ChinRey

Bitsy Buccaneer wrote: My problems with slow rezzing were worse at the weekend when traffic was higher, better during quiet parts of Monday. I'm in the UK. Maybe but as I write this, it's Tuesday, 3:13 AM SL time, 12:13 European time, so most American and European users are busy with other things than SL. Only 28,217 accounts logged on and the load lag is horrible. All stats show up as normal and once the scene has loaded, there isn't noticeably more lag than usual. The asset servers' unexpected bi-monthly nervous breakdown is quite a bit overdue now. Maybe that has something to do with it. (Edit: fixed a rather crucial typo.)

Pamela Galli wrote: It will never happen but it would be great if mesh could be instanced like textures can – like a given mesh would only need to be rendered once, no matter how many copies were rezzed. As far as I know, even with full instancing every single instance of an asset will have to be rendered separately. But reused assets mean there is less data to transfer and process through every link in the chain and that helps a lot. Btw, since it seems nobody is going to do their homework Here are the answers: The LI saving trick Drongle unknowingly taught me was to export without triangulating. The SL uploader is more efficient than Blender's exporter when it comes to splitting bigger polys into tris. It's a good feeling actually: if the uploader can do something right, there's hope for everybody. As for Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus, there are two features that trick the eye there. One is the fruitbowl. It seems to be on the table but it isn't, it's hanging off the edge towards the viewer, only held up by the suspension of disbelief. The trick has a purpose btw, along with St. Peter's outstretched hand it expands the picture outside the canvas, inviting the viewer to join the meal. (As Caravaggio did himself, that fourth person standing in the background is him.) Interesting but I was using the picture to show how the brain fills in details and that' the second trick. Take a close look at the table, examine the table legs...

Drongle McMahon wrote: And that's surely the most important advantage of using reuseable textures, tileable or otherwise, instead of baked textures. They can be used on a whole set of different models, so that you don't have to download a new baked texture for each. Oh yes, except to be more precise, some tileable textures are easier to reuse than baked textures. You can reuse baked textures too - Hattie for example is an expert there - and not all tileable textures are reusable. What matters in the end is not the individual textures but the total number of texture pixels the poor graphics processor has to keep track of. I wonder how a typical SL scene compares to a typical modern computer game there. Has anybody ever checked?

As Syo said, you can't see if an account has been suspended. That is, you can see if it has been closed but there's no way to know if it was the account owner or LL who did it. Amazing as it may sound, people do occasionally leave SL voluntarily. As for groups, closed accounts are supposed to be removed but sometimes they aren't, probably because of a bug of some kind. I have no idea what happens to temporarily suspended accounts but I guess nothing changes except that the owner won't be allowed to log on for a while.

Oh, I thought that bug was fixed by now. It's been there for a long, long time. Anyway, what you do is log on to https://my.secondlife.com/ That's the web interface for our profiles and you should be able to upload the picture there. You can even save10 Lindens if you know about it in advance since uploading to the website is free, uploading through the viewer is not. Edit: If the web based uploader is broken too, I'm afraid the only option is to file a bug report at https://jira.secondlife.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa and hope somebody at Linden Lab notices and fixes it.

Pamela Galli wrote: Those do look good, even without shadows on, those are good texture selections :-) Thank you! I realized after I posted that I cheated quite a lot, by accident, not on purpose. Only two of the textures on that cottage are truly tileable. One is seamless but with to obvious a pattern to work across large surfaces, three are only repeatable horizontally and two are not repeatable in any way. But they're all versatile and that's the real point. I also forgot to mention the normals. Smooth and flat normals are great for sharpening and rounding off edges but they can also be extremely useful for controlling the effect of the basic shaders. Pamela Galli wrote: Also good job repurposing the mesh to create so many versions (that is what I do, too). Yes. If the purpose is to get lag down, reusing assets is by far the most important thing.

