Christhiana

Yw, glad I could help!

Are you sure you are using blender version 2.71 or higher?

Looking at your nodes window I assume you are using the cycles render engine. Since version 2.71 blender is able to bake textures with cycles. Rather than trying to explain how, I'll give you a link to a short tutorial on how to achive the result you want. I'm not very good at explaining things clearly. Good luck!

This worked for me until I did the edge splits on the top and bottom edges. I need these to make sure the smooth shading only works horizontally. In your example I see the smoothing going both ways so I assume you did not have edge splits on your model. But you're right that time is better spend on custom normal export for now, this would also solve the problem and give us a lot more flexibility with normals. For now the method drongle suggested gives the proper result for me albeit it being a little extra work. BTW, it's your youtube tutorials that got me started with sculpties and mesh in SL and helped me made sense of blender 2.49. I'd like to take this oppertunity to express my graditude for your efforts and ongoing support! You're aweome!

Thank you Drongle! That's a very clear explanation of how to work around the problem for now and not too much work either. I can work with this until it is fixed in the uploader or until the Blender collada exporter can export custom normals. And as a bonus I learned a lot about how the collada file format works! I hope LL will decide it's worth fixing this in the collada importer. I will follow the Jira closely. BTW, you finally got me to try Notepad++ and I love it. I should have tried it years ago.

That's interesting... Using one of the extended LOD's for a physics model should work fine for this build though.

The model is exported with extra geometry which is later deleted manually from the Collada file. So as long as I bake the normal map with the same added geometry present, the Collada vertex normals and the ones used for baking are identical and all should be fine. I will test this later and report back on it.

Ah thank you! This together with the solution Drongle came up with should have both ALM and non ALM smoothing covered.

One more question. For the other LODs I will have to do the same thing, but how about the physics model? If it fits the BB of the LOD0, the original physics model with no extensions should work right?

After some experimenting I have found the following: - I have the opposite with the axis. The y axis is set to the original and the x axis isn't (more findings on this later on). - The deleted geometry still counts when calculating Li - Adding extra geometry on the opposite side of the y axis has no effect on the boundingbox. - extending the original extra geometry on the y axis by extruding has no effect, it seems to remain at the same position. Now comes the weird part.... When stretching the original extra geometry on the y axis (to try and compensate so it can still snap to a grid) has effect only when stretching it to multiples of a whole meter ( so the total diameter on the y axis is a multiple of one meter). anything less or more has no effect. If it is stretched to a multiple of one meter the bounding box drops the old size on the y axis and updates to the correct size of the model with deleted geometry, fixing the problem. This might explain your result with a cube. I have no idea what this means but I'm sure you will have an "Aha" by moment now This is the extra geometry that worked for me: Here you can see how it was the opposite for me:

Gaia Clary wrote: but it should work exactly like that. you used the edge split to make sharp edges. then you make the sides smooth shaded. and finally the adjacent edges of your parts would be welded as wanted. But maybe i did not understand your issue well enough. That is exactly what I did. All is well until I add the edge splits. For some reason then the result is as in the image at the bottom of this post. However i found some other issues which have to do with the lighting setup in SL. I need to go deeper into this normal stuff again, there is definitively some room for improvement. But i meanwhile believe that i better do the support for custom normal exporting to Collada first, then use that experience to improve the Avastar exporter as well... It would be great to be able to export the changed per face vertex normals. This would solve the whole problem. Thank you for your great support!

It's seems the bounding box is correct, but the origin is at the wrong position (correct for the object with added parts).

Thank you so much Gaia, I could reproduce your examples with the same effect. I now understand how the weld function in the avastar exporter works and why it only works on smooth shading (there's no point for it to work on flat shading). Your solution for my problem will not give me the desired result though. I want the smoothing on the edge to be in only the horizontal direction. That's why I did an edgesplit on some of the edges (see image below, where I marked seams, I did an edgesplit). I now understand why this will not work with the welding function of the avastar exporter. I find it a usefull function though and I will have uses for it in the future.

