ChinRey

Lesson ∞: Here we go again With special thanks to everybody for being polite enough not to point out the obvious flaws in those seven lessons, here's the final(?) result:  1.4 and 0.7 are both rounded off to 1 LI of course so this final optimisation stage doesn't make much difference in itself. But as I said, it's all about getting more for less. There should be room for a visible chain in the low model now. Or maybe I should add a few bolts? Just to prove that I have nothing against hexagons. There may even be room for both within the 1 LI limit.

I always do as much work as possible in-world and use Blender and other off-world programs only to add the detials that simply can't be done with prims. One reason is that building in a virtual environment is more enjoyable than building but there's more to it than that. Buiding in SL makes it much easier to see how the work fits in SL, it's easier to get the proporions right and you see at a much earlier stage some of the places where there is room for improvement. People keep askign me how I get so low LI numbers without sacrificing LoD and although I haven't measured this the way I've done with the tricks I've posted elsewhere here, I'm farily sure that inworld building is an important part of the secret.

Pamela Galli wrote: When the barrier to entry was raised so far beyond the skill level of most people, Second Life lost something very valuable. With the danger of taking the discussion even further off track, take a look at Cuge Lacnala's christmas village. No pictures, they wouldn't do the build justice. You'll have to visit the place if you want to see it: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Buttermere/64/183/3011 The village was orginally made as a skybox (above a tropical themed homestead sim of all things), according to Cuge just to put the spare prims of the sim to some use. ;-) When the sim closed down, Cuge rebuilt it on the ground in Caledon and in 2013 the ground version was voted Best architectural design/build in a virtual world in a contest sponsored by VSTE. A few months ago I managed to persuade Cuge to rez the sky version above my Buttermere land. No real purpose to it really, I just didn't want the build to be lost in an inventory and never seen by anybody. Some pieces may have gone AWOL over the years but most of the buld should still be intact. What all that has to do with this thread? Cuge doesn't build anymore. He told me he couldn't compete with all this new mesh stuff. He's wrong actually, the few meshes he made are all really good in every way. But that doesn't matter because the thrill is gone.

Jokes aside, you do have all my sympathy, Matt. I know how much work and how much love you have out into 1st Chapter Plaza, I know from experience how well you treat your own renters and I'm really sorry to hear you've run into such problems You're the last person to deserve that kind of treatment. But I don't think Qie was trying to defend anybody, he was just stating the facts. Second Life is a free, unregulated market and that means it's wide open for all kinds of liars and cheaters. Maybe we shouldn't make crude jokes about it but what else can you do? It's laughing just to keep from crying really.

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: Pamela Galli wrote: ... Do people even know what free-market means?... For the entitled, when they are the person having to pay for something they want, a free market means greed. However when they figure out how to make something they can sell or can afford to buy land to rent out, then all of a the sudden the definition of a free market changes and they join the greedy enemy.:smileywink: Or to put it another way: It's the playground where everybody love to play it rough until they stub their toe and go all Trump and run back to mommy to cry about how unfair it is. In the free market of 19th century England dairies used to spike their skimmed milk with lead to make it look richer and fatter.

Hmmm... I have a feeling I didn't explain all aspects of that first lesson clearly enough. Cleaning up that messy UV map would certainly reduce the LI increase but it wouldn't eliminate it completely. UV islands will nearly always give bigger files and higher download weight than simple symmetric UV maps. And of course baked custom textures are always considerably laggier than repeating ones. That's why Pixar developed the repeting texture system in the first place. (Digression: Why is it that so many people in SL seem to think that techniques like UV islands and normal maps are the latest in 3D modelling? They're not, they're stone age stuff. The reason why they weren't included in the original SL was not that they hadn't been invented yet but because by 2002 they were considered to be hopelessly outdated.) Don't get me wrong. baked textures and UV islands do have their place and not even the original SL dev team could avoid the completely. I'm also very much for reviving old "outdated" ideas in general. We can learn a lot from studying how the pioneers could work miracles using "supercomputers" with less power than a modern mobile phone. But in a case like this exmple there'd be absolutely nothing to gain by using UV islands and a lot to loose. We can always discuss how much work it is reasonable to put into a build but I do hope we all agree that spending a lot of time and effort reducing the quality is a bad idea.

