IvanBenjammin

FYI, and sorry to be off-topic: The building in your second set of images (Teleporter Solution 1) is a rip from Fallout 4.

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...

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.

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

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.

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 .

A lot of mesh modelling starts with a cube, too

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hey, fair enough - use whatever tools work for you.

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...

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.

TGA is the standard for 3d graphics. What exactly makes them so painful to use? Compression artifacts are definitely something to be aware of, and how severe they are is going to depend as much on the image as the compression level. TIF is wasted on textures, I agree, but you're definitely going to the notice the difference in print between a compressed JPG and TIF.

You're preaching to the choir I'm going to go ahead and say it anyway - it would have limited freedom of expression from their point of view. I don't understand the logic, and agree with you that forcing creators to be more efficient is a good thing, the philosophy of LL seems to have been: "Let them create whatever, and suffer the consequences." I think they're realising at this point that its gone too far, and are scrambling to adjust priorities. There's also the fact that the developers who wrote the original engine, as well as those who bolted on mesh functionality are long gone from the company (as far as I know, anyway), so no, they don't entirely understand the monster they've created. Otherwise, someone would have removed that idiotic 512mb VRAM lock...

Even in the latest generation of games, true mirrored surfaces with dynamic reflections are used very sparingly, and these are engines that are light years ahead of the tech that SL is built on. I think LL won't do mirrors because they're aware of the potential abuse and performance cost of such a feature. Not necessarily intentional abuse, just the kind that amateur creators will do. Yes, they can add functionality to limit that, but it seems to me that they're in a constant struggle to improve performance, improve visuals and maintain the freedom of expression that keeps the core SL users here.

Ok I would certainly like better reflections for making water inside objects and improving metallic materials, but a far more efficient way to do that is with cube mapping. We have cube maps ('environment' reflection), but the ability to define/customize them would be a much better use of resources. These could be something you import, or baked from your environment. Not sure why you bring up Pixar? Film rendering has almost nothing in common with realtime rendering, and I was never suggesting that it would need to be 'film' quality to be effective. I only use the LL viewer, so I didn't realise other viewers could customize the reflection res. Good to know, thanks.

Oh, yes. I didn't mean higher resolution than the primary render (that would make no sense whatsoever), but higher resolution than the water reflections. Sorry for the confusion

Reflective surfaces like water use a secondary camera to render the scene from the water's "point-of-view". This gets output as a texture which is applied to the water surface, then distorted with a normal map. So effectively rendering every frame twice; This can be done with little performance cost in the case of water because its rendering at a lower resolution and omitting avatars, with less (if any) anti-aliasing and post processing. Mirrors would be fundamentally the same, but at a much bigger performance cost. They would need to be higher resolution, and include avatars. If the viewer already struggles with decent frame rates in busy regions, imagine the performance if it was having to render each of those frames n+1 times (where n = number of mirrors).

I export from Maya as .obj, import that into Blender and export as .dae. Its not the most straightforward way to do things, but it works for me.

Melita Magic wrote: Gunner Grun wrote: Did you try and get a hold of the merchant first to see if there was a fix for whatever you didn't like or did you just leave a bad review without contacting them. The customer has absolutely no obligation to the merchant. Why do some merchants feel otherwise? That is a rhetorical question. There is no defensible reason a merchant should order a customer to contact them prior to leaving a review, let alone break TOS and harass them for leaving a review. No one is ordering you to do anything. No merchant in this thread (or anywhere else I've seen on these forums) has suggested that harassment and abuse is an acceptable response to a negative review. Sometimes, a customer doesn't actually understand how to use a product, for any number of reasons. Sometimes, merchants make genuine mistakes when listing products - they're not trying to scam you, they just messed up. Presumably, you paid the merchant for something you wanted. If your expectations are not met for whatever reason, surely its worth contacting them? Its not an obligation, its self-interest.

melaniehaughton wrote: I am sure that there are several of us who have purchased an item off Marketplace and have not been satisfied for whatever reason. We then decide to make a negative review of that product. However, on occasions some of us have received abusive IMs from that vendor over the review. Perhaps I am being naive, but surely it is the vendor's responsibility to either assist the customer or make an effort to improve their product rather than attack the customer. In other words... After Sales Service! Its your responsibility to ask for assistance. I'm certainly not condoning abusive behavior, but every merchant who has been doing this long enough will have received a bad review from a customer who didn't read instructions, had no patience, didn't ask for assistance, or all of the above. Sometimes those reviews are abusive. Most people wouldn't want a merchant contacting them to make sure they're happy, some might even consider that harassment. All we can reasonably do is make ourselves available for customers to contact us.

ChinRey wrote: I just wish we had good, user friendly in-world mesh building tools specially made for the special quirks of SL mesh. But that's not going to happen of course. Hmm. The quirks of SL mesh are a symptom of the less-than-perfect integration of mesh uploading. I could write a list as long as my arm of improvements they could make to their system that would improve accessibility to amateurs, but that's going off-topic. There is definitely a social element to building in-world for many people. Most of my sales come from what I think of as 'mesh lego' kits, where I try to give the user as much freedom as possible in assembly. Its a lot of work, multiplied by those 'quirks', but its always a thrill to go to a customer's sim and see what they've built with my components.