linkin Slate

If im reading things right a counter clockwise mesh is the faces away from veiwer isnt that basicly turned inside out ? your just flipping normals ?

Winding describes the vertex order of a polygon. Polygons with clock-wise winding face towards the viewer and are not back-facing. Polygons with counter-clockwise winding face away from the viewer and are back-facing. All the faces in a mesh must have the same winding order. One face cannot "backface" from the other faces. IM STILL CONFUSED

i found this page it might be helpfull im still reading to figure it out my self . http://download.autodesk.com/us/maya/2011help/index.html?url=./files/Editing_UVs_Display_UV_winding_order.htm,topicNumber=d0e269035

Even though i hadnt tested it and just asked here i basicly went with the idea it wasnt going to work with mesh av's or attachments, so as allways the lindens, seem to cause confusion, Allmost like for example coming out with a feature that will only work on veiwer 1.25. and not for v2 veiwer back tracking kinda, i guess in my eyes mesh , was to allow devolopment in mesh clothes and av's, leading away from the club foot, bad uv av we use in sl today, Unless this is a sign there planning them selfs to devolop a avatar 2 for sl, i know they talked about it,

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I havent been able to try uploading a rigged mesh av lately, been working on other things but wondering will the body phyisics work with mesh av's ?

To me all this veiwer talk drives me nutts, we dont see any 3d party veiwers on mesh beta grid and when it hits the main grid, i would hope, the mesh veiwer is defult and only one allowed.unless the 3d party veiwer is mesh compliant, havent we give every one time for this to get ready, its time to move forward. a new chapter in sl,comply or die. i dont have anything aginst 3d party veiwers , but i belive if they should hold all features as the defult sl veiwer to be able to link to sl, i find it insane that there is any idea of lindens not forceing all veiwers compliant for mesh on release day of mesh, and i personaly if this goes as you all seem to think, that there will be nonmesh veiwers, that those of us that own our own sims be able to set sims to not let non mesh veiwer users to enter. its bad enuff to deal with all that cant use or see shared media and now to have to deal with non mesh veiwers, i run a business center and rent out office spaces and meeting rooms so i am dependent on people to come and rent yes, but i can live with out there money ,that cant move forward.

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/3d-creation/blender-meshes-trail/meshes-overview/ on that page is a blender av file sl mesh and armature

If you create in zbrush you need to export as object file then import to Blender, If i was you i would start off with, just importing a rigged av to sl .Blener is free so use that first to get used to how this works. there is a blender file. sl mash av thats all ready rigged. follow the vidoes provided and just import that first. rigging and importing is a mass of learning in its self you can with in a few clicks rigs and export a mesh to sl yes, but then there is allso weight painting bone ajustments, the fine tuneing and full understanding of it all will take a while.

I think some of the qestions that you should ask is, or ask your self is ,even after figureing out a work flow and programs to use, is, what road you plan to go down in maken av's of clothes, there is 2 options , both with problems, 1 is useing the old mesh av that millions use right now, its limited and maken clothes that will fit the masses has still not yet been worked out yet, sure you will have a larger market to sell to, but your limited with the uv layout and club feet, then option 2 create your own av line, but then your forced to create a unless suplly of clothes to go with it, this has plus side though your lesslikely to then have others stealing your work and selling as its harder to blantly do this or have asscess to all your files to do it, if your succuessfull then you could sell your files to others wishing to create clothes for your line of av's also, Draw back, if the lindens create a new updated mesh av then your competing again agisnt every one, and that would be universal, but still new and a long while for the mass product lines we see today with older mesh av, my personal option is the lindens will let us develop the next av for sl, there is all ready many base female and male av meshes for free and free use of out there now with perfected topoligy, its a waste to start from scratch. other thoughts also would be if you create a custom line would one just merge cloths with body and rig as ahole and chage the hole av as a outfit verses the av and seport clothes and each part rigged and worn. so not only are alot of us figureing out how to use our programs and create the mesh,we also have to decide, how we will market it ,building them in the best ways thats useable,sellable, and that others can build apond your works, with other products, thus createing a new market base.

