ChinRey

Flat (or sharp) normals doesn't necessarily result in higher download weight than smooth ones. In many cases smooth normals gives considerably higher weight than flat ones. I've never tried uploading a mesh without any UV map at all so I don't know if that affects the download weight. However, what kind of mapping you use has little or no effect on the land impact. There are several other ways to reduce download weight though. I posted a list of some techniques in another thread two weeks ago: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/The-importance-of-LOD/td-p/2873204/page/3 In your case, #2 on that list, weight balancing, seems to be the most relevant. Generally speaking, if the download weight is higher than the server weight, you can reduce LI by splitting the mesh into several smaller ones. If it's the other way round, you probably want to upload as fewer and bigger meshes. Of course, it's sometimes a question whether an object can be split up in a sensible way but if it's a building you're talking about, I'm sure there is a way.

If I remember correctly, you can find the Mesh test here: https://secondlife.com/my/account/ip/index.php

Poltergeist Azarov wrote: Oh hey Chin, I dont really understand what you mean, sorry :\ Can you say it different way please. I can give it a try at least. It is possible to use a script to temporarily change the regular camera position to just about anything you like, including the same 1st person view that you get in mouselook. If you do it that way, everything else work as usual, you have full access to all your menus and buttons and dialog windows, the avatar's body will always turn the way the camera is pointing etc. That won't solve the problems with AOs and other animations making the avatar turn their head every now and then of course. The only solution I can think of for that is to use custom animations.

Could you just do away with the antiquated mouslook function altogether and simply use a script to set the regular camera position to 1st person point of view?

I have to agree with both GTA ans Kwakkelde here. the JVTEK Land Map is a great invention and can be a great help for any SL landscaper but it comes at a price. The prim count shouldn't usually be an issue, it only takes 64 sculpts to cover an entire prim and you shouldn't get any noticeable sharp edges between the sculpts if you're careful and follow the instructions. Lag can become a serious problem though, especially if you're careless with the texturing, you'll have to make new sculpts every time you reshape the ground, you can't rez on top of them and there's no way you'll ever get them to fit exactly so be prepared for a little bit of sinking into the ground (actually, come to think of it, on a beach that may an advantage, not a problem). My advice is don't be afraid to use Land Maps if you really need them but check if you can retexture the actual ground first.

Rolig Loon wrote: Put a script in the mask and then ping all masks with a llRegionSay to see who responds when you ask the masks to send you llGetOwnerKey(). Match the responses you get against the results from llGetAgentList. Anyone who is on the parcel's agent list but is not on the list you get from your ping is not wearing the mask. What do you think of my suggestion of doing a simple head count first and only run a full agent check if the numbers didn't match? Would it be just an unnecessary complication or is it likely it could reduce the scripts' server load?

That looks amzingly realistic! Focusing on the muzzle flare rather than the bullet may have been the right thing to do regardless of the technical issues. How often do often actualy seen bullets in the air in real life? I never have and I've been dangerously close to them.

