drop to a tiny fraction of what it is now. ETA: OK, I've edited this post about a hundred times now, for typos, and I'm getting sick of finding them. If there are any still in there, they're in there to stay. Yup, insomnia is just that much fun. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Void Singer Posted October 3, 2011 Share Posted October 3, 2011 I also see a driving force in making the creation of items external to SL much easier.... when SL began apps for 3d creation were exclusively the domain of high priced businesses... now we have multiple options for the free creation of these same things that can be used not only in SL but in other places too... yes, the skill sets are more advanced, but they're also now accessible to people without having to shell out gobs of cash. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chosen Few Posted October 3, 2011 Share Posted October 3, 2011 Void Singer wrote: I also see a driving force in making the creation of items external to SL much easier.... when SL began apps for 3d creation were exclusively the domain of high priced businesses... now we have multiple options for the free creation of these same things that can be used not only in SL but in other places too... yes, the skill sets are more advanced, but they're also now accessible to people without having to shell out gobs of cash. Yup, another inevitible consequence of time. Technology gets cheaper and easier to access. In fairness, Blender and some other free 3D modeling tools do predate SL. I remember dabbling with Gmax, back in the early 2000's. TrueSpace was available as early as 1994. But your point is well taken. The financial barriers to getting invoved as an amateur or semi-pro 3D artist are lower than ever. Blender is now almost as powerful as the best of its commercial counterparts, and tons of good inexpensive tools now exist as well. Even Maya, which used to be as much as $8000 is now only $3500. It's still out of reach for most, obviously, but it's a damned sight better than it was. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Susanto Posted October 3, 2011 Share Posted October 3, 2011 To clarify: 1) I do think most sculpties are crap, and we couldn't do much worse to replace them with mesh. Yes, even some of my own. Fine. 2) I AM somewhat excited about mesh, but I'm not even going to touch it until people have basically run out of new negative observations to make about their various personal mesh experiences. 3) By "efficient", I should have explained that I specifically meant PE cost. And because this will be the very last sticking point in getting people to go to mesh, this is why I believe that LL will inevitably add a PE cost to sculpts. Whether or not they should have before is a separate question. Assuming that they should have before now, it will be fair to ask (when they finally do it) why they've put it off until they're "incidentally" having trouble getting people to use mesh. Assuming that they shouldn't have when they didn't, it will be even more fair to ask why they are doing it at all. 4) Having mesh as a new option is great. But the hype surrounding mesh in the lead-up to its release tells me that someone at LL has a personal interest in getting people to use mesh that goes beyond the company's interest. Maybe if mesh fails to catch on by some point, someone is out of a job. Something like that; not to hard to imagine. 5) Look at the total timeline between when mesh was announced for release and when it was released. During what proportion of that time had people been made aware of PE costs at all, much less how they were actually going to impact the utility of mesh as compared to sculpt? PE cost is a pretty important product feature to consider, but it was the elephant in the living room that everyone chose to ignore before it was announced, easily because they did not know what, exactly it would be. I figured the elephant would be massive lag, and I said so. When PE cost was explained, it appeared to be, to me at least, nothing but a way of getting around the massive lag I had anticipated. 6) Killing sculpts, even where they are a good option, is a bottom-line issue for LL, and that is why they will do it. By the time PE costs were explained, a lot of important designers had already invested long hours into mesh products that were rendered inefficient compared to similar sculpts in terms of the PE costs. This has been a political problem between LL and mesh designers, and the inevitable resolution will be to make the corresponding sculpts somehow less efficient. Sculpt designers are less politically important than mesh designers simply because, as a group, we don't have as much money to throw around. Also, every time mesh data gets loaded to replace sculpt data, LL gets paid the mesh money and keeps the previously paid money for the sculpt data that is now practically useless in a lot of cases, and certainly will be useless in almost every case if the PE cost of sculpts can be set highly enough. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chosen Few Posted October 4, 2011 Share Posted October 4, 2011 Josh Susanto wrote: 1) I do think most sculpties are crap, and we couldn't do much worse to replace them with mesh. Yes, even some of my own. Fine. Let's be careful not to jump from discussing the limitations of the medium itself into critiquing the quality of the human-made artwork. That's really not the subject I was referring to when I said "most of what we see on the grid looks quite terrible". My point was simply that for the first several years, the system wasn't set up in a way that would enable any of us to do any differently than what we’ve all done. In many ways, it still isn't. But it's getting there. SL content, even the best of it, has a distinctive look to it. You can always tell it’s SL. This is in pretty stark contrast to just about every other platform. Show me a random game or virtual world scene, and I probably won’t be able to tell you at first glance whether it was made with Unity or Unreal or Cry Engine or what have you. It’s possible to make an incredible variety of looks with any of them. But SL always looks like SL, and that’s primarily because we’ve for so long been so limited in the things we can make its content out of. Sculpties improved things a lot over just prims, but sculpties too have a look of their own. A sculpty model, no matter how good or bad in terms of aesthetic quality, can always be identified as a sculpty model, from a mile away. Josh Susanto wrote: 2) I AM somewhat excited about mesh, but I'm not even going to touch it until people have basically run out of new negative observations to make about their various personal mesh experiences. You're going to be waiting an awfully long time. If there's one constant in SL, it's that people complain ...about EVERYTHING, especially change. Some will keep going with new versions the same old complaints for YEARS, whether they're founded or not. Heck, there are still people out there to this day who dedicate themselves to reporting "new negative observations" about Quicktime, or BVH, or various script functions, or mono, or any of the hundreds upon hundreds of once new features that have been added to SL over the years. Those same kinds of people will also continue to complain about mesh for many years to come. If you’re gonna sit around and wait for all of them to run out of breath, all I can say is good luck, and I hope you packed a big lunch. Josh Susanto wrote: 3) By "efficient", I should have explained that I specifically meant PE cost. And because this will be the very last sticking point in getting people to go to mesh, this is why I believe that LL will inevitably add a PE cost to sculpts. Whether or not they should have before is a separate question. Assuming that they should have before now, it will be fair to ask (when they finally do it) why they've put it off until they're "incidentally" having trouble getting people to use mesh. Assuming that they shouldn't have when they didn't, it will be even more fair to ask why they are doing it at all. You're probably right that the low PE of sculpties will serve as an excuse to prevent SOME people from immediately embracing mesh. But I don't think that will be the case for the long term. The smart ones will figure out that all three mediums (mesh, sculpties, and prims) all have their place, and they'll use all three accordingly. When sculpties were invented, we had these very same discussions about them. Stubborn prim users were afraid sculpties would overshadow prims, so they launched all kinds of complaints about sculpties every day. But eventually, everyone learned that prims and sculpties could and should coexist. One wasn't to replace the other. The same will be true of meshes. It's not a case of either-or. It's all of the above. As for your assumption that LL will increase sculpty PE in order to get people to use mesh, I just don't see what possible motive they'd have for that. If I'm a Linden, what the hell do I care whether you choose to build your shiny new rocket ship out of prims or sculpties or mesh? All I care about is that you have all three options at your disposal, and that all three continue to work. Linden Lab makes their money on tier fees. They want you to create content because content is the reason people own land. They hope your content will be compelling enough to attract more users, who in turn will want to buy more land. Remember, LL is just a service provider. They don't get anything extra for