Rahkis Andel

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/avastar/the-second-life-skeleton/ Yes, you're right. It does work that way. I can't really say any more than that article already does.

This workflow demo was made for another user here, but it fits well into this thread. The .Blend file is freely available in my public Dropbox as long as I feel like keeping it up. Use it however you wish with or without attribution. It can be useful to play with other's work first hand. Enjoy, and bring your own music -- It's pretty boring without some background noise in my opinion.

Codewarrior Congrejo wrote: Cute lil video Rahkis. Made me chuckle (especially the repetetive rotations ) Good 'baby'-start (to use your expression) You should add it to my topo tutorial. Because it's just another good proof of how little faces one needs, with the right topo, to make certain shapes =) PS: you can add music from youtube's list to it, in case you can't upload an own track along. (it's in the youtube video edit options. They have a fairly big list) Annoying side-note: their copyright protection stuff repetetive cancels my uploads with tracks friends made, telling me this would be an existing track of someone else. For the sake of it we even tried it with recording our own voices and randomly ending up with such fail-notice lol. Anyways, if ya wonna spice it acoustically up, just grab something from their list. Thanks, I had no idea! I appreciate the feedback. And also, that's a good idea -- I'll add it to your thread.

I am not a Maya user, but I can answer your question: Yes. Maya does allow you to copy weights. The thing about Blender is, if you don't like how it works today, wait a few months and check again. It progresses impressively fast and it can change based on user feedback instantaneously, unlike paid software. Of course, that's best-case-senario. Often new functionality is someone's pet project that they can only work on in their spare time, and in that case certain new developments can take far longer than you'd expect in paid software. As you can see, it's in the eye of the beholder. I'm not trying to sell, Blender, of course. Maya is well worth the price if you are good enough to make money with it!

I have made you a 10 minute pair of pants in Blender: You can follow along with my 10 minute workflow demonstration to creating them yourself: I've always wanted to make a video tutorial, so this workflow demonstration is kind of my first baby step towards that goal. I hope that despite the lack of narration, the annotations and screencast keys will be enough guidance. The .Blend file is freely available in my public Dropbox as long as I feel like keeping it up. Use it however you wish with or without attribution. It can be useful to play with other's work first hand.

It will be a mystery for the ages.

Yes, that's totally fine. I can see that there are some flipped normals, though. That's what those shading artifacts are. Either they are flipped normals or you have duplicate verts. You can select all verts (press A) and find "Remove doubles" in your toolbar (Press T for the toolbar). You should check out Codewarrior's tutorial a page back on topology, though. You are going to have deformation issues with perfectly grid like topology as you have there. Plus it could use some heavy optimizing.

Sorry, when I said wireframe, I meant with wires enabled rather than wireframe mode. Like this: Edit: Bah, hopefully that isn't too small to see.

A wireframe screenshot would help me visualize what you mean. When you say "connect them all", I'm not sure if you are refering to an open ended object or duplicate vertices in the same object or something else.

It shouldn't really matter...The avatar is a totally enclosed shape and yet it is weighted to move and bend without collapsing on itself. the inside verts of your clothes should do the same. Try recalculating the normals of your mesh -- it's very likely when you created the inner faces, you created them flipped. That would definitely cause the problem you'r speaking of. Edit: Select all verts and press Ctrl+N to recalculate normals in blender. I'm not sure what software you're using.

Perrie Juran wrote: Trying to make rhyme or reason of this stuff sometimes is mind boggling. When Mesh was introduced it brought my computer to a crawl also. A 75% plus hit in performance. I did good to get 5 FPS on some SIMs. Several JIRA's with many people here and a Linden Dev trying to find a solution. No one was ever able to discern a cause or a solution. I probably did 20 clean installs trying all kinds of Viewers. The Dev even obtained the exact same GPU I have and could not duplicate my problem. So I limped ahead with Firestorm Beta (pre-mesh) for at least 6 months, maybe longer. Last winter I decided to upgrade my computer from Win XP to Win 7. All my problems vanished. And I now get higher frame rates then I did before Mesh was introduced. Same exact hardware. It really can drive a person nuts! Unless you were using Windows XP 64 bit, you transitioned from a 32 bit to a 64 bit operating system which greatly expands your system memory potential. If you had a pretty decked out system, you may have had more ram/vram/etc. than WinXP could address and after upgrading to Win7, all of a sudden you had all this unused potential unlocked. Asides from that, very true. There are just so many variables at play in Second Life that it really can drive you nuts.

