Kavorka

try flipping the normals, not recalculating them. If you have them all flipped, recalculating wont do anything.

even if it is dropped, you can just use an older version of blender that has it. no new features and fixes, but it works well for me now.

Okay, got it working. What happened is that I exported it without joining the trunk and leaves meshes so I could apply 2 textures. this made it set a physics shape for each object. Now, I joined the meshes, keeping the material data and was still able to add both my alpha leaves texture and my tiled bark texture to the parts and only load one physics shape. And btw, my shap is 5 triangles and 1 hull. So, everything works out good. Thank you guys for all your help

Okay, I was able to make the prim option show up by first selecting "lowest" for the physics, then "from file" and loading up my file. But when I I check the physics meta data, it is using the lowest setting for physics and not my file even though I selected "prim".

I am using the official viewer. I did all that, I saw the 2 faces to make the bounding box disappear when I analyzed and it calculated fine.

I got it to work, but I cant set the physics shape to "prim". my only options are "none" and "convex hull". I am on the beta test grid. How do I set to "prim"?

I am creating trees and all I want the physics to do is stop the avatar from walking into the trunk. When I upload my physics shape, it scales it out to match my object. Is there any way to stop it from doing this? What if I want parts of my mesh to be able to be walked through? I make my shape right over my mesh, so it is the size and position that I want. Anyone have any work arounds?

The hotkey for toggling the shelf on and off is "T"

is it possible to have a seperate texture for the imposters? As it is, at LOD 2 I have each quad leaf cluster turn into a tri, delete all internal branches and simplify the trunk. I'm using OpenSim for the project, so the "cost" of uploading doesnt matter and as far as I know, the PE is irrelevant. All I really care about is the polycount.

Ya, no worries about that, I've been making mesh objects for over ten years when low poly was REALLY low poly. Just asking because I want to make sure that the objects I'm making will be more effecient than the previous scupties. I'm making tree's btw for a rain forest research island that will be used in science classrooms in universities. The tree I just made for testing has about 3k tris which seems about the equilivent of 1.5 prims, but SL tells me the PE is over 100. So, I was just making sure I didnt actually have a tree that was actually 100 prims. Looking on the forums, it seems some prim trees were around 30 prims, so my mesh should be fine. Need to do testing still but it seems fine with lots of instances on a slow machine.

I was wondering how many polygons are in the highest LOD of a sculpted prim. Just so I can keep it in mind for when I am creating my mesh objects.

Did you try using Blender 2.61 to export? I'm pretty sure the collada exporter was updated for 2.6 and maybe that will solve your problem. I dont work on avatars, so not much I can help there. Also, for your LODs, are you placing them all on seperate layers and then exporting? Because this always give me an error upon uploading to SL. I have to save the original as a seperate file then work on it seperatly for my second LOD. Save that twice (one for LOD 3) open up my LOD 3 file and work on that.

Also, If you change the view mode in blender from solid (default) to textured, it should only render the front faces, this can be a quick way to see if you have any normals that are flipped. The button is located on the bottom and has a white sphere as default (solid)

Oh, and to answer that baking question, I think that was a bug in 2.59 because I saw it before on these formums. Try it again in 2.61 and see if it fixes it.

I have blender for mac and PC. My PC is slower, but has photoshop so I switch between the 2 very frequently when working. I have used several versions from 2.49 to 2.61 and have had no issues what so ever. there are no problems on the mac that are not on the PC.

In edit mode click "N", this will open up a panel on the right side. Under the "mesh display" panel, look under "normals" and click "faces". This will show blue lines coming out of your faces. This points the direction that the face is faceing (known as a normal). If some are pointing in (towards where the avatar would be) these wont be visibe because only the front side of the face (the sied the normal is pointing) is rendered is SL. Flip any normals that are facing the wrong way. You can try to select all faces and click control+N. This trys to make all of your normals consistant. If this doesnt work select the problem faces, under the mesh tools panel (Hit "T" to open) click flip normals.

I dont think anyone mentioned this, but an other reason to use quads is to teach yourself how to make a clean mesh. If you were to ever want to get a job in the industry and show an all tri model to a comapany they would just laugh and dismiss you. A nice clean mesh shows that you know what you are doing. I generally dont subdivide my entire model when making SL models, but I sure do add edge loops, which are just impossible when there are tris in the way. Also, I often create a high res model that I then back an AO map onto because if you bake an AO map onto a low poly model, you get a lot of hard edges showing in your texture and ends up showing just how low poly it is. Using the AO map from the high poly version gives an illusion of a higher poly model. Whether you utilize it or not, trying to keep quads is a good practice as it will teach you to be a better modeler and may even help you out somewhere along the way.

yes I did. i even tried deleting the main mesh and just having the LOD and it still didnt work.

Well, I think I figured out what is causing this. Originally, I just duplicated my mesh, put it on a seperate layer and then lowered the detail. This is when the problems started happening. Now, if I save the file, then change the detail and save as a seperate file, I dont have these problems. Anyone know why that is? I am using Blender 2.60 btw

I'm not sure at what point the LOD4 actually shows up, but im not seeing it ever actually apear, so I'm just generating LOD4 and going on with my life, haha.

How do I check this? I am only using 1 material thoughout and it's the same material.

Ok, so I just did an experiment. I loaded my LOD 4, works fine. I change its LOD 4 to that file (so its in both LOD 1 and 4) and looks fine. Change LOD 1 to my main LOD and my LOD once again gets weird

I did, I deleted it, but it didnt fix the scale problem.

I had already done that, and tried again, but still scales out weird. And, uploading just that LOD works fine, no scale issues.

I'm using Blender Ya, there must have been some hidden objects because I was using select all, having my LODs on different layers, and exporting selected only. Now, I just selected the 3 parts and exported like that for each layer and I no longer have that error. But now, my 4th LOD gets scaled out of proportion and looks weird, but if I upload just that LOD as a mesh, its fine. Anyone have that problem? Just went through the outliner and there was a hidden object there, so that was the culprit for the first problem.