JackTheOtterFox

This is amazing news. Really, really glad to be reading this! You have my full support on this decision, and I know countless of others that would agree with me on that.

Okay, just for the sake of completeness: I'm done with this! That was quite a journey, but I'm happy that it's done now. And this might be the first proper thing I created for SL, but at least in my opinion, it looks really good, and I'm really happy with it. Things I learned on this adventure: - Land impact calculation is weird and partially nonsensical - The larger the object in actual dimensions the higher the download impact because it could in theory be seen by more people, so the server has more stress - The more high-resolution textures there are on a mesh the higher the VRAM usage, however that does not impact the LI value - Textures are instanced, which means that if one object shares the texture with another one, the texture is only once loaded into VRAM - If your nose isn't directly glued to the floor you can't see the difference between 512x512 and 1024x1024 resolution textures for small objects like stepping stones - If you try to cheat by making the LOD only a stone-shaped plane, make sure it's at the top of the model or it won't be rendered because it's clipping with the terrain - Physics meshes are tricky - and can very quickly increase the LI. They shouldn't have unnessesary details - Both LOD and Physics meshes will be "aligned" to the main mesh by stretching their dimensions until they fit the dimensions of the main mesh. - To properly align these meshes, make sure their dimensions are equal by adding 0-scale triangles at two opposite corners of a box containing all vertices of all meshes (Blender 2.8's new 'edit multiple objects at once' feature comes in very handy for this) - To actually use the physics mesh in-world, you need to first enable it in the object preferences - If the dimension of the object is 0.5m or smaller in height the physics mesh will be ignored completely without a warning - whatever you do - There is more to the specular and bump-maps than meets the eye - further investigation required And finally, probably the most important lesson learned from this: - Placing 115 stones in a neatly fashion can get very boring very quickly The final model is actually made out of 5 smaller models, each of them having a LI of 1. That means that the total land-impact for the stepping stones is 5, which is a fantastic number in my opinion! It's also a number that is significantly smaller than 19, which was the original LI value that lead to me opening this thread. Optimizing models is extremely important, and can bring a lot of improvement to performance, visuals and LI - It's definitely always worth it. I think I will actually make a marketplace item out of this, I don't think there are any ways of increasing the performance more without suffering in quality - Before I do that I will try to improve the textures though, I think especially with the new information from @Beq Janus and @OptimoMaximo I see a lot of room for improvements. Thank you to everyone who helped me in the past few days, I really learned a lot thanks to you, and I enjoyed working on this a lot (at least for the most part), so I might continue to create assets in the future. (I'll probably wait until I can finally get onto the Beta Grid though, I don't think I want to know the total upload costs of the past few days... For that reason alone I should create a listing on the marketplace for sure xD)

Oh wow, that is extremely useful to know, thank you a lot for this information! I will definitely experiment around with that. When I read "Specular" in the viewer I was assuming it was just a grayscale texture representing the value 0-1, I didn't even think about the fact that the other channels might actually serve a purpouse. It's really nice to know that my assumption was wrong and that the channels aren't just wasted. I was too quick to come to a conclusion (and also quite tired), so my deepest apologies for that.

Okay, that's something at least... I suppose the smartest thing would be to drop the texture resolution to 512x512, which should 1/4 the VRAM usage of the object, which is probably a good start. Looks like you are right, at least from my few tests it looks like it is inflated up to 3 channels, which is kind of not so great (especially because it's a specular map...) but oh well. I don't really want to completely remove bump and specular map, but that leaves me with no option to further decrease the intensity. If I'd use tiled textures it wouldn't match the UV mapping and I'd see seams, which is something I absolutely want to avoid at all cost. So for now I suppose that's it, at least if noone has better suggestions. (And I was actually planning to re-purppouse these assets as something to be soled on the marketplace, but I suppose I'll just get kicked in the butt if I do so now...)

Textures are still instanced though, right? So having that object or others using the same textures 20x in the scene wouldn't increase the VRAM used, am I correct with that assumption?

Okay, updating my prior statement. That window tells me my object is taking up 90.112KB of VRAM, which is a lot more... (It's a really nice feature though, I'm learning more and more about SL :D)

Okay, just found it. It tells me my object's textures are taking up 32686KB of VRAM, which honestly seems to be okay for me. Is that including all textures, so diffuse, normal and specular?

How can I check how much memory (or video memory) my textures are actually consuming? You mentioned some VRAM readout?

Wait, if I upload a texture with only one channel it won't add more channels to it, will it? I mean, there is absolutely no reason to have more than one channel for a specularity map, and that's not new, that will be the case ever since SL introduced specularity maps, whenever that was. Does it really just inflate the textures? o.o

I meant 8 Sets of Diffuse, Normal and Specular ^^ So that's 3 channels each for the Diffuse, 3 channels for the Normal and 1 channel for the Specular. With compression that should be something around ~3000KB per Texture set, so ~24.000KB or 24MB in total, which is still fine since the textures will be instanced for all parts of the walkway I suppose ^^ If I'd distribute something like that, I would probably make multiple versions, like one with 512x512 and one with repeating textures, allthough they would look quite bad on my current model since it's not designed for that.

Well, I mean, it's my first proper creation, so I might as well give it all I can

Yeah, I thought it would be, well, more worth it, but the actual influence of the bump and specular maps are almost unnoticable, so I'll drop it down to 8 textures And I could have probably made the textures 512x512, but I honestly do like the extra detail for closeups ^^ (And also I don't want to upload them all again :P)

All right, just for the sake of completeness, final result of the first section of my new stone walkway in front of my new home! I'm kind of a little sad though, the bump- and specular maps seem to actually not have any impact, but hey, at least I'm done now! I might remove the maps completely, like, it is nearly invisible and I would go from 24 to 8 1024x1024 images, I mean, it's only 3 and 1 channel for both, but it adds up. Anyway, thanks again for all of your help, I will now work on uploading the rest of it! ^w^ (Wow, so much work for just a few pebbles...)

Okay, I will hide in a corner now. Thank you so much! I did actually forget about that! It's perfect. FINALLY! Thanks to everyone involved in helping me, that was a long and difficult jounrney, but I'm finally there now. (Apparently the physics are now at 1.6 LI though, I mean, it's only 8 triangles, but apparently that's just too much to be one LI. I might try to remove a vertex somewhere, but that's good enough for me right now ^^)

Hehe, all right, I'll better not ask any further questions Just know that I've actually been using blender for years, and I've read up a lot on mesh editing, so I should at least know enought to make relatively high quality models... That is, at least if SL lets me. All right, so, I'm back at the previously solved problem, just that it isn't solved anymore So, here is what I changed: First, all models have the bounding box expanding zero-size triangles added. In the uploader everything is lined up perfectly. Secondly, the height of the object is detected as 0.7, so it's higher than 0.5, which should mean that it actually uses the collision mesh... But it doesn't. Since I needed to this time post-process the collision mesh, here is what I did: As you can see, everything looks perfect in the preview. Also, once again, the model detects as so it should actually use the provided physics mesh... The lineup of things in the preview is perfect now, so I'm really happy that this is resolved and I'll maybe look into trying to create a little blender script that helps preparing the model for upload. But that's not the point, now. In theory I now have solutions to all problems I was facing, now I just need to make sure all of the solutions actually work at once, and then I should be good to go (Also, still no access to the beta grid, so bye bye L$ :P)