snakeappletree

"with the money they're raking in, you'd think they'd pour some back into fixing things that desperately need fixing" Arthur Reece yes, that is called Sansar

"am I allowed to stop paying for this unstable 13 year old betaversion ? " Charlie Stokes You are free to leave at any time. Compare SL engine with a car - after 13 years, it gets buggy. Doesn't mean we don't still love it for what it is.

I have been uploading .dae (aka collada) into SL for a year and this is what I know of it from experience and from picking up tips in the forums and the in-game Builders groups (whose staff mostly specialise in pc's / prim / blender / gimp): 1st method: reduce complexity of original object, using built-in (Blender apparently has this) or bounce the model between eg; BalancerLite (is free and works on mac) and your 3D app (I use Cheetah3D for mac). 2nd method: lower the physics setting (high, low, extra low) for the upload in the SL viwers mesh upload screen. This renders the object in its full glory but without the avatar and the shape interacting as if the shape is solid, only some of it will be solid. This is not recomended for building sections eg; door frames. 3rd method: upload and set it to Convex Hull so it reads as 1 Prim no matter how complicated the shape is. You will need to set it to Phantom otherwise the hull will push avi's away from the object. If you need the object to have physics, Link it to an overlaid Prim which is set to Alpha texture (making it transparent which is not the same as Invisible texture, invisible texture can be still seen from some angles in some viewers because it has a dark patch on it). 4th method: link everything together to reduce Land Impact (does not reduce prim count). There are some restrictions on this (see the Convex Hull link above for a great article by Jeremy Linden detailing everything about this). I picked Loki's link up from this thread, it has taught me a lot about LoD Level of Detail: check it out.

Thanks everyone for the advice on user content bump maps. This is a breakthrough for me also. I know from experience and then from further research that .png files means you can use transparency as part of your texture, where all other formats replace it with white.

Thanks Gavin, I will let you know how my test following your advice goes. It did import my previous test upload as black. Import model has 2 faces; does this mean a maximum of only 2 texture files can be allocated to a model? Cheetah3D has internal textures including glowing lights, water effects and reflective metals, all of which I use inside the program while building, as well as uploading custom textures (eg; from photoshop). I am hoping that SL can deal with mirror effect textures, without causing lag.

I was glad to find this forum here! It is the closest thing to 'upload from Cheetah 3D into SL beta For Dummies' the web has to offer. I am 1 month into SL and have been using Cheetah 3D for a while (I am using v5). Yesterday I attempted uploading my first ever design into SL beta from Cheetah. Problem 1: scale. I had to downsize it in Cheetah and re-upload it, in this process I discovered that I can upload tiny items and then stretch them in SL to avoid paying extra Lindens for larger items, without losing any shape detail. Problem 2: skin / texture / wrap (various names for the same thing across different platforms). Although the original object in Cheetah has 2 different surface colours in Cheetah, it uploaded with none and defaulted to black in SL beta. I haven't figured this out yet. As I said; process For Dummies ... Any and all guidance and help I can get will be muchly appreciated, not only by myself and others in same situation but also by the hordes of fans lining up to experience the really wonderful 3D artwork and environments that I am obsessively constructing night after night (by which time oculus rift will probably be out-selling game consoles).