Aquila Kytori

Hi, welcome to the SL forums Hmmmmmmmm................. yes perhaps to many questions in a single post. I can answer a couple of them then perhaps others more qualified can reply to the others. For a small object like shoes or a table you would bake all the materials to a single texture. (Maximum of 8 materials for a SL mesh object). You already understand the process of how to bake out to a image texture in Blender. (Add a new Image Texture node, create a New image in that node to bake to and then to have that Image Texture node Selected before hitting the bake button. When you have more than 1 material to bake to a single Image Texture you simple copy (CTRL C) and paste (CTRL V) this Image Texture node from the material 1 node setup into the node setups of the other materials. And of course making sure that the Image texture node is selected in each setup before baking. Blender will then bake all the materials that are pointing to this Image Texture into that one Image. In the screenshot below, the 2 materials are both pointing to the "2 material bake" image to bake to so both materials are then baked to that one image: A mesh object for SL can have up to 8 materials but only 1 UV map. These materials faces can be UV unwrapped to occupy a single UV space or they can be unwrapped so that each material occupies its own UV space, Stacked UV's, (or a combination of the 2). For a small object, a single texture for all the materials would be sufficient but for larger objects like buildings and vehicles then the stacked UV islands method would be used. Of course when using the stacked UV's then each "layer" in the stack would have its own Image Texture to bake to. Hope this makes some kind of sense to you :). If I remember correctly, The Original SL avatar (Ruth) uses around 7k triangles so for a pair of shoes ......................... ? 500 tris ? 😧 lol There are no guide line. Your friends are correct, use as few polys as possible, Create your first pair of shoes with 20k tris, texture them as best you can then load them up and rezz them in world to see how the look. The thing is how close do you need to look ? People like "pretty" They like all the tiny details. Offer someone a pair of trainers, one high poly version with every stitch modelled in and another lower poly pair where the shoes rely on basic texturing for things like that. 99% are going to choose the the first pair. ...................high poly sells !!! How many tris an object should have depends on the mindset of the creator. You obviously do care about trying to produce optimum mesh so you have to look at the 20K shoes you have just produced and say how can I reduce them to 5k? High to low poly workflow and baking out normal maps etc Let the texture do the work. Modelling is not difficult , texturing is ! Ideally you should be producing "game ready assets" so search for tutorials on how they are made Note: Instead of logging into the SL Main Grid (Agni) to do your test uploads, there is a second option the SL Beta Test Grid (Aditi). Uploads to Beta grid are "free" http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh But unfortunately I believe that at the moment there are problems with new people logging into that grid. https://status.secondlifegrid.net/incidents/q3mnxnpys7dt The same shading you apply in Blender will generally be used on the rezzed model in SL. Yes but you have to make sure that you have the Apply Modifiers option checked in the Collada export panel. Collada export panel > Gear icon > Geometry > Export Data Option > Apply Modifiers. If you choose the SL+Open Sim Static ( or Rigged) Presets then generally all the right options will be checked for you : I hope the above helps some

Thanks for taking the time to make tutorials like these. I am sure many people, including me would find a complete A to Z series like this very useful. The reason the Display Stretching in the UV editor is hard to find is because it has changed place 3 times in the last couple of years, In the latest versions 2.91+ they have added a Overlays drop-down menu in the top bar of the UV editor. Looking forward to the next video 🙂

Hi You could start by checking out artons reply to this earlier thread : If this is not the issue the quickest way to solve the problem is to share your file/model (or part of your model) so that others can check it out and do a test upload. If you are using Blender you could upload the .blend file to this Blender file sharing page https://pasteall.org/blend/ "Error: dae parsing issue - see log for details" How to find the log ? 1: Do a search on your PC for : Secondlife.log 2: Open the File and do a search for: LLDAELoader

I am guessing the reason you have so many horizontal edge loops in your model is because you are using Blenders cloth simulator to create the folds? Just thought we should mention another way to create curtains without all the horizontal edge loops. Starting from the ground up : 1: Create a row of half circles laid out approximating the lower edge of the curtain. 2: Join the half circles together creating a continuos wavy edge (using the merge tools). Edit this edge to better simulate the folds along the bottom edge. 3: Extrude up to the upper edge of the drapes. Edit the upper edge curves. 4: Add a Mirror and Solidify modifier, Add seams etc etc.

