IvanBenjammin

Can you post a pic of what the texture looks like? Often a lower LOD won't keep quite the same UV seams. Often fixing something like this is as simple as filling in the empty texture space with the main color, thereby disguising any potential seams.

If you're talking about material faces (if you're not, ignore me!), you might be able to select all and then deselect all parts you can see, leaving you with the hidden part still selected.

Well, just from looking at the tri/vertex counts it seems to me your low and lowest LODs are far too high. In your last upload where you got the land impact down, I can see the lowest LOD has 40 tris instead of over 1000. Are you creating your own LODs or is the uploader generating them for you? If the latter, I'd say that's your problem. For some reason, it seems the uploader (in this case, anyway) has better luck reducing the tri/vertex count with flat shading. You can see that in your successful upload, your high LOD has a higher vertex count, but the lowest LOD is greatly reduced.

My skin is fine - that's got nothing to do with not wanting to offend anyone

Oh, I didn't mean *I* was ahead of the curve, just the fact that I build everything with mesh and normal maps etc. I know the power of normal mapping, but I get the feeling that lots of residents don't see what the fuss is about just yet. But, it was the same situation with mesh when it first arrived on the scene. Hope I didn't sound arrogant before, wasn't trying to claim I was better than the rest. There's some fantastic stuff out there, and lots of really talented creators. And thank you for the compliment Drongle's graphs: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Download-weight-and-size-Some-graphs/td-p/1057163

Yeah, very glad, especially now with mesh much more prevalent and materials coming onto the scene. I suspect I'm a little ahead of the curve with my stuff, but oh well: The curve will catch up LODs: Yes, always build/upload my own. In the words of Ellen Ripley, "Its the only way to be sure." The auto generation almost always ruins the shape. I have Dronge McMahon to thank for his fantastic LOD graphs - they took a lot of guesswork out of the process.

I've heard other traditional artists say similar things about texturing and photoshop in general. I think its just a big mental shift from drawing/painting to texturing. Personally I love to model and texture, but couldn't animate my way out of a paper bag You're absolutely right, everyone has their own talents. When you think about it, the 3d art pipeline isn't really meant to be handled by one person, and I think there's a lot of value in focusing on what you are good at and enjoy. Except UV mapping. No one likes UV mapping. If you think you do, you haven't had to do it enough

Possible, sure, but the difficulty would be in building a user-friendly interface. In theory, alpha channels can be used to affect anything within a material, but how would you make that accessible to the end-user? Would the end user have to create their own alpha channels to make their particular outfit work? If that's the case, then you need access to the UV map of the particular clothing item, which not all creators include in their products (especially if its a no transfer item). Because there's no standard for UV layouts, every alpha would have to be unique. Finally, there's the fact that layering multiple alphas on top of each other can lead to rendering issues (unless you use alpha masking which has its own limitations). Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have more control over materials, but given the fact that normal and spec mapping has only just now arrived on the scene, I think a feature like this is unlikely to be implemented anytime soon, if at all.

Well, as a builder who got into SL only because mesh became available, I'm somewhat biased. But mesh really is the way forward. Most of the disadvantages of it spring from people not building efficiently. Mesh builds that look terrible at a distance is usually down to the auto generated LOD models in the mesh uploader. Then there's the art of UV mapping and using texture space efficiently. Others have said it, but mesh builds can be very versatile if they're built to be modular. I would dearly love to be able to use custom pivot points, as it would make modular construction so much more straightfoward, but we work with the tools we have. Having said all that, I can totally see how many creators would prefer to work in prims because learning 3d modelling is a pretty serious undertaking. There are multiple skillsets to master and new tools to learn and it can seem pretty daunting to beginners.

A very bad effect on lag, I suspect - but then avatars walking around with 200,000 polys in the form of sculpties isn't exactly lag-less!

