Anna Nova

I turn ALM off because I don't want the sea to come up inside my yacht.

Interesting thread. Excuse me if I hijack it a bit. How long does thermal paste last? I replaced my screamin' stock AMD FX-8350 cooler with a Deep Cool Captain 250 integrated water cooler, and replaced the paste with that supplied. I'm wondering if I should have policy of replacing the paste after X years, say 3 or so?

Oh no not another 'our terms and conditions are changing' letter/email/message. While I welcome the phEU making this regulation, the law of the untended flatulence of legal notices is being sorely tickled.

Ummmm, programs written by lazy humans? If it was just a matter of deciding which verts can be collapsed into which other verts without too much visual distortion then I would agree that what is needed is a better algorithm. However, when you take into account techniques like imposters, and replacing mesh detail with baked-in bump-mapped detail, you start to get into areas where the LOD is an artistic decision.

Chinrey is being modest. She makes houses with the lowest Land Impact about. I have one of her skyboxes, and you can't get lower LI than 1. So add her name to that list.

I hope you mean Firestorm. Some versions of Firestorm don't have the extensions that give the options under analyse. Try the SL official viewer.

As far as I can tell, the only way to become proficient is to try. You make something that YOU actually want to make, and you follow up on the issues you discover doing it. Sometimes a tutorial will help - as I found with High-Poly baking - that has little apparent relevance to SL. Sometime you just get inundated with wrong leads and come here and ask nicely. Sometimes you think you have made something really fantastic, and then you realise it's pretty mediocre, but even that teaches you. What you cannot do is watch a 'how to build an X for SL' video, and expect to be an expert, even in Xs. Now those who tell you that unless you have done 13 years in Art College, followed by a PhD in 3D graphics, and hold the Chair in Advanced Algorithms at Berkeley, you can't make mesh for SL. Those that have those, make the worst stuff, IMO. Just start.

BIG light just came on! That's why everything I ever exported to blender and cleaned up like this needed a complete new UV-map. The one it came out of the Firestorm collada export with ... got dumped by the uploader! Extremely useful thread.

There is a way of dropping a cloth over an object in Blender (and I assume the other 3D programs as well) that results in realistic folding. I don't make clothes so I have no idea if it can be used with clothes. There are a lot of tutorials, for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zd1AI198I8

What Chinrey said. In the early days of my adventure in learning mesh, I would frequently make a prim model, export it with Firestorm, and import it to Blender. I didn't know Blender very well then. So all I could do was to decimate each item, and join them, then export them as .dae. On import it was hit and miss if I could texture them acceptably, usually not. It soon became apparent that you either use an in-world tool like Mesh Studio to convert prim to mesh (you can use Blender on those meshes to improve things - but it also often screws up the texturing), or you build from scratch with a proper 3D program like Blender. I invested the 2 years of learning into Blender. Never looked back.

Just to record that the reason your system feet look like the hard end of a club-hammer is that the 'shoebase' for those mesh shoes sets the sliders for the feet to extreme positions. If you had the mesh feet that it expects you to have, the feet's alpha would make those club-feet invisible. The EFFECT of the club feet is to position the shoes at exactly the right place to rig so the sole is on the ground - and they are usually wrong - so you will have to play with the hover anyway. But don't delay, follow the advice and go mesh. I invested in Maitreya, and have never regretted it. Not so sure about the mesh head, that's an entirely different equation.

You CAN use subsurf for the model that you use to bake it's textures onto a low poly version for SL. It's the only economic way I have found of getting the detail of a superhigh poly model in to SL. You may need to bake the displacement map as a separate texture. It's not a perfect solution, but it can help.

Well, there is a very good way of using the dreaded subsurf modifier in blender to give an excellent low poly result in SL. You use a high poly model to bake it's texture onto a low poly model. This way the actual number of vertexes imported is low, but the texture applied the faces contains the details from the high poly. The tutorials on the Anvil from Blender Guru (easy search in You-tube) explain this in extreme detail, although in his case it is low poly to reduce scene render times in animation - but the results are similar.

Well, I was in your position a year or so ago. What I did, and what I recommend is that you decide to make something, it doesn't really matter what, say choose a photo of a nice house in RL and choose to make a blender model of it. You could start by following any old tutorial that shows you how to make a house. If it is not an SL or Game Asset tutorial it will almost certainly use horrid things like subsurf modifiers, but just ignore that. Then see if you can import your model to SL. You will not end up with a good SL model, but you will whistle up the learning curve. Doing it, is so much more effective than reading how to do it. Come and ask questions in the Mesh forum, after you have something you have tried to make. I also think it's worth following these tutorials from Chic Aeon. They are only for simple objects, but she is cute and touches all the right buttons. Don't just watch the vids! http://www.slartist.com/browse-ca-videos-1-date.html

Like modern politics, commerce, oh, and most other things.

I've often thought it would be nice to have a 'pack and ship' facility from beta to main grid. It would involve the same cost as uploading afresh, but avoid all the reapplying and setting textures.

Depends how much money you have. If you have money and want to use Maya or 3D Max, then I'm told they are great - but it's not an unbiased opinion if you spend THAT much on them. If, like me, you don't spend money on software unless there is no alternative, then Blender is perfectly adequate, and probably no more difficult to learn than the others. If you are going to make clothes, then you will need the body tools for whatever you use, for Blender that means Avastar, and that isn't free, but isn't expensive either.

Please please please market the bed or the script!

Well, well, well. Just down the road from my patch. I liked the 'rustic' building, especially the room with the dance pole...

Where's your parcel?

or give up and make proper flexi hair.

Thinking of the 'spatial test', the distance could be a function of speed and direction, I guess. So your deduction is the same as mine, there is no way to know if the object that the HUD is associated with is in the dead zone, you have to infer it.

Thanks Whirly. I tried to compile it this afternoon, and it was fairly painless - I use Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu, so the Ubuntu instructions were good. However, even though it runs, it crashes quite a bit too. I don't have the skills to debug that, so I'll have to wait for a release. I don't think there is much point in joining the Beta Testers unless I can debug.

When a boat or car or plane crosses a sim crossing there is a small, sometime not so small, time when control inputs are ignored. I have a helicopter by Kelly Shergood that has a HUD with a light that is green when you can input and yellow when you will be ignored. I wondered if it was possible to make such a HUD, and then the question: how do you detect when you are in a sim crossing, so that you can change the color or HUD light?

Please continue to support Firestorm having a viable Linux viewer, it doesn't matter to me that you don't have one, but I must have RLV for my wardrobe management. If Linux viewers disappear, I have to too (and my tier).