Check again with the Bounding Box option enabled. With the object selected : Object Properties > Viewport Display > Bounds (Box) . If the Bounding Box is bigger than you expected it to be then you should check more thoroughly for extra geometry. If still having problems a few screenshots may help If you can, sharing your .blend file is the surest way of sorting the problem. Blender file sharing : https://pasteall.org/blend/

Could that be Blenders way of suggesting that it is time that you move up to 2.8 or even 2.9 !!!! ? lol

Well thats sorted then Just to note that when I tried uploading an object with negative scaling the Uploader gave the error "Missing required level of detail" and "Dae parsing error - see log for details" Annoyingly, the Uploader now has a Log tab but it was empty ! So had to rummage around my harddrive to find the log: 2021-01-01T11:01:55Z INFO # llprimitive/lldaeloader.cpp(2035) LLDAELoader::processElement : Negative scale detected, unsupported transform. domInstance_geometry: Cube 2021-01-01T11:01:55Z INFO # llprimitive/lldaeloader.cpp(2058) LLDAELoader::processElement : Negative scale detected, unsupported post-normalization transform. domInstance_geometry: Cube 2021-01-01T11:01:55Z INFO # llprimitive/lldaeloader.cpp(1104) LLDAELoader::OpenFile : Scene could not be parsed 2021-01-01T11:01:55Z WARNING # newview/llfloatermodelpreview.cpp(1913) LLFloaterModelPreview::onPermissionsReceived : Upload permission set to true but uploadModelUrl is empty! Common LL you can do better than this, or is that new Log tab supposed to log some other type of information ? TY @arton Rotaru and I wish you and all other readers of the SL forums a Happy New year.

Hi Alma I don't have the time to check out your tower this evening but if no-one else has answered before then I will look into it first thing tomorrow.

Just me thinking aloud ............. ................... The model has 4 materials assigned to it in Blender but when rezzed, the object still has 4 materials but the assignment to geometry has changed? The assignment of the materials to the rezzed model does show some intelligence (not random). Cups one material, the Plates one material, the Teapot one material, ...........that would leave the Top book, Bottom book and Pages all sharing the same material ? (pages do look like they are using your Page baked material but not the correct tint, same tint as the Teapot ?) The SL mesh Uploader has zero intelligence. Chic has some. Conclusion, Chic has messed up something in her workflow. It looks like you have baked all 4 materials to the same image texture? So do you need to upload the model with the 4 materials if you are applying this one baked material to the whole object? First thing I would try is : Save to a new .blend file. Delete 3 of the materials so that the object uses only one material. Do a test upload and apply your baked texture. All so, in the original file have a look how many UV's are listed. Best would be to share your file (or a file that contains just parts of it, for example the inner surface of one of the cups, top surface of a plate, teapot lid, top surfaces of each book and the pages and pack the texture into the file). Blender file sharing at : https://pasteall.org/blend/ then perhaps we can work out what is going on. Happy Rez day Chic

Hi Can you share your file (or a .blend file containing just the relevant parts) so that we can check it out and do a test upload ? Here is a link to a Blender file sharing site : https://pasteall.org/blend/

Unfortunately, as far as I know This is a 2 step process. First Bake out the shadows on the ground plane. (Note: the image to bake to can be quite small, for a shoebox a 128 x 128 or 256 x 256 would probabaly be plenty big enough). Next use the Compositor to Convert the white to Alpha. (This could also be done using Gimp or Photoshop instead). Open the Compositor. Enable Use Nodes. Delete the default nodes and then add an Image node, an Invert node and a Viewer node. Connect the 3 nodes as shown in the screenshot below. From the Image node select the baked shadow texture. Select the Viewer node. (If you don't select this node the Viewer Node option may not show up in the list in the next step). In the UV editor from the Image dropdown list choose the Viewer Node. Save this image: Image > Save As............. and save as a .png with RGBA option enabled.

