How do I increase the detail of a blender object before I import it?

[Myra Wildmist]

I'm having level of detail issues with small objects I'm importing to sl. They look all chunky when I zoom out. I've set the LOD to high when I import, but that's not helping. I think I have to increase the detail of the objects in blender before I export them, but I'm not sure how to do that.

How do I increase or change the detail of blender objects?

 

Thanks.

[Myra Wildmist]

After some work and research, I think I figured it out. It doesn't seem to be possible to change the detail of an object after you've changed it, but when you first create it in blender hitting F6 brings up details settings. I set my band up to 128 vertices and that's better.

[Luc Starsider]

I may be misunderstanding what you actually mean, but the trick is to make separate LOD meshes, and specifying these on upload. This way, you decide how your object is going to look at different LODs in SL.

- Luc -

[Myra Wildmist]

Hi, Luc. I think the issue is I don't know how to change the LOD in Blender, if that's what you're referring to. I set the LOD to high when I import objects, but that doesn't help for everything I import. How do I set the LOD in blender? Do you have a link you can refer me to?

[hibit Spad]

You don't actually "set" LOD in blender.  If you want more detail you add more vertices.

 

Now having said that there is this great little modifier (under the modifiers options)  that is refered to as subserf but is acually labeled as "subdivision surface."  
This modifier will automatically add vertices to round and smooth your surface shape. 

 

btw it is posssible to create different dae files for each leverl of SL LOD  and upload each instead of having SL make the lower LODs for you.

[Myra Wildmist]

Thank you, everyone. I finally got my brain wrapped around this. My mental roadblock was happening at the upload process where it was asking about the 4 LOD. I just didn't really understand that I was actually uploading 4 different ones.

This post helped a lot:

http://www.demonkiddesign.co.uk/blog/

(A special thanks to Keli Kyrie for sending me to that blog.)

[DaddyStickler]

On 3/29/2012 at 7:53 PM, Myra Wildmist said:

Thank you, everyone. I finally got my brain wrapped around this. My mental roadblock was happening at the upload process where it was asking about the 4 LOD. I just didn't really understand that I was actually uploading 4 different ones.

This post helped a lot:

http://www.demonkiddesign.co.uk/blog/

(A special thanks to Keli Kyrie for sending me to that blog.)

That url is gone

[Myra Wildmist]

On 7/8/2019 at 1:29 PM, DaddyStickler said:

That url is gone

Sorry, Daddy. The post is very old.

[Jessica4u2]

On 8/26/2019 at 1:43 PM, Myra Wildmist said:

Sorry, Daddy. The post is very old.

Wayback Machine to the rescue... https://web.archive.org/web/20120625100028/http://www.demonkiddesign.co.uk/blog/?cat=22

[Kyrah Abattoir]

On 3/29/2012 at 10:37 PM, hibit Spad said:

You don't actually "set" LOD in blender.  If you want more detail you add more vertices.

 

Now having said that there is this great little modifier (under the modifiers options)  that is refered to as subserf but is acually labeled as "subdivision surface."  
This modifier will automatically add vertices to round and smooth your surface shape. 

 

btw it is posssible to create different dae files for each leverl of SL LOD  and upload each instead of having SL make the lower LODs for you.

Which you should never use on your "final" model output, your final model should be as optimized as possible, and while it is perfectly fine to use subdivision modeling during your creation process, all those wasted triangles that subdivision will add in many areas where they don't contribute to the object's shape should be removed.

So yeah, bad advice.

[ChinRey]

15 minutes ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

So yeah, bad advice.

This is a good example why we shouldn't necro threads here. This one and the blogpost it links to date back to 2012. Nobody knew how to make good SL mesh back then. I have a lot of respect for the early SL meshologist and the time and effort they spent trying to untangle the mess and all the info from that time is likely to be hopelessly outdated by now.

[OptimoMaximo]

55 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

This is a good example why we shouldn't necro threads here. This one and the blogpost it links to date back to 2012. Nobody knew how to make good SL mesh back then. I have a lot of respect for the early SL meshologist and the time and effort they spent trying to untangle the mess and all the info from that time is likely to be hopelessly outdated by now.

Well, I'd say that regardless of the time this stuff was posted/put online, such advice is bad for any game related content creation, whilst one can argue that in the meantime poly budgets have increased overtime in games, SL has never gotten out of the early 2000's types of polygon budgets scenarios in regard to its technology, reason why it performs like it does now.