York Jessop

Thanks Gaia, I understand the part about them not needing to be next to each other (Thanks too Drongle I understood most of your post, I just had to read it about 8 times ) I guess what I'm not sure about is how it relates to the same number of texture faces per lod. Say I have 6 materials/textures on my high LOD model, Do I need to have the exact same materials textures on each lod, for example

Is it possible that as the resolution is lowered the UV outlines become wider to fit into the lower number of pixels?

Thanks Could you translate Gaia? Google Translate failed.

Me too sort of, I'm guessing that if you have 8 'textures' or 'uvmaps' each LOD needs to have the same number? Im not sure if they need to be relatively in the same place tho?

To see the edit functions, on the log in screen where it says basic, change that to advanced. After you have done that, click 'Me' in the top left corner, then 'Preferences'. In the new window click the Advanced Tab then tick the 3 options shown. You should see Advanced and Developer menus along the top of your window now, you can find everything you need in those.

Excellent news, plan A is steaming ahead

Yeah I noticed the Linking/Script thing after reading the forums today, enlightening stuff Ill have to run some further tests to see if uploading my builds in sections will give better PE results, I think it will, even with scripts because of the no LOD on interiors which will save an immense amount of PEage. I was wondering however, if its 8 UVMaps per section, if I say linked 2 sections would I still be able to have 8 per section? come to think of it, will it work if i upload an exterior with LOD and link it to an interior without? I probably need to get back on the grid and do some more tests lol!

Does the same apply if you link 200 normal prims inworld and add 1 script to it? EDIT: no it doesnt... so a comparison: 10 x 1PE mesh objects linked = 11PE ... with scripts = 21PE 10 x 1PE regular prims linked = 10PE ... with scripts = 10PE A reply from a Linden about why this is would be nice. Lets hope its unintentional.

I think I must be missing something here, from this thread I assumed linksets produced less PE, however i just tested this in world by linking a 8PE mesh to a 2PE mesh, after its linked i got 11PE lol. Yet going by Drongles test, he linked 200 2PE cubes? or were they simply 1PE rounded up to 2? with them linked it provided them with the correct linked value? If so then whats the point of the test? who is actually going to link heaps of under 2PE meshes? Once you start linking builds with 'normal' PE's like say 10, 12, 8, 10 (40) you would end up with 42+4 per script giving you a PE of 46? if you added another script it would give you a PE of 50? (am i getting this right?) So in effect scripts only double PE in cases where massive amounts of 1PE or less objects are linked into a linkset? Im not saying that scripts should add to each object in linkset, they should count once for the whole linkset, im just saying that only in very specific circumstances do scripts actually 'double' PE.

Ive been wondering this too Medhue, as a buildings er builder I have been considering using linked meshes. One of the main reasons is how I have started constructing my buildings differently, instead of a mesh basically having interior rooms and exterior walls all connected into 1 model, I have decided to do an exterior 'shell' with an interior 'shell' instead. This makes it alot easier to actually work on but I also had the idea of uploading them seperately, as you would never really see the interior from distance it would allow me to use no LODs at all on the interior and just having to do exterior LODs it also makes texture matching a much more simple process. The only thing putting me off right now is that i intend to use scripts, which really makes the linking option a no go because of the way it doubles per script.

I believe Charlar mentioned they are currently working on all the documentation to put all the complexities into perspective but I think you are absolutely right about the comprehension between 'residents' and 'pro builders'. I wouldnt consider myself to be a pro builder but compared to the average resident I know a lot more about meshes than i did 3 weeks ago, having not touched any mesh building tools or anything before then I have spent a great deal of time and effort just learning how to model, uv and bake meshes, the import process I feel right now is as complex and time consuming to understand as actually learning the 3D application and thats really saying something. Most of my understand thus far has come from testing different things on the mesh beta grid, how PE works, how scaling affects PE, how LODs affect PE, how linking works and even though I have a basic grasp on these different methods im still far from understanding it properly, when I think how the average resident is going to feel when mesh starts being sold i shudder with expectations of spending as much time on customer service than i will on actually building. Lets hope this new documentation can shed light on meshes for resident and pro builder alike!

Drongle McMahon wrote: Just for you, I did: 200 cube meshes, 200 prims, PE = 200; link them -> 200 prims, PE = 101; add script -> 200 prims, PE = 202. Edit, misread the middle 101PE Well that doesnt make any sense at all! But neither does linking 200 prims into 101 PE, what gives? If its 200 prims unlinked then why would the PE be halved when its linked? surely the server still have 200 prims to render? linked or not? Why would anyone go to the trouble of making 1 optimised mesh model as a single upload when they can split thier meshes up into hundreds of objects, creating a super inefficent mess, and just link them in world for half the PE?