chunkygravy wrote: 15600 L$ / 262 L$ = $59.5 262 L$ exchange rate is a bit optimisitc to put it mildly. Say 270. Until recently. the model you're suggesting was marginally more lucrative than simply paying tier for a whole sim, at least if you didn't take into account the increased workload managing such a complex setup. Last time I did the calculation - only about two weeks ago - the total cost for the two models seemed to be all but identical. What happens in the future is anybody's guess but don't expect either model to be much cheaper than the other. The real advantage of the multiple-premium-alts solution is that it's scaleable. The advantages of a single big tier are that it s much easier to manage and doesn't require such a big initial investment. chunkygravy wrote: Minimum break even rent price= 136 L$ wk Qie and Amethyst have already mentioned vacancy rate. Expect 90% vacanices first year, 75% second year, 50% third year and from then on about 10-30%. If you're lucky and work really hard recruiting renters that is. Be prepared to spend at least 10-20 hours of promo/recruitment work for each long term tenant you get. You're trying to enter a declining market that already has far more supply than demand. Even the big, well established actors are cutting down now. What do you have that they don't? That is always the Big Question for any new business, you got to have something that sets you apart from everybody else. It doesn't have to be much and it can be anything. But it has to be something and the multiple accounts model is not it.

Rhiannon Arkin wrote: Your initial example of uv layout is indeed a huge waste of space. I don't know blender, can you manually generate, manipulate uvs in that software? Unfortunately for me, yes. I have a depressing tendency to try to edit every single vertice on the 3D model and the UV map and every single pixel in the texture manually.

Lesson 7: Getting physical Finally time to upload:  We got the download weight down to 1.389, that's low enough to be rounded down to 1. Yay! The physics weight is 1.4 though, not high enough to make a difference to the LI but even so, is that really necessary? People may bump into the sign every now and then but they're not likely to ever try to walk all over it. A cube would make a much better physics model than whatever the uploader generates (and if you thought GLOD was horribly bad at his job, just look at what lunacies his physics generating brother can dream up!)  0.36 physics weight, that's more like it. I think most mesh makers know this but just in case: Make two dae files, one with a single triangle and one with a simple cube, and save them in an easy to find spot on your harddisk. Use the triangle (0.200 physics weight) as physics model for items that don't really need physics at all and the cube (0.360 physics weight) for anything avatars and/or moving physical objects are going to bump into. No need to worry about the size of these two meshes, the uploader will automatically scale them to the same size as the main model. But the proof is in the pudding... And here it is. High LoD:  Mid:  Low:  Lowest:  And a few details:   A final word We keep talking about keeping the LI down but this is also a way to increase the amount of fine details in the full high resolution model. The challenge with this sign was of course the chain, the other parts are very simple. The common solution would be to reduce the curve resolution for the chain links but I really wanted to avoid that. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against octagons and hexagons, some of my best friends are... No, they aren't really. Anyway: there is a time and a place for everything but a rugged chain is not the place for any kind of polygons. These efficient modelling techniques meant that I could afford properly rounded chain links. They may actually be a bit too round, perhaps I should remove a few vertices from them just to make them look more natural before I upload to the main grid. Resource efficient modelling is not about saving for the sake of saving, it's all about getting more for less.

Lesson 6: The faraway Here's the lowest LoD model:  and yes, I could have done a little bit better... I don't know if anybody remembers an old C&W song called "The Builder": Ev'ry builder knows that the secret to survival Is knowing what to throw away and knowing what to keep (Kenny Rodgers rewrote the lyrics and called it "The Gambler" but that advice doesn't make any sense at all to gamblers of course.) A common problem with the lowest LoD model - and sometimes with other LoD models too - is what we need to keep. We need to keep triangles outlining the main elements. We also need to keep at least one triangle for each face and those are not necessarily the same ones. In this LoD model the horizontal beam at the top is very prominent and needs four triangles, two facing each direction. Texturing isn't very important there though, we just need the shape. So, assign those four triangles to four different faces and we save three tris elsewhere in the model. There isn't much more to say about this model, really. I obviously kept four triangles for the actual sign - that part is important at any distance - and then cut down as much as possible everywhere else.

