ChinRey
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Posts posted by ChinRey
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16 minutes ago, Drayke Newall said:
I also did hear back then when they removed them that any existing 2048 texture had been resized to 1024 automatically,
One way to find out...
/me logs on to the beta grid, rummages through her inventory and finds the 2048x1024 she had kept just because she's an incurable packrat.
Apparently not. I tried to download it and it's still at that resolution. I don't have a 2048x2048 or anything bigger but I would assume it's the same with them.
3 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:I'm pretty sure it was baked at that quality because those clothing items looked far better.
Texture quality isn't only about resolution and it's not at all unusual to see 512x512s that look sharper and clearer than 1024x1024s.
One very important and always overlooked factor is the scaling algorithm. Nearly all textures we see in SL have been resized at at least one point during the creation and/or uploading. Take a look at this wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_gallery_of_image_scaling_algorithms. It only illustrates a few of the algorithms that exist and don't include the ones I would usually recommend for SL textures but you get the idea.
SL uses a lossy texture compression and that also affects the actual resolution. For some textures the loss of details is barely if at all noticeable for others it can be very significant.
Then there are lots of tricks good texture artists use to make their texture look sharper and more detailed than they really are. It's hard to quantify and explain, it's all about intuition, experience and attention to detail. But take a look at Crazy Mole's Nautilus textures or Hattie Panacek's Ex Machina and (especially) Rampart Castles ones. Those are two of the greatest texture artists SL has ever seen and it's amazing how much they can squeeze out of a pixel. They can make a 256 look better and sharper than most of us can manage with a 1024.
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5 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:
Lag... not really. There's a lot of false SL wisdom as far as things like that, the actual hardware 'cost' of rendering these simple particle effects is pretty small.
That's a truth with modifications. A few particles aren't going to cause any significant problems for any reasonably modern computer. A massive number of them, however, can bring even the butchest game computer to tears and make it beg for mercy.
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23 hours ago, Ardy Lay said:
I use LL's viewer. It displays how long the rendering each avatar in the scene takes, in microseconds, and has a setting to not render avatars that have taken over a set amount of time.
Oh, I didn't know LL had adopted it for the official viewer too. That's the feature Beq was working on when she wrote the blogpost me and Arielle linked to.
Unlike LL's own jellydoll function this feature actually works as intended. It's not relevant to ARC and the jellydoll function though. It's a completely separate and more reliable system.
For those not familiar with it, select "Improve graphics speed" in the "World" menu, click on the "Avatars nearby" button and adjust the "Hide the most complex avatars..." slider to a suitable amount. The setting you want depends on how powerful your computer is so it's impossible to give any general advice.
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Maybe I should explain a little what it's about (WARNING: Long explanation probably only for those who just have to know how thing works).
1. Monitor frame rate
As everybody probably know, a TV or a computer monitor works by drawing a new picture several times a second to create the illusion of movement. Each of these pictures is called a frame. Standard frame rate for a monitor is 60 fps (frames per second) which is more than enough to create smooth animations. Some monitors may have a frame rate as low as 30 fps (which is still more than enough for most people), high speed ones can be as high as 144. VR headsets are usually set to 90 fps.
2. Viewer frame rate
The viewer frame rate is how fast the render engine can create new pictures to be displayed. If this is lower than the monitor's, the monitor will have to redraw the same picture while it's waiting for the next one. If it's higher, the monitor will skip some of the pictures. So the actual frame rate you get is always the lowest of the two.
Obviously there's no point in having a viewer frame rate higher than the monitor's and it's strongly recommended to set a max frame rate in the graphics preferences either by enabling Vsync (which automatically sets the viewer's max fps to the same as the monitor's) or (for Firestorm) setting it manually.
3. Good fps values
This is different for different people and depends on your health, your age, your focus and lots of other factors. But we need a standard of course.
- 10 fps is not good but us humans are good at adjusting our view of the surroundings and the longer we watch, the less noticeable the jaggedness tend to become. Although it's not ideal, many people can live with it.
- Good old fashioned TVs and movies typically have a frame of 24 fps which is a bit on the low side but not lower than what most humans can be satisfied with.
- With 40 fps most people will never notice any jaggedness at all on a screen.