hosting your land if you use a mesh instead of a sculpty for a given object. It's in LL's interest simply to give you the best options they can to build your content with. That's it, and that's all. Mesh is what it is. Sculpties are what they are. LL has no incentive to care which one you use for what, beyond the obvious. Has it occurred to you that maybe the reason people at Linden Lab are excited about mesh is because it's worth being excited about? Josh Susanto wrote: 4) Having mesh as a new option is great. But the hype surrounding mesh in the lead-up to its release tells me that someone at LL has a personal interest in getting people to use mesh that goes beyond the company's interest. Maybe if mesh fails to catch on by some point, someone is out of a job. Something like that; not to hard to imagine. Careful not to join the conspiracy theorists. SL already has more than its share of those. OF COURSE there's hype surrounding mesh. It's the most fundamental and potentially beneficial change to SL that has ever happened. It simply couldn't be a bigger deal. If anything, it's been under-hyped, compared with how important it really is. Since the very first day SL went online, the single biggest criticism of it has always been that its content is all non-standard. But now, that doesn't have to be the case anymore. SL finally works the same way as everything else. Not only does this mean that the world will look and work much better than it ever has, it also means that a tremendous barrier to mass adoption has been removed. Both of these factors mean that a lot more people will be using SL than ever before. All of that is good for LL, and good for all of us. As for people losing their jobs if mesh doesn't succeed, forgive me, but I have to say I find that notion laughable. First of all, it's not even a question of "succeeding" or "not succeeding". Mesh is here, and it works. There's no measure of "success" beyond that. Second, most of the people who tirelessly worked to bring us mesh have already been let go. There are very few members of that team left still working at LL, and none of them have the power to influence policy in the way you seem to want to believe. If LL chooses to fire the remainder of the mesh team, it won't be because you chose to make that giant mesh castle in the sky out of sculpties. It'll be because that's what corporations do, for reasons that usually have nothing to do with anything that we on the outside might imagine. Corporate board rooms are crazy places, to say the least. Josh Susanto wrote: 5) Look at the total timeline between when mesh was announced for release and when it was released. During what proportion of that time had people been made aware of PE costs at all, much less how they were actually going to impact the utility of mesh as compared to sculpt? PE cost is a pretty important product feature to consider, but it was the elephant in the living room that everyone chose to ignore before it was announced, easily because they did not know what, exactly it would be. I figured the elephant would be massive lag, and I said so. When PE cost was explained, it appeared to be, to me at least, nothing but a way of getting around the massive lag I had anticipated. As a member of the private beta team, I knew mesh was coming long before it was ever publicly announced, and I can promise you, the concept of PE was made very clear to all of us, right from the start. It took a long time for them to work out the exact formula, but we all knew that in principle, there would have to be limits on mesh complexity and size. As soon as the NDA was lifted from the private beta group, all aspects of it, including the PE concept were publicly discussed. The public was made aware of literally everything that we private beta testers had known. Again, they were still tweaking the PE formula at that point, but the concept was hardly a secret. As for PE being a way to help prevent massive lag, hell yeah, that's exactly what it is. Nobody ever suggested anything different. You didn't honestly expect they wouldn't limit the amount of polygons people could use, did you? That wouldn’t have made any sense at all. SL doesn't run on magic. It runs on mathematics, just like every other computer system. Resources are finite, and have to be allocated proportionally. Since prim count has always been the measure by which all things in SL have been restricted, from scripts to textures to physics to objects themselves, it only made sense to stick with that. It's worth noting, by the way, that the amount of bang for the buck you get in terms of mesh complexity and size per equivalent prim is pretty generous. If you could only see some of the poly count constraints I've had to work under when creating assets for various games and virtual worlds over the years. The amount of complexity I can pack into the 117 prims allowed on a 512M parcel in SL is huge by comparison with many. But even setting that aside, the fact is you can now create all manner of things with any given prim amount that you never could even dream of before with just prims and sculpties. So where's the problem? Josh Susanto wrote: 6) Killing sculpts, even where they are a good option, is a bottom-line issue for LL, and that is why they will do it. What on earth gives you that idea? What possible incentive would they have to kill sculpties? Sculpties are a very important part of SL, and all signs are that they always will be. Josh Susanto wrote: By the time PE costs were explained, a lot of important designers had already invested long hours into mesh products that were rendered inefficient compared to similar sculpts in terms of the PE costs. By the time it was explained? You mean day one? As I said, it was explained, in concept, right from the beginning. As for those poor unfortunate "important designers" whose mesh products are so horribly inefficient, I'll say three things: First, I'd love to hear from some of them, and see if they're really complaining like you seem to think they are. For my part, as someone who made 100% of my living by creating content in SL for several years, I'd say I qualify as "an important designer". I'm not complaining. (At least not about this.) Second, if anyone invested time during beta into developing products that they expected to be able to sell right away upon release, they had to know they were taking a huge risk. Things change constantly during beta; that's the nature of the beast. Nobody should have expected any values to stay the same. Any beta period is for testing and feedback, not getting a head start on related product development. Third, I have to reiterate that there are plenty of selling points for a mesh object over a sculpty object aside from just prim count. A clever (and honest) marketer would seek to educate his or her customers on this. One might, for example, put something like this in one's advertising: "Both versions of this product are excellent, and both have nice low prim counts. The sculpty version has a few less prims, while the mesh version produces only a fraction of the lag, has correct physics, and looks way better. You decide which version you want, or you can buy both at a discount!" If the ONLY thing anyone cares about is having the lowest possible prim count for every single item, we might as well just draw a pretty picture of the item, and slap it on the side of a cube. There you go, one prim for everything. Me, I'd rather create the best looking, most practical items I can, with all the tools at my disposal. That means meshes for some items, sculpties for others, prims for some, and combinations of all three for still others. There's a whole new world of possibilities, and those of us who are savvy will capitalize on all of it. I for one am pretty excited about the fact that the PE of most items is going to go WAY down, right along with the rendering overhead. My film-quality Cylon avatar comes to mind right away as a great example. In its present form, it is 198 sculpties, which is why I've never put it up for sale. I've never wanted to be responsible for large numbers of half-million-poly character models walking around the grid, so I've kept it off the market, even though a great many have repeatedly asked to buy it. I estimate the mesh version will weigh in at right around 8,000 polys, and will have a PE somewhere in the double digits. Way better, all around. There are countless other models all over the grid that could similarly benefit. Josh Susanto wrote: This has been a political problem between LL and mesh designers, and the inevitable resolution will be to make the corresponding sculpts somehow less efficient. It's not an "inevitable resolution". There's been no indication whatsoever that anything of the kind will happen. Some of us feel that it would be beneficial if it did happen, but I don't think anyone here (besides you) thinks it ever actually will. I know I sure don't, at least. Josh Susanto wrote: Sculpt designers are less politically important than mesh designers simply because, as a group, we don't have as much money to throw around. Now you really do appear to be jumping on that conspiracy theorist bandwagon. Where exactly are all these oodles of money that mesh designers have to throw around, and where exactly are we supposedly throwing it? More importantly, how do I get my share? I'd really like to know, because right now, just like 99% of America, I'm barely covering my bills. Further, why do you assume there's this tremendous divide between "sculpty designers" and "mesh