OK, next challenge... I tried editing the collada file and it works.....almost. The normals are perfect now but the problem is the bounding box now has the size of the original with added parts. I made the pieces all in steps of 2m so they can easily be aligned to a grid, this now doesn't work anymore. Also the Li got raised slightly because of it. Can I manually adjust the boundingbox in the collada file?

Drongle, that's a genius workaround! Thank you for the effort! You know, I never even knew you could edit a collada file like that... It'll be a bit of work, but well worth the trouble! Since I'm also baking a (hi to low poly) normal map with rounded edges, am I correct to assume that if I unwrap the "added parts" to an empty place on (or even outside) the UVmap, that seam won't be visible as well?

Can someone link me to the thread where drongle explains his overlapping trick? I'd like to try that option but can't seem to find it....

After some experimenting I found the problem to be the split edges on the top and bottom of the faces on the outer rims of the walkway.

The edges on my walkways are open edges, so I would expect it to work as you described....

After reading back my post that thought also came to me. But the result is still the same...

Thank you Gaia! I read the howto in the advanced section but I still cannot get it to work... These are the models in blender, all three of them have open edges. I export the middle section using the avastar collada exporter. I set it as in the image below: But the result is still a visible edge when lining them up in SL: I also tried exporting all three of the objects at the same time with the option weld edge normals but with the same result... I don't know what I'm missing here....

Thank you for the reply! I read the other thread and to be honest have no clue about vertex normal editing. I will update my blender to 2.74 (still on 2.73) and have a look at the new modifier tool. Hopefully it makes a little sense to me I do have the Avastar plugin and once I figure out the vertex normal editing I will give its exporter a try.

It's not a cylinder but 2 quarter cylinder shapes (the same object rotated) put next to eachother in SL to make a halve cylinder shape. The seam is where the two objects meet. The sides are already smoothshaded which masks the effect you mentioned. A normal map baked from a high poly model gives the same result. *edited to add image* Maybe the next image show more clearly what I mean:

When I connect two of my quarter turn walkway corners to make a halve circle I get this visible edge when light hits it at certain angles. I have the sides smooth shaded with an edge split on the upper and lower corners. Is this something I can prevent or is this just SL and I have to live with it? I already tried an edgesplit on the ends of the smooth shaded side.

Drongle McMahon wrote: "there's a huge difference between a model uploaded to the beta grid and the same uploaded to the main grid." That is interesting. Can you give some more detail of the differences? The As the "Analyze" is done in the viewer, that would seem to indicate a difference in how the servers are treating the same shape. There are usually different servers on the two grids, and several different versions in different regions of each too! So that is always possible. The only thing in the viewer that I know of that could make differences is the LOD generator, which is non-deterministic and can produce different results for identical input. So if people use LOD meshes for physics shapes, the results can be variable, but they would be variable on either grid, not reproducible on each. Anyway, we already know that you are not using auto-LOD meshes or LOD meshes for physics. "But what I can't for my life understand right now is how could I ever feel any joy in building?" I guess it's good only for people like me who enjoy studying the problems more than making the end results. :matte-motes-smile: And I'm eternally gratefull for that! :matte-motes-big-grin:

No problems here.... Do you use the inworld or an external browser? If using an external one, try scanning for computer for spyware. I've had the same issue with just browsing MP. After getting rid of some spyware everything worked fine again. It turned out my GF got seduced into downloading a **bleep**ty piece of SW (yes, on her own request I took away her admin rights after that!). A good friend of mine had her L$ balance dissapear after logging onto MP (L$16.000). Turns out most of it got put into some tipjar. After contacting support she was able to get the majority of her Lindens back but she's still short a few thousand L$ that LL couldn't retrieve. I scanned her Laptop and found a keylogger to be present. Moral of the story... If you're a merchant, be very carefull what you install on your PC and avoid malicious websites!