IvanBenjammin

That's reassuring. It can be hard to gauge popular opinion from these forums, considering its already a minority of people who post here. Not so reassuring that people are ignorant of what constitutes IP theft. It occurs to me that that's one of the reasons for that silly test that authorizes you to upload mesh - One cannot claim ignorance as an excuse.

Ok, well I'll raise my hand as someone who creates original mesh and posts on the forums, but you're right - we seem pretty thin on the ground. Its discouraging seeing people post comments along the lines of 'I don't buy mesh, its all ripped from other sources', but I guess that's understandable if you've been burnt before. Its also unfortunate that a creator needs to build a reputation for NOT ripping content. Guilty until proven innocent, as it were. I don't know what can really be done about it, though. SL is definitely the most lucrative market out there, so I'm sticking around.

Nimue Galatea wrote: People on Second Life, much like [real life] - are prone to narcissim and rampant greed... There, I fixed that for you. Its not that I disagree with your statement, I'm just wondering what the point is. Second life is an ultra capitalist world where everything is for sale and the struggle for survival is nonexistent. So yeah, people have a lot of sex and buy stuff. I mean no offense, just having a bit of fun. I hope you find the value and substance you're looking for.

Depending on what format you imported(?) it from, one or more axis may need flipping. Usually its Y and Z as both are used as the 'up' axis in different programs. So look for options in your import dialog that say something like 'flip Y/Z axis'

Post some pics if you're still having trouble. Normal maps can be tricksy - sometimes they'll look inverted but are in fact not, and its just an optical illusion. A couple of lights around your work area can really help when working with normal maps.

I think its pretty appalling how this thread has been hijacked. I'm normally happy to debate economic doctrines and international politics, but not here. It's certainly not the place for personal attacks. The man died. You don't have to like or approve of him, but surely a little respect isn't asking too much?

Rest in peace, Mr. Mandela - you've earned it.

Yeah, What Parrish says. I discovered that by accident when taking a little longer than usual to update MP listings - before that I made new listings every time. Give it about 10-15 minutes and it should show up.

Thank you, both of you for drawing attention to these tools, I'm going to check out the trial version of bitmap2material (which is also on sale via steam) and see if I can incorporate it into my workflow.

Yes, though in the interests of being pedantic (sorry...), its not actually a bug so much as a rendering limitation called 'Alpha Sorting'. Basically the renderer gets confused by multiple transparent surfaces and doesn't know which one is in front. Alpha masking is a simpler way of rendering transparency because it only needs to tell a pixel if its transparent or not without having to deal with semi transparency. Its a yes/no calculation. This is a limitation in its own right however, as it will not handle an alpha channel which has a gradiated change from opaque to transparent. This is what the cut-off value is: telling it at what value transparency kicks in. Apologies again for being pedantic

Well, I dunno about melodramatic, but that's good too - had it as an mp3 for years... But I'm keeping my liver, thanks

Always happy to share some Sagan The voyagers are truly remarkable, and the people involved with them are in the same league as Magellan and James Cook as far as I'm concerned. Pioneers and starry-eyed explorers all. Check out The Sagan Series - chapter 10 is the 'pale blue dot' monologue, put to video.

My rig is pretty similar to that, and runs fine on a 550W PSU, but its definitely a good idea to have breathing room. I have all settings on 'ultra'. RAM: higher clock speeds will have some effect, but not much. If its a significant price jump to the higher speeds, then don't bother. Suggestions: Get a small(ish) solid state drive to go with the 1TB HDD you have there: Hard Drive speeds are by far the biggest bottleneck in PCs these days, and running your OS and important programs off an SSD will dramatically improve performance.

Well, this isn't Saturn, and chances are most of you astronomy buffs know of this pic already, but I think everyone on the planet should know it. As Voyager 1 was hurtling out of the solar system, it turned around and took one of its last photos before its cameras were turned off to save power. Note the white pixel, near the mid-right edge of the image? In the words of the late, great Carl Sagan: “Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” Those words apply equally well to the dot in Cassini's latest pics of Saturn.

Of course! Cats! Listing enhancements, too - hadn't considered those. Yeah, just going to assume it doesn't work, that makes more sense.

Not strictly by sales, no, but I'm sure its part of the ranking algorithm somehow, combined with other stats. If I look at my store, ranked by relevance, most of the items on the first page are among my best sellers, but its not in any order (except top selling product is #1). But also something to do with revenue, because items that have sold less but made more in total are ahead of items that have sold more copies, but not in every case... Maybe it just doesn't work as intended, so there isn't any way we can truly make sense of it.