Hi Mila, I think you may be asking more than you realise. I use Zbrush quite regularly, but for objects and building components not clothing. I have also tried to teach people Zbrush before, and left them more confused than they were to begin with. Its not a complex program, its just does everything differently to other 3d apps and it requires a kind of mental shift to use effectively. I say this because you might have better luck learning and getting a teacher if you can refine what you want to learn. I know this might be easier said than done, as often in these cases you don't know what you don't know (The Rumsfeld principle of 'unknown unknowns' ) My advice is to actually look at some of those tutorials. Zbrushcentral.com is an excellent resource, especially for the initial period of getting to grips with the interface. Then you can start asking specific questions about specific tools and effects I don't have the time to be an actual teacher sorry (and I know NOTHING about clothes or fashion...), but I'm happy to help out with specific questions/suggestions. Good luck.

Check the land impact of the house, specifically the 'more info' pop up. If your download or physics weight is high, then its the fault of the mesh, otherwise its likely textures. Because you don't have an actual 'land-impact' value for textures, a lot of people have a very casual attitude towards their use, when they're actually the biggest cause of lag and poor performance. Yes, mesh items can be inefficient and laggy, but only when they're built badly - the actual cost of downloading polygon data is tiny in comparison to textures. And if your house is using normal and/or specular maps, you're downloading 3 maps for every surface instead of one. A single 1024x1024 texture is close to 2mb of data, more if it has an alpha channel. This is why developers for games reuse textures all over the place, all the time.

Often when it comes down to the wire, what's 'legal' is what holds up in court. There have been a number of cases in the US and elsewhere where EULAs (Those agreements you click 'agree' to when installing anything) have been ruled to be invalid. But then the software company appeals the decision, and it becomes lawyer-war... It is more complicated with international law, although in theory everyone who uploads content to US servers is bound by US law. Its also worth pointing out again that LL claims 'non-exclusive' rights. Not much of a consolation to scripters are other creators whose work is very SL-specific, but it does at least mean they're not able to take away your rights to continue selling your work on your own terms.

Thank you Chic, for linking to that blog post. Nice to read something about this whole thing that is well thought out and rational. The connection (or potential connection) between the TOS changes and Desura is very apt, but I would like to point out that asset libraries for indy developers already exist, not the least being the one built into the Unity3D engine. Most if not all of these have profit sharing arrangements with creators. Their commission is much higher than the SL marketplace cut - up to 50%, but this is offset by the higher price you pay. Similar quality items in other asset stores can sell for 10 or 20 times the real world dollar amount as SL items. I'm not really trying to make an argument either way, here, but assuming LL's strategy is to license SL content for Desura, they're in for a whole new level of competition against existing asset stores which may not be in their best interest. Also, it shouldn't be underestimated how much work would be involved in translating SL assets into a format for Unreal or Unity. Guess I'm still sitting on the fence on this. I was cautiously optimistic, but now I'm just cautious

Thanks Loki for quoting that. Personally I wasn't concerned about the CGtextures thing, but I was a little nervous about how the TOS impacted my own work. Nice to know LL's intent isn't as evil as it might seem. At the end of the day, their commercial success depends on the user base, and they gain nothing by alienating that.

I believe that when you use materials on prims, you force them to use 'true' land-impact values. I'm not 100% sure on this as everything I make is mesh, but I think its mostly physics weight that is driving the LI up. I found this with a quick google search: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MATBUG-277

