HD Pomeray

This is not a new SL avatar. They use the same old avi. These are just fitted mesh bodies that are worn over an alpha. No different than the ones offered in the Market Place.

If you are using an ATI Graphics card you need to install the 12.1 or older drivers .... 12.2 through 12.4 will crash you if you try to edit Mesh. There is also a work around .... in the Build menu... you can go to options and turn off "Show selection Outlines".... that should stop the crashing on edit.

If you have no mod scripts in your object it will show as no mod in your inventory, and keep you from being able to change properties while in there, but you should be able to mod the object once you drag it into world.

While we are on material zones... is there a way to predetermine what zone will end up being face number 0, face number 1, face number 2, and so on?

Karl, That is one incredible looking tank. I would be interested in knowing more about its scripted functions such as the treads, the turret, does it fire, do avis ride inside it and control it. It would also be interesting to know what it's display weights is. As far as people not being able to see mesh on your sim, you may want to suggest that they try adjusting the MeshMaxConcurrentRequests in the debug settings. Default is 32... I set mine up to 100. Go to the advanced menu ----> Show Debug settings ----> MeshMaxConcurrentRequests ---- Set to 100

What viewer are you using when you are uploading? I found that the LL 3.3 works best and have had some crash issues during uploads with some of the others.

That's kool Bother... and I do appreciate what you said. It's just that I see it as constructive criticism and I appreciate what anyone has to say. When I posted my pics and numbers in this forum, I hung my ass out there fully knowing there would be some criticism, and I accept that. As a designer in RL I know you have to put some skin into the game or you'll never advance. This thread was awesome and I learned a few things that will be very helpful. I also learned a few things that worked out better than I thought. I didn't even know that the bikes display numbers were as good as they are. Baloo was the one that brought that to light by saying they seemed high. That forced me, Kwakkelde and a few others to look and see what the sculpt bikes were coming in at. Surprise !!! Mesh wins !! LOL Baloo has a lot of experience in the 3D gaming industry and he is totally correct in his thoughts of reducing mesh as much as possible with the use of good textures. It is just that in this particular case, geometry is more important. In another situation... it may not be. It's all Good Toysoldier... BTW ... have you ever thought about writing novels ?? LOL

Well Guys... I think we beat this one to death huh? LOL I want say thanks to all that contributed to this thread. Marianne, StoneDwarf, Kwakkelde, Luc, my good buddy Toysoldier, WolfBaginski, Arton, Dronggle, and of course Baloo. I learned a lot here through this thread. Thanks Guys ! Oh... and last but not least... Thanks to LL for giving us MESH !!! It Rocks !

I bet if HD had uploaded the bike using the autoLoD with looks matching the viewing distance (so no custom LoDs), the display weight would have been insane, but it's not. In fact I'm pretty curious what the numbers would be..HD?...could you try that out? @ Kwakkelde I don't have to try it, I saw what the calculations were coming in at in the uploader before loading in the custom LODs and you are spot on. Parts that I was able to get down to 1 or 2 LI were starting out at insane numbers upwards of 50 LI. It would be interesting to bring the bike back in with no LOD models to see what the display numbers would be. I could try it out in the aditi and see... but there are 31 parts... gonna have to do that another day. I'll let you know.

Absolutely Brother... I hear you loud and clear... and I promise not to go over ... ummmm lets say 12,000??? LOL But .... There is always a BUT.... ya know... Kwakkelde saw bikes out there at 49334 and 70204... No stopping everyone else... I can assure you ... I'll be responsible :-)