'Relevance' has something to do with how many sales an item has, but also seemingly how recent those sales were. And yes, it would be nice if the marketplace was more functional.

My two cents - I don't use 3ds max anymore or bake textures as you describe, but you might want to do a bit of editing to the texture after its baked, and before you import it to SL. Levels: Instead of fudging around with lights and gamma settings, you can just alter the levels of the image in photoshop or your image editor of choice. Image>Adjustments>Levels in PS. You'll see a graph called a histogram. Basically what you want to do is adjust the min and max levels to fit the graph. Try doing auto adjustment - sometimes that'll be all you need. This is generally something to do to all textures, especially those taken from photos. Blurry texture bakes: I can't remember the setting off hand, but in mental ray there are controls for the antialiasing of textures and its possible the default value for this is blurring them too much. If you can't fix the output this way, just bake out textures at a higher res and downsize them in PS.

Naa, you still win. I used 2012 for a couple of weeks as part of a job test, prior to that the last version I'd used was 4.5. I have no idea how many version numbers there were between that and them changing it to year numbers.... It was the first 3d package I learnt to use, but never got to use it professionally. To this day though, a lot of Maya shortcuts and hotkeys are still muscle memory, so I customize whatever app I'm using to be as close to Maya as I can.

Thanks Chosen, might be time for me to grab the latest trial version of Maya and see what's changed since the last time I used it - 2012 I think.

Nice post, Chosen. I use Xnormal for all my baking needs, but I might have to check out Turtle. Is that included in Max and Maya? Just wanted to add a point or two, hope you don't mind: Specularity/Reflectivity: You can control both reflectivity and specularity in SL. Reflectivity is faked in with the Environment setting, with the alpha channel in your spec map acting as a reflectivity map. Environment is only reflecting the sky so its not 'true reflection' by any stretch, but works fine for just about anything except an actual mirror. You can also have a glossiness map (glossiness being how sharp specularity is) with an alpha channel in your normal map. You can control glossiness for the whole surface with a single value - the alpha channel is only useful if you have a material with differing values - lets say you have a mirror with a wooden frame - you want the glass to be highly glossy and reflective, with the wooden frame having a softer spec. Obviously can also be done with two different materials. Incandescence: One of the new alpha channel modes is 'Emissive mask', which maps to the glow value of the material. Assuming you don't need the alpha channel in your diffuse texture for something else, you can use the Incandescence bake here. If doing this, be aware however that people viewing your stuff without advanced materials will see a partially transparent surface as they can only interpret the alpha in the default manner. So by working with the maps you can bake out of turtle, combining some into your diffuse maps while using others for spec maps and alpha channels you can get some pretty good results.

Blender has a better DAE exporter than some other apps. Example: I model in Silo and used to use Wings3D to export DAEs. I discovered that Wings3D DAEs fail to preserve smoothing groups/hard edges. They would be visible in Wings but somehow failed to translate properly - even edges deliberately split manually. Using Blender instead of Wings solved that problem.

This sort of issue is usually solved through a process of elimination. Be a detective and isolate what's different. From the sounds of it is the obj itself that's a problem as you've tried different ways of converting it to DAE. So, something to do with the most recent changes you made in Zbrush. Do you have multiple subtools, layers or polygroups? Did the vertex/triangle count increase? Regarding Blender: I don't use it much myself, except as an import/export tool. I was having DAE issues with my workflow, and using Blender to export solved my problem (entirely different issue involving soft/hard normals, but goes to show that DAE exporters are not made equal). In Blender's export DAE window, there are two checkboxes - 'export only selected' and 'export for second life' - No idea what the second one does, but I check it.

What are you using to convert from FBX to DAE? Its seems strange that your process would work the first time but not subsequently. Can you import your DAE file back into Maya or another 3d app? This should at least tell you if there's corruption in your file. Try it with Blender, as this has one of the better DAE exporters. (If you're a maya user, you probably don't like Blender much...give it a shot, if only for the import/export process). I found this thread when googling your error message - it might have some relevant suggestions for you to look at: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Mesh-Uploader-Dae-Parssing-Issue-why-does-it-not-read-my-DAE/td-p/1181637

No experience with the remesher, but if its anything like other decimation tools, its not going to give you the best result. As Sassy says, you want to build your LOD models manually. Decimation tools can work, but generally best for irregularly shaped objects where topology isn't as important. You always want to try and engineer some 'padding' into your texture maps by extending colors and patterns past the UV seam. Happy to give more of an explanation if you need one.