Lesson 5: Going low I hate to make compromices but sometimes they can't be avoided. The chain of my sign isn't really noticeable at low LoD so I didn't really need it at all there. It is noticeable at the switch between low and lowest, when it suddenly pops up or vanishes, though, and because of that, I really wanted to keep it. However, simplified chain links wouldn't work since sudden shape changes between LoD models would be just as noticeable and since the low LoD model was so significant to the LI, a working chain representation would require far too many triangles. In the end I removed the whole thing and here's how the low LoD model turned out:  I couldn't remove the chain link face though and a single triangle there did more harm than good to the appearance so I hid it. Here's the bracket reduced to a single triangle:  What you don't see in this picture is that i's actually two triangles, facing in opposite directions, one assigned to the chain bracket face, the other to the chain face. Here I've moved one of them slightly upwards:  This trick has two functions, first, unlike what GLOD believes, it's usually better with no triangle at all than a single "eyesore triangle". The other function is to reduce the LI a little bit. With the vertices for the two triangles aligned perfectly with each other, the file becomes a little bit more compressable, reducing the download weight a little bit. Align your vertices consistently whenever possible and you can easily save 20-30% LI with no visible effect at all. Here's a top view of the low LoD model:  Yes, it's hard to see what this picture illustrates but nearly all the triangles and vertices of the model are aligned with each other along the y axis. The only exceptions are the signboard face which has to be a bit away from the base plate to avoid texture flickering and the wall mount which may occasionally be seen from the edge even at low LoD. (Looking at that picture, I see where I could have done better but oh well, it's good enough to keep.)

Lesson 4: The middle ground This is a very important lesson: people in Second Life does not see your carefully created mesh. They may study it every now and then and marvel at all those lovely details but what they actually see as they go about their Second Lives, is mid and low res LoD models. That is how it should be. All those details are not necessary for a scene and there is no computer in the world powerful enough to render everything in an SL scene at speed. People do notice distortions like the ones in all the GLOD created models though. They drop you straight into the eerie Uncanny Valley where things look almost but not quite right. For this sign I really needed the chain to look spot on even in the mid level LoD model yet I needed to get the poly count way down. It actually accounted for almost 7000 of the 7358 triangles in the original. Here's the solution I came up with:  Took a bit of creativity and I could probably have reduced them down even more with no visible effect but with a little bit of reduction to the chain's fastening brackets too, I got the triangle count down to 602 and the land impact down from 13.803 to:  12.859. That doesn't sound like much, does it? Still better than what GLOD could manage though and unlike GLOD I did it with no visible changes at all. There's an important lesson there: Download weight is calculated separately for each model and then the four numbers are added together. If you really want to reduce the weight, you need to know which model is the heaviest one. In this case it's very clear to see but when I'm in doubt, I do a mock upload, zeroing out the models one by one to see how much each affects the LI.

Lesson 3: With friends like this... Say hello to Glod. GLOD (Geometric Level Of Detail) is the little part of the uploader that generates LoD models and he's always so eager to help. And he loved my sign so much he thought it was well worth 14 LI, that's sweet of him, isn't it? Let's see what he can produce for that. Here's LoD level 0, the high LoD model:  LoD level 1, Mid model:  Not bad but not good either. There are some very noticeable distortions of the chain links. Lod level 2 - low model:  and level 3, lowest:  Overall, not ideal but I could live with this. 14 LI is not acceptable though, we have to tell Glod to be a bit more economic with the tris:  1.4 LI? Yes, that's more like it. Actually it's 2 LI but that's because of the physics - we'll deal with that later. Here's LoD 1:  LoD 2:  LoD 3:  LoD 2 is still acceptable but 1 and 3 are disastrous. I want this sign to be seen! (ChinRey sighs) Oh well, Glod is really trying his best to help but in the end: with friends like this, who needs enemies?