If I can join this thread as late as now... Elinah Iredell wrote: What do you think about all those sculptie plants and trees vs mesh plants and trees? The most efficient trees in SL - that is the ones that gives highest possible visual quality with the lowest possible lag and land impact - are neither sculpts nor mesh, they're made from clusters of sprites. Unfortunately this method was never made available to builders and most of the few "Linden Trees" LL made themselves back in 2003 use textures well and truly outdated by today's standards. Even so, the few models that still hold up to today are probably the most common type of trees you see in SL. As for sculpt vs mesh trees, generally speaking sculpts are more suitable for complex organic shapes like trees. But mesh gives you more control over the shape and texturing and creators like Lilith Heart and Alex Bader have shown that it's perfectly possible to make wonderfully detailed mesh trees with realitvely low land impact. (If you've just returned to SL: land impact is the same as the good old prim count except it gives a more precise calculation of the object's actual load and lag. At the moment both the old prim counting method and the new land impact calculations are used side by side and that causes a lot of confusion.) Elinah Iredell wrote: Mesh seems to be more expensive. Well, it's more fashionable :matte-motes-wink: Elinah Iredell wrote: I have also seen sculptie houses and wonder how they compare to mesh. Prims are better than sculpts for houses. Or perhaps prims for the main structure and sculpts for the intricate details. Nekka has made some surprisingly good little sculpt cottages but she is in a league of her own when it comes to mastering the technical aspect of sculpt making and she's still really pushing it a bit too far with those houses. There might be one exception, log cabins. Sculpts may well be the perfect solution for those. Mesh houses are a bit trickier here. There are mesh houses and then there are mesh houses... The thing is, mesh puts a lot more responsibility on the builder than prims and sculpts do. Get it right and the result is spectacular, get it wrong and you have a disaster. Not all who think of themselves as mesh makers have been willing and able to learn how to make quality mesh and even those who did had to do lots of less succesful ones during the learning process. The result is that the quality of the mesh houses available today varies tremendously. You have mesh houses that break down into a pile of detached triangles even at mdoerate viewing distances, with walls you can walk halfway through, with floors you sink into, with floor you can't rez objects on and/or with sky high land impact and lag. But there are also solid mesh houses with amazingly low land impact and with lots of the lovely details only mesh can provide. Even today prim houses by quality builders - people like Eric Linden, Gene Jacobs, Toby Howton, Jamie Parfort, Joan and Harald Nomad just to mention a few - can easily put more than half the mesh houses on the market to shame. Things are changing fast though. The average quality of mesh has taken a quantum leap this year and I believe we still only have seen the start of the mesh revolution. There are a few threads about mesh houses running at the mesh section of this forum at the moment btw. You may want to take a look at those if you're interested in the topic. Elinah Iredell wrote: I know that second life is apparently planning a new more advanced version of itself called future life or something like that in 2015 and they claim that the newer mesh will still be used but maybe not other types of things. That's Ebbe Linden's reply to a question in another thread here and it's really, really worrying but not for the reason you may think. I can't imagine he would have said that without consulting the tech guys at LL first and if they don't know how easy it is to convert prims and sculpts to mesh, we may have some serious problems coming our way... Elinah Iredell wrote: What is rigged mesh? Is that a newer type of mesh? I wonder if they can do something about the invisibility aspect. I do agree also I like to choose my own shape . I hope they can make the size more editable. I would be nice not to have to use an alpa layer and edit it to fit your exact size. I think others have already given better replies to that than I can. I'll just add some boring technical bits: Regular mesh is stiff and inflexible, more like armor than clothing. There is no way to make it follow your body movements or body shape (mesh can be resized but not reshaped). The only solution is to hide parts of the actual avatar, make the mesh clothes specifically for a few standardized body shapes and try to make the stiffness as unnoticeable as possible. Sometimes this works amazingly well but not always. There isn't really much difference between mesh and sculpts for that kind of clothing. I think the reason it's nearly always done with mesh is that mesh was the most marketable option when this idea first came along. Rigged mesh, liquid mesh and fitted mesh are meshes attached to and following some of the key points ("collision bones") of the avatar with the mesh between those points flowing relatively freely. The mesh doesn't follow the avatar shape closely enough though so we still have to hide parts of the avatar with alphas to keep it from poking through the clothes. "Rigged mesh" and "liquid mesh" were the names given to this technique by two different people (or groups of people? - can't remember) who hacked the mesh system independently of each other to make it work. "Fitted mesh" is the name LL gave it when they finally decided to make it an official part of SL. Recently full body - or nearly full body fitted mesh avatar has come quite a bit of a fad. Since makers of wearable itmes don't have to worry too much about land impact, these are made from tremendously inefficient mesh and it doens't take many of them in a sim to lag it down significantly. Linden Labs have also made their own clumsy range of mesh bodies and are handing them out to newcomers - as if those poor guys haven't been humiliated enough already. Elinah Iredell wrote: I am glad to know that not everyone is taken with mesh I was feeling behind the times in not having that much of it, Well, I first came to SL just before the mesh revolution started to pick up speed so maybe it should have been natural for me to focus on mesh. Fortunately I ran across Aley (you may know her better as Arcadia Asylum) very early and she told me in no uncertain terms that the trick to good building is to use all available materials and tools, not just one. Oh, and of course, twisting prims in SL is far more fun than moving mesh vertices in Blender... Elinah Iredell wrote: I can create textures in photoshop There will always be a need for good textures. The texture scene has changed a lot though. The number of free textures available to everybody is constantly growing for a start. I'm not talking about pirate copies here (althoguh that is still a huge problem) but genuine public domain ones made and/or uploaded by people who for various reasons have chosen to give them away to the public. Many of these textures are really good too and it's much harder for a texture maker to succeed commercially today. Color inflated texture packages are probably more of a problem than they used to be. (Color inflation is when you take one basic texture, add different simple tintings to it and sell it as a set hoping the buyer won't realize such basic recoloring is better done from a single texture in-world. It should not be confused with the similar looking packages where the makers has made the effort to create nuances not achievable with in-world tinting.) The kind of texture builders need has changed of course. Mesh allows us to create far more details as geometry so things like wall textures with windows painted on them are out. The introduction of different surface effect maps, normal maps, specular maps and AO maps and the slow but continuous improvements in virtual world shading techniques will probably revolutionize texturing in the months and years to come. We're only just seeing the beginning of that. Elinah Iredell wrote: I think furniture for instance looks very nice in mesh . I hope it isnt too hard to learn to do . I guess from what you have said it is easier than sculpties The situation for mesh furniture is very similar to mesh houses but it might have come a bit further up the road. Not long ago people were oohing and aahing about the amazing one prim wonders of mesh furniture some makers produced even though they cost you an arm and a leg, broke down into a heap of triangles when seen from halfway across the room and probably weren't any better than the sculpties they were supposed to replace anyway. People seem to expect a lot more these days.