- 60 fps should be more than good enough for all human beings for display on a screen (although there may be some extreme cases who can still see the picture jump from frame to frame).
- 90 fps is regarded as good for VR headsets (actually 180 fps since 3D viewing requires separate images for each eye).
As a very general rule of thumb: 20 is acceptable, 40 is good, 60 great and anything higher is overkill.
4. Render time vs frame rate
Render time is measured in microseconds (μs) and as the name implies it's the time it takes for the viewer to create the image of an object, an avatar or a whole scene. If the viewer runs out of time, the frame rate drops.
- If you want 20 fps, the viewer has 50,000 μs to create the whole picture, avatars, objects, everything.
- 40 fps: 25,000 μs
- 60 fps: 16,667 μs
Now, if you look at illustration no. 7 in Beq's blogpost, you see the laggiest avatar had 46,000 ARC (which is very loow) and took 4820 μs on Beq's computer. I don't know what hardware Beq has but I'm quite sure it's well above average. Let's say it would take an average viewer 10,000 μs to render that particular avatar (it's probably much higher). Five of them in the scene and we're down to 20 fps even before we take everything else in the surrounding into account. Ten such 49,000 ARC avatars and most people in SL will have serious trouble keeping their frame rate at an acceptable level.
By comparasion, the 14th avatar listed in the illustration had 128,000 ARC (way over the recommended setting for the jellydoll function) and took 1,553 μs to render. Let's again assume the average SL computer is half as fast as Beq's so 3,000 μs. Five such avatars and you should still be able to keep a nice and smooth frame rate (unless there are other heavy items in the scene of course), ten of them and your computer should still manage a frame rate higher than what you see on your TV.
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8 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:
who is this Beq being touted as the God of SL with all knowledge?
Beq Janus is one of the three Firestorm developers and the one who does most of the development of maintenance of Fs. She's also the only person I know of who is both a developer of SL/OS related software and a skilled content creator.
8 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:Do does this mean I bring in laggy-assed mesh and not take the trouble of optimizing it?
It's mostly about fitted mesh so fortunately it's not that relevant to content creators like you and me, Luna.
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No!
The avatar rendering complexity number is just a joke and does not in any way reflect how heavy an avatar actually is to render. Look at this post on Beq's blog: http://beqsother.blogspot.com/2022/03/how-to-use-new-firestorm-performance.html
Scroll down to illustration no. 7 on the page. It's a list of the avatars that were in the area when Beq did the test with their ARC numbers and the actual render time they took. The most telling comparasion is perhaps between the first and 14th avatar on the list: A third of the ARC = three times as high actual render cost!
If I understand Beq right, LL has done some tweaks after that test to make the ARC figures a little bit closer to the truth but only a little bit - a drop in the ocean.
Now, if LL had adopted Beq's code for measuring actual render load or something similar to calculate ARC, I would have agreed it would be a good idea. But they haven't and they won't. As it is now, ARC is just a way to shame and block people with perfectly safe and sound low lag avatars and let the big "offenders" go free.
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3 hours ago, Skylar Woodford said:
I really wish I could do baked shadows, I tried and my laptop sounded like it was going to explode! It also said it would take 2 hours to complete?
On the bright side, using tiled textures reduces the lag considerably compared to baked ones. 😉
Blender's "bake fail" functions can be a bit hard on your computer but there's a lot you can do with "fake baking". I use paint.net here but Gimp or Photoshop or any other image editor that supports layers will do. This is not a very good pattern and the color is rather ghastly but it'll do as an illustration. I'm also exaggerating the effects a little bit to make them easier to see.
Here's the texture I start with:
Add a little bit of structure (not as much as this, I told you I was exaggerating):
What I did here was simply impose a plaster texture onto the wallpaper.
Some random shading across the surface, adding a perlin noise layer:
And then a little bit of shading at the top and bottom. This means the texture is no longer tileable vertically but it is still horizontally and that's what really matters for a wall texture:
These are 512x512 textures which may be a little bit too low a resolution for a full height wallpaper texture. But you can do it with a 1024x1024 too. It's not ideal but not too big a deal if you can use it for all the walls in the room.