Lesson 2: Hidden faces This is a short lesson. Even in the simplest mesh model you often have superfluous vertices and polys, details that add to the complexity but not to the looks at all. In this case there are several polys hidden inside other elements, like these:  and these:  Get rid of them and the triangle count drops from 7358 to:  The LI - still with default automatic LoD, drops from 14.644 to:  Not bad for a few minutes of work.

My earlier post weren't as helpful as they should have been and maybe they came across as a little bit arrogant. To compensate, here's an example. I'll split this into several posts since it may be too long for a single one. This is perhaps an advanced class but I think there are lots of tips suitable for any level here. Introduction This is the sign outside my Queen of Spades pub in Keswick:  It seems quite simple at first glance but it has details like miter joints for the base plate:  and most significantly a rather elaborate attachment using six toruses and six twisted tubes:  The pub was supposed to be the gathering point for my Greater Coniston build but then Saul opened his Rathskeller and Rye his Drunken Sailor. I don't really need three active pubs on my land and those guys seem to know a lot more about pubs than me. The Queen of Spades is currently used as part of the Silent Slasher game but mostly it's just a decoration in the landscape and I never bothered to do much about it. Especially not the sign because I'm really happy with how it looks and don't see any need to change it. But it's all prims and that means 10 LI, a bit too much for a simple sign really. Yesterday, just before I saw this thread, I finally got around to do some serious work on a mesh version. Almost straight out of Mesh Studio with just a little bit of cleaning in a Blender, it's 3694 vertices and 7358 triangles. Sounds a little bit heavy to me: Lesson 1: UV mapping I may be wrong but I understand that the common way to UV map an SL mesh today is to use few faces and "islands" for each part on the UV map. In this case you'd probably use three faces, one for the signboard itself, one for the wooden base plate and one for all the metal parts:  If you're lazy, you'd just use the basic automatic UV mapper in Blender and end up with this:  Now, this is of course a very poor UV map, you waste more than half the pixels in the texture, the toruses are visibly distorted and so on. Be prepare to spend a lot of time cleaning this up before you get any kind of decent result. But how many people realize that a UV map like this also affects the land impact? If I try to upload this, using the default automatic LoD settings I get:  16.409 LI. Here's a different way. If I split the metal parts into five separate faces:  I can get a much cleaner UV mapping:  Much cleaner and much less work, most of the parts I didn't UV map at all, I just scaled the mapping from the prim original. The map still looks a bit wasteful of texture pixels but it isn't. The vertical and the different horizontal segments are different faces and will end up using all the pixels of the texture. The LI?  14.644. Still too high but 10 percent reduction by saving a lot of time and effort on the UV map? Yes, please! I've heard so many times that simple texture maps and repeating textures are outdated and the only right thing to do is to use "proper" UV maps and baked textures. It's the Emperor's new Texturing. I don't know of any skilled mesh maker in SL or anywhere else who thinks that way. Quite the contrary: use simple UV maps and repeating textures wherever possible, complex UV maps and baked textures only where they really make a difference.

Chic Aeon wrote: I still see mesh that breaks apart but not all that much thankfully. I run at LOD2. I appreciate the idea that some folks build for LOD1. That is not my choice or actually the choice of most content creators in retail. Public SL builds are a different matter. Things may change slowly and modeler may start testing at lower LODs. That would be a good thing, but this is supposed to be a free market, economy, and for the most part world. If people choose to make mesh that only works at LOD4 they will find a market. "I" don't think that is the best choice, but it isn't MY choice to make for THEM. Yes but that doesn't change the fact that increasing the LoD factor causes significant lag increase for everybody, regardless of how strong their computer and how fast their connection is and with well made sculpt and mesh it is never necessary. It wasn't necessary before the prim limit increase and it certainly isn't necessary now. I do understand that not everybody have the skill and patience to maximize their builds' performance and we certainly can't expect the same from hobby builders who build for their own sake as we can from people who sell their works to others. But at Coniston I now have 13 full sim sky platforms (although to be fair only 7 of them are fully developed), several smaller sky installations, a fairly complete ground level build and several offsim installations. I don't have access to the full sim prim quota since the Linden Road and Linden Waterway takes up quite a bit but I do build across the entire sim (and yes, I do have LL's permission as long as my builds don't interfere with their ground builds). Last time I checked, I had 4500 prims left. If you can manage 1/20th of that efficiency, you can fill up your place from corner to corner without ever having to worry about land impact or LoD. Can you? That is my challenge to everybody who build for Second Life. I do not expect everybody to accept the challenge and I do not expect everybody to manage but I do respect everybody who are willing to try.