designers". I'm both. Most 3D artists I know are both. Again, it's not about either-or. It's about using all the tools that are available to you, in the most sensible possible way. Forgive me, but it sounds to me like you're just comfortable with sculpties, and you're uncomfortable venturing out, so you've erected this hard wall of separation in your mind. The irony is that if you've already been making sculpties, then you're already a mesh modeler. Sculpties are just a particular type of mesh, after all. The only difference is that now there are less constraints on you. I'd also like to add that I've never needed to "throw money around" in order to get my voice heard by LL. When I want to talk to someone over there, I just pick up the phone. It's not a difficult concept. Dealing with LL is just like dealing with anyone else. Treat each human being there with individual respect, and they'll treat you the same way right back. Accusing them of essentially having been bribed by some mysterious group that you're not a part of isn't exactly the way to do that. Josh Susanto wrote: Also, every time mesh data gets loaded to replace sculpt data, LL gets paid the mesh money and keeps the previously paid money for the sculpt data that is now practically useless in a lot of cases, and certainly will be useless in almost every case if the PE cost of sculpts can be set highly enough. LL doesn't make a profit on the L$ you expend by uploading stuff. Upload costs were a part of SL, even back before Lindex existed, when LL's written policy was that they would not sell L$ themselves. It even used to state in the TOS that L$ are not real currency, and have no inherent value. Nowadays, they no longer argue that L$ don’t have value, but they’re not exactly raking in the dough off of them either. When you buy L$ on Lindex, they charge you all of 30 cents, regardless of how much L$ you buy. You could buy just 10 L$ to cover one texture upload, or a million L$ to cover practically unlimited uploads of everything you want, and they'd still just take in 30 cents. The reason they charge you L$ to uploa files is not so they can get you for another 30 cents when you run out. There are two absolutely vital reasons they do it: 1. It provides a sink for the economy, which helps ensure L$ retain in-world value. Without sinks, everyone would just continue to accumulate more and more L$, as premium members have a fixed income. Inflation would run rampant. None of us would be able to sell anything, because prices would just keep going up and up and up. It would be like post WWI Germany, on steroids. By keeping the supply of currency at a relative constant, the value of currency in-world is kept relatively stable. If a skin cost you L$3000 yesterday, chances are good another one will cost you L$3000 tomorrow. RL governments do the same thing. It's very important part of any economy. 2. It keeps people from abusing server resources. If everyone could just upload all day long with impunity, LL would run out of disk space and bandwidth in no time, flat. There has to be at least a perceived cost for uploads, to keep people from operating unreasonably. Believe me, LL's not in business to squeeze you for upload fees. Those fees have always been about sinks and allocation of network resources, nothing more, nothing less. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Susanto Posted October 4, 2011 Share Posted October 4, 2011 1) People often tell me that my stuff DOES NOT look like SL. When you're able to see my museum boxes in stereo, this will only become an even more accurate statement. So far, everything I've seen of mesh still looks like SL's "distinctive look"; a look I'm still not really sure why exists to begin with. I freely admit that some of my sculpts are junk, but I have to keep selling them because people keep buying them. If they can get something better in mesh, they should get that and let me delist the item. But mesh still has an SL look that even some of my worst stuff seems not to. Feel free to fix that any time. 2) I'm sorry that I've overstated how long I will take to get into mesh. I know that there will always be all kinds of pointless gripes. I probably should have saisd I would wait until I'm confident enough that I can see why the remaining gripes are pointless, which is what I did with sculpts. 3) A) I still understand the initial resistance to sculpts. Several things about them are just plain silly. There are plenty of uses for which I would not even try to use them, and for this reason I am happy that mesh, in some form at least, has finally arrived. Sculpts didn't replace standard prim types mostly because of the physics. But I don't see any similar excuses to keep sculpt around now that mesh is here, other than, for a few things at least, it is actually slightly advantageous. I defend sculpts only on that basis, but I do defend them vehemently on the question of PE cost for items such as those I tend to provide. B) The sinks are important yes. Not only for preventing inflation in-world, but also to prevent the $L being driven down in value next to RL currencies. I get that the tier fees are the bread and butter, but the RL value of the tier fees, itself, is dependent upon how quickly LL can suck more L out of the economy and make it disappear. Just because the money "doesn't exist", "never existed" or "doesn't actually go into an account when LL collects it, but gets destroyed" does not mean that it is not revenue; it is revenue not lost due to inflation, and it is substantial. 4) Warning me not to become a conspiracy theorist is like telling a fish not to get wet. Ask anyone on the merchant's forum. People in all kinds of businesses are worried about losing their jobs for all kinds of reasons, yes. On any job I've had, if my work underperformed the company hype the way mesh has so far, I would already have cleaned out my desk. It's clear from the way the commerce team does things, though, that, maybe short of somebody burning the office down (if even then), no LIndens are going to get fired this year, no matter what. So, yeah- I should agree; the mesh team would have nothing to worry about, even if mesh did nothing but crash every sim in which it were rezzed. But do they know that? 5) When mesh was first announced, I was among the many who did not actively follow what was happening but was periodically inundated with the hype. I know people who were beta testers who clearly were not well informed as to the PE costs as compared to the technical benefits. In fact, the person who most agressively pushed me to start getting mesh ready ahead of time only comes to SL now in order to cash out and tells me that if I'm even going to bother to participate, I might as well stick to sculpties - and not due to my personal lack of ability. This person was and is a successful merchant, but seems to feel she was duped. If I had been following technical updates instead of just trying to ignore the hype (none of which mentioned PE costs), I might have been "informed" about how the lag problem was being "fixed". But that doesn't explain what happened in the case of some beta testers. Again, the problem is not mesh. The problem is fanatical mentality that has surrounded it. Hopefully people just get over it, but somehow I doubt that. Anything that remains effectively elitist will have both proponents who truly consider the costs and benefits, and others who advocate it simply because it is both new, and something that makes them more personally impressive, or because they have something personal to gain by obliquely disparaging competing products or services. 6) Not every mesh builder or mesh advocate at LL would need to see a reason to kill sculpts in order for it to be the decision they will reach. Some sculpts, at least, are too inexpensive The proliferation of free copymod sculpts is a barrier to the collection of mesh upload fees, which I have explained drived the RL value of the $L down. Their presence also contributes to the perception that their mesh equivalents might really not be all that necessary. That sculpt Alien Queen probably has to go, I grant you. I'm not sure that I've ever really seen it rez all the way. But my stone spheroids with one pucker and no seam will always be a better option than someone's mesh rock that still has things on both ends you'll want to hide, especially in mega-size. When I go mesh, I'm not going to start by making a bunch of rock spheroid megas. That's just silly. 