@Baloo I can totally understand where you are coming from about the fine details. In RL I'm an architect and I use 3D modeling to render conceptual designs for clients all the time. I would never think of modeling, for instance, window moldings because you would Never see the difference between the geometry and a nicely shaded texture. I fully agree with you. But, what you referred to as a ""ridiculous level" of detail"... "Stuff like relatively fine grooves and flanges and stuff that you'd only notice if you were really close to the object and not at more of the distance it would be generally viewed at." may not be ridiculous to others. As a matter of fact, motorcycles in SL and RL are mostly viewed up close. To custom bike builders, again in SL and RL, it IS the fine details that count. When I modeled this motor, I had a real V-Twin engine sitting here in front of me and yes... I counted the cooling fins... I measured the distance between them and I made this engine as true to life and as accurate as I could because I know there are RL bikers in SL that are going to look at it very closely. I wanted to give them something to look at and discuss. So what you may see as "ridiculous" others may view as an accomplishment. And... the bottom line is still... the bike has a display number that is half of what is out there now. Ridiculous to who?

WolfBaginski, I have to agree with Arton, and not just because this is my build but because of the obvious advantage Mesh has over comparable sculpty bikes. Just look at the numbers, they tell the story. My original post was to report to this forum the numbers I was getting with a mesh bike build that had considerable more detail than the present day sculpty bikes. Also in the original post, the first picture I showed was of the weights it was registering. To be honest, it was not until the question of the display weights came up did I think to check them against the sculpty bikes. Again... look at the comparison pictures... we can all see the numbers. I also went out and checked the numbers on many other sculpty bikes and found that all of them that were in the 30 prim range were close to... if not over 20,000 display weight. The mesh is coming in at 11,000. This isn't a discussion of my bike as much as it is of Mesh bikes in general. After all... I did the first comparison to one of my own sculpty bikes, one of my best selling bikes too I may add... LOL, and willingly posted my numbers up on the forum so we could all see a good comparison. As far as your comments on the moving parts and the load overall, I honestly can not tell you if it is better to rotate the mesh wheels or to rotate the textures. I can tell you however that on this mesh bike, along with probably 90% of the sculpty bikes out there, we are rotating the wheels and not the textures. Maybe someone reading this forum can let us know which is the better way to do it. My old bikes rotated the textures and from riding both, I think rotating the mesh wheels is better because I used to notice at times the texture rotations lag, whereas this bikes wheels move smooth and steady. I can understand that if you were to be out looking for a bike to ride "you" may wish to find one that is very minimal for whatever reasons you may have, and of course that is your prerogative. But when I was describing the moving parts of this bike, it was in a discussion about how best to combine parts during the upload. I was not saying this bike has more or less moving parts than other bikes out there. To be honest, it is probably in the average range for moving parts and features of today's bikes on the market. I think if you look around you would be hard presses to find the minimalist bike you alluded to in your post. Having said that, with the clear advantage mesh has over sculpty vehicles, you are correct... I could widdle this down to a bunch of flat parts and load it back up with mant textures to fake the eye, but would we be gaining anything ? Maybe, I'm not sure. I am however sure that this mesh bike has 5 times the detail of the sculpty bikes (whether you like detail or not), it has less textures due to the fact that it does not need them, and even with all the detail, it's display weight is half of the comparable sculpty bikes. "Here's your sign" So I guess time will tell what the market really wants. For now I think we have taken a really good look at how sculpty vehicles and mesh vehicles stack up side by side. I also think that my first mesh bike came out looking pretty darn good and that the numbers make good sense to continue refining how we use mesh. As we all know, there are some wickedly talented people in SL. You can bet that there are some amazing things coming from our content creators just around the corner and from where I'm standing, mesh will be a big part of that.

