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Devriv

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Everything posted by Devriv

  1. 8 GB of RAM is more than adequate. You do not need 16GB to make SL run faster. If you had 4 GB, then yes, increasing that to 8 would have been a good recommendation. Given your graphics card, you should not have issues with the High setting. I would agree with Jean that those upgrades will give only a minimal boost, if any. If your system is installed on a mechanical hard drive, upgrading to SSDs (ideally, one for your operating system, and a small capacity, inexpensive one for SL cache and chat logs) will give you more gain in performance than the three upgrades you mention combined.
  2. Thank you again Drongle, and sorry for the inconvenience. It’s an issue I’ve had since the very beginning with similar shapes…with visual thinking, I see now, superseding the logical (geometrical). Very much appreciated
  3. Thank you for that explanation Drongle. I used the insert faces method this time, and now I see that I get the same extrusions using it, the solidify modifier or the add-on. I understand now why the radial edges are more than 25cm. Are the edges on the arc section behaving as expected too?
  4. “What you got was effectively geometrically correct” Thank you Immy, that particular 42cm extrusion seemed so way off (by 12 cm!) the mark and seeing the other irregularities it didn’t occur to me that it was correct. I mistakenly used .3 as input, here I used the .25:  So, getting the exact extrusions on all edges would require a) that the polygon be convex and b) that its angles be congruent? I do get the exact measure with the two met, but not with this one. Equiangular convex polygon:  Not Equiangular:
  5. Hello Everyone :matte-motes-big-grin:, I’d like to extrude all the top edges of the mesh below inward exactly 25 centimeters, so that any point on the extruded edges is at a distance of exactly 25 centimeters from the original edge.  I’ve done everything I could think of, experimented with transformation orientations and various pivot centres, even resorting to the solidify modifier (hehe) and add-ons, but the extrusions are still uneven. The add-on that I tried is the “Offset Edges” add-on which is not a precision tool (I cannot input 25 centimeters). I also wanted to try the newer “Perfect Shape” addon to see if that would help but I cannot install it on 2.77a.  The idea here does not seem complex to me, so I must be overlooking something. How best to extrude those edges inward exactly a certain amount? :matte-motes-nerdy:
  6. Madisen, you only have to look at the building and mesh forums here to see that we’ve all experienced these frustrations. Errors are good, because by addressing each one we come to have a better and deeper understanding of how things work. If I like a build, it will not make the slightest difference if it is prims or mesh. I do see more heart in prims, more emotion, more the person and the community. I think that inworld, prim builders such as yourself also tend to be among the best mesh builders in SL. Perhaps because you know the SL fundamentals and stand on a solid foundation. In case you’re still getting the materials not a subset of reference issue, it has to do with a material in a given LOD model being absent (or having a different name) in another. For instance you’ve modelled a book, giving the cover material A and the pages material B. Both materials A and B must also be present in the Medium, Low and Lowest models. That is all. The rule still stands, of course, if you introduce a new material, say, in the Lowest LOD model (such as when you replace the model or a part of it with an image on a plane). Then you will have to add that material to the High, Medium and Low LOD models too (You can assign it to a tiny triangle and hide it within the mesh model). I’m still learning, but this is how I work: I build the High LOD model and assign all the materials. Then I copy the model to another layer as the Medium LOD, and once I’ve reduced the number of vertices I copy that to another layer as the Low LOD and so on to the Lowest. A general rule for the various LOD models is that the smaller your object, the more the lower LODs will determine its land impact. The larger your object, then, the less the lower LODs role in affecting the LI and the more important the Medium LOD becomes. Also, knowing when to break up a model into separate objects will help with lowering the land impact. Experiment and you’ll see this very clearly.
  7. Hello everyone. :cathappy: On the sides of a building I have two planes with alpha textures. I set up the lighting, but once I turn the lights on, the alpha textures become gray. They are supposed to remain white. To add to my confusion, at times one of the textures does display correctly. This is happening with my Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) on. When I turn off ALM, the textures display correctly. When ALM is disabled:  When ALM is enabled (my viewer’s default): :catsad:  Edit: Fairly certain that the problem is solved. I should have posted this in the Building and Texturing forum. There is a light source inside the building too (the red ball in the image below), and when I turned that off, the textures looked normal. Which is very strange, as I have another light source to the back of the decals (the blue ball). 
