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anitabush

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Posts posted by anitabush

    Texturing large objects? (houses and shops)

    in Building and Texturing Forum

    Posted

    On 4/2/2024 at 9:12 PM, Thecla said:

    I personally dislike buildings with baked lighting unless it is extremely subtle and confined to AO details. The reason is that I'm a bit of a lighting freak and like to have control over all aspects of it through EEP local and ambient light. And given that advanced lighting is going to be the default in viewers going forward, with PBR, that baked lighting is potentially rendered redundant or even counter-productive.

    While efficiency is a laudable goal, I believe that buildings are one type of object that get a bit more of a pass than other objects. I have a pair of hair pins from a well regarded creator in SL and was horrified to learn that each one uses four 1024 textures...for a total of 8 between the two of them. Not to say that poor craftsmanship on smaller objects excuses lack of efficiency on larger ones, but at least you're working on an object where 1024 textures can make a significant difference in visual quality.

    I generally agree about baked shadows and lighting, especially if they are not optional. In this case as I’m only building a small shop for myself I just want to have some more control over the textures. I’ve broken my building up into parts now and I’m baking tiled textures out using blender rather than substance. It’s early days but I’m finally making progress at least. 

    I appreciate your thoughts on it.
     

     

    On 4/2/2024 at 10:06 PM, Chic Aeon said:

    This is the OLD interface but the the idea no doubt translates over to the new (or maybe you are still using the old LOL).  You can bake to MULTIPLE texture planes from one mesh object.  

    Typically (for me) dividing the build into two or three parts (main - roof- base and stairs for example) works best but this will work even on ONE  single mesh building. If yours is a simple one that will do it. 

    I typically bake to 2048 and let the uploader resize. There was a comment just now on another thread saying that resizing down to 1024 works best.  A few of us did a LOT of testing on this some time back and discovered that it depends a LOT on your software and the settings within that but MOST often  letting the uploader do it is best. So I advise checking that out for yourself to see what works best FOR YOU.

     

    For me -- a small but fairly ocmplex house would be three to five textures uploades.  Your simple house could easily be 3 and hopefully still look good.   It will ALSO depend on the texture you are putting on things.  Ones that need lots of detail are going to be tricky :D.

     


    Thank you for the tips and the video. I’ve broken my building up into parts now and everything is going much more smoothly. I appreciate the pointers.

    • Like 1

    Texturing large objects? (houses and shops)

    in Building and Texturing Forum

    Posted · Edited by anitabush

    I’ve spent the last few years getting used to texturing small objects using blender and substance painter. Stuff like maximising texel density, baking in AO and shadow information where necessary, etc. Im now trying to make a minamilist shop for myself on a 512 plot and I’m really confused about how to make something look good and be efficient in terms of LI and textures.
     

    My understanding is that things can only be textured in two ways for SL. Making tiling textures and texturing within SL where I could take a 512 or 1024 texture and spread it across a big wall with tiling to still get those crispy details, but meaning there’s no baked shadows or AO. I understand I could use trim sheets with this approach but for a minamilist building I’m not sure how useful that would be. Secondly by texturing in substance or blender and baking all the information to the UV map which gives the option of AO, shadows and anything else but at the expense of those crisp looking textures. 
     

    Am I missing anything? I’m just really struggling to make a building look good with those options. All I can’t think is splitting the building up into more models so I can get more UV real estate but this seems really inefficient? 

    Does anyone have any tips or maybe links to appropriate tutorials? I’ve only found stuff for other game engines which is useful but doesn’t really answer my questions (makes me jealous of what UE5 can do as well).
     

    Sorry if this is a stupid question, thanks folks!

    Creating PBR material maps for lowest LoD imposter models with 3ds Max

    in Building and Texturing Forum

    Posted

    On 2/22/2024 at 10:44 PM, Cube Republic said:

    Here's my contribution. I can't find an equivalent modifier in blender, however this is how I make my plant LODs which is more or less the same theory. I put the camera in orthographic mode and take a shot from the front and side. I will say I only do this for big plants because a small plant or flower would only be a blob of pixels from a distance anyway so I sometimes use that idea to my advantage in terms of making lower LODs. 

     

    The empty is just for parenting the camera to make it easy to rotate. 

    The shots are made into a cruciform mesh  (like an old school plant) and used for lower LOD. You could do the same for a chair by taking the photos in blender and compositing the texture in your image editor of choice. There's probably a way to do it with nodes. The only projection modifier we have it like for casting meshes onto another.  Onc caveat that Arton didn't mention is the meshes need to have the same size bounding boxes or you'll get weird popping behavior  

     

    I shade the lower LOD  in-world so it matches as well as it can. It's not the most elegant solution, but its all we've got and it's better than setting LODs to 0,0,0 then advising on debug settings.  https://gyazo.com/0380629183d8b251466cc74834e60a64

    81f0aea75590ee3ac7572aea6261f06c.png

    6bb52026c14974f9ae9b89c21c12b907.png

    Thank you for detailing your workflow, that’s really helpful 

    • Like 1

    Looking for a solid workflow

    in Mesh

    Posted

    50 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

    Thanks.