Do you want to learn how to create normal and specular maps as well, or just diffuse textures? When you're talking about materials like silk, a huge part of the effect is due to specular mapping. Normal mapping can be used to create fantastic folded fabric effects. Google is definitely your friend, though beware the rabbit hole effect - you're staring down an entire craft that people spend years getting good at. Now with advanced materials, it got even more complicated for the hobbyist. But of course if you do mesh you probably know all about the rabbit hole. I'd recommend reading up about materials on the SL wiki - some really helpful tips in there for dealing with different maps and alphas. There's also probably some general '3d arts' discussion around how to achieve a look like silk - have a look through forums and sites dedicated to video game art. A couple I can think of from the top of my head are game-artist.net and polycount.com. Now that SL is more or less mainstream in its use of maps and mesh, builders have a wealth of information to draw on. Also, on the drawing thing, you can be a perfectly good texture artist without being able to draw in the traditional sense. Planning - knowing what you want to achieve and roughly how to get there - and a thorough understanding of Photoshop or whatever you use will take you where you need to go. Being able to roughly sketch out UV maps can be handy, but anyone with a hand and a drawing stick can do that

Normal maps are fantastic - best thing since mesh Few tips: Without getting too technical, normal maps use the red, green and blue channels for different angles. Red is left/right(X), green is up/down(Y), and blue is depth (Z). With this in mind, its really easy to fix a normal map that might not look quite right when imported into SL. You can usually tell this when you shine a light on a, for example, brick surface and the wrong edges are shaded. If your normal map does look wrong, invert the offending channel in Photoshop or whatever image editing software you use (In photoshop, go into channels tab, select the channel and CTRL+I to invert). You might need to do this for red and green. Blue you usually want to leave alone unless you want to completely reverse the surface. Technically speaking, SL (can only speak for the official viewer) uses +X, -Y, +Z for its normal map vectors. This is something you don't need to know unless you're baking normals from a high poly object. Oh, and Xnormal ftw.

Thanks Drongle for expanding on all that - I don't use Blender myself. For my purposes I find the uploader normal settings sufficient but that's because I a) use a modelling program that doesn't have smoothing groups (Silo), and b) tend to plan out where my hard edges are going to be by either breaking them as I described or with UV/material seams. Like you say, they often go together.

Can't help you with smoothing groups in Blender, but the cheap and nasty way to do it is to just break your model along the edges you want to be hard. Not sure of the right terminology for blender, but probably something like 'split edge/vertex' . Then when you import into SL tick 'generate normals' and set it really high, to make sure you get smoothing on everything you haven't deliberately broken. You'll also have hard edges wherever there are breaks between pieces in your UV map. Smooth edges will drastically lower vertex count on your meshes, but can make shading look a bit wierd if you don't have enough edge loops. Normal maps can correct that, but that's a whole different subject

Hard to give specific suggestions, but I'll throw in some cents. What I've learnt in building stuff for SL (been a 3d modeller for years) is that it can help to work (or at least plan) backwards. Design your textures and meshes so that it works at the lowest LOD and go from there. It can be tricky but all I can suggest is practice, practice, practice That error you're getting about not the same number of faces? If you don't know what that is, its a mesh LOD having a different number of texture 'faces' than the others. If you get this after deleting a portion of your mesh, just make sure the material it had is applied somewhere - throw in a hidden triangle somewhere. Smoothing groups (hard/soft edges): Anytime you want a hard edge in 3d rendering (realtime or otherwise) the renderer has to 'break' your vertices into 2 or more. So, while in your 3d program you can move a corner vertice around as it if were one, for all rendering and display purposes its 2 or more verts on top of each other. Best way to learn about this: Practice! Mess with the uploader options and the 'generate normals' option. Export a basic sphere out of your 3d program and import it into SL (well, not import - just get it into the uploader), play with the normal values. You should see the vertex count change as you do this.Vertices 'cost' more that triangles to render, which is why a smooth object is going to be lower LI that a hard edged one, even if they have the exact same number of triangles. I hope I'm not being too technical...

The best way is unfortunately the slowest way - removing edges and vertices manually. You can rely on automatic decimation tools, either within your 3d modelling program or something like Meshlab, but it can be very unpredictable and can ruin your UV mapping. Determining how much to reduce comes down to trial and error and lots of practice. Experiment, load different meshes into the uploader and see what it does it your LI. Good luck!

If I understand the question correctly, you want +x, -y, +z.