ChinRey

Whirly Fizzle wrote: It's not too late - that bug is fixed in the Maint-RC viewer. Oh, that's good news. Last I heard from Beq there were some server side issues that caused conflicts with her patch. Even so, it took five years, several bug reports, a new management and an unpaid volunteer to fix a blunder that never ever should have been allowed past the early beta stage. Now, imagine if LL released a new set of beginner avatars and they forgot to set the elevation height so the avis were sunk waist deep into the ground. That's the LoM (Level of Mistakes) they made with mesh LoD.

Imnotgoing Sideways wrote: But, in rendering environments like games, it's an absolute necessity. There's often no predicting where a viewer's/player's camera will be at any moment. I may have misunderstood you there. But as I already clarified in my reply to Penny Patton, I was talking about LoD the way it's done with mesh in SL. Other 3D environment have far better way of dealing with LoD, usually a gradual algorithmic decimation, sometimes perhaps a single LoD model and/or an impostor. Imnotgoing Sideways wrote: Come sculpts and mesh, the potential complexity of any solution grew exponentially. The Lab had to pick a balance between unrestrictive support for careful creators and reasonable limitations for the careless. No, sorry, I don't buy that. To borrow Penny's very precise words: LL screwed the pooch with LoD. Two quite telling facts: it took several years and several JIRAs before they finally noticed that they had got the LoD formula for three and four face meshes wrong (and by then it was apparently too late to fix that bug). Also, it took several years before LL's own content creators, the Moles, even started experimenting with mesh and it's only very recently they've started to get it right. Clearly they were not involved in the development, that was all left to programmers with no real understanding of practical 3D design. Nyx Linden once told me that GLOD, that pitiful excuse for a decimator they included in the uploader, was the best on the market and he clearly sincerely believed it. That shows how ignorant the LL developers were about practical mesh building.

anna2358 wrote: Has anyone managed to upload a mesh to beta WITH a physics file since it came back? Yes. I tried both analyzed and unanalyzed physics models and had no problems whatsoever. Ummm... I mean, apart from the regular problems getting the physics engine to behave of course.

Great!

Sally Audebarn wrote: Alright, so I would only be able to upload four premade physic shapes per model upload? I think you misunderstood Drongle's answer. Let's say you named those five parts "Part1", Part2", Part3", Part4" and "Part5" (without the quotes of course but also without any spaces in the names!) In the medium LoD model, name the different parts "Part1_LOD"", Part2_LOD2" etc. In the low LoD model, name them "Part1_LOD1" etc. In the lowest LoD model: "Part1_LOD0" etc. and in the physics model: "Part1_PHYS", "Part2_PHYS" etc. But really, I seriously suggest you reconsider the diea of uplaoding a whole house in one go. There are just so many things that can go wrong and assembling inworld isn't that difficult if your workflow is reasonably well structured. I don't know how many parts you really are going to use for your house (I assume the numebr five was just an example) but the golden rules are to have slightly less than two parts for each LI and try to avoid more than 255 parts. Upload all of that in one go, discover one flaw you can't live with in just one of the parts and you have to do it all over again. Or maybe something goes wrong halfway through the upload and you have to try again. You may end up paying a fortune in upload fees that way. In addition to that, you almost certainly want to reuse mesh assets through a house. Are all the windows different? All the doors? Better upload once and then copy. And of course, how are you going to keep track of the LI if you upload in one go? Which of those parts adds those 20 extra LI you want to get rid of?

Update: https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Beta-grid-downtime/m-p/3075926

Posting this in the Mesh forum since it's probably mainly of interest to mesh makers. (Moderators: pelase feel free to move it if you feel it should be somewhere else). The beta grid has been down for almost two days now with no explanation so I asked live chat support about it. Their answer was that they are performing maintenance of the grid and unfortunately could not give any estimate when it would be back online.

Aditi has been down this whole day and still is as I write this. I suppose the only answer is to be patient and remember that LL does not in any way guarantee access to Aditi. It is a testing grid after all.

Rolig has quite a lot of good advice but first, just to be sure, you know Second Life passwords are case senstivite, don't you?

I know this isn't nice of me but I just can't resist it and there is a rather important point here:  Avatars logged on: 51,004. Total number of people at the 32 "Hot" places: 0. I suppose that means people in Second Life prefer to play it cool.

SkillsFurrystorm wrote: It's two fireplaces with particle smoke, rotated 180 degrees because they are at each end of the building. Not exactly rocket science. No, as I said, this only happened once - usually the smoke from both chimneys go in the same direction. If it had been the rotation of the emitters, they would always have gone in different directions.

You need to do the mesh upload test before you are allowed to lsit anything as mesh on MP.

Devriv wrote: ...but an issue with the script I was using. Some old door scripts are made to set the door phantom when it opens and if the door is linked to the building, it's quite possible the script will set the whole building to phantom. Isuppose that's what happened here.

Bobbie Faulds wrote: I would say that was a function of the particle script Yes but the strange thing is I've only seen it once. Usually the smoke from the two chimneys flow in the same direction. SO obviously what happened was that two identical copies of the same script run on the same sim got different readings for wind direction.

Drongle McMahon wrote: I saw no differences between 2.77a and 2.78 here. Oh, I skipped 2.77... and 2.74 and 2.75 and 2.73 and 2.72. Anyway, thank you both Gaia and Drongle! Next question is of course: is it possible to swtich "dissolve vertices" option off permanently? It's getting rather annoying.

I guess the picture says it all. ^_^ 

I've finally got around to updating Blender to 2.78 and I notice dissolve edges doesn't work as it used to, somnetimes it deletes vertices too. Take this for example:  If I dissolve the edge at one of the corners:  I end up with this:  Is this a bug or is there some setting I overlooked when I updated?

