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IvanBenjammin

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  1. FYI, and sorry to be off-topic: The building in your second set of images (Teleporter Solution 1) is a rip from Fallout 4.
  2. Interesting, and puzzling. The only land I have is my rented homestead, and I can't mess with the terrain there without destroying my store. I wonder if terrain generated from a heightmap vs. one that's sculpted has any impact? The number of textures being blended? My guess is that its a performance drain because it has to be dynamic. If anyone with the rights can edit it, and those edits need to be propagated to everyone else, it can't be stored on server in the same way that mesh is. Is it constantly fetching/updating data, and therefore causing a bottleneck? I'm so over the fact that residents need to reverse-engineer SL to work these things out...
  3. Its not going to become the norm if the majority of creators continue to produce non-ALM content. Older video games used to layer up textures inside their materials, as well as vertex color shading - two things we can't do in SL.
  4. Heh, ok! We're all in agreement then. I think we misunderstood each other's point, but at least we added some useful information for the forum archive
  5. Yes, textures get reused as much as possible. But, its about texel density, like was said before, and 10/cm is common (that's 1024 per metre, or 1 per mm). MIP-mapping will take lower resolution versions, depending on the situation. A door might have multiple 2K textures (when accounting for normal/gloss etc), but unless you're right up next to it, only a fraction of that resolution is actually getting computed by the renderer. It's typically the same textures, just different MIP levels and mesh LODs being rendered - There's no sense doubling up on what's being stored in RAM. You're correct regarding cutscenes, though usually its the same location in the game space, just overriding the normal rules of which MIPs and LODs to compute. In linear games, they're often used to purge assets from the previous environment and preload the next. MIP-Mapping is used in SL, too, but it's not as efficient because of the downloading/caching issues you mentioned. SL also hamstrings itself with its unrestricted camera. Generally speaking, the more restricted the camera, the easier the job for the artist(s). Sorry to be "that guy" and reply point-by-point. I'll concede that its not completely irrelevant what modern games can do, but so many of the tricks and efficiencies can't be used or don't apply to SL, and the potential bottlenecks are different. Here, the rules are pretty simple: use texture space efficiently, reuse textures as much as possible, avoid alpha blending as much as possible. Those rules hold true for game development, but there are a bunch more "yes with an if, no with a but..." caveats.
  6. Well...Current gen games use 2K and 4K textures all the time - its all about texel density as Arton says. You might have several hundred maps in an environment when you account for diffuse/normal/gloss/AO channels. But what current-gen games can do is completely irrelevant to SL .
  7. A lot of mesh modelling starts with a cube, too
  8. Isn't SL restricted to 512mb VRAM, or has that changed? Also, on the subject of GTA 5: http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study/ What's going on "behind the scenes" is nothing short of mind-blowing. Goes to show what average PC hardware can do, when fed the right way. Oh, the topic. Yes, Advanced lighting always. I'll make everyone a jellybean before I give up my normal maps.
  9. SL Materials are all about fakery - they don't simulate realistic light reflectivity, so the best you can hope for in any situation is something that looks mostly correct in most circumstances. So yes, you'll be able to fake it with the right maps, in the right lighting conditions. I would recommend laying hands on some real velvet you can personally examine under different lighting and angles.
  10. If you're using the Edge browser, I feel your pain. Try something like chrome or firefox. At some point in the recent past, Edge became usable for me (a windows update possibly) in MP, but for a while I was switching to firefox every time I needed to manage my store.
  11. Well, if its on the internet, it must be true I agree that the review system is flawed, however I would like to suggest that its not the place for constructive feedback and critique. A consumer's role is to buy your product, not give advice on how to improve it. If they do give good feedback, consider it a bonus.
  12. I don't export animation, so I can't help with specifics, but in your export options, look for something that swaps axes. Maya's 'up' axis is Y, whereas SL uses Z.
  13. Hey, fair enough - use whatever tools work for you.
  14. TGA is "standard" in the same way that photoshop is "standard". It's not universal, just best practice. Also, we're not talking about internal formats here, we're talking about the format that you, the artist saves your work as. The point of TGA is that its lossless - you want to avoid at all costs feeding a lossy compressed image into a different compression algorithm. I repeat, I'm not here to tell you how to work. If you want to use PNGs, fine. If you want to use jpgs, fine. This whole "debate" started because you expressed a negative opinion for a widely used image format - an opinion that apparently stems from the limitations of your tools. Personally, I've never had issue with unwanted compression in my TGAs (I didn't even know that was a thing...), but maybe that's because I use photoshop...
  15. Wow, you really don't like photoshop, huh? All the problems you describe are user error and/or application limitations, not the fault of the image format. TGA is standard across the game industry because its uncompressed and lossless. It can then be compressed as needed when game files get 'cooked'. PNG is fine if it does what you want - I'm not here to tell you how to work - but they're awkward to work with if you need an alpha channel for something other than transparency. I'm currently working with Unity, and its shader system has inputs for Diffuse/Albedo, 'Metalness' and Gloss (plus other things). If I'm doing a surface that needs to be glossy but isn't metallic, I can use the Diffuse alpha channel for gloss and avoid using another separate map.
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