The UV 's were deliberately laid out and saved this way. In Blender we can assign any X Y dimension (pixel size) to the base UV space. But usually it would be 1024 x 1024 for most things and especially for a car Uv's to have the maximum texture space to work with. best texture resolution. For this particular test dragster shell model, when unwrapped and scaled up evenly in X and Y so that it took up maximim UV space without going outside the UV space and without distortion, the UV's took up just over half of the available area. Then the UV's were moved down to the lower part of the UV space. In a full model this would leave the upper most portion available for the UV's of other parts of the same model for example the drivers cockpit and the rear wings etc. The resulting UV.png image was exported with a 100% transparent background. You should perhaps look into Illustrator as to why it lost the transparency and had a white background. The UV space in Blender:

You may have missed the clue that can be found if you dig back in the OP's post history ( crossing my fingers I have this right ................. ) .

For the the test Jaq was supplied with a UV map with a ratio of 1:1 (1024 x 1024px). So somewhere along the workflow, Uploading to Dropbox, downloading from Dropbox, loading it into illustrator, creating the new texture, exporting from Illustrator, importing into SL and finally applying it to the test model, the textures is having its ratio changed from 1:1 to 2:1 (1024 x 1204 to 1024 x 512). and my guess is on Illustrator as the "culprit" (taking as a given that, as Rey has already pointed out, textures are rounded (down) to a power of two when importing into SL

I have just did a test with a cropped image, 630 x 1024px size when exported from gimp and reduced again to 1024 x 512 as expected when Uploaded to SL. and when this is applied to the model it looks remarkably similar to yours: Somewhere along the line the texture is being resized. probably when exporting from Illustrator . @Quarrel Kukulcan Yes I think we are in agreement the texture is being resized somwhere.

I have just repeated your test using Gimp: and as expected the blue test marks are perfectly mapped to the model. Can you confirm that the Image exported from Illustrator is exactly 1024 x 1024 pixels ? And also that when you double click on the texture in your inventory to open it that it indicates the same 1024 x 1024 and that the scale ratio is 1:1 as in the image below : Note that there is also a little red spot on the very front, left in your first screenshot and the red mark on the side panel seems a little blured top edge.

@QueenKellee Kuu If you don't want perfect sculpties then the following may be of interest to you. Using Blender Cycles 2.91, (I guess it would work with any earlier versions of Blender which has Cycles), create a new material using these three nodes: Texture Coordinate, Gamma and Material Output. Connect as in the Image below: Without the Gamma node the resulting "sculpty" was very deformed, (see image below). With the Gamma node, set to a value of 2.1 the cylinder and sphere "sculpties" had noticable flattened surfaces but I am guessing for your purposes this would not be a problem. Examples: and finally a landscape type "sculpty" using the Plane : and all for the price of 1LI You can download the .blend file with the Sphere, Cylinder and Plane from here : https://pasteall.org/blend/62e563ba83fc42ab97b05c28b82e82da

Hi Export as a .FBX file. Import into Blender. ( https://www.blender.org/download/ ) Export as a Collada .dae. If you are wanting to walk around on the surface of the floor then you are going to need to have a physics model. For such a simple object like in the image below ............... ........... you can use the same object for collision surfaces. After loading up your Floor.dae file open the Physics tab of the SL mesh uploader and in Step 1 choose the High (LoD) option. Next hit the Calculate weights and fee button, (bottom left) and then check the Physics cost and the Land Impact. If those are acceptable then hit the Upload button. When rezzed in world Edit your floor model. Open the Features tab and change the Physics Shape Type from the default Convex hull to Prim. Now you should be able to walk around on the floor surface and the "backsplash" will act like a solid wall.