Pamela Galli wrote: What a cute house, Chin, and 10 LI is amazing! Thank you. But remember this is just a small cottage. It would be easy to make something that looked similar at 5-6 LI. But details like those shutters, your columns and Christiana's blinds are worth a little bit extra. We don't save LI just to save LI, we save it to make room for more things like that.

arton Rotaru wrote: Good old prim torus can have still nice physics weight numbers. At least more than a fullsim can hold. Yes but... ummm... err... I suppose it's safe to come clean now. One of the other land owners in a sim where I also own some land left SL for several months, leaving the parcel with no autoreturn and wide open for anybody to rez and build. This of course attracted a lot of griefers and since it's in an area with many newcomers, the parcel also started filling up with prims left by people making their first steps towards building not realizing they ought to clean up after themselves. Now, **bleep** shaped particles and such may seem like fun to some but it gets rather boring in the long run. LL refused to do anything about it and I couldn't get hold of the landowner so eventually I just filled up the parcel with high LI invisible phantom prims. That worked well for a while but one day I found a squatter had taken up residence on the parcel. When I checked, it turned out nothing had been removed from the parcel but my filler sim had suddenly dropped drastically in LI, leaving room for others to rez there again. Oh btw, I did eventually get hold of the landowner and she agreed I had done the right thing, cleaned out the parcel and fixed the land settings. She's a good friend of me now. (Edit: I didn't write "''bleep**" but it's actually better than the original. Turns out censorship can actually improve a text occasionally :matte-motes-big-grin: )

I'm not quite sure what you mean, Laurent. You can't check the textures while the item is in your inventory, can you? Do you mean the texture of face 2 has changed when you rez/wear it again after it's been in your inventory? In any case, the first thing you should do to narrow down the possible causes, is to retexture it after the pworblem occurs and see if the textures stay the second time around. If they don't try with two completely different textures from the original. It is possible for an UUID to get scrambled and that may be the explanation.