Yes. As a premium member you can choose either to have a Linden Home or free tier for 512 m2 of mainland. You still have to buy the mainland plot you want but that's jsut a one time expense and doesn't have to cost much - anything from 256 to 5,000 Lindens, depending on the location. If you choose to move from a Linden Home to your own mainland plot, rememebr to abandon your Linden Home first, *then* buy your new parcel.

Chic Aeon wrote: The FIX -- and it is a VERY easy one -- is to put a prim floor (or rug) in your house and then you can rez inside. Just to clarify: what Chic suggests is a fix if you have a house with faulty physics. It is of course better if the house was made correctly from the start. Chic Aeon wrote: For me -- aside from the land impact savings -- mesh gives you the abilitly to add many details I agree with that. All those extra details you can add with mesh is a far more important argument for mesh houses than the LI you can save.

Phil Deakins wrote: So both the Gene Jacobs house and the one in the pic are prim houses, yes? Yes. My modified version only uses prims from Gene Jacob's original which conventiently enough is full perm. I got rid of 53 of the prims by using a single large prim where the old 10 m limit forced Jacobs to use several smaller ones, by using pathcut doors instead of hinge prims and by using six pathcutand hollow prims in place of 12 individual posts under the terraces. Then I cut the LI almost in half with different physics shape types. The house can easily be reduced to about 270 prims with techniques that were available and well known back in Gene Jacob's time actually but oh well, nobody's perfect. Phil Deakins wrote: And by recreating the same house in mesh, you estimate that you could reduce the LI to less than half but, in so doing, you'd increase the render weight a lot? I'm not sure about the render weight to be honest. As far as I know, nobody's done a proper test of that and I'd rather not do it myself. Even a quick-and-dirty mesh conversion would require quite a bit of work for a build as big as this. There is also serious reason to question how well the calculated render weight reflects the actual one. In my conversion for example I reduced the render weight by 1651.5 simply by including all four doors in the same linkset. Regardless of the numbers, there's no doubt that prim builds tend to be significantly less render heavy than mesh though. I posted something about that in a different thread a few days ago... let me see... There it is! https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Building-and-Texturing-Forum/In-defense-of-the-sculpt/m-p/3074126#M16145 (First paragraph in the third post in the thread.)

ChinRey wrote: Compared to an old style prim house, you can typically save 75-90% of the land impact with mesh withouth sacrificing quality. That may sound like a lot but keep in mind that you can also typically save 40-60% of the LI by updating the prims with recent build features like different physics shapes and larger prims. Maybe I shouldn't reply to my own post but I'd like to illustrate this. Here is Gene Jacob's Beach Bungalow, a really good house by the standards of the time it was made:  Except it isn't really. Gene Jacob's house has 308 land impact and 25,343 render weight and it comes in eight parts in a rez box. This one is 129 LI, 18,043 render weight and it's a single linkset. It looks exactly the same except for one very minor detail that nobody's ever going to notice (and that would have been fixable if I had access to the textures). If I had the textures I could have reduced the LI to 124 and if I find time to do a proper delagging conversion, I expect the render weight to end up at around 12,000. As mesh? Well, these numbers are estimates of course but for a quick-and-dirty mesh conversion with poor LoD and everything, expect around 50 LI and 30,000 render weight. For a proper cleaned up mesh with proper LoD models and all, probably around 20 LI and 20,000 render weight. For a thorough quality mesh rebuild with the extra details mesh allows us to add, say about 30 LI and 25,000 render weight.

Penny Patton wrote: I'm not sure what you mean. LOD is commonly used in videogames and you have to think of SL as a videogame with regards to 3D design or you're going to create a lot of problems for yourself and everyone else. We may be discussing whether a glass is half full or half empty here. Except, keep in mind that I was talking about fixed, pre-made LoD models, not LoD in general. I think it's quite telling that wikipedia's article on Level of detail doesn't even mention LoD models but only talks about various LoD algorithms. Of course, LoD models isn't always used in SL either. It's just for meshes; prims and sculpts use very basic decimation algorithms instead. There's a quite interesting article at the Valve Developer wiki for those who want to learn more about how LoD models may be used outside Second Life.

AkumaShadowWolf wrote: Haha yes I do have the source, unfortunately it's half made with prims Singularity still allows you to export and import prims. Make sure you upload without textures though or you'll have to pay fees to reupload each and every texture your build has. Oh, and it only works for prims. If it's a combined prim/mesh build you'll ahve to upload the mesh parts separately.

VanillaSunsets wrote: The rezzing "bug" you mention has probably to do with the physics shape of the mesh. That is correct and the bug is easy to avoid if you know how. Just one more thing mesh makers need to know but LL forgot to tell about...

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: To me prims, sculpts and mesh are all tools in a builder's toolbox. You can say that again! Ithink we're on the wrong track when the material used becomes more important than the results achieved. Mesh allows you to make far more detailed houses with lower land impact but there are several traps and even today less than half the mesh house makers on the market know how to use the material effectively. So you get houses with faulty LoD models, with faulty physics and so heavily textured a single house adds noticeably to the overall lag. And you get mesh houses with unneccessary high LI. Compared to an old style prim house, you can typically save 75-90% of the land impact with mesh withouth sacrificing quality. That may sound like a lot but keep in mind that you can also typically save 40-60% of the LI by updating the prims with recent build features like different physics shapes and larger prims. I think it also is important to keep in mind that the LI reduction is mostly nominal, not real. Land impact is after all supposed to be a way to measure how much lag an object causes and converting an old prim build to mesh (or modern "convexed" prims) doesn't help much there. You have to be a very careless builder to lag down a sim with prims but with mesh you have to be very careful not to do it.