  8. Hello Laika :smileyhappy: Your system likely uses Realtek for audio, making the Nvidia audio driver unnecessary. As I* always update my card’s drivers manually, I don’t know if Nvidia’s updater auto-installs its audio driver. You should see “Realrek High Definition Audio” listed in Device Manager. If you also see “High Definition Audio Device”, that’s also a Realtek driver, a Windows-certified one. Some would recommend disabling the Nvidia HD audio driver in the device manager. I would recommend uninstalling it (under Programs), then unplugging the headphones and restarting the computer. I hope this helps. *I’m not an expert; building and repairing PCs has been a hobby.
  9. Devriv

    suit

    Hello Jaycie :smileyhappy: The suit is by Lapointe & Bastchild, I think their Modern Open/Modern Black Open design. This is their location inworld.
  10. Hello Lilac If your budget is £500, consider the one below. Of the three, It would be my choice. It's a start; you can upgrade the parts at a later time. If you can, get a cheap Solid State Drive (SSD) too, or as soon as you can, and use it for your viewer's cache. http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/computing/desktop-pcs/desktop-pcs/cyberpower-gaming-empire-elite-ii-gaming-pc-10140548-pdt.html
  11. I just saw this. I didn’t have the pleasure of meeting you Betty but Silver King was one of my favourite destinations and that of my friends. Thank you for all the fun times we had there. I hope that you won’t have difficulty finding another job (in RL, if I understood you correctly), wish you all the best, and hope to see Silver King back very soon.
  12. Hello Everyone, For the past two days it is my regular inventory from the main grid that is showing up in Aditi. It has replaced my regular Aditi inventory, of mostly test builds. Has there been a change? Thank you :)
  13. You can also use cylinder projection (it would be my first choice) and you will not need to add a seam.
  14. “When they are uploaded separately, that makes eighteen textures in the database, because it doesn't [know they are the same]” Thank you so very much Drongle. Although uploading as a linked set will not have this terrible issue (think of all the duplicate textures that have to be processed and the lag that would create!!), I’m going to take your and Chic’s advice and paste the textures inworld from now on. :matte-motes-nerdy: @ Chic, The LIs will be exactly the same (confirmed by Drongle, Kwakkelde and Arton) so definitely give linked uploads a try especially if you like precision alignment of things. You can always separate them inworld, as they have only been "pre-linked". Thank you again for your help and kindness :cathappy:
  15. Hello Arton, I had not added the alphas for the lowest LODs when checking the costs. Both sets have only the main non-alpha textures only. I’m in Sandbox 22 and Drongle has come in to take a look, yaay
  16. “I have had a much better TOTAL LAND IMPACT (which is what I thought you were asking)” I was, hehe, that is precisely what I was asking Chic: The total land impact when uploading objects separately then linking them inworld, versus the land impact when uploading them all at once to avoid the need to align and link inworld. In every build where I’ve had several objects, I’ve always uploaded it as a set, all at once, unless the physics types got in the way. Unless the entire build was a single object, I don’t think I had even tried uploading one by one before, until the little test today. But I’m often puzzled too. Only last week I was looking at some mesh balloons which had a physics weight of nearly 8000 (Eight thousand!) but a land impact in the 20’s! But as far as larger builds, I follow the same rule mentioned by Pamela: To make smaller (small triangle) or high poly parts separate objects. “…and of course the LOD holding when inworld (a big part of the testing process for me).” Of most importance to me too, but not from the beginning, and I’ll explain why for the benefit of the helpers here. When I first began to build and was searching for guidance and answers, I was reading everywhere and told by others that it is the residents’ responsibility to increase their viewer LOD settings to 3 or 4, and not that it was the responsibility of the builders to make sure the LODs hold for the viewer default of 1.125. So in the beginning (just a few months) I would at times zero the lowest and sometimes even the low LOD. Soon, however, I would read very informative posts like this specially and understood to never sacrifice the integrity of a mesh for a low land impact, and deleted and rebuilt any zero-LODed object I had made. My viewer LOD has been on the default 1.125 since (which I’m certain is assigned even to cards like the GTX 980). To answer your question regarding the textures, yes I usually upload them with the models. I just find it more convenient and a time saver. In this set of the five creatures, the entire set is textured using two 128x128 textures and a single 64x64 (Thank you Penny). On the lowest LOD’s I have four alpha textures, three that are 128x64 and single 64x32. I have no idea why the display costs are different, I’m still learning and very much a newbie. Drongle, Would you at all be interested in inspecting these inworld? I can rez and leave them there in Sandbox #22. I can even post a download link here to all the files and textures (my own), but I’ve never “packed” a Blend file before and will need instructions. Thanks awfully
  17. Drongle, could it have anything to do with my not positioning the singles the same way as the linked set? The linked set of course rezzed as you saw in that picture. The singles I just rezzed next to each other, then moved them apart to their correct positions (more or less). And yes , all UV mapped. Edited: I may have used an older model of one of the objects, I may have not, but this must be more accurate. The LI’s are identical. This time I left the physics be (not set to none as before). All the objects are exactly the same, as are their textures (I double checked all the textures, to see if that was responsible for the display cost.) I don’t know why the display costs are so different. 