If it's a mask you supply to them, you can include an identifier script in each. Then you need a server script somewhere in the parcel to ping the masks every now and then to see if they're all there. The most efficient way would probably be to just set the server script to count the numebr of responses and compare to the number of avatars in the area first. Then if and only if the two numbers don't match, it can run a routine to identify who's mask is missing.

Christhiana wrote: I think for the shutters (I really meant window blinds) that might be the best way to go. In order to have them "pull up", The blinds are moveable? That adds quite a bit of LI of course. I had a similiar challenge with this house. It's just a small 8x12 m cottage yet with ten movable window shutters the LI went up to 10. In the end I decided it was worth it. :matte-motes-smile:

The linden Homes house control system does something like that. It's only been around for five years so it's still in beta but when it works, it seems to retexture the house in stages with pauses between them raher than in one big swwop. That might be the solution.

Interesting idea. Looking at the script, my first question is what the PSYS_PART_END_COLOR and PSYS_PART_END_ALPHA values are doing thee. They're not supposed to have any effect at all without the PSYS_PART_INTERP_COLOR_MASK flag. Same with PSYS_PART_END_SCALE which requires the PSYS_PART_INTERP_SCALE_MASK to have any effect. I can think of two possible reasons why the particles only appear 200 m away from the emitter, server lag and client lag. Although there doesn't seem to be a limit to how high you can set a particle's speed, I don't think the system was really made to cope with ones moving as fast as this and it's likely there is a slight delay from the "official" start of the particle's movement until the gpu actually gets around to render it. Server lag can be reduced by setting the two variables speed and vel before the EmitBullet routine is triggered and possibly by removing those redunant parts of the llParticleSystem function. Don't expect much - or even noticeable - improvements though. Client lag depends on how powerful and busy the client's gpu is and that can vary a lot. The tracking issue may have something to do with the fact that particles are generated client side rather than server side but I'm way out of my depth already here so maybe I better leave it to somebody else to figure it out. :matte-motes-wink:

For the sake of completeness I can think of two more ways but both are horrendously complex and probably not worth it. One is to switch off autoreturn and instead set up an lsl based system to scan the parcel every now and then and return any objects that shouldn't be there. I know a group that includes some of the best scripters in SL tried that method on a parcel they owned last year but eventually they abandoned it as too impractical. The other option is to have a bot re-rez the object whenever needed. I know that is done by people to keep permanent builds on Linden Land but again you have to ask yourself if it is really important enough for such a drastic measure.

arton Rotaru wrote: I always wonder why people uploading a mesh more than once. Even more so when they claim they did not change a thing on it. Well, reuploading the same mesh adds a little bit of lag to SL since it means more mesh asset models and it can help reduce the balance of your L$ account. But in either case the effect is so minute you're better off trying some other methods if that's what you want. (Edit: Serioulsy: if I understood Sabanco correctly, what he did was reupload some old files just to see if they gave the same result as they did the first time and that makes quite a lot of sense in a case like this.) Something did change in the way physics weight is calculated in SL a couple of months ago though - or more like a year or something, can't remember exactly when. Some of the high LI prim shapes suddenly dropped significantly in physics weight over night. I know because I had a few heavily twisted toruses rezzed on a parcel when it happened. I don't know if the change affected meshes though and in any case it seems to have been a reduction rather than incrrease of the physics weight.