Icarus Lytton wrote: Okay I'm going to write a nice and long reply to this: I tested a lot of different viewers - Singularity is the only one that didn't have the problem. Areas that would lag massively on Firestorm, run butter smooth on Singularity. The fact that it runs on V1 code kinda shows me the problem lays with the viewer code and how it handles mesh in memory. Also, I don't really buy that whole "mesh has always existed so it shouldn't be different" etc. Why? - prims are saved in memory with text - what is saved is the UUID of the textures and all the settings of said prim. The viewer basically applies these settings to the prim and since the prim is hardcoded, it doesn't have to be cached as mesh - sculpties = cached as a texture, NOT polygons. - avis and everything else mesh = hardcoded into the viewer. User-made mesh is loaded in memory as mesh - not as text, not as textures - so it IS the first time the viewer has to constantly load and unload mesh into memory. I also did quite a few tests with my friend and we found out the following: It's not about how complex the mesh is. It's a problem with how it caches it. I spawned about (and I'm not kidding) 500 mesh items with each item having over 30k polygons. that's 15 million polygons and I got 45fps. I THEN zoomed in, hiding my avi (and its mesh hair, boots, etc.) and zoomed back out and the exact same scene suddenly saw my fps drop to 0.8fps. And it remained there indefinitely. Please someone explain to me how this is NOT a viewer problem - because it seems to me that when I zoomed out and it had to load the mesh on my body, it started to spaz out. I've tried a million different settings, all sorts of stuff, and it all boils down to this: the performance is completely random and when I get 80fps one minute, I'll get 1fps another minute when nothing new has appeared. My graphics card isn't taxed, my memory hasn't run out - yet my entire PC is down to a crawl. It's like some bad code in the viewer is sending stuff in an endless loop. So does anyone have any ideas now? I do appreciate all the answers but it's not the solution and this lag shouldn't happen so drastically. Not to say you don't have a potentially valid point, but your experiement wasn't exactly scientific. You didn't use a controlled setting, you're not giving us all the variables, such as how you set your LODs and you have no point of comparison to prove or disprove that the mesh makes a difference. It's possible that when you zoomed back out, it tried to switch to the highest level of detail on all the items at once and crashed. That isn't exactly an unexpected consequence of doing what you did in that test case. Did you reuse the highest LOD for each item or did you generate different LODs for each? Would you have gotten the same result with sculpties? Did you try this test on all of the viewers you have? I don't know -- It's possible that it is a viewer issue, but I can't corroborate that with personal expeirence, so I'm not really able to offer much as far as ideas asides from my initial thoughts.

You probably don't want persistently meeting edges/faces at all. While they might loom fine in some situations, there is no telling how they will be interperated. It could be made more chaotic by the differing latencies of sim hopping. Who knows? Its possible LL is testing new stacking order code. It could be that it really does perform better on aditi.

Ciaran Laval wrote: Chosen Few wrote: The ONLY way to ensure good performance is to make sure the poly counts in the models you buy are never any higher than they need to be. If a model is very poly-heavy, just don't buy it Look for an alternative that is better made (or better yet, learn to make it yourself, and you'll never ever have this problem again). How can a consumer find this information though? How can a consumer gain the knowledge to know what to look for when shopping for products? That is an excellent question. Honestly, I think that there are some simple and not so simple things LL could do to help guide the consumer in the right direction, but I just woke up from a nap, so I'm not really lucid enough yet to propose such ideas seriously. Long story short: In the case of Second Life, It's in the hands of the end user to educate itself... I think I speak for all software developers simultaneously when I say "We're doomed."