Or you can do it at 256x1024:
(In particular case I had to "squeeze" the texture horizontally to keep it tileable but that's easily fixed by setting a suitable repeat rate in-world).
As I said, I was exaggerating the effects a little bit. Here is a more toned down version - with a hopefully less ghastly color too:
Finally, here it is with four horizontal repeats and stretched sideways to compensate for the "squeeze":
It's still not a great texture, partly because I wasn't going to spend a lot of time fine tuning the settings for one I'm not actually going to use but mostly because the seed texture wasn't good enough. But even so, compare this to the first illustration and you'll see how much of a difference a few basic image editing tricks can do.
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5 minutes ago, Skylar Woodford said:
I do notice the scale is off, and blender you can measure so I set it on meters since SL is in meters, it's significantly bigger in game but I can resize it to make it the correct size..
I also noticed the texture scaling is off?
Is that typical for a house build for the texture scaling to be off, it's an easy fix I can just go in game and edit the textures so they show up correctly.
That sounds like you hadn't applied the scale in Blender. Select the model on object mode, then type Ctrl-A and apply scale, rotation and position. I'm afraid you may have to redo the UV maps afterwards, Blender tend to mess those up on models with uneven scale. For the future, remember to apply scale every time you resize a model in object mode.
15 minutes ago, Skylar Woodford said:I tried getting on the beta grid, but it wouldn't let me maybe it's under maintenance?
Sorry, I forgot to mention that. You have to file a support ticket and ask LL for access to the beta grid.
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23 minutes ago, Skylar Woodford said:
Do I need to have 10,000L in the bank? Or is it a fake balance in the beta viewer?
It's a fake balance. The Lindens on the beta grid are kept completely separate from what you have on main SL and can't be transferred or exchanged or anything like that. You can only use it on the beta grid.
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25 minutes ago, Skylar Woodford said:
I have not uploaded it to SL yet with the beta viewer, I did some research on how to use the beta viewer - if I upload it via beta is it free?
It's not the beta viewer, it's the beta grid. The beta grid is a kind of a "second Second Life" used for testing only. You kind'a "pay" for uploads there too but you start with 10,000 L$ and get a refill when the balance is running low.
About the door width, I didn't know you were going to have double doors. That explains why the door openings looked so wide, you need them wider to fit two doors of course. 🙂
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11 hours ago, Skylar Woodford said:
Question : I will be modeling doors for the home, Should I upload them separately to the house?
Doors, windows, columns and all other smaller details must be separate meshes and not part of the main structure. You probably want the battens to be one or more separate meshes too and not part of the wall mesh(es). If you do it as one big chunk of mesh, you'll end up with a way too high land impact or collapsing LOD models or - most likely - both.
You can split them in Blender and upload everything in one go but I wouldn't recommend that, partly because you'd end up with several duplicate meshes (windows for example, you don't want different uploads of the same window) but mostly because it's hard to control LOD and physics models for that many meshes in one go.
Judging by the picture I would guesstimate your house should be in about 40 pieces, maybe as low as 30, maybe as high as 60. For a house like this I would have budgeted with a land impact of 20-30 but I would have been prepared to go a little bit higher since I don't really know how much the battens would add. That is, and this is important, with solid LOD models so no noticeable collapsing when viewed at a distance. A good mesh house maker could probably do it at 50-60 LI, a Mole 200-250. If you can get it down to 100 LI without sacrificing LOD, you're doing very well if this is your first mesh house.
Btw, I take back what I said about the pillars needing crowns and bases. I didn't know they were supposed to be woodbeams. They don't really need such details of course although it's still a nice touch.
10 hours ago, Skylar Woodford said:Ill upload it and see what I have goin on!
Do you have access to the beta grid? You have to be prepared to do a lot of test uploads before you get it right and that can be expensive if you do it on the main grid.
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I noticed one detail just as I was about to hit the submit button: You may want to do something about the door openings. It's hard to tell from the pictures but they look a bit too wide to me. If you want RL proportions a single exterior door should typically be 2.6-2.8 times a high as it is wide and no less than 2.5. I speak from experience here, I used to make my doors way too wide myself.
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3 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:
My best advice assuming your house looks great when it is all textured and the physics is CORRECT (if you haven't been there yet be prepared)...
... and the LOD is good and the land impact isn't too high.