Perrie Juran wrote: And btw, your houses look absolutely stunning. When I get back into owning land again I'll be shopping your store. I've left some parcels at my sim empty specifically in the hope that somebody would come along and adorn the place with a La Galleria or LAQ house or two... :matte-motes-big-grin:

Judging by the pictures, I'd say the LOD is quite good. 62 LI isn't too bad either. Not exactly low Li but it should be quite acceptable for the market. You might be able to reduce the LI considerably by using the object impostor trick Drongle mentioned in the other LDO thread for the window shutters. Or maybe you can just make them as textures? A single 32x32 pixel custom texture shouldn't add any lag and if it's well made you'll have to look very closely at the shutters to notice any difference at all.

arton Rotaru wrote: Don't get me wrong, but that might be your rules, but hardly any standard. That's true. There is no set standard and different builders may have different priorities. arton Rotaru wrote: 5 - 15 % of the LI of what a prim build would have, sounds kind of impossible, when it comes to larger structures. At least when you build proper LoDs. Not at all! Take a look at this: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Keswick/235/45/35 (Sorry about the furnishing - haven't had time to do that porperly yet.) That house was made from more than 1500 prims and two sculpts and meshed down to 49 LI. That's actually less than 4%. I leave it to you to decide whether the LOD is good enough. :matte-motes-wink: An while you're there, take a look at the 45 LI modernish timberframe house beside it. Not sure how many prims went into that one but we're certainly talking several hundred. Then there's the 9 LI old fashioned timberframe cottage next to it again, the five 10 LI modern houses across the channel etc., etc. 5% may be pushing the limit but 15% isn't too hard and 25% is easy. 50% - well I have most of Hattie Panacek's brilliant castles, built long before mesh was introduced, scattered about in my sims. We've been discussiong LOD and LI and lag for as long as we've known each other and one day she challenged me to see how much it was possible to reduce the land impact of those castles. The biggest of them - http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Coniston/37/137/1023 - was originally 1330 prims and sculpts. Considering the complexity and sheer size of that build, thatt's good even by today's standards - must have been mindblowingly amazing back when she made it. Even so, by using larger prims than she had access too, applying physic shape types conciously and relinking I had no problems reducing it by 50% and that's with no meshes whatsoever. (Afterwards Hattie redid a few parts as mesh, bringing the LI even further down.) arton Rotaru wrote: Some builds will still have even higher LI than comparable prim builds, simply due to the fact that there are still 2 different accounting algorithms in place. Those dreaded LI peaks you can get when switching from one LI algorithm to another is nearly always caused by rougue physic shapes and easy to counteract. arton Rotaru wrote: Mesh isn't here to make everything less prims, it's here to give creators the opportunity to build efficient. Less polygons, custom UV's and LoD etc pp. Even if a mesh build has more LI than a similar looking prim build on the old accounting, it's mostlikely more efficient regarding performance. I agree with you there. I my view, the main advantage of the new LI accounting system is that it offers us builders more precise info how much load our works actually put on the computer network. As for building more efficient, mesh gives builders more responsibility. It is possible to reduce lag with mesh but it is also possible to increase it and there are lots of examples of that in SL. It's not without reason many people in SL still think of mesh as laggy. Another advantage of mesh is that it allows us to add far more details. If you look at the house in the first link again, it couldn't have been made with 50 prims of course but you could probably make something that looked the same at first glance with just a few hundred. But there are all those little details - window frames, rafters, molding door handles, etc. Doing them as mesh rather than painted-on textures adds so much to the build even if you don't conciuosly notice them at first. The handrail to the spiral staircase could have been made from a twisted torus but it would have been chunky and out of propotion. With mesh I could slim it down to the dimension it should have. And of course, with mesh you can play with the normals. Some strategically placed smooth normals can add a tremendous amount of life and realism to a build and - as far as I know - at hardly any cost. This thread is named "The Importance of LOD" but the real topic is of course efficient (or eco-friendly as Nekka calls it) building. We will always have limited resources in SL and it's our responsibility as considerate builders to try to make the most of it. That means we have to consider the three L's - LOD, LI and lag - as a whole. Except of course LI is in the end just a rough estimate of some lag related aspects and LOD - "Level of Detail" - has actually two very different and equally important meanings. arton Rotaru wrote: P.S.: The Mesh Detail slider actually changes the LODFactor, between 0.0 and 2.0. So when you set the Mesh detail slider to medium, it'll change to 1.125. It won't stay at 1.0. Ah, thanks! I was kind'a wondering about that to be honest. But that raises the question, why are we still told to rummage through the debug settings to find it if it's already right under our nose in the prefs???