arabellajones wrote: The entry in the Library is owned by Alexandria Linden, and none of us users are Alexandria Linden. I don't think anybody are Alexandaria Linden actually. It's a placeholder account LL created jsut because they needed an "owner" for the library items. The name itself is a dead giveaway of course but yu can also check the profile and see that it's blank. ;-) arabellajones wrote: Problem One: All the outfits in the Initial Outfits folder can be accessed through the "Choose an Avatar" menu option. (There are variations in the name with different TPVs, but they all seem similar enough to be recohnisable.) But that tool doesn't appear to use the name of outfits... It doesn't but that's an easy proble to work around. Choose an avatar from the menu and a named folder with all the items is created in your Clothing folder. arabellajones wrote: Some clothing items used by the Initial Outfits are very well made. For instance, a 40-fold reduction in complexity for a pair of boots, compared to something that looks similar in the Marketplace. Unfortunately, not all of the outfits in the Library are easy to access. Hmmm, yes, seems something's got messed up there. The library copies of the new beginner avatars do not work. Strange nobody seems to have noticed until now. But again, just wear all the avatars from the menu on after the other and you have everything nicely stored in your regular clothing folder, fully wearable and with all the right names. It takes a few minutes if you want to grab them all but you only have to do it once. arabellajones wrote: Anyway, that's what the Lindens have ended up with. On some things they're worse than MS-DOS 2.11 I think this explains a lot: http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/spaghetti-code

VanillaSunsets wrote: Many residents won't notice, lots have their viewers set to LOD 4 and will see your stuff just perfectly, but there is a trend going on to set LOD's to just 2 (about average) and ppl will see the shortcuts. Some creators do not care and rely on the ppl that have viewer settings up to 4 and they do sell, some sell a lot! I call that lack of ambition. It is not good mesh unless it works at LoD setting 1. But apart from that, yes. Many "creators" seem to make good money foisting their garbage onto unsupecting customers through MP. You can't actually see the item on MP so it's easy to get fooled there and the rule is never buy mesh unseen unless it is made by somebody you know is a qualified and considerate mesh maker. As to how to make efficient mesh, there are lots and lots of methods and I don't think anybody has figured it all out. I've uplaoded thousands of meshes and spent countless hours experimenting and studying and I'm still learning. Every single time I build something, I learn something new. As Vanilla said, the best place to start is to make your own LoD models. Making truly efficient LoD models takes experience and is a little bit of a black art but anybody who are prepared to spend a little bit of time and effort can do better than the models automatically created by the uploader. Next step is perhaps to check some modern computer game. Notice how great the graphics are, full of lovely details. Then look closer and see how few polys the 3D artists have used to achieve that effect. Making efficient 3D models for a damic VR environmet is very much about creating illusions, to make everything seem much bigger than it really is. This is more art than science so it's hard to quantify but one important thing is to be very aware of which details are important or which aren't. Third step, keep reading this forum. There are ltos of tips here. And of course experiment experiment and experiment. The beta grid is the mesh maker's best friend. VanillaSunsets wrote: Ok, trees... those are very hard, if you want to make them well! I have been toying around with those for a year or so. Trees are large, most of the time, large meshes are punished very harsh by the uploader. The only way to get them a "decent" LI is to collapse the lowest\er LOD into a mix of cross planes and branch textures but that will only work for a straight tree, so not gnarled or angled. You mean something like this? https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Prim-Bonuses-and-LODs/m-p/3080457#M35385 (Sorry, culdn't resist it and to be honest, I do expect it to go up to 3 or even 4 LI once I've added the foliage)

Just like Qie I thought it was my computer that was acting up but yes, everything load much, much slower now than usual. I live in Norway and my connection to USA is routed through UK but this seems to be a CDN issue and I have no idea where that server is located.