9 hours ago, Skylar Woodford said:My question is about pricing, by the time this house is done I'll probably have dedicated a full 24 hours to creating it! It's quite detailed...
Oh, that's a really well proportioned house and I love the board-and-batten exterior! You got a proper deep fundament too so people can fit it to sloping and uneven terrain. Lots of builders miss that simple point.
However, it's not "quite detailed" by modern mesh house standards. It's easy to fix though: add some proper lining to the roof, simple crowns and bases for the pillars and maybe gutters and you can double the price. Texturing will also make a huge difference in what people will be willing to pay for it and we don't know how that will be.
Even so, Chic is absolutely right about the price level for such houses in SL. What she said about Belli is especially important. If it had been a bigger or smaller house or one in a European or Asianish style, it would probably have a little bit of sales potential. But this is so close to Bellisseria style and that's a market segment LL has grabbed for themselves. It may even be smack bang in the middle of the future Belli market. I wouldn't at all be surprised if LL added battens to some of their houses and marketed it as their new "coastal style" Belli theme.
It's a lovely house and you should be proud of it but no matter what price you set, don't expect it to make you much money.
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3 minutes ago, Jennifer Boyle said:
Is this intended behavior?
Yes, it is. It's to allowed boxes with content that is sold or given away to be non-modifiable.
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On 7/5/2023 at 4:26 AM, elleevelyn said:
there is a thing called "Escape From Freedom vs Escape To Freedom" which a number of people have written about. Not least of who was Erich Fromm circa 1941.
I'm not familiar with this concept but judging purely how the term is used in this thread, it seems to me that "Escape From Freedom" has two very different - opposite even - meanings.
In a game the purpose of the rules is to create challenges. They limit your options and you still have to figure out a way to finish your tasks.
In HOA style settings like Bellisseria the purpose of the rules is to eliminate challenges. Everything is laid out for you and all you have to do is sit back and (presumably) enjoy.
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4 hours ago, Leora Greenwood said:
I think that is the Orsa Wedge cottage: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Trompe-Loeil-Orsa-Wedge-Cottage-V11-mesh/22246556
Yes, that's another replica of the same house. It seems to be a bit closer to the original than Meshworx' take on it.
This is a bit worrying. Although the house is, as I mentioned earlier, probably inspired by the Vandamm House, it's still a very unique and original design and should be IP protected (by Atelier Monolit unless I'm mistaken). And neither of the two MP listings give any credit to the actual creator.
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On 7/2/2023 at 5:13 PM, Innula Zenovka said:
Isn't a weed simply something that's growing where you don't want to be?
The dandelion was spread across the world by people who grew it for food. The whole plant is edible, the root can be a significant source of carbohydrates, the leaves is a great alternative to lettuce and the flowers have a lovely sweet taste. (The stalks aren't really delicious food but they're edible too.)
It's a great source for nectar for the bees to make honey from although too much of it in the mix can be a bit of a nuisance for beekeepers since dandelion honey crystalizes so easily.
The dandelion can be great for improving soil quality since deep roots are able to extract nutrients from soil too deep for other plants to reach and bring it up to the surface.
It's a beautiful flower and great fun for children too. What is it not to like about it?
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The dandelion got a bad reputation when some Brits with too much money decided they wanted huge sterile lawns just to show the world they were so rich they could afford to lay their land to waste.
There's a lesson for us all here: The dandelion became regarded as an unwanted weed because it can be so useful and valuable! I think that says a lot about humanity in general and our moden society in particular.
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45 minutes ago, PekeNL said:
Can't even find how to play m2. Such a great competitor!
I don't think it's open yet.
Improbable, the company behind M ², has been in the virtual reality business for a while, specialicing in simulation software for military forces. But it was only earlier this month they announced this new platform for the general public. I suppose it's because the defence industry isn't very lucrative at the moment with peace all around the world and everybody cutting down on their military spending.
It actually looks like one of the more serious attempts, more serious than Meta at least. But they're probably too late, the hype is over now. Even the word metaverse is toxic among investors nowadays.
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15 hours ago, Gopi Passiflora said:
My question is simple: do you think seeing "nature" in Second Life (or other virtual worlds) has the same effect as seeing nature in real life?
