Gaia Clary

Half correct. Yes, you can create 4 different shapes for each LOD (highest, medium, low, lowest) and you will have to unwrap them all individually. But ... The UV-layout for the Highest_LOD will be reused for all other LOD shapes. So when you want to keep your texturing intact all your unwraps must be "similar", i.e. must use the same UV-layout. Here are some details: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/kettle-quest/

It could be possible that your avi can simply not get up on the floor of the cube... In the secnd part of the video the cube is partially dumped under ground so the avi justwalks on ground level... Maybe check if the avi can pass the smaller cube when you move the cube down a bit further, or when you add a ramp to get up on the floor ?

I have been asked about verifying for mesh uploads yesterday after i upgraded to the newest viewer from http://automated-builds-secondlife-com.s3.amazonaws.com/hg/repo/mesh-development/latest.html So i followed the