Well... I hope more people will chime in on the Display weight question because if that really does need to get to 1000 to be what we need to shoot for... we are back to Mesh being unusable for anything other than a table or a chair. This is exactly where I was hoping this thread would go so we can all have a clear understanding of what is acceptable and what is not. Here is what I do know. The lowest LOD's are already reduced to almost nothing. Like 8 sides and 10 verts in most cases. I also know that I am on an older machine and I'm not seeing a jump in lag or a drop in frame rates when it is rezed. As a matter of fact the mesh bike rezes twice as fast as the old sculptir/ prim bikes. And most importantly, if you compare this to a bike that is built from standard prims and sculpties, with even way less detail, you will see that the new mesh bike way out performs the old way of doing things. There are literally thousands of the sculpt/prim bikes all over the grid and if the stats shown in the picture below are typical, which I believe they are, then how could you say we need to get to 1000 on the display. The way I see it... We are heading in the right direction. no ? EDIT: I just took a look at several other sculpt/prim bikes built by other builders, and they are all coming in at around 20,000 Display Weight as compared to the mesh bike hear at 11,381. Again, I think this is a move in the right direction and this would explain why the Mesh bike rezes twice as fast as the sculpty bikes. Sculptie / Prim Bike Stats 100% Mesh Stats

Hey Toysoldier, I'm sorry, I didn't meant to lead you in the wrong direction. When we were talking about modeling without concern to poly count and I said I love working with millions of poly's in ZBrush I meant I LOVE working in ZBrush, but not that I built this maodel in it. I do my poly modeling in Carrara Pro 7. I did however do a lot of my sculpty work in ZBrush. The xRAZxORx body I have in my shop was all done in ZB, but for this new build it is all traditional poliginal modeling like you would do in Carrara or Blender, or 3DS Max.

Hey Toysoldier !! Good hearing from you as well Brother, and thanks for the words of encouragement. I hear what you are saying. I absolutely love going into ZBrush and sculpting with a few million polygons or using nice smooth fillets on my hard edge models in Carrara. But when it comes to building for game content we do have to count every polygon. So my way of looking at this is this. Instead of feeling like I'm being limited, I try to challenge myself to create the detail I crave with as few polys as possible. And if that count gets a bit high, at least I know I did everything I could to make it as low as I could without giving away my creative rights. Take a look at the jugs and heads on my engine. I refused to block that out and use textures to fake the look, or to use less cooling fins to reduce the poly's. I even counted the cooling fins on the engine sitting here on my work bench and then modeled this one after it. I wanted it to be as visually accurate to the real thing as I could get it. So... that was the challenge I put on myself. Build an accurate representation without giving in to the limits, but to still make it as light as possible. It came out pretty light considering. So Brother... although I feel your pain, if we use it to motivate our creations, it can work out. I'm sure as we all build more and more we will get better and better. I'm pretty sure there are some out there working on things right now that are going to blow our minds with even less polys, and I can't wait to see them. It's good seeing that you're here and doing well Toysoldier...

I think the bottom line is that you need to look at each build and determine how best to combine or not combine based on the three weights SL looks at, how the LOD's will be effected, and how it will be used/scripted. Pre planning and efficient poly use are both key to good light weight builds. For instance, your example of uploading 80 cubes. If you combine them your server weight will be 1. One Prim. but your Download weight will be whatever it the LL formulas calculate it to be. Thus, your LI will be based on the higher of the two. If you were to upload them all as separate objects, your Server weight would then be 80 and the LI would also be 80, which we know is much higher than the 80 cubes combined download weight. BTW... Nice architectural Build.... The grid is going to look so different in a year from now with the new mesh builds. These are exciting times in SL.

Kwakkelde Kwak: Combining objects will result in bigger objects ofcourse and that has an impact on download weight. For the bike that means the LI would probably rise. To balance that out however, LOD behaviour will be better, since the switch is based on size aswell. Another benefit you'll always have when combining objects is the LOD switch is probably less visible, since there are less objects that switch. (ideally you don't see switches at all, but that's very hard to accomplish often) This is some really good and helpful information. I didn't realize LOD was also based on size. I fought long and hard during this bike build with LOD switching, especially with the smaller parts. I actually hade to hand build my lower LOD's to overcome this. This is another good lesson in planning your uploads. Thanks Kwakkelde... Good post!