Pamela Galli wrote: She does beautiful work -- but is not using tiled textures, and my question is how using tiled textures can result in such effects. Oh, I misunderstood you then. It's easy: first you spend a small fortune on the MP buying textures from the biggest and most prestigious texture stores. Then you rummage through your old inventory, find all the garbage you picked up at Yadni's on your first day in SL and realize that a few of the textures there are far better. It's all about selection. High quality, versatile textures are precious gems and every time I discover one is a moment of celebration. You can find them in the most unexpected places. Apart from the edges of the signboard, all the shading you see are just default basic shaders created by the viewer. They are actually much better than their reputation if you only give them the right surfaces to fall on. I do use just about every function in the texture tab for all they're worth and often in rather unconventional ways but if you're talking about the beta grid pictures of my sign, there's nothing fancy. Quick adjustment of texture repeats, heavily darkened metal, that's all. You can use AO on tiled textures too btw. There are some limits of course, you can't do edge shading for a start. But in principle it's the same and many of those old textures have quite heavy shading even though they didn't call it AO back then. If you have time, take a look at Oliva Oriolus' Vintage Village. I think half that place is covered with stock textures straight out of the library folder yet it's absolutely perfect. That Old wood texture in the library with that garish technicolorish orange tint, it's not even tileable really. At Vintage Village it does the job of dozens of baked textures and it does it quite well. Don't ask me how he managed that, I have absolutely no idea. I wouldn't be too surprised if he couldn't explain either. And that's it, really. I can't explain it better because it's more intuition than logic. (ChinRey stutters and shuffles her feet, trying to find an excuse to change the subject...) Oh, do you want to see my latest house? I thought it was time I entered the luxury house market so you finally got some serious competition, so here it is! It's got windows and a door and everything! What more can you ask for? Come to think of it, it is actually a better illustration of how I texture than the sign was... Exterior walls and fundament texture by Crazy Mole Roof texture by Moard Ling Doorstep: Tooter Claxton All plank surfaces: my own shaded texture based on a plain plank texture by Eric Linden All other wood parts use the same texture as the sign Door handle: same texture as the sign, used both as diffuse and specular map Windows: a scaled down version of a Linda Kellie texture, used as diffuse, specular and even normal map Door's balancing face: my own 4x4 pixel full alpha Wallpaper... umm, that's actually an HL2 texture. We are allwowed to use them, right? I've double and triple checked and I can't help noticing that even TRU still sells them. But maybe I should have quadruple checked. Oh, well, I can change it if necessary. All these pictures were taken with ultra graphics, windlight set to standard 9 AM. Here's how the house looks with medium graphics: I don't know what other thinks about the looks of course but I'm quite happy with it. And it's all textures I've just stumbled across - hidden among huge piles of garbage I have to admit. Some I've edited One of the advantages of doing it this way is: 3909 display weight. That's not going to lag down anybody's computer Another advantage is of course that it only takes ten minutes or so to make this little collection:

Rya Nitely wrote: None of this happened through careful planning, advertising, strategies, marketing or high expectations. It was simply good products, word of mouth, and enjoying every minute of it all. That's how I do it too. Somebody buys one of my builds, they see it's good and buy some more. They rez it on their land, other people see it, sees it's good and buy more. It's slow but it works. Every month I make a little bit more. I'm not sure if that's a good strategy for a newcomer today though.

Nutria2016 wrote: Wish I knew some better advertising services other than Listing Enhancements and SecondAds. I think those listing enhancments are a waste of money for everybody at this stage. The problem is that you pay a flat fee regadless of how many impressions and click-throughs your ad receives and the more optimists there are who pay that fee, the fewer impressions there are for each ad. There are quite a lot of optimists selling on MP these days. I once tried a 7 day enhanced listing on the MP main page. 899 L$ for 56 untargetted impressions, that's just didiculous. It may be a little bit better now since LL was favoring some advertisers with extra impressions back then and I don't think they do that anymore. But even so, you'd need thousands of impressions to justify the cost. Nutria2016 wrote: My goal was to at least make $20 a week. There are almost 200,000 registered merchants on MP. The total annual amount of income withdrawn from SL by users was about 60 million dollars a year or three ago, it's probably a little bit less now. That's the net income for all merchants and landowners and... well everybody. There are lots of unknown factors here but these numbers should give us some idea what the average SL builder/merchant makes. Let's say 1-10 dollars a week to keep a good margin of error.

You don't have to buy a mesh head if you don't want to. But to get good match between the skin tones of head and body you need a skin that comes with a Maitreya or Omega applier.