    I think I'm going to like painting with this much better than painting with Blender.

    I find it so much nicer than blender for texturing, it all clicks in my head much more easily 

    • Like 1

    Looking for a solid workflow

    in Mesh

    Posted

    13 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

    Do you use the Substance Painter purchased at Steam?  If so, is it as good as the SP monthly plan?

    It’s no different at all, you just don’t get designer, sampler or access to the online assets. I believe the steam version gets 12 months of updates. It just comes down to how you prefer to pay for software really. If you need painter and designer then paying monthly makes more sense

    • Thanks 1

    PBR materials creating a white haze on meshes

    in Building and Texturing Forum

    Posted

    18 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

    In order to prevent legacy content from being too saturated, and the contrast being too strong from ACES tonemapping, the strength of ACES had to be dialed down by one third in SL.
    Furthermore, the default midday is just an approximation of the recommended HDRI. So there won't be a 100% match between Substance Painter and SL. But since it's still PBR, colors, and roughness will be displayed correctly in SL. It's just the little bit more of that greyish shine of the Linear tonemapping in SL. That one third of ACES that is missing.

    Especially when you build on a skyplatform, make sure you also have a manual reflection probe rezzed there, which helps to minimize the haze.

    That’s useful information, thank you. 

    Second Life Mobile 2023 - First Look

    in Mobile

    Posted

    On 5/21/2023 at 1:09 PM, davidventer said:

    I hope that the mobile viewer will support most (or all) of the default desktop viewer functionality. 

    There are really awesome 3D design apps on iPad such as Shapr3D and Nomad Sculpt. Nomad Sculpt can do PBR painting and export GLTF files. How awesome would it be if we can create content on iPad and take it directly into Second Life from iPad - no need for a desktop viewer? This is already possible in other virtual worlds such as Spatial, so it should be doable in Second Life as well. Hopefully, it will be, eventually. 

    Nomad is fantastic and cosy blanket can do part of the optimisation work but we are missing a general purpose 3d app such as blender to create the LOD models. There’s also no good texturing apps yet. I agree it would be cool and hopefully those missing pieces will be available at some point in the future (looking at you Adobe)

    PBR reflections

    in Building and Texturing Forum

    Posted

    I've been playing with the PBR project viewer. I can get the environment to reflect but not objects or avis. I'm clearing being dense about something but are object reflections impossible or am I not enabling something? I have enabled screen space reflections in preferences.

    Imposters!

    in Mesh

    Posted

    On 1/5/2023 at 8:03 PM, ChinRey said:

    Some excellent answers already but to add a little bit, sometimes it's possible to use the same texture for the main model as for the impostor. I've posted two examples of it here earlier:

    This trick doesn't work very often but it's very useful when it does.

     

    Yes, LL didn't think things through when they decided that fixed, object radius dependent swap distances were a good idea. It's good for prims but for meshes it really only works for mid sized (say 1-2 m object radius) objects. Small objects swap way too early and big ones way too late. Of all the content creation related mistakes LL has ever done, I think this is one of the top three... I mean four... no five.

    But we can trick the viewer into thinking an object is bigger than it is. Look at this:

    image.png.76a15613c15ad82d6bf4f2e605cdbc28.png

    That little dot at the top is a loose vertice. What it does, is double the nominal height of the vase, significantly increasing the swap distances. You have to sort the vertices so the loose one is number 1 on the list to prevent it from being culled by the uploader but that's easy to do in Blender. Select the loose vertice only and:

    image.png.9b769f48bdb09be7c60539fa96b43fe9.png

    You can achieve the same by substituting a degenerate or 100% transparent tri for the loose vertice but I prefer this method. It's cooler, more elgant and it does save one tri and two vertices from the model.

    Thank you very much for this, it solved my issue! I’d been pondering trying to fool the system into treating it as a larger object but my ideas were a lot more complex than a single vertex.

    On 1/5/2023 at 6:45 PM, animats said:

    At present, we can't really do sprite impostors in SL. I have a demo which fakes it.

    slscreenshot_348.thumb.png.c41ea8e4bef533e3c59e4251e460793d.png

    Impostor demo. One stone lion is a model with 20,000 faces. The other is a sprite impostor with 2 faces. Which is which? Visit Vallone/123/11/36 and see.