7) PE cost, I agree, is not the only consideration, or at least should not be everyone's only consideration. Just as people will pay more for something that looks better, they will either pay more for something that looks the same at a lower PE cost, or they will pay more in PE costs for something that looks better at the same $L price. There's a hiuristic. I get it. I'm cool with that. I think it's great, in fact. That's why I know that sculpts have to be killed off. They offer too many choices, and that's not good for people who have a vested interest in one particular set of options. I'm not trying to kill mesh, myself. I'm trying to keep options open for my customers and for myself in the long-term. I am eager to see your Cylon. I'd also like to finally see an Alien Queen. Please hit that next. 8) The reasons I say that mesh builders have more money to throw around than do sculptors are several. When I lived in the US, I was also often not making ends meet, even with 3 or more jobs. If someone hadn't actually given me a computer in SF, I would have missed the first year of sculpts altogether. And yet, people complaining about budget problems in the U.S. all seem to have Photoshop and a bundle of other software I can't afford. They also seem to have processors that will run things I'm unable to run on a Sony VAIO laptop my wife and I got only about a year ago. Blender opens but does not run. Wings does not open. Cracked versions of (um) "other things" which mesh builders have begged me to take do not open or do not run. I can't even get Gimp to load up. And my current configuration actually works better than anything I had in the U.S. Even in my boss's office in downtown SF (yes, I was allowed). I'm using the 092 version of Sculptypaint, Lunapic, and, more recently, Irfanview. Some applications that are being used to produce mesh product cost more than a lot of Colombians make in a year. Again, I'm OK with that. Users deserve the best options possible if they are willing and able to spend. But the incentive for them to spend is smaller as long as people are, with any frequency, getting comparable results and effects with anything cheaper; especially with anything free. Introducing mesh is a GREAT idea because it provides more consumer options and potentially increases total revenues for anyone deriving revenue from the total SL economy, by creating a more compelling in-world experience. But now that mesh has arrived, the same argument can't be as strongly made about continuing to make sculpt available. The thinking among mesh fanatics seems to be that because the argument is not as strong, it is not valid at all. That is my issue. The eradication of sculpts raises the threshold in terms of whose products are allowed to compete by cutting out of the market a huge demographic segment that can't get the secret Illuminati digital handshake to begin step 1 by at least getting the buttons in Blender to do something (anything) when clicked. 9) When I tried treating the Lindens with more respect, I found it was counterproductive. As you can see from the merchant's forum, they have repeatedly lied and condescended not only to me, but to others. Whole threads have been deleted without explanation, and I have had to begin archiving messages on my own computer. I have learned that one important aspect of doing business with Lindens is absolutely not to trust them about anything if I don't absolutely have to. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drongle McMahon Posted October 4, 2011 Share Posted October 4, 2011 "but if it's a sculpty, I have to have 2048" I agree with almost everything you say about sculpties, but to be fair to them it should be noted that this isn't necessarily true. For a long time now, smaller sculpt maps produce smaller numbers of triangles. If I recall, this works correctly down to the 8x8 map, 4x4 = 16 vertices*, 32 triangles. Thus it is possible for a sculpty to have many fewer triangles than the simplest prim cube (108). While that's not very useful, intermediate sizes below the standard 64x64 can be useful. The 32x32 map, and equivalent oblongs, produce 512 triangles, much less than a sphere or torus prim. Unfortunately the small maps are not widely known about or used. Most stick to the standard 64x64 even when it's not needed (and some even think 128x128 is still better). So it makes no real difference to your overall conclusions. Also, perhaps deliberately, you omit consideration of the download resource cost. Here, and I think here only, sculpties are considerably more efficient (although the streaming priorities seem to be set up to disguise this). For people with fast mechines on slow connections, this can be as important as the rendering resources where meshes win every time. As you know, what is now called PE (oh no, now it's Land Impact!), was originally intended as an estimate of that cost, although it is now interpreted as an effective average (by LOD) triangle count (which happens be mathematically equivalent). I never understood the reason for that change in focus. *for simplicity. In fact it's 5x5 vertices for the plane topology etc etc... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Susanto Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 Sculpties have 1024 data points. No matter what you feed into the sculpt renderer, it will always, one way or another, assign 1024 data points to the data you provide. If you load in one pixel, it will try to assign all data points to that one set of RGB coordinates. At 64x64 (the standard) , it basically reads every other line, so a trick some people use is to reduce to 32x32 and then enlarge to defeat the asymmetry. I just load everything as 128x128 and figure I can push the data to one axis or the other as needed later, or I can cut it down into as many as 16 pieces and enlrage them all x2. There's always time to destroy potentially useful data later. I would like to load at 256x256, which is not totally impractical considering the limits of RGB. But Sculptypaint 092 only puts out 64 and 128, even though it clearly processes at 256. At least I have access to Sculptypaint 092. 093 only puts out 64x64. I've actually tried taking screenshots of the 256x256 graph and cutting them out, but you can probably imagine how well that has gone. It is nonetheless possible to enlarge 128 to some larger number and process the thing like a photograph by blurring, exploding, etc. Cutting a piece out of that can sometimes produce a result I wouldn't get just by cutting the same portion out of the smaller image. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chosen Few Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 Josh Susanto wrote: 1) People often tell me that my stuff DOES NOT look like SL. When you're able to see my museum boxes in stereo, this will only become an even more accurate statement. I've been looking over your offerings on the marketplace, and I must say, from what's pictured there, you've done some very fine work. Your photosourced (at least I assume they're photosourced; correct me if I'm wrong) relief panels and other sculpted objects look great. You've found a fantastic way of expressing the "more with less" principle that so well characterizes the quintessential SL artist, and you've added your own unique flair to it. I would agree that a lot of your work "does not look like SL" in the sense that very few, if any, other artists are doing the kinds of works that you've been doing. You've really built a great niche for yourself, and you've done it with style. It's great to see. But at the end of the day, there's no escaping that what I'm looking at are very clearly just SL objects, great looking SL objects for sure, but SL objects, nonetheless. You could take all those same screenshots, remove the backgrounds so I can't see the tell-tale SL ground textures, put the images on some random website that never once mentions Second Life, and I'd still go "Those are sculpt prims", at the very first glance. The kinds of geometric shapes you've had to work with are the same kinds of shapes we see everywhere on the grid, despite the fact that you happen to be using them in a novel fashion. There are only just so many ways you can bend a sculpty into shape, after all, and those methods broadcast themselves every time. Remove the constraints imposed by sculpty geometry, and your stuff could look like it came from anywhere. That distinctive "This could only have been SL" form factor won't have to be there anymore. You've already proven you've got a great eye for composition. Add to that the open ended freedom of form inherent to mesh modeling, and the great work you've already been able to do will only get even better. Personally, I can't wait to see what you're gonna do with it, once you do get up and running. I expect we'll see some rather remarkable works of art from you. Josh Susanto wrote: So far, everything I've seen of mesh still looks like SL's "distinctive look"; a look I'm still not really sure why exists to begin with. I'd say there are two main reasons for that. One is on us, as users, and the other is on the technology. I'll take the user part first. Existing SL artists are still in the early stages of discovery, regarding what can be done with mesh. It's natural to cling to what we already know, in the face of change. A lot of people (myself included) are right now focusing more on how we can redo our old work better than on what we can do that's brand new, that no one's ever seen before. Once people get that out of their systems, they'll start blazing new, less familiar trails. But that will take time. The technology part remains a barrier to truly breaking the SL mold altogether. We have mesh itself, but we don't yet have the things next-gen, and even last-gen, game engines have, to take full advantage of it. We don't have the simplest of tools, like light maps, bump, spec, etc., which are what help make things look so great on other platforms. We don't even have a proper material shader system, just the same circa 1998 flat-lit texture system that SL has always had. Mesh by itself will broaden the horizons considerably, in terms of the kinds of objects we can and will make. The visual quality of the world will improve by orders of magnitude, just from that alone. But until we also have a full featured graphics pipeline at our disposal to control how it's all rendered, a good portion of the present SL look will remain, in everything. Without mesh, there wouldn't be much point in developing the other stuff. Hopefully, the fact that we now have