The furmula √(x2+y2) is used to find the diameter (length of the diagonal through the center, corner to corner,) of a rectanglar box shape, (our Bounding Box), and √(x2+y2) /2. gives the radius. So instead of simply dividing by two (= radius) they use the *n* ( a scale bias* ) instead. Which is the almost the radius but not, AND this n "constant" value can change between 0.48 and 0.6 ! depending on ....... To a non techie person this seems just silly. Writing this down here will hopefully help me remember it better so thanks again for filling in some of the details. * scale bias : "For non-rigged we use getScale() which also returns the size of the avatar hitbox (a diameter) BUT we use the scale bias. this is setup based on the object type (historical adjustment for certain prim shapes). It defaults to 0.5 (it can be slightly more but that's beyond the scope here) "

@ChinRey Thankyou I had vague memories of Drongle mentioning that it was the radius of the bounding box that was relevent for the size part of the Download calculation so now after spending over an hour searching through very old threads found the one I was looking for. (Before that I was searching Google to find out what your √(x2+y2+z2) was generally used for. Maths is not my thing ). Anyways, now I think I was correct in saying (guessing) that it was the radius, distance from the center of the BB to one of its corners and that you forgot to add the divide by 2 at the end of √(x2+y2+z2) ? Check out Drongle's second paragraph here : Whatever happened to Drongle ......................?

As a general rule, before making any lower LoD models, load up your High LoD model into the SL mesh uploader then play around with the variables of each LoD to find out what triangle count you need to be aiming for for each of the LoD models . For example, your door, lest say you have in mind a LI (Download cost) of 1. A single door is a small object so the Medium LoD probably has little effect on Download cost so you can set that to "Use LoD above". Then play around with the Low and Lowest triangle counts to find out what numbers you need (tri count) to get a download cost of around 1. To me it looks like you are using way to much geometry in the Lower LoD model . For the front wall it looks like it is the Medium LoD you need to be work on to reduce the tri count. Download cost is depended on number or tris/vertices and the size of the model. The more complex the higher the Download cost, the larger the BB the higher the Download cost. Smooth shading / Flat shading, UV's and material bounderies also effect the download cost but the by far the most important is the complexity of LoDs and size. Once you have your high LoD model optimized as much as possible then all you are really left with to reduce Download cost are the lower LoDs. I am not 100% sure of this (perhaps someone like @ChinRey or @arton Rotaru can correct the following) but for the the size it is the Bounding Box radius that is used.(?) The distance from the center to the outer edges (corners?). So sometimes it can be more advantageous to upload all four walls of a room instead of each wall separately. For small models it will be the Low and or Lowest LoDs modesl that have a big effect, for larger objects it will be the Medium and for huge objects it will be only the High LoD model. Sometimes you can get away with using "billboards" / "imposters" (images on planes) for one or two of the lower LoDs. If you can do this then this can really reduce the Download costs dramtically. page 2 third post down Physics has no effect on Download costs.

This crazy high Physics cost happens sometimes . The fix that usually works is to make sure the coplaner surfaces are perfectly flat. In the Physics model, select the faces of the top surface 'floor) and scale them to zero along the Z axis. S Z 0 validate. Then repeat for the faces on the underside (cieling).

I didn't find any noticeable difference between the two roofs in Download or Physics costs in the Uploader or when rezzed. I should mention that I brought all the models into a single Blender file and this resulted in multiple versions of the materials, different materials for each model. So rather than sort all those out I simply deleted them all so they would be accepted by the Uploader but I don't think this will have made much difference to the Downlod costs. If need be you can have much more accurate physics for these roofs and still have a Physics cost of 0.5 when set to Prim. For the roof models the Download costs are higher than the Physics costs so its these that you need to work on to lower the final Li cost. A quick check in the Uploader shows that if you can reduce the tri count of the Medium LoD to between 20 and 25 this would result in a Download/LI cost of less than 2. For an object this size the Low and Lowest LoD models have little if any effect on the Download cost.