    This is a proof of concept. The impostor object senses the nearest avatar, turns the impostor plane to face the avatar, and selects one of 8 images from a texture atlas to display. This approach works for only one avatar at a time. If you go to look at it, walk around rather than camming; it can't tell where the camera is, but can tell where the avatar is. The size of the fountain pool discourages people from getting too close to the impostor.

    The images were made with a test fixture I built. I have a stage with a turntable, a green background, and a red frame. There's a chair fixed some distance from the stage. You link the object to the turntable, sit in the chair, and click on the stage to start. The turntable rotates through eight positions, and beeps at each stop, to tell the user to push the "take picture" button. Then the 8 pictures go into a Python program which trims them to the size of the red frame and makes the green background transparent. That produces the impostor images. Those are automatically trimmed to fit the outline of the object and assembled into one image with 8 frames. The appropriate frame is selected by changing the image UV offset from LSL.

    It's a cool demo, but not a useful approach. It does let you see how far away you have to be to maintain the impostor illusion.

    The viewers do this now for avatars. Avatar impostors are generated in the viewer, which means it has to drag in all the avatar's textures and objects to generate the impostor. So it doesn't help with initial appearance time at all. You're still stuck in pink cloud mode.

    Good impostors would take more machinery. You'd like to be able to impostor big objects, such as buildings, with all their contents. Then you could look at large cityscapes. But SL doesn't have a way to talk about groups of objects in that way.

    I'm not sure this is a win with a modern GPU. Triangles just aren't that expensive any more. As the LL viewers go to retained mode, and maybe even to Vulkan, it becomes less important to keep the triangle count down. I've shown that with my experimental viewer, where I have all mesh at full resolution but reduce texture resolution based on screen area covered. Beq Janus points out that most of the data volume sent to the viewer is textures, not meshes.

    The real win is showing the world beyond draw distance. I'm looking into impostoring entire regions for my experimental viewer. Take pictures of each region from 4 or 8 directions, and from above. These would be stored on a server, like the map tiles. The viewer would assemble these into a sim surround out beyond your draw distance. You'd be able to see distant shores when sailing, and distant airports when flying. Like my old slippy map of SL.

    Above Second Life. Those are the regular Second Life map tiles, viewed with a slippy map program. When you're flying, distant regions should look at least that good.

    (If BUG-226530 from 2019 is ever fixed, I'll make that slippy map freely available again.)

    SL is such a good big world, yet it's really hard to see it big. Few people have ever seen the Snowlands or Mt. Campion from a distance.

     

    That’s a really cool demo, it’s a shame something like this can’t work for more than one person.

    On 1/5/2023 at 4:54 PM, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

    As Wulfie points out Second Life doesn't have support for imposters, so you basically have to cheat and make them manually by creating flat planes and generating 32-bit textures to apply to them (either by baking the information from the high LOD model or simply rendering low resolution images from different angles).  You'll probably need at least 2 or 3 intersecting planes and, depending on the item in question and what it's going to be used for, you may want to make the planes double sided by duplicating them and flipping the faces/normals.

    It's helpful to set up a separate material for the imposters so that you can adjust the properties separately from the other LOD models.  Bear in mind that these imposters are only ever seen from a distance so you really don't need a lot of pixels for the textures.  If the texture for your high LOD model already has an alpha channel then, with a little creative arrangement of the UV mapping, you can probably sneak the imposter textures into some of the wasted space.  It's a good idea to set your alpha settings to Alpha Masking for the faces on your imposter models (also if you decide to add an alpha channel to your main texture just so you can incorporate your imposter textures on the same image and the textures for the higher LOD models don't use/require transparency then change the alpha settings for those faces to None to avoid any alpha swapping issues).

     

    On 1/5/2023 at 4:10 PM, Wulfie Reanimator said:

    Maybe @animats can give some input here, but the short answer is that currently we can't make 2D sprite/image impostors for mesh LODs.

    If you could share a screenshot of what your object looks like, and an idea of how small of a scale we're talking, maybe we can give more advice.

    Thank you both for the tips. I was hoping I had just missed something with sprite imposters but at least I know not to bother with that approach now.

    I appreciate all the information very much, thank you everyone.

    Imposters!

    in Mesh

    Posted

    Does anyone have any information on making imposter objects for the lowest LOD? For simple objects like pictures in frames the process is simple (if time consuming to do manually) but I’m struggling with more complex shapes. 
     

    I don’t know if I’m just being dense but I can’t find any guides or videos on making imposters apart from links to addons that don’t seem compatible with SL like instant imposters. I use Blender but anything would be helpful at this point.

    For small complex objects the lowest LOD kicks in so quickly that I’m really struggling to make something acceptable.