mesh will one day mean we get all the rest of it, too. Fingers crossed. Josh Susanto wrote: But mesh still has an SL look that even some of my worst stuff seems not to. Visually, there's absolutely nothing a sculpty can do that a mesh can't. It may well be that what artists' work you've seen so far just hasn't been all that special. But that's got nothing to do with the medium itself. You could create arbitrary meshes that have the exact same geometric structure as your sculpty models, apply your same textures, and they'd look 100% identical to your sculpties. From a rendering standpoint, they'd BE your sculpties. There would be no way visual way to distinguish between which ones happened to have been uploaded as sculpt maps, and which ones weren't. So there's no such thing as "mesh has a look". Josh Susanto wrote: 2) I'm sorry that I've overstated how long I will take to get into mesh. I know that there will always be all kinds of pointless gripes. I probably should have saisd I would wait until I'm confident enough that I can see why the remaining gripes are pointless, which is what I did with sculpts. Quite sensible. It's largely academic at this point in time, anyway. Third party viewers are too popular, and none of them yet can display mesh. Until they get there, there's not a whole lot of immediate practicality in spending your time making mesh items. Any investment into developing your mesh inventory is mostly an investment into the future, rather than into the now. I don't blame anyone who wants to wait until " ". Me, I'd rather not wait. But then, I'm not selling off-the-shelf products these days. So, I've got no reason not to jump into the deep end. Josh Susanto wrote: 3) A) I still understand the initial resistance to sculpts. Several things about them are just plain silly. There are plenty of uses for which I would not even try to use them, and for this reason I am happy that mesh, in some form at least, has finally arrived. Sculpts didn't replace standard prim types mostly because of the physics. But I don't see any similar excuses to keep sculpt around now that mesh is here, other than, for a few things at least, it is actually slightly advantageous. I defend sculpts only on that basis, but I do defend them vehemently on the question of PE cost for items such as those I tend to provide. If we were building a world from scratch right now, then I'd whole heartedly agree, there would be no reason to include sculpties in that world. But that's not what's going on. For better or worse, sculpties are an integral part of SL. They can't simply be done away with. There's way too much existing stake in them for that. As for why sculpties never replaced prims, the physics were part of it, yes. But it's more than just that. Sculpties are simply too poly-heavy to be practical on a large scale. Use too many of them, and your frame rate drops to a crawl. If you recall, that problem got so bad, so quickly, that it wasn't long before LL revamped sculpties, so that the lowest LOD became 6x6 instead of 8x8. This cut the poly count of all distant sculpties within view nearly in half, from 64 to 36, without much visual detriment. Sculpty lag was alleviated tremendously. But it even with that improvement, it only went form really bad to pretty bad. It'll never get to good, not when so many wasted polygons have to be there in the higher LOD's, and they do have to be there, by definition. Josh Susanto wrote: B) The sinks are important yes. Not only for preventing inflation in-world, but also to prevent the $L being driven down in value next to RL currencies. I get that the tier fees are the bread and butter, but the RL value of the tier fees, itself, is dependent upon how quickly LL can suck more L out of the economy and make it disappear. Just because the money "doesn't exist", "never existed" or "doesn't actually go into an account when LL collects it, but gets destroyed" does not mean that it is not revenue; it is revenue not lost due to inflation, and it is substantial. I can't agree with your analysis. The RL value of L$ doesn't directly affect LL's ability to collect tier fees. First, I have to believe that most people pay their fees with real money. Second, when tier is paid with L$, it really doesn't matter what the exchange rate is. LL will always take exactly as many L$ as are required to cover the US$ value. It could be L$1 or L$1,000,000 and LL would still get their real money out of it, just the same. There is an indirect dependency, though, of course. A stable economy attracts and maintains a stable user base. Those users pay tier. If the in-world economy were to tank, the dropout rate would go up. There would be less users to pay tier, so LL would make less money. It's in LL's interest to keep the economy healthy, simply because it's in our interest as users to have a healthy economy. That's all. Josh Susanto wrote: 4) Warning me not to become a conspiracy theorist is like telling a fish not to get wet. Ask anyone on the merchant's forum. Haha, point taken. I give you credit for knowing yourself. Josh Susanto wrote: People in all kinds of businesses are worried about losing their jobs for all kinds of reasons, yes. On any job I've had, if my work underperformed the company hype the way mesh has so far, I would already have cleaned out my desk. You've lost me, I'm afraid. How exactly has mesh "underperformed the company hype"? The technology does exactly what it was designed to do. It works. We can make a mesh model in just about any 3D modeling program, and bring it into SL, check. The cost associated with doing that is dependent on the amount of data required to describe and render the particular model, check. That's what was expected, and that's what was presented, right from the start. Where's the disparity? Josh Susanto wrote: It's clear from the way the commerce team does things, though, that, maybe short of somebody burning the office down (if even then), no LIndens are going to get fired this year, no matter what. So, yeah- I should agree; the mesh team would have nothing to worry about, even if mesh did nothing but crash every sim in which it were rezzed. But do they know that? I don't pretend to know what you mean by "how the commerce team does things". But I can tell you two things, with certainty: 1. Every Linden I've ever met (and I've met a lot of them over the years) has been a human being worth knowing. I don't always agree with LL's policy decisions, of course, but I do see the organization for what it is, a collection of highly talented, highly passionate individuals, who do very challenging work, and usually do it well. Further, they tend to be highly approachable. Not a single one has ever made me feel unwelcome, unwanted, or unappreciated. I firmly believe that anyone who says otherwise either just hasn't made an effort to get to know any of them, or is just plain looking for negativity. I understand the tendency to see any company as some faceless entity, which cares about nothing and no one. But that's never the reality. Companies are made up of people, and those people are just like the rest of us. 2. People have already been fired this year, and it would be ludicrous to assume nobody else will follow. Companies hire and fire all the time. LL is no different. I'm frankly stunned at some of the people who have been let go. I stopped trying to assume any rhyme or reason behind LL's personnel decisions the moment they fired Qarl. The man invented sculpties, squashed more bugs than you could count, had a lot to do with bringing us mesh, was one of the most publicly beloved figures at LL, and is just an all around great guy. Yet they let him go. It makes no sense. But then, such things rarely ever do make sense to anyone on the outside. It's arguable that they're not supposed to. If we had enough information to piece it all together, we'd be on the board. Josh Susanto wrote: 5) When mesh was first announced, I was among the many who did not actively follow what was happening but was periodically inundated with the hype. I know people who were beta testers who clearly were not well informed as to the PE costs as compared to the technical benefits. In fact, the person who most agressively pushed me to start getting mesh ready ahead of time only comes to SL now in order to cash out and tells me that if I'm even going to bother to participate, I might as well stick to sculpties - and not due to my personal lack of ability. This person was and is a successful merchant, but seems to feel she was duped. If I had been following technical updates instead of just trying to ignore the hype (none of which mentioned PE costs), I might have been "informed" about how the lag problem was being "fixed". But that doesn't explain what happened in the case of some beta testers. I don't know who your friend is, but I have no idea why anyone could possibly feel they were "duped". There was always going to be a PE cost. We all knew that. Selective hearing can be a powerful thing, though. As for why some beta testers apparently were better informed than others, that's rather obvious. Testers are human. Just because someone was allowed to participate doesn't mean they actually did, in any meaningful way, or even at all. If an individual chose not to attend meetings, not to read the announcements, and not to communicate with other more active testers, then they easily could have gone through the entire beta period without ever learning a single thing. Ever know anyone in school who was really smart, but flunked out