  18. The Appdata is in the same folder (the “personal folder”) where all the My (Pictures, Videos, etc) and the download folders are located. It’s hidden to prevent accidental deletion.
  19. Thank you Drongle, and thank you very much Arton for doing the test, I should have mentioned that I had made all the LODs myself. I tested today, using the five creatures on the hat. The LI’s were the same (actually a tiny bit lower on the linked upload!): 
  20. Hello Chic, You need two files contained in Blender’s Config folder in AppData. These are hidden by default, so I’ll assume they are hidden in your system as well. In windows 7 go to Start menu, Control Panel, Folder Options. Under the View tab, check “Show hidden files, folders, and drives”. Click Apply and Ok. Now go to start and click on your personal folder on the top right (its name is the name of your pc). Once there you should see the AppData folder. Click AppData, Roaming, Blender Foundation, Blender, 2.XX, and you’ll get to the Config folder. Close Blender if it’s running and copy the Config folder and save it in a folder in your backup drive or disk. On the new PC, once you’ve installed Blender, again locate the Config folder. Delete the two files “startup” and “userpref”. Then copy these two same files from the backup folder and paste them there as replacement. Then close everything, restart the computer (not necessary but a good idea), and open Blender to check if the changes have taken effect.
  21. Hello Drongle, “I read the question in the context of comparing uploads of the identical sets of mesh objects either together in a scene, or individually. In that case, all my understanding of the upload process suggests that all the weights and therefore the LI will be exactly the same, although I never explicitly tested it. In other words, the weights and LI of a mesh object is expected to be independent of which other objects may be uploaded at the same time.” This is exactly what I meant and what the disagreement/question concerned Drongle. You read the question in the correct context, and I hope the others who kindly replied did too. To make it perfectly clear, this is a picture of this build:  It's a large building and there are 15 different objects. I too believed that it would make no difference at all how they were uploaded, individually or as a group (in which case they’d be linked automatically once uploaded). Now if Kwakkelde also understood what I meant, then aren’t we in the wrong given his explanation? “For a split up model, the value for download weight will be lower, since the size per object is smaller, but the value for server weight will be higher, because there are more objects. So it depends which value is the highest, since that will determine the land impact.” Thank you very much for your help.
  22. Hello Pamela, “Uploading separate meshes as a group can often have higher LI than uploading each mesh separately.” That was the very point of our disagreement. The rule of thumb you mention is what I thought she was thinking of. Anyway, now I know to always check the server weights to compare with the download weights. Thank you for your reply :heart:
  23. Thank you so much Kwakkelde, I’ll be sure to check both values with every set I upload from now on….
  24. Hello Chic, Well I must say that’s both interesting and most puzzling, as that has not been my experience (consequently the “I know”). I have not tested uploading the pieces of this set individually, no, only in the past with quite a few other sets, mainly to avoid having to align and link inworld. I can of course test this set, but if I don’t know by what logic the uploader determines the land impact, or if how it behaves depends on the linked set or other factors of which I may be ignorant, can I answer my general question conclusively? Knowing the answer, the logic, we would not have to test with every single set, every time. Thank you very much for your reply :heart:
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