    • Like 1

    Uploader-generated LODs are the Devil's vomit

    in Mesh

    Posted

    1 hour ago, OptimoMaximo said:

    If you're learning only through YouTube, you're going slower than you could. My evergreen suggestion is to invest on a manual, best if physical print (well that's my taste 😁) , to read, study and try the featured classes. Doesn't matter if things in those classes aren't SL related or relatable, do them anyway. Build your acquaintance and confidence with your software! I guarantee you'll make a quality jump.

    Do you have any recommendations? 

    Uploader-generated LODs are the Devil's vomit

    in Mesh

    Posted

    22 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

    The problem is the sheer amount of relevant information available given all the various commonly used workflows and tools.

    Some folks spend 3 or 4 years at university just to gain a solid foundation upon which to build their knowledge and skills and will continue learning and developing those skills throughout their professional career since the software and techniques used in the content creation process are continually evolving at a fairly rapid pace.  Sure the vast majority of SL creators aren't interested in creating content professionally but that doesn't make learning to do it properly any easier in the same way that wanting to be a brain surgeon "just for fun" doesn't makes brain surgery any less complicated (thankfully the stakes in content creation aren't as high, you may burn out a few GPUs but you probably aren't going to kill anyone).

    I would like to see LL provide more resources for creators but I think it would be more impactful if creators were encouraged to expand the scope of what they learn beyond how to make stuff for SL.  All the necessary relevant information is already available online but only a small portion of it is covered in tutorials that focus purely on creating content for Second Life, so a lot of creators end up just learning the bare basics of 3D modelling along with a few SL specific skills like exporting and uploading mesh to SL, rigging mesh for specific bodies and how to make a mesh with a land impact of 1 (even when it should be higher 🙄) rather than actually learning all the important do's & don'ts of creating content for platforms like Second Life.

     

    20 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:

    Glad to have given you a track to learn something new and possibly useful in the future! 🤗

    And I understand your feelings when you say that it would be beneficial to have an in depth guide. But believe me, a guide like that would be an Egyptian pyramid stone block sized book. Unfortunately, 3D modeling and all the related matters (rigging, animation, etc) currently are university courses matters: require study, practice (lots and lots), trials and errors, features digging... And more.

    The very moment that LL introduced Mesh content into the platform, they made content creation require a (at least semi-) professional grade skill set.

    Thank you for the replies. I do see what you mean and I suppose fully in depth guides would be unrealistic. It would just be lovely to have some tutorials from linden going through their workflow for some different items using different tricks and techniques. I’m a few years into learning blender via the university of youtube, a month into substance painter (adobe make some lovely tutorials for beginners) and a sporadic year or so learning how to get that stuff into SL. I’ve made a couple of reasonable things recently and lots of terrible ones before that but I’m getting there slowly. 
     

    • Like 2

    Uploader-generated LODs are the Devil's vomit

    in Mesh

    Posted

    3 hours ago, OptimoMaximo said:

    That's what a vertex normal transfer is for...

    Stuff like this is why we need some kind of in depth guide. As someone new to second life creation I had never heard of this before. Im desperately trying to learn and make efficient models but there’s so many techniques, tips and tricks spread across dozens of threads and websites that it’s really hard to find them. 

    So thank you for this, I’ve done some reading on vertex normals and the data transfer modifier in blender thanks to your comment and I will be doing some experimenting later.

    • Like 1

    I think we should, collectively, be somewhat embarassed.

    in Second Life Viewer

    Posted

    2 hours ago, Jackson Redstar said:

    Id tend to agree with the OP, you don't get alot for your upgrade money in SL. But then again, it is what it is. Just the way SL is

    What might be helpful I think, with SL as it is right now, is if anybody that really understands what is going on under the hood could make a list (if any) tweaks in debug settings that might be useful for people with the latest processors, graphic cards, etc. While it is nice to have access to those settings, for most people it is like having access to the settings of a modern car computer and told to 'make it perform better". Or, since a majority of SL users are MS users, if there are any tweaks in Win 11 that might help SL perform better on modern hardware.

    SL is still pretty  amazing considering is was written at a time when most were still on dial up and those that did have broad band were like 1 - 2 mbs and maybe  had a 'high end' 256mb graphics card and 2 gigs of ram

    It is pretty amazing, I just worry about the future if things don’t change. To lose SL would be terribly sad 

    MacOS viewer Issues

    in General Second Life Tech Discussion

    Posted · Edited by anitabush

    On 12/10/2021 at 8:57 PM, Drakeo said:

    Looking at SL mac downloads . Seems No reason for the dev team to do anything.  There are 10 times more Linux downloads  for  Firestorm and Kokua then any of the SL mac downloads  SL should drop mac it is a loser with M1 Mac users should just leave  like  SL asked all the linux users.  So please close this  thread. Because  macosx and the M1 cpu’s really do not play well.  So why. Even have this thread about macosx.

     If you aren’t interested in a thread about macs, don’t read it.

    • Like 4
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