well you all ready state you have one program that will do all but rigg your cloths and av's mesh, is zbrush since your just starting out on all this ,maybeis best to stick with what you know first, if you dont want to use blender for creation, you can at lest for the rigging , its simple and fast and 90 % of any help from this forum will be from blender users, and for zbrush you can do start to finish in there, i have had great luck extracting clothes form mesh its fast and simple. and with spot light you can paint directly to mesh , and up to a billion polygons to paint on if your computer handles it, in my personal; option zbrush is best set up for av and cloths creation or organic type meshes , blender will cover more area's of design more hard surfaces and more tools for building type meshes or vehicals, This is a hole new playing feild, and right now is like building a house on sifting sands, hard to know what really works,till the lindens lay down the final costs, that will help in what type of real detail we can work with.

If your importing them correctly you should have a mesh folder in there is more a text file of your mesh i belive, and then in your object folder is a mesh you can drag drop directly to ground, or wear, not understanding about the rest your trying to explain about, and as for the textures you can set up to 8 textures to a mesh object and up to 1024 in size, for example a avatar mesh you can set seport textures for head arms hand feet legs and middle all being up to 1024, this seems to work best as a full av mesh with 1 texture is hard to get alot of detail on, blender and zbrush you can, set for multiply textures, im sure most 3d programs you can , it all depends on how much detail you want 1024 is over kill for alot of things,

Reading your blog, you was saying about maybe doing your out fit in parts and do all the detailing on single meshs, only problem i have seen with that is its hard to pull alot of detail out of the topology with out haven problems, and looseing detail. you could try witch i been playing around with is merge your sub tools in to one mesh, you can still have textures for each area, like your jaket 3 textures one for short and one for pants, then in sl it be one mesh attached rigged but then its just a drop of texture to change pants color and rigging would be no more work that the body mesh its self.

Sorry for double post explore 9 doesnt seem to let my post show, nice work and great to see others useing zbrush, did you create the clothes by extract from av mesh ? and did you do all the textureing in zbrush also ?

One semi work around would be when createing a mesh av, is to have head hands and feet as seport rigged attachments from body, reasons for example hands you could have a few sets worn at different times like open hand or closed the head with smile or no smile feet as well for woman for example for high heals or flate, you would have to manuly detach and attch to change but is one option and the concept opens doors for many products that could be made to go along with a certain line of av .

Thats interesting , i didnt kow one could use seport textures, for seportated poly groups, im guessing your useing blender, myslef useing zbrush, and i can create poly groups or uv,islands, thus letting you apply different textures to each ploy group, but each texture has the same uv layout, what your saying is each poly group you have for your full body mesh has its own uv layout and is a seprot texture ?

Wondering how every one else is coming along with there mesh av, i myself have been playing around with full body mesh av's, and it seems to me a full body mesh , how ever you lay out uv's a 1024 x 1024 texture doesnt give enuff detail to cover a full body mesh, i know many are useing the sl defult av to do your pratices on, others have used other full body base meshs either self made of found bases to start with, . id like to hear from others as there option on this as best pratices, on how best to set up your av mesh, full body or in parts.

this all reminds me of the old days back in sl beta, there was a time we payed a fee for every prim we rezed,it just shows the first systems they the lindens come up with arnt allways the best but over time they work out things,,back when we had the pay for prims fee , some person created the flyng fish that produces offsprings, it would fly up to you was like a pet people would take a copy then rez it it would lfy around you then take off soon it would multiply on your land and you sit there and watch your bank account drain in short order , what ever the system they come up with for mesh, wont stop people maken what they want and or people buying anythign they like, yes they can slow the process and people will work at maken things low prim, this will come over time. this is my option but i feel the mesh beta grid has basicly at its end of its usefullness , most have worked out there work flow systems , have a idea of how to do things, and not many really building things there cuse it seems like a waste of time, i think people want to test thing out in the main grid in real conditions,and let the lindens fine tune things from there.