Christhiana wrote: I've been on Aditi exclusivly for the past 1,5 weeks working on my house. I had set the LODfactor to 1.125 (SL viewer default) to work on my LODs (it used to be set to 4). Today I logged onto the main grid to check Im's and such and it really surprised me how bad the LODs are on most products. Yes but to be fair, remember it takes time to learn how to make mesh. Much of the mesh you can see (and buy) in SL is relatively old and only a year or so ago only a few mesh makers had really had time to figure out how to mesh efficiently. Builders have aquired and shared a lot of knowledge since then and today's standard is much, much higher. That's why I don't want to criticise the maker of the village in the picture that started this thread. The mesh isn't anywhere near today's standards but it was about average at the time it was built and you just can't expect builders to keep updating their old builds to new standards all the time. If we did, we'd never have time to make anything new. (Edit: One problem that's becoming more and more apparent though, is all the meshes people find at various free content sites and upload and sell as their own works. These are never optimized for the special requirements of SL and they certainly bring the average mesh standard down considerably.) Since you mentioned houses in an earlier post, here's what I think we should expect from newly made mesh houses today: Walking surfaces (1): Correct elevation - no noticeable "sinking" or "floating". Ramp physics for stairs is usually acceptable though. Walking surfaces (2): It must be possible to rez and build objects on them. Walls: Completely impenetrable from both sides. Roofs: I consider them to be walking surfaces but that might be a bit over the top :matte-motes-wink: Ceilings: I prefer to make them impenetrable too but I'm not fanatic about it. After all, people don't usually jump or fly much indoors. LOD - with LOD factor set to 1.0, mesh details at medium and draw distance 128 m: Minor distortions acceptable at about 10 m, sometimes even closer - depends on so many subjective factors. The house should be identifiable with no major parts missing at least up to about 75 m and the structure as a whole should never break down into triangles before it's lost to the draw distance. LI: Hard to say exactly but 5-15% of what the same build would have been as prims is a good rule of thumb. I'm more than happy to accept a little bit of extra LI if the design of the house is above average though. With modern, efficient building techniques and materials, you should hardly ever run out of prims on your land anyway so LI isn't nearly as important as it used to be.

One trick that can sometimes be useful for complex items like that is the object impostor. What you do is add one extra face to the mesh and use a picture of the object as the texture for it. Hide that face in the higher resolution model and scale it up to full size in the lower ones.

DelizaLove wrote: Where can I download mesh studio or mesh generator ? Neither is free Iæm afraid but you can buy them on the Marketplace.

IvanBenjammin wrote: A piece of hard earned wisdom for anyone who is learning: If you get to a point and simply cannot fix an issue and your forehead is getting sore from banging it on the wall, go jump into your favourite video game from the last 5 years or so, and play the game I call 'spot the seam.' There's this game called "Real Life" that's really good for that. Virtually unlimited LI, details down to subatomic scale, looks so genuine. And yet, if you look closely you'll find plenty of flaws. In fact, too much perfection can often diminsh the object's quality, making it look synthetic and artificial.

If you're already familiar with prims, you may want to start with a prim-to-mesh converter like Mesh Studio or Mesh Generator. You can make amazingly advanced objects with these tools and I know of high quality mesh makers who don't use anything else. They are also great starting points for Blender. One of the problems with Blender is that there's so much to leanr before you can even get started making useful meshes. If you start with a prim converter, you can ease your way into Blender one function at a time. Mesh Studio ahs a very good support group, Sweet Meshes, with Mesh Generator you are pretty much left to yourself although you can get help in the generic builders' groups and here on this forum. One program you should stay away from is SketchUp. It's not that SketcUp is a bad program, it's jsut that it's a CAD (Computer Assisted Design) program and not suitable for 3D environments.