anyway? Was that the school's fault or the student's fault? You can't blame the company when a beta tester chooses not to educate himself or herself on what they're testing, any more than you could blame a school when a student chooses not to do the course work. I'm sorry to put it in these terms, but frankly, even if PE cost had never ever been discussed (which was NOT the case), it still would have been idiotic for anyone not to assume there would be a cost of some sort associated with the complexity of each uploaded mesh. That was my very first question, in fact, when I was first informed that mesh was in development. How would they regulate it? What's to prevent someone from uploading a billion-polygon model, and bringing everyone's framerate to a standstill? Pretty much everyone else I know had similar questions, right off the bat. I don't know why your friend wouldn't have. In the very first weeklly private beta meeting I attended, which I believe was only the second or third meeting ever, PE was discussed. If I remember correctly, Pastrami Linden was leading, and he said something to the effect of, "A prim is about ___kb of data. That's equivalent to about ____ faces on a mesh..." and the discussion took off from there. Sorry, I don't remember the exact numbers. I did not attend every meeting, so I don't know the exact evolutionary steps PE took along the way to get to its present form (I know a few of them, but not all), but in the meetings I did attend, PE was almost always one of the topics. There's simply no way someone could have been paying attention through the beta and not have known about it. I remember there was this huge model of the Titanic someone had made. With just about every new revision, people would ask, "How many prims is it now?" Obviously, nobody could have asked that question if we didn't know there would be a prim equivalency for meshes. With all due respect to your friend, I don't know how she could have missed all that. I can only conclude she must not have been paying attention to much of anything. From the way you described her present attitude, it sounds to me like she's just fed up with SL right now, for who knows what reason. It happens to all of us from time to time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chosen Few Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 Had to break the post in two. Too many characters. Josh Susanto wrote: Again, the problem is not mesh. The problem is fanatical mentality that has surrounded it. Hopefully people just get over it, but somehow I doubt that. Anything that remains effectively elitist will have both proponents who truly consider the costs and benefits, and others who advocate it simply because it is both new, and something that makes them more personally impressive, or because they have something personal to gain by obliquely disparaging competing products or services. There's that odd backwards thinking again, which arguably makes SL so special. Mesh modeling is not elitist in any way. It's what every 3D artist on the planet, outside of SL knows how to do. This has been the case for decades. It's only people who grew up with prims and/or sculpties who think mesh is some newfangled thing that only the very select few can touch. The truth is, as I said before, the elites of the world are those who know how to model well with prims and sculpties. People who can do that have a skill set that 99.99% of all 3D artists in the world do not possess. The common peasants the 3D modeling world are all mesh modelers. Josh Susanto wrote: 6) Not every mesh builder or mesh advocate at LL would need to see a reason to kill sculpts in order for it to be the decision they will reach. Some sculpts, at least, are too inexpensive The proliferation of free copymod sculpts is a barrier to the collection of mesh upload fees, which I have explained drived the RL value of the $L down. There are copy/mod meshes as well. So I don't get your point. Any item in SL could be uploaded once, and then freely copied across the grid, by the entire population, whether it's a sculpty or a mesh or anything else. Upload fees are not at all relevant in the way you seem to want to believe. Josh Susanto wrote: Their presence also contributes to the perception that their mesh equivalents might really not be all that necessary. That's not an unrealistic perception. Not every sculpty can or should be replaced by a mesh. As we've discussed several times now, there are, and will continue to be, plenty of cases in which a sculpty is a better solution for a given problem than a mesh. That's perfectly fine. Nobody's ever gonna have a problem with that. Josh Susanto wrote: But my stone spheroids with one pucker and no seam will always be a better option than someone's mesh rock that still has things on both ends you'll want to hide, especially in mega-size. When I go mesh, I'm not going to start by making a bunch of rock spheroid megas. That's just silly. Why should a mesh rock (or a mesh anything else) have "things on both ends you'll want to hide"? There's absolutely no reason they ever should. I think you're letting your experience with sculpties color your preconception about what mesh modeling actually is. The whole point with mesh is that you can make any shape you want, with zero waste, zero extraneous parts. If you don't want a pucker in there, just don't put one in. If you don't want a seam, don't make one. You don't have to find ways to hide these things. They simply won't be there in the first place (unless you deliberately put them there). Regarding spheres in particular, there are lots of ways to model a sphere without poles and without a seam. SL's prim spheres are the polar kind, as are spherical sculpties. But that's hardly the only way to do it. As for things like rocks, you don't even have to approach them as a deformed sphere, the way you would with sculpty modeling. A rock can just be a rock. It doesn't need to have any correlation with primitive topology at all. Once you've gained a little experience yourself with making mesh models, you'll see what I mean. Your experience up until now with sculpties has been so specialized, you've skipped over the more general. Josh Susanto wrote: 7) PE cost, I agree, is not the only consideration, or at least should not be everyone's only consideration. Just as people will pay more for something that looks better, they will either pay more for something that looks the same at a lower PE cost, or they will pay more in PE costs for something that looks better at the same $L price. There's a hiuristic. I get it. I'm cool with that. I think it's great, in fact. That's why I know that sculpts have to be killed off. They offer too many choices, and that's not good for people who have a vested interest in one particular set of options. I'm not trying to kill mesh, myself. I'm trying to keep options open for my customers and for myself in the long-term. You had me right up until "that's why I know that sculpts have to be killed off". Everything you said before that was spot on. But again, I really don't think sculpties are going anywhere. We've got them, they're part of SL, and that's that. Their popularity will dwindle, as people begin to discover the almost infinite freedom they have with mesh that they could never even imagine with sculpties. But sculpties will still remain as an option. There's no reason to do away with them outright. Josh Susanto wrote: I am eager to see your Cylon. I'd also like to finally see an Alien Queen. Please hit that next. Ooh, good call. My old prim aliens definitely need a mesh overhaul. It had been on my "when I get around to it" list to make sculpty versions, but that was a long list. Most of it will be shredded now. The mesh versions will be way better. Josh Susanto wrote: The reasons I say that mesh builders have more money to throw around than do sculptors are several. When I lived in the US, I was also often not making ends meet, even with 3 or more jobs. If someone hadn't actually given me a computer in SF, I would have missed the first year of sculpts altogether. And yet, people complaining about budget problems in the U.S. all seem to have Photoshop and a bundle of other software I can't afford. They also seem to have processors that will run things I'm unable to run on a Sony VAIO laptop my wife and I got only about a year ago. Blender opens but does not run. Wings does not open. Cracked versions of (um) "other things" which mesh builders have begged me to take do not open or do not run. I can't even get Gimp to load up. And my current configuration actually works better than anything I had in the U.S. Even in my boss's office in downtown SF (yes, I was allowed). I'm using the 092 version of Sculptypaint, Lunapic, and, more recently, Irfanview. I'm sorry to hear you've had so much software trouble. It's hard to imagine why a system that can run SL can't also run Blender or Wings or even GIMP. SL is far more demanding than any of those programs. I've got all three on my nearly 10-year-old Dell, which I'm sure is way, way less powerful than your Vaio. They run just fine on it, as do Photoshop, Maya, etc. But SL can't run on that thing at all. There's simply no reason a laptop that was new a year ago, even if it was a low end one, shouldn't be able to run those three programs. Something's wrong with your system, and it's likely not the hardware specs. Chances are you can fix whatever's preventing those programs from running. That's really neither here nor there, though, with regard to your point