Pamela Galli wrote: The reason we can't make our second life creations light and dark like a Caravaggio , is because we have to make them for not just one environment but multiple ones, including ones wth dynamic lighting and shadows. So much of the baked lighting must be subtle, like on a cloudy day. For those who want to learn how to do effective shading in SL, I suggest studying Hattie Panacek's work. She's the Caravaggio of Second Life (but don't tell her I said that, she'd die of embarrasment). She's even more obsessed with lag than me and still uses baked textures nearly all the time. She gets away with it by keeping the resolution down and by reusing textures whenever possible. (Disclaimer: Hattie Panacek s one of my best friends and bulider sparring partner and one of my alts is her main scripter so it is possible my evaluation of her qualities is a tiny weeny bit biased )

arabellajones wrote: And this can be considered good UI design? I don't consider any part of any SL viewer, official or third party, present or past, to be good UI design. That's something we just have to live with if we want to be in SL.

Madelaine McMasters wrote: Have you taken the any of the Harvard implicit bias tests? https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html Really interesting. The one test I tried there seemed to be seriously flawed though. The test went through several rounds. At first you were told to associate negative obejcts with black Americans and positive objects and the test measured how fast and reliably you could do that. Then in the middle it's suddenly switched, now you have to assoviate positive objects with black Americans and negative ones with whites. As far as I could see, the test did not take into account the confusion that sudden switch caused nor the test subject's fatigue at the second part and both those factors will of course significantly reduce the speed and accuracy. The correct way to make such a test would be to have alternating rounds. As it is now, it's just a silly game and not in any way a serious or reliable test. After that, I didn't even bother with the other tests. Edit: took a quick look at the other tests and they do actually say something important ... about the test makers' preconceptions of people's preconceptions. They probably weren't concious about it but all the tests are quite strongly biased towards giving the result they seemed to expect. (Although of course, my preconception about what result they expected may be wrong.) I really, really hope this was a students' project and not a serious work by members of the faculty at a prestigious university.

StJohnOfGods wrote: You all are racist What? All of us??? That being said, I use European, Asian and African looking avatars for my different alts and yes, I have noticed the difference that makes in how people treat you. I actually did a test once. I went to a popular beach wearing my very best African avi and was left all alone. Then I went home, changed to blonde hair, pale skin and blue eyes and returned to the beach... I always use the African avi for that sim since then. There is such a thing as unwanted attention.

If mesh avis are first class and classic avis second, where do I fit in? I use both, depending on the outfit, my mood and the situation.

entity0x wrote: I appreciate your skill and hard work that got you there, but that's besides the point. What was 'lost' has actually helped you succeed by widening the gap between builders and those who can mesh. Yes, mesh did exclude a lot of old builders and if we want to be cynical about it, that in itself was an advantage for those who persisted and were willing and able to adapt. But mesh also gave us this new kind of freebie resellers, people who simply upload and sell whatever meshes they come across on the internet, and all in all I don't think the competition lessened. Freebie resellers don't spend any time or effort building the items they sell, most of them don't spend any time of effort getting (and learning how to) get decent uploads and some of them can't even be botherd to take their own product pics. That means they can sell very cheap and still make a profit and it's hard to compete against that. I think the best answer to that is summed up in Chic's title for this thread: "Building in an Environment". All 3D platforms have their own peculiarities, SL perhaps more than any of the others, and meshes built speifically for a platform will usually work much better than ones intended for another one. Unfortunately that also require "Buying in an Environment" to really work. You don't see those differences in a picture on MP or on a vendor, they only show up after rezzing.

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: I think a lot of the 'trouble' results from a misunderstanding of what is exactly being rented. If your friend has stores in malls, generally you are renting prims not land. Yes, and he told me he understood that. But of course, he doesn't want to pay more than market price for those prims so move the stores he does. I think we're going to see quite a few malls emptying because their owners don't udnerstand this. It's different when it comnes to cases like Caitlin's and Matt's. They can't simply say they don't want those extra prims. Basically, they have to pay extra for something they didn't ask for and that wasn't included in the deal.