MattMonroe wrote: ... It is a rare occasion that a realtor raises tieron existing land owners and lowers tiers on land that has been returned because of the tier increase. Is it? All the landowners I have talked to about the prim increase have given the extra prims to the renters at no extra charge. But then again, I haven't discussed it with that many so maybe they're all among those rare exceptions.

Pamela Galli wrote: There is a contingent in SL -- most of whom I suspect no longer log in to SL -- that lobby for more realism. It depends on what you mean by "realism". I think most people who use SL want it to be more real, not necessarily more like real life but rather the same way a good book or movie feels real when you read/watch it. But yes, there seem to be a number of quite verbal people who lobby for more detailed and better graphics in SL because they want more realism. They are wrong anyway because there are four major factors that limit SL's realism (regardless of how we define that word) and the amount of visual details is not one of them.

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: There is also the fact that a percentage of people who have tried VR gear say it mays them sick. Kind of like motion sickness. There are two reasons why people get "seasick" with VR headsets. One is the frame rate. The closer you get to the image, the more sensible you re to the switches between the frames. You can try that in SL actually. Walk around a bit in regular mode and then switch to mouselook and you'll notice how much "jerkier" everything seem. It isn't really, it's jsut that the frame rate becomes so much more noticeable in mouselook. With a VR headset you are even clsoer tot he action so you get even more sensitive to frame rate. 90 fps seems to be the minimum requriement for safe VR headset viewing and that is a lot faster than you'll ever get in SL. That means mroe efficient software but, above all, more efficient content. That is probably the real reason why we are told we can't transfer SL content to Sansar. Mesh is mesh and sculpts and prims are mesh too so there shouldn't be any serious technical problems converting them from oen platform to another. But converting the typical high poly SL items coated with high resolution SL textures into lean and mean and fast game style content, that may be asking for too much. LL seems to be on top of that challenge although it is of course impossible for anybody to know for sure before the first full load test with an open access Sansar. The other reason for "VR sickness", however, is much harder to handle. It's about conflicting messages from your sensory organs: your eyes, looking at the VR display may say you're upside down but your balance organs say you're sitting perfectly straight and the poor brain doesn't know which one to believe. There's no technological solution to this of course, at least not without an enormous amount of hardware, and that may well turn out to be the limiting factor for the success of VR headsets in vitural environments. Some people won't have much problems with this at all, some will get used to it eventually but some will never be able to handle it.

Drongle McMahon wrote: ... rocks, apples etc. Do not confuse rocks with apples, it's bad for your teeth! At least that's what my mum told me.

Drongle McMahon wrote: I guess I wasn't clear enough. The sculpty physics shape is the convex hull of the low LOD torus, not the torus itself. Oh, I misunderstood you then. I thought the two physics shapes on your picture showed the two sides of the sculpt physics. 2.1 sounds about right for a convex hull of that shape. 1.8 physics weight sounds about right for a hull of that complexity. Still doesn't explain why they chose a shape as complex at all though. Might be because sculpts predate Havok and they didn't want to change the original sculpt physics shape.

Prokofy Neva wrote: There are nearly 1000 of them I believe. I counted 32 houses on one sim. Others count less houses because on some sims there are infohubs or islands or whatever I guess. 24 houses there are on each and every sim there. It's very hard to count on the grund since it's difficult to keep track on where the sim borders go but try to count them on the map. Or do the math. 32 702 prim parcels add up to 22464 prims which means there would only be 36 prims left for the houses, the roads and all the other fixed items. In any case, 864 or nearly 1000 new parcels is a lot in itself but not compared to the large number of existing avaiable parcels in Zindra and on private A rated sims so the number shouldn't really matter for the A rated land market as a whole. I think it's a good move financially for SL though. They don't need to fill up those sims to make a profit, tier from a quarter of the parcels should be more than enough to finance the entire Horizon continent. I can't imagine they'll make big money from it but profit is profit and for them there is hardly any risk at all.