about this alleged financial disparity between sculpty artists and mesh artsits. Most sculpty artists use the very same programs as most mesh artists. Some use sculptypaint, yes, but not most. You're one of only two people I've ever encountered in SL who use Lunapic, by the way. And all kinds of people use Irfanview. If the history of this forum is any indication, by far the most popular program among sculpty artists is Blender. But sculpty artists as a group make up just a tiny fraction of the entire Blender user base. What are the rest of those users doing with it? Mesh modeling. I highly doubt the financial status of the average Blender user is any different from that of the average sculpty artist who uses it. I'd be willing to bet that Blender will remain the most popular program among SL mesh artists. Most people just aren't gonna shell out $3500 for Maya or Max. I myself am a Maya user, but that doesn't mean I'm any richer than a Blender user. My software expenditures are part of my cost of doing business. After expenses, my take-home pay isn't much different from that of the average SL user, I'm sure. Josh Susanto wrote: Some applications that are being used to produce mesh product cost more than a lot of Colombians make in a year. Again, I'm OK with that. Users deserve the best options possible if they are willing and able to spend. People use those very same applications to make sculpties. So I just can't see your point. Josh Susanto wrote: But the incentive for them to spend is smaller as long as people are, with any frequency, getting comparable results and effects with anything cheaper; especially with anything free. Sure, but the vast majority of free programs that can make sculpties can also make arbitrary meshes. So again, I don't see where you're getting this assumption that mesh modelers are somehow richer than sculpty modelers. Josh Susanto wrote: Introducing mesh is a GREAT idea because it provides more consumer options and potentially increases total revenues for anyone deriving revenue from the total SL economy, by creating a more compelling in-world experience. But now that mesh has arrived, the same argument can't be as strongly made about continuing to make sculpt available. The thinking among mesh fanatics seems to be that because the argument is not as strong, it is not valid at all. That is my issue. So dismiss the fanatics the same way all reasonable people dismiss all fanatics, and call it a day. Those people don't control anything. If they choose not to make sculpties, fine. It doesn't affect you or me in any way. Josh Susanto wrote: The eradication of sculpts raises the threshold in terms of whose products are allowed to compete by cutting out of the market a huge demographic segment that can't get the secret Illuminati digital handshake to begin step 1 by at least getting the buttons in Blender to do something (anything) when clicked. OK, let's say there are people out there who just absolutely cannot use anything but Sculptypaint, because they've got some kind of chip in their head that is programmed to explode if they so much as look at another program. Yeah, those people wouldn't be able to use mesh. What's their fate going to be? They'll just keep right on making sculpties with Sculptypaint. This threat you perceive regarding "the eradication of sculpts" is entirely in your own mind. There's been no indication whatsoever that anything of the kind is ever going to happen. So why keep worrying about it? Josh Susanto wrote: 9) When I tried treating the Lindens with more respect, I found it was counterproductive. As you can see from the merchant's forum, they have repeatedly lied and condescended not only to me, but to others. Whole threads have been deleted without explanation, and I have had to begin archiving messages on my own computer. I have learned that one important aspect of doing business with Lindens is absolutely not to trust them about anything if I don't absolutely have to. I don't know who you talked to or what you said. I also don't put a whole lot of stock in the negativity that people harp about on forums. It's all too easy for, "_____ Linden told me something a year ago that was true then but is no longer true today," to be come, "____ Linden lied to me," and then everyone jumps on the bitchfest bandwagon. That kind of mob mentality happens all the time, and it's frankly disgusting. If you've got a legitimate grievance with a company, the way to resolve it is to talk directly to that company, not to bitch about it on forums (especially ones that company employees don't even read). It would never occur to me to jump online and complain about LL, or Adobe, or Autodesk or even Domino's Pizza, or any other company with whom I do business. If I have a problem, my first instinct is to call the company up, speak with a real human being with whom I can forge a bond, and work it out. That's the mentality I apply, and my dealings with LL have all been positive. Think maybe there's a pattern there? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chosen Few Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 Drongle McMahon wrote: "but if it's a sculpty, I have to have 2048" I agree with almost everything you say about sculpties, but to be fair to them it should be noted that this isn't necessarily true. For a long time now, smaller sculpt maps produce smaller numbers of triangles. If I recall, this works correctly down to the 8x8 map, 4x4 = 16 vertices*, 32 triangles. Thus it is possible for a sculpty to have many fewer triangles than the simplest prim cube (108). While that's not very useful, intermediate sizes below the standard 64x64 can be useful. The 32x32 map, and equivalent oblongs, produce 512 triangles, much less than a sphere or torus prim. Unfortunately the small maps are not widely known about or used. Most stick to the standard 64x64 even when it's not needed (and some even think 128x128 is still better). So it makes no real difference to your overall conclusions. Thanks, Drongle. I was not aware that smaller maps can now produce lower poly sculpties. That's good to know. I think you're right that it probably doesn't make a ton of difference, though, as the vast majority of sculpt maps out there are 64x64. Drongle McMahon wrote: Also, perhaps deliberately, you omit consideration of the download resource cost. Here, and I think here only, sculpties are considerably more efficient (although the streaming priorities seem to be set up to disguise this). Nah, it wasn't a deliberate omission. I didn't think of it. But now that you've brought it up, I'd love to discuss it. Please enlighten me if I'm mistaken, but I'm having a hard time understanding how it could always remain true that sculpties are more efficient downloaders than meshes, in practice, and at real scale. Take that Greek column previously discussed, for example. As a sculpty model, it would be seven assets. As a mesh, it's just one. Can we really say with certainty that it takes less to download seven unique sculpt maps than it does to download one mesh? I don't know enough about the mesh data set to answer that intelligently, but I'm hoping that you do. Drongle McMahon wrote: For people with fast mechines on slow connections, this can be as important as the rendering resources where meshes win every time. Initially, perhaps. But that's just temporary. Once the scene has loaded, rendering is far more important than streaming, and remains so until the scene fundamentally changes. If someone's doing a ton of traveling around the grid, or if they're in a place where new objects are constantly rezzing and derezzing, then download speed would be of paramount importance. But in more typical use cases, render speed is going to be the chief factor that makes or breaks the experience. Drongle McMahon wrote: As you know, what is now called PE (oh no, now it's Land Impact!), was originally intended as an estimate of that cost, although it is now interpreted as an effective average (by LOD) triangle count (which happens be mathematically equivalent). I never understood the reason for that change in focus. I was actually going to mention that, but some of my previous posts were so long, I deleted what I'd written about it, to save characters. Yes, back in the beginning, it was "streaming cost", if I remember correctly. The numbers were still understood to represent the equivalency for prims, but it was the cost to stream those prims, rather than the cost to render them. I always considered it to be about rendering costs as well, though, no matter what the name was. Generally speaking, a mesh that costs more to stream will also cost more to render, since the amount of included triangles is what's going to determine the weight of both. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drongle McMahon Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 With the original implementation of sculpties, you would have been correct - smaller maps were interpolated to get the full 1024 vertices (for sphere/torus toplogy). However, that changed when the oblong sculpties were introduced. If you need convincing, try some smaller sculpt maps and look at the results in wireferame view*. I think I understand that you use clever image manipulations of sculp maps which likely require you to work with larger images. However, in the end, only the same subset of pixels taken from the 64x64 will be sampled from a larger map. If there were a simple way to remove the 12288 redundant pixels from a 128x128 map, the result should be indistinguishable. Unfortunately, this is not a function available in normal image manipulators. Thus I can understand your use of the larger maps. There is another factor that probably affect the download size of sculpt maps. In many, the unused majority of the pixels in the 64x64 map are set at values between the adjacent pixels. If instead they are set to the same value as an adjacent pixel, or even all to the same value, the file becomes much more compressible by a losslees compression algorithm. I can't test this vwith the jpeg2000 in the veiwer, but it works with png, and I would be surprised if it doesn't work with jpeg2000. Once again, there is no simple function to do this in image manipulators and it is generally too tedious to do by hand. I guess the reduction to 32x32 and rexpanding to 64x64 achieves this if it's done without interpolation, but it would destroy the extra pixel row/column used in the unstitched toplogies (I always use plane). *Here is a table of the vertex numbers for different map sizes. h and w are the map dimensions in pixels, s and t are the quad dimensions (whatever the stitching type). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drongle McMahon Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 "...how it could always remain true that sculpties are more efficient downloaders than meshes..." Well, sculpt maps should be 3 bytes per vertex before compression, but the wasted pixels make them 12 bytes/vertex. That excess can be reduced by suitable treatment of the wasted pixels (see my post above). Meshes are minimally 16 bytes per vertex, more for any sharp edges, UV seams or materials, and still more for LOD and physics shapes. See this diagram for details - all the stored values are 16-bit. Both the sculpty and the mesh data get compressed, and that seems to be quite effective for meshes with rectangular parts that replicate position and, especially, normals. However, that's the same for both, and the more precise numbers of meshes are probably generally harder to compress. To me that makes meshes always more expensive for the same vertices. Of course where the more efficient mesh has less vertices, all bets are off. If someone can tell me how to get the actual sizes of dowloaded data for images and mesh assets out of the cache (not the actual data, of course!!!), It would vbe very interesting to compare these exactly to answer such questions. "Once the scene has loaded, rendering is far more important than streaming" Yes, it all depends on type of use, I guess. My experience is commuting between my two land plots. The cache always has to refill when I go back and forth. I also travel around. So for me, on my slow connection, the download cost is definitely much more important. For others, it will be the exact opposite. What was called streaming cost is now called download weight, which is still really the same thing. It is still based on the data size of the LOD meshes. However, the conversion to PE is done by estimating the triangle count from that data size, and applying a limit to the total number of triangles that can be visible on a sim for certain viewer settings. So although it is calculated from the download data size, it is conceptually interpreted as a measure of rendering engine load. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Void Singer Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 injects a small reminder that that parametric data is not the only thing streamed, also streamed are all "prim" properties. I have neither numbers nor percentages for that data, but it is something that will scale the differences between any format downward. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chosen Few Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 Drongle McMahon wrote: Of course where the more efficient mesh has less vertices, all bets are off. Yup, that was my point, exactly. Considering that a mesh model can have potentially hundreds, or even thousands, of times less vertices in it than a sculpty model, it's pretty hard to say that either one is always going to win or lose. For the most part, I do think meshes will come out ahead, though, given the numbers you provided. Assuming a mesh model is even reasonably well made, it's hard to envision a scenario in which the sculpty version would win. Let's apply your numbers to that Greek column example: 7 sculpties x 1024 vertices x 12 bytes = 84K1 mesh x 750 vertices x 16 bytes = ~11KEven if all four LOD levels, and the physics mesh were identical in size to the highest LOD (which of course they're not; they're much smaller) the mesh model would still weigh 35% less than the sculpty model. Apply the math to something more expansive like my Cylon, and it gets even nuttier: 198 sculpties x 1024 vertices x 12 bytes = ~1.6 MB1 mesh x (estimated) 7000 vertices x 16 bytes = ~109KAgain, multiply by 5, to more than cover all the LOD levels and physics, and the mesh data comes out to less than a third of the sculpty data. But of course, there will be a LOT of models that won't be well made. In another thread I posted in just a few hours ago, someone was asking for help with a very simple model. I noticed right away that the author's first attempt had more than double the amount of polygons it needed. That sort of thing is likely to happen all over the place. But on the other hand, there are always going to be tons of sculpty models that have way too many sculpties in them, too, so the comparison may be a wash, in that regard. Average SL users are nothing if not wasteful. (I did post a tutorial in that thread, of course, to show how to make the same object, with the minumum amount of polys. Hopefully, at least SOME readers, will take the principle to heart, and apply it to their future models.) Steerng this back to PE for a second, with the above in mind, I'd be willing to bet that more than 90% of the people whining about PE would realize their worries are totally unnecessary, if they'd just learn to model more efficiently. Really, if someone's model has more polys than it needs, they've got no one to blame than themselves that the PE cost is too high. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Susanto Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 This has been the most (potentially) useful discussion of mesh I have seen anywhere, yet. Thanks to all of you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rolig Loon Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 I agree. I have been just sitting back and reading for the past several posts, soaking it all in. This has helped me get my head around several big questions as I move gradually into the mesh world. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drongle McMahon Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 Pretty much right, except that the compressed sculpt maps should be more like 3 bytes per vertex instead of 12 if the unused pixels are all made the same color. That might redress the balance a bit. By the way, what is a Cylon? Is it somewhere we can look a it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Medhue Simoni Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 Reading is 1 thing, doing is completely another. To really understand, you have to do. You will learn even more by actually making a mesh. Plus, it is my experience that everything that I sit down and make has it's own unique qualities. Things you would have never considered before are now not only possible, but you'll end up prefering. These are not things you will ever read about. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rolig Loon Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 Medhue Simoni wrote: Reading is 1 thing, doing is completely another. To really understand, you have to do. You will learn even more by actually making a mesh. Plus, it is my experience that everything that I sit down and make has it's own unique qualities. Things you would have never considered before are now not only possible, but you'll end up prefering. These are not things you will ever read about. Oh, I'm not concerned about making a mesh object. I'm not a professional 3D modeller like Chosen, but I can make a passable mesh object in Blender now. I'm concerned about the economics and social environment for mesh in SL..... about whether it's worth my time and energy to start uploading mesh now, whether I ought to wait, whether I ought to give up on sculpties, etc. That's what I was asking about in each of my posts in this thread. Thanks to the very thoughtful exchanges here, I am much more confident now about moving ahead. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chosen Few Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 Agreed. Not only has it been useful, it's been highly enjoyable. Where we've had disagreement, everyone's calmly and informatively discussed their views, and presented the facts as they understand them, without negativity of any kind. It's been a perfect thread so far. From my point of view, this is the best welcome back to the forums I could have asked for. Thanks, everyone, for that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Void Singer Posted October 6, 2011 Share Posted October 6, 2011 Drongle McMahon wrote: [...] By the way, what is a Cylon? Is it somewhere we can look a it? seriously? wow. I dunno about Chosen's model I think he posted a pic many moons ago, but.... cylons in images and in context Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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