on mesh hq 2 sim what i did is have rows of a mesh object each lod level is a different shape, so when you walk past them depending on distance you can see when they change , also i did each rows in different sizes so you can walk around them getting a idea of different sizes mixed . shpere is highest sqaure med cylender low cone lowest. what i find with all this is most times unless your standing right on top of a object high lod hardly shows, and low to lowest are more common. i might be wroung here but this seems like its defeating the perpose of a step down lod system, id think the idea here is to allow you to produce at veiwing range a high quality mesh and at less needed veiws less detail is needed thus the step down lowers over all cost as to full mesh at all ranges of veiw, but what im seeing is with current set up,is the main high end of our mesh is lost. one qestion if any one else might be interested in this ,is, can we have control ,some slider, where we can set when lods change. like a building there big enuff your going to up close see high and med lods and probally be in next sim before lowest shows but most content will be in the smaller size, it be nice to on smaller object set the change later or greater distaints

yes this shape changeing lods object works great, like for my shoes im maken i basicly wear this object size same as my shoe size i wish to make and can see at what distance the changes happen, in normal veiw you cant see below your knees basic camera view with shoe size object its all ready on 3rd lods once you zoomout a bit to see feet so for your own veiwing pleasure or your own shoes for example here your all ready on end of quality of the object.

ok seems your both right changeing the size also changes the distance of change. so basicly on how you want your object to look and how you set up your lods, a person needs to think about how your objec t will be viewed in what type of settigns they will be viewed in , like if you make shoes , due to there size you probally have to zoom like your face is on floor to see high lods amd normal standing in group chating with people your view of others shoes would probally be3rd lod , the low lod, maybe med but only when standing close. seems every time i get close to thinking i can perfect some mesh projects, i learn more like this lods, stuff and it throws you for a loop.

i see you both posted as i was posting last statments ty your info heps

well i did what is best and tested out to find my answer , so maybe this will also help others in some ways . ok here is what i did to test out where and when these switchs happen , i took a shpere, as high lod, then a sqaure and med lod cyclender for low and cone for lowest lod reduced the ploys also and i changed shape. so basicly this is what i found out , with shpere out and basicly walked up to it with normal camera veiw behind me, my chest up to it, its shape is spuare, meaning just normal veiw up tight its on second lod . you have to zoom in to even see high lod. this seems way to tight , so basicly this tells me every day life in secondlife unless you zoom in at the lest of 1 click of the scroll wheel, you will never see high lod. this seems like a big waste to me, so ok normal veiw is 2nd lod zoom in some to see high , and 16meters about away then low lod kicks in then another 16 meter for lowest , i tryed this with different draw settigns basicly sameevery time. to me this seems not right, say i walk in a room and a couch is in front of me, most times somehting you plan to sit on is at lest as far in front of you as your camera sits behind you, so that puts you at lest 5 meter away from where you would even be able to see high lod, so basicly with this info , how i would set up my lods is med lod the second lod, id either have same as high lod or most 10% then bump the last to down faster. seems to me any mesh you will like in a building with rooms will mostly only see the med and low lods and most times out side you will be seeing lowest since most things will be at lest 32 meters away . anyways if any disagree with meor im looking at this wroung feel free to tell me one thing was cool to find out was, how you can add different objects for loads, might be cool for holloween, maken objects when people get close it pops out at them . ok time to end my endless babel.

Ok just kinda getting in to the lods thing and seems easy enuff and flexable. some say 1/4 or 50 % drop is good but then also you can have all the same but will cost you so seems we have flexableness here , lods is a tool, sooooooo, my qestion is to use this the bast way does any one know what the drop off distances are? like at what distance does it drop to meds then at what distance to low and them lowest. to me this would be helpfull since the first 2 i would think are most important, highest for closeups , but seems you hardly zoom out much and you switch to med lod, this first step down seems tight, i would think first 2 or first drop one could do like 10% DROP AND SAVE MORE DETAIL THEN LAST 2 DROP MORE IN THE 50 %. if your looking from across 2 sims well lowset can be just a outline . to me this would help a person to get lower ploy count over all.

ya i been just doing the auto, but with most of my tests i been most on the shape and looks , this time i droped the poly count down to get lower prim costs seems that effects the lods lower you go bigger the changes, guess ill have to dig in to maken my own , just off heand if you have time to answer its a 25 % drop right for each lod ?