See below

Thanks Gaia, very straight forward understandable explanation as always

It sure would be nice for it to have a toggle between convex and prim, all my builds will be using custom physics and while its not that much of a big deal as I'll testing everything on Aditi first hand. I expect when meshes are 100% deployed people who don't use the beta grid will not be very happy about wrong or misleading PE calculations in the upload window. Created a Jira here: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/CTS-729

Let me understand what your saying here, you add 1 script to a 200 prim build and it goes up to 400??!! 1 script = 200 prims? Thats got to be broken.

do what?

I just uploaded some stairs im working on and used the same dae file for the physics mesh, in the upload window it states the PE is 3.796 and as expected when rezzed it shows as 4PE, however when changing the physics from convex hull to prim the PE jumps up to 12! Shouldnt the upload window show PE12 when uploading considering convex hull is not the actual physics shape that was uploaded with the mesh?

Comparing an MMO with SL is like comparing windows O/S with second life veiwers lol MMO's have optimised graphics that are preinstalled onto your hard drive with professional scripts and an overall development process to ensure that the game runs as well as it can. Second Life is filled with amateur builders who dont know the second thing about optimisations (myself included to an extent) Who have piled endless amounts of prims, scuplts and scripts into seemingly bottomless content tabs. The reason SL lags is not because your graphics are having problems rendering its that its just updating and streaming and reading so many things piled into tiny tiny areas that any run of the mill decent computer just cannot cope with it. Second Life with or without a direct x compatible engine will never be like an MMO, not unless they remove all content and restrict content creation to inhouse deveolpers, which would in turn leave us without anything at all.

What I do is have a seperate bank account with no funds in it, when i want to purchase something online, for example some lindens, i transfer funds into the seperate bank account and then make my payment, this prevents anyone from using my billing details to make purchases that i have not authorised. These days with online banking it is very easy to move your money around and imo everyone should do this and keep thier main bank accounts locked down. It would save people millions if we were more cautious.

Win XP and Win 7 wasnt meant as a literal comparison, you know what I meant With shadows I agree, it would be great to have crisp clear super reactive real time shadows, but you need to see the demographics of SL residents, 35%(ish) of them have computers that are on the bare minimum requirements for SL akin to 6 year old computers, something like 5% are in the high end computer bracket. Do you have shadows turned on ingame? Compared to the alternative of having no shading at all, baking will have to do, at least until the majority of the SL population buy computers capable of rendering shadows! :matte-motes-big-grin-wink: EDIT: To Drongle: I didnt pick the worst picture i could find, i genuinely thought thats what you meant lol! I see what you mean now, possibly the best option would be to add texture changing scripts into products, a low rez and a high rez so customers could choose which is best for them.

Looking good You can see heaps of meshes here too! http://www.flickr.com/groups/secondlife3dmesh/

I think we can both agree there are certain tradeoffs between baking and unbaking, I must admit over this last few days ive been obsessed with baking and im personally very very happy with what it can do. I did pop onto mesh grid to have a peek at your underground chamber (looks really nice btw) I guess what you mean with the fuzziness is this? I had a similiar problem on mine: But I went into paint and started manually smoothing out the jagged edges (only took a few mins) and the result was this: Im not sure what program you use to bake textures but i have a feeling that its much easier to manually edit the lightmap than spend an eternity baking a highly detailed less pixelated lightmap. You can see my examples on mesh sandbox 11 on aditi

Its true, higher resolution textures come at a cost, my point is that not many people use shadows and lighting even if they can run them, my computer is capable of using it and it looks ok but pixelated, the problem i and many others have is when your streaming in new content that hasnt been cached it can cause extra lag with shadows and lighting enabled because of the extra render so its feasible to use baked textures to get the same result and in most cases it looks much better than the pixelated real time shadows at a cost less than combined streaming and lighting render. A build that uses only 1024 textures can be baked to look very very nice without it looking pixelated and there are alot of builds that use that resolution, the example i made above is a 1024 UVmap and the shadows look smooth and realistic and not pixelated at all, even close up. The great thing about textures too is once they have rendered they can be stored in your cache, unlike shadows and lighting which are calculated in real time, all the time.

Phew, glad it wasnt just me!