Chic Aeon wrote: I do know who Caravaggio is. Not my favorite, but I do appreciate the school. Same here really. But his work is certainly worth studying for anybody who wants to learn about light and shadow effects and of course, the optical illusion in Supper at Emmaus has made it a classic textbook illustration of how we preceive our surroundings.

Caitlin Applewhyte wrote: Matt had just uprooted his successful mall to move to this full sim so moving again would be detrimental to the business. It would but Eldowyn Insham actually did something like that. After eight years in the same sim, with a Medieval Fantasy Hunt and christmas market just started and with hardly any warning, all of a sudden United Inshcon had moved to a new sim because of "disagreements with the landowner". Not sure if it had anything to do with the prim increase but the timing is right. Eldo seems to have gotten away with it and the hunt may actually have helped since the hunters have to ask where the new base is. Even so, it must have been a very though decision but sometimes you just have to cut your losses and move on. The best solution is perhaps to find a better offer somewhere else, then tell your current landowner that if they can't match it you have no choice but to move. If they know what's good for them, they'll drop the price. Of course if you have a really bad landowner you may find yourself homeless an hour later, better be prepared for that. You have a good group with more than 1000 members and also the groups for all your artists so I don't think moving will affect your visit count very much. The problem, apart from all the work it takes backing up an entire sim and re-rezzing it somewhere else, is to convince your tenants to come along. Talk to them well in advance and tell them how it is. I don't have a store at your place at the moment and can only speak for myself but I would be more than happy to move if it meant lower rent and I think the store owners you have now will be too. Edit: Did anybody foresee that the prim limit increase would cause problems like this? It's not unique. While I was writing this post I was also on IM with a friend who's running a network of affiliate stores across SL. He told me several of his stores are still on the old price/prim limit and he's looking for new locations for all of them.

Chic Aeon wrote: I will say that learning how to map for tiling textures is a great place to start for those learning mesh. I doubt though that it is the end goal for most folks Why not? Don't get me wrong, as I've said several times in this thread, the good old style texture mapping still has its place. But currently there seems to be a trend to believe that it's more "advanced" or more "professional" or more "modern" than tiling textures and nothing could be further from the truth. As for cycles, well, it's easy and there's nothing wrong with doing it the easy way. But if you really want to get the lighting and shading right, take a look at the the Caravaggio painting in my previous post. That photo doesn't really do the original justice of course but you should still be able to see it. Can a computer program do that? I think not. (The shading wasn't why I posted that image btw but it works for that too. Caravaggio is after all particularly famous for his light settings and why learn from studying the real masters? The point I wanted to the picture to make was that nobody was going to get the point unless they were told. I'm surprised if nobody knows the answer already though, the picture is used quite often to test people's visual perception and attention to details.) Chic Aeon wrote: So we are talking APPLES and ORANGES here and likely getting folks that haven't put in those thousands of hours even more confused. Yes probably because it's a question of what the purpose of the model is. If it's supposed to be a standalone item, complete in itself you want to give attention to every little detail, just like those people who spend thousands of hours building cathedrals from Minecraft thingies (or from matches before it all became digital). But if it's supposed to be a part of a bigger whole like a virtual reality environment, you have to think different and consider boring stuff like focal points, visual layers, context and resource management. That's when things start to get really tricky and suddenly the answers aren't nearly as clear anymore.

Pamela Galli wrote: Oh okay, so you mean putting all the UVs on one layer as opposed to stacking them? I mean aligning them. In the final UV map every single vertice has the coordinates <0,0,>, <0,256>, <256,0> or <256,256>. In other words, the whole list of UV coordinates only has two different numbers. Dowload weight depends on the mesh's file size after it has been compressed and the more identical data bits and bytes the file hold, the tighter it can be compressed. This is perhaps the biggest of all LI saving tricks. Pamela Galli wrote: And as for details, what I hear over and over from customers is appreciation for details. And you know what? I don't know what they mean. Listen to this: It's a single cello playing one single note at a time yet we hear full chords. The part of the human brain that deals with sensory input is eminently good at filling in the gaps and we see, hear, taste, smell and feel far more details than what the sensory organs actually catches. That brings up another aspect btw. SL is supposed to be a world for fantasy. What happens when it gets so detailed there's no room left for the imagination to play in? Of course, there is no textbook answer to how much and which details are needed to give the right experience. There are some guidelines but in the end it's pure art. Edit: we're talking visuals here, not sound so maybe this is a better example than the Bach Prelude: 