Hey Stone, I don't take any constructive criticism in a negative way. Feedback, good or bad, is why I posted here. To share and learn for the good of all of us content creators. Thank you for your insightful comments and suggestions. Now, on to your comments, I never exceed 256 x 256 on my textures so we are on the same page there. I even try to go much smaller when I can without getting blurry looking parts. This was my first mesh build and my objective was to get the LI as close to the existing bikes out there with as much modeled detail as I could get. In those regards you are correct, I relied much more on modeling details than creating the impression of detail with well placed textures. But, the detail when inspecting this close up is far more realistic this way and this is what mesh, in my mind, affords us to do, within reason. Being that yesterdays vehicles are limited to 31 prims, 49 is a bit high but not horrible. I agree we can do better and should strive to do so. The idea of bringing this in as one mesh has some merit and I totally agree it can be done that way, with of course the exception of the wheels that need to spin independently, but let me explain a little about some of my thoughts with how to separate and which parts need to be separate. I know I stated above that I didn't want to discuss marketing but your comments lead me right into some of the reasons I had to model this as I did. In today's vehicle market customers expect certain things when they buy a bike. These are mechanical objects and should be scripted to work as such. The wheels need to be separate so they can spin. The primary side of the bike has an open belt drive which is VERY popular in both RL bikes and SL. There are three separate parts there that need to move separately in order for that to work. The drive belt on the final drive also needs to work independently. When the bike is parked the kick stand needs to be able to rotate into position. The front forks need to rotate so the front end can either turn as the bike leans over onto its stand or we can now even have it turn it during riding with the avatar changing poses while turning. There is also a need to offer the customer customizing options and far as changing the graphics, colors and shine depth to many of the parts separate from one another. As far as that goes, the script memory requirements to store information 128 textures per part would far outweigh the cost of uploading parts separately. so as you can see, a lot of this is customer driven. There are also other considerations beyond scripting that influence how to separate our uploads. For instance, you mentioned the engine. This engine is one model using separate material faces for all 8 available. The decision on how to break it up also has to do with future use of the model. I kept the engine as a whole but made the air cleaner separate so it could be changes from model to model while using the same engine base. The trany is separate so it can be used for both right and left hand drive models with either open or closed primary drives. Other items such as handel bars, seats, gas tanks, fenders... al interchangable with future bikes and customer mod requests. Hopefully this helps you understand some of the decisions that go into it a little better. But, having said that... I do agree with you that there is much room for improvement and I do fully agree with what you said about getting the LI lower. We should all strive for that.

Thanks Marianne, I appreciate that. I would like to try and keep this thread about mesh and the use of mesh in the creation of vehicles. And their impact on the grid. I was a bit worried about posting this here because I'm not trying to use this as a marketing tool. I just want to show those who follow this forum that mesh is a very useful tool in vehicle creation and to get some feedback on those topics. Also, if there are those out there that have questions about my work flow in building and uploading this into SL, I am more than happy to give back to this forum with what I have learned in the process. As far as a ladies sized bike, feel free to IM me in world. I would love to help you out there.

I have been watching this forum for months now and have learned an incredible amount from all of the really knowledgeable regulars on here. I wanted to say thank you and share with you what I have been able to create using mesh. The pictures below are of my 100% mesh model and I am happy to report back to this forum that not only can you get stunning details with mesh, but the performance of all mesh vehicles, so far seems to be another advantage to mesh building. When I walk into my shop which has mostly sculptie bikes in it, this new mesh model rezes much faster. When I'm out riding it, there seems to be less lag and better overall performance than the old bikes. In the first picture below are the server stats. Not too bad - LI of 49

Have you looked at the ZBrush plugin called GoZ ? http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?125810-GoZ-Update-1-with-Photoshop-Support It has 3Ds Max support.

When uploading a Mesh, choosing to let the uploader generate lower LOD's, there is an option to use "Error Threshold". Can someone tell me the technical description of this option or direct me to this information? Thanks...