From what you say, it is not a bug in how mesh is loaded. If that were the case, it would happen to everyone and it would only affect you while the mesh was loading. Meanwhile, you say it doesn't just go away. My guess is that it is isolated to one or more items in your house. Unfortunately, content creators have an unprecedented freedom to upload things that completely disregard the limitations of a game engine (much less an online game). It is possible the item has an okay LI too; LI says nothing about how the item is handled by your graphics card. Check the wireframe of every item in your house and you'll probably find one that is much denser than the others. Or maybe it is something about the item that has nothing to do with the fact that it is mesh, like a lot of large materials or inefficient physics shapes. It's a bit of a laundry list of things to look for, but that's why you must be careful when purchasing things, mesh or otherwise. Edit: Regarding what the person above me said while I was typing my response, I have largely already said my peace, but I will expand it a bit. This issue is complicated by ignorance and human error. The plain fact is, mesh doesn't specifically lag anything. To say that "Mesh Lags" or to imply that there is a conspiracy by builders to impose mesh to make Second Life lag for those who don't have expensive computers is rediculous and frankly, stupid. The truth is that content creators are not usually knowledgable game asset designers. An ignorant content creator can and usually will create an item that is much less resource efficent than a prim. Prims are a rediculous concept if you think about it -- All you can do is keep mashing them together and adding textures to them until they look the way you want. Meanwhile, modeling for a game engine is all about preserving as much geometry as possible while still getting the shape you want. It basically contradicts good game design. It's frankly impressive that Second Life could ever run on anyone's computor. In fact, my experience is that it hasn't. I had to buy a new computor for Second Life to run anything close to smoothly and that was before mesh was introduced. Since then, every mesh item that I've personally bought has loaded much faster than prim objects, has had lower LI and I have never singled one out as the cause of lag. What does that say to you? Experienced mesh creators can and do make items that look and perform infinitely better than prim products. Unfortunately, the ignorant ones I mentioned above are probably more the norm right now. So, what does this all mean? Buyer beware: If you can't demo it before you buy it, don't buy it. Mesh is something that needs to be embraced so that the ignorance that causes the "lag" can be cured by experience and new knowledge. Cheers. *Edited again to remove some irrelevant hyperbole.

It's only relevant in that you asked them to create a material and texture. In cycles, I would probably add the texture directly as a node or as the color value rather than go into the separate texture menu. That and it looks different, which might be confusing. Maybe not, but hey, no unsaying it now.

One more thing to mention is that the materials/texture menus look and to a degree work differently depending on whether you are in cycles or blender internal (selectable at the top of your screen). Most beginners will be using BI since it's the default choice, but it's still worth noting.

This is one of those instances where a screenshot could say more than you ever could. All I can really do is answer your final question: "No, It works fine for me." What 3d software are you using to model this? What viewer are you using and what version? What are your computer specs? Can you provide a screenshot of the wireframe of your model? Are you trying to upload on the beta grid or the main grid? That aught to get us started with a solution.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Some-riggid-mesh-start-Flickering-and-Stretching/m-p/1773653/highlight/true#M18402 This question has come up before, most notably in the thread above (since I remember commenting in it). I don't know that it was ever "resolved" per-se, but one of the answers within may help you where it didn't help them. Otherwise, I'd suggest typing in "flicker" in the search for this board. I saw a few other threads that sounded promising based on that search, but I didn't bother looking into them. Good luck and come here first if you have any other questions about mesh. No one will look at you like you have 3 heads here. Maybe just 2.

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: Ciaran Laval wrote: Obviously I don't want to cause chaos by being wasteful with resources! A simple prim box in SL has 108 triangular faces (on the highest LoD), Well...That's surprising. I will alter my advice above to the following: The rule of thumb here should be "moderation": Clearly the basic SL prim square is unforgivably dense for it's purposes as a visible object, so stick to mesh for everything except physics shapes. If you need a simple physics shape, choose the simplest prim object that suits the shape you need. If you need a complex one, use a mesh physics shape that is as optimal as possible while still retaining enough shape to satisfy it's purpose.

I don't quite understand what your issue is by your explaination, but it may (or may not) help you to know that copy-paste has been added globally to Blender. You can now ctrl+c ctrl+v between two completely different blend files if you wish. It's less finnicky than linking/appending from another scene when you know you want whatever you are linking in to be independant of the original.

I guess I have to get something done today rather than playing in the sandbox with my pail and spade.

See? Sometimes there is an easy answer.

Drongle McMahon wrote: However, there are two risks. First, they can get unlinked. Second, they can get stretched (with edit-linked) so that they don;t satisfy the rules any more and the weight jumps. So for items with mod permissions, they are not very safe. That's rather disconcerting. I wouldn't have thought of that. This sounds like a case of "buyer beware". A lot of content creators could be inadvertantly selling at one LI and as soon as you edit it in a certain way, boom.

Knowing someone more knowledgable than me will probably step in and elaborate or correct me, here is my opinion: If the shape is really so simple that a prim will suffice, I see no reason for the extra overhead of uploading mesh. It's the same thing for physics shapes, if not moreso (I believe the physics system is optimized to use the prim cube). If a cube is all you need, use a cube. For the sake of using one thing over another, Mesh is more an alternative to dealing with sculpties than it is to prims. Also, if you need something with a lot of variance in it's topography, a triangle based mesh physics object will be usually be preferable. Edit: To directly answer the question, focus on optimizing the physics cost. That will have the largest effect on all parties involved.