Remaining Convex Hull if less than 0.5m? No this not a problem for Cube physics. @grezz360 For the Floors I believe the issue is with the little vertical triangle that you are using to keep the BB Z dimension of the physics model equal to the BB of the visual model. (the triangle by the stairway opening) I have had problems using a vertical triangle this way not so long ago and the answer was to use a much bigger triangle! But if we use the extra vertice method as mentioned in my previous post then this is not necessary. I haven't looked at the roof models yet so the following is only for the two floor models : 1: For the Physics model of the floor first add a new big plane aligned to the under surface (cieling) of the visual mesh. This will be used to keep the lower limit of the BB box matched to the visual model. 2: Delete two of the vertices of the little vertical triangle by the stairway opening, keeping only one of the upper two vertices. This will be used to keep the upper limit of the BB matched to the visual model. 3: Make this floating vertice the first in the list as mentioned in my previous post. Vertex selected > Mesh > Sort Elements > Selected. BTW you can see the order of the vertices in Blender if you open the Viewport Overlays dropdown > Developer > and enable the Indices option. The first in the list is numbered 0. Then export as .dae. I did this mod for both floor physics models and when uploading found only a very little difference in the Download costs and final LI when rezzed. Floor left LI 1.7 and Floor right1.8. An example of the modified Floor Physics can be downloaded from here : https://pasteall.org/blend/d4248ae99f914a4b940e5962bc1dcf62 I will take a look at the roofs later Edited to add : Nope, you can only have 1 loose vertice, "the first in the list" vertice. (The other will be deleted). That is why a big plane was added under the floor instead. (The uploader likes to find big tris in the physics model. Part of the physics equation cost is the average area of the all the tris in the physics model, Larger the average size lower the cost. Adding a big plane can actually lower the physics cost). Take a rezzed model using non analyzed physics, scale it up and watch how the Download cost increase and the Physics cost decreases.

Without having access to your .blend file it is differcult to say what may be poing on. So if you are still having problems you could, copy and paste the floor models (along with their Physics models) into a new .blend file and upload it somwhere so we can check the model and do some test uploads. A Blender file sharing site : https://pasteall.org/blend/ A couple of things that don't look quite right in your screen shots : First, in the preview window, your collision surface is in the middle of the visual model instead of being aligned to the top surface of the floor. Secondly, your, high LoD visual model seems to be using more triangles than is necessary, 76 instead of around 35 or so. As the difference in LI looks like it is being caused by the Physics costs try rebuilding your Physics model. Note: when using "planes type" Physics, (not Analyzed in the uploader) if one or more of the X Y Z dimensions of the models Bounding Box are less than 0.5m then even when you change the Physics Shape Type to Prim it will actually remain as Convex Hull and all opening will be closed. There are different workarounds to this. One is to add an extra vertex to the visual and physics model to increase the size of their bounding box and set this vertex as the first in the list of vertices in the .dae file. ( Loose vertices are usually deleted on upload but not if it is the first in the list of vertices). In the example below the original floor is 15 x 15 x 0.2m. This 0.2 needs to be increased to something more than 0.5m. For this floor using two collisions surfaces (upper and lower) make a copy of vertex A and move it up along the Z axis by 0.6m, (vertex B). With this new vertex still selected, open the Mesh menu > Sort Elements > Selected. The new extra vertex is now the first in the list. Note: if you modify your model again before exporting it is best to repeat the above again for the extra vertex. Use the same method to extend the Bounding Box dimensions of the Physics model. Note: If you are only wanting a single collision surface on the top surface then the Bounding Box would be extended dowwards, the extra vertex would be below the floor level. In all cases the Bounding Box dimensions of the Physics model should match the BB dimensions of the visual model. If there is a difference then the SL mesh uploader will stretch or squish the Physics BB to that of the BB dimensions of the visual model. This will result in offset collision surfaces ! Now you can try upoading again. When rezzed inworld the extra vertex will not be seen. In this example the Physics cost for a double sided floor is 0.5.