It's not even close.
But Second Life is always there. I'm an outdoors person, I've always lived in the kind of places tourists flock to to experience and I'm more than healthy enough to get around. But even for me getting out in RL isn't always an option. The weather may be too bad, I can have a flu or something so I have to stay indoors, I may be on tour and stuck in a hotel room etc., etc. On those occasions Second Life is good to have. It's not as good as the real thing but it's still much better than nothing.
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I'm not going either but:
♥️♥️♥️🎂Happy Birthday Second Life! 🎂♥️♥️♥️
I hope you have many more years to come!
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On 6/14/2023 at 2:52 PM, Thecla said:
There is a very similar house as that last one for sale in SL...I think it's from Meshworx, I forget.
Similar? More like identical I think.
Anyway both Animats' picture and the one on MP shows the house in the wrong settings. The original Vandamm House (from the 1959 Hitchcock movie North by Northwest) was on a hilltop:
Now, that's more like it!
(Edit: Yes, that "modern" house is actually a simplification of a movie set from 1959. Not only that, I'm sure at least some of you notice how heavly the Vandamm house leans on Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, dating all the way back to 1935. Nearly everything that is presented as "modern architecture" today is actually quite old, typical pre war Lloyd Wright and/or Le Corbusier style with a little bit of brutalism and Bauhaus thrown in for good measure. Es gibt nicths Neues unter die Sonne.)
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1 hour ago, Frionil Fang said:
Photoshop is applying some kind of gamma correction to your alpha mask gradient instead of treating it linearly.
That may be part of it. But it may also be that SL uses lossy texture compression and anti-aliasing that both blur the texture. And of course, there is no exact 50% calue in a 0-255 scale.
2 hours ago, Darx Snowpaw said:What is the best way to get an even gradient for the cutoff mask so I can make a pretty accurate progress bar? I had used animated textures before and they always seem extremely buggy and was suggested to use this instead...
What I would have done, was make a texture that is 50% opaque white and 50% transparent and use texture offset to move the bar.
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4 hours ago, Thecla said:
In short, a square house is much cheaper to build than a round one.
Say that to an iron age European. Houses here used to be well rounded but then the Romans came along with their little boxes and suddenly it was hip to be square.
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2 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:
Yeah, and never be listened by LL and whoever is working on such feature, at least not until "it's too late to add/change" what they've got and the request be dismissed, with the promise of "in future iterations" that will never come. Exactly like it happened with path finding, animesh, EEP, etc etc...
And mesh and MOP ... and the Marketplace.
It's still worth trying though, you never know. I heard LL brought in some new developers with game developing experience recently at that may help.
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On 6/9/2023 at 6:59 PM, Nalates Urriah said:
When the Lab turned off the last previous mentor/helper teams they explained the stats revealed those using mentors left sooner than those that did not use mentors. Eliminating mentors increased retention. 😵 Which doesn't make sense to me. But it is hard to argue with simple stats.
"Simple stats" also say that more women suffer from PMS than men. Ummm, I mean... Never mind, it's probably true either way you read it.
This looks to me like a classic example of poor data analyzis. A large proportion of the new accounts are just new alts for existing SL'ers. They are far more likely to stay for a while than genuine newcomers and they aren't likely to use mentors.
On 6/9/2023 at 6:59 PM, Nalates Urriah said:The Lab has provided lots of training and learning aids.
Quantity is not the same as quality and in education they are often opposites.
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34 minutes ago, animats said:
We have an interesting opportunity in Second Life. Not only can we build architectural models, we can live in them. So we can see what will work.
It's a great idea in principle and it's one that was proposed right at the start of Second Life. It was also one of LL's main selling points for Sansar.
However, to get an impression how an SL house will work in RL, we need:
- Realistic scale and proportions both of the environment and the avatar
- 1st person POW
- Realistic walking speed (for security reasons most people won't move around in their RL house at a brisk jogging pace but that's wat we do in SL)
Ideally we want VR headsets too of course but that's not actually essential. The factors above are though and they would require a paradigm shift in how Second Life - and even virtual reality in general - is perceived.
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Oh, don't get me started on terrain! This is a thread about avatars and you don't want a long off topic rant from me here!