Pamela Galli wrote: Thank you for your lessons, Chin. Yw. Ummm... is it stupid of me to give away trade secret this way? Pamela Galli wrote: I notice that your pictures look like they are taken with shadows on -- not sure about Ambient Occlusion -- which gives a nice 3D effect without baked AO. The pictures of the current prim sign were taken with graphics set to ultra. For the metal parts I used the same texture both as diffuse and specular map (another lag saving technique btw although it doesn't lower any of the officially calculated weights). The wood and the sign are just good old textures. The wood texture is so rich to begin it that any additions would be overkill and only result in that silly plastic/doll house effect you often see when people get overexcited about all those new wonderful surface effects. The shading and smudge on the sign are all added manually in paint.net. Generally I prefer to combine Overlay and Color Burn to get a richer shading than what Color Burn alone can do. All the pictures of the mesh sign were quick-and-dirty work-in-progress pics, standard mid level graphics, quick texturing with no additional surface maps. I didn't even bother to set a specific windlight - this was all about meshes, not textures after all. Pamela Galli wrote: I am not sure what you mean about using symmetrical UVs instead of islands. What is the difference? Here's the UV map of the lowest LoD model from Lesson 6, all materials on top of each other:  The result of an UV map that wasn't ideal to start with and then had most of the vertices removed. The UV map of the final lowest LoD model looks like this:  That change alone reduced the LI by 0.4. Similar changes to the other model also reduced the LI although not nearly as much as that. The rest of the final LI reduction came from more efficient chain links and removal of some other superfluous tris in the mid model and straightening up the low LoD model. Oh and a new secret trick I learned from Drongle although he doesn't seem to be aware of it himself. You don't expect me to give away all my tricks do you? That would take too long, would spoil much of the fun and besides, as the owner of a well known builder school once told me, you can teach people how to fish but you don't necessarily show them the best fishing spots. He told me that after I had stumbled across his best fishing spot myself so maybe I can give you a little challenge there: what is that new secret trick? (Hint: read Drongle's recent posts here and take them out of context.) Or don't bother. It's just a minor LI reduction anyway. Pamela Galli wrote: That means adding shading to pretty much every texture I use, whether baked or Gimped, mostly using UV islands tho sometimes not. There's no limit to how much details we want to add to our builds, is it? I've been trying to figure out how to add welding seams to that sign. One occupational hazard all builders and everybody else who do creative work has to deal with is the tendency to get too hung up on details. We see every little thing, especially and annoyingly every little flaw. Other people don't usually see it that way, they see it as a whole. Ideally (although far to rarely) in SL they see it as part of the whole. More textures mean more lag of course and that is serious enough. But even apart from that, too many details can easily reduce the visual quality. Take a look at a typical Blueberry piece of clothing. Notice how simple the design is compared to so much other SL clothing? That simplicity doesn't make it look any worse. On the contrary, it looks much better that way because lack of distractions helps bring forth those few details that are crucial for the overall look.

Rolig Loon wrote: Heh. I have a couple of clever alts. They don't even tell me what they do in their spare time :smileyvery-happy: That's right, Never trust your alts! I was thinking of a rather special one with a name similar to yours but in a different language. But you don't have to answer that of course.

Chic Aeon wrote: But, while there is some nostalgia in my post as I had some of my best times in building classes -- I was mostly mentally extrapolating the difference between prim building (all in world), current mesh building (part in world) and "hitting that publish button" that has been mentioned. While it "may" be OK for me, I am thinking it might be too far removed from virtual life and much more of a simple commodity. 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.

Rolig Loon wrote: To be more honest (with myself, mostly), the big reason that I stopped making clothing and became a full time scripter is that I am not a very talented artist but I do have a puzzle-lover's flair for writing challenging scripts. Hmmm... I don't know about clothes but I have seen some very clever aquatic prim thingies made by somebody I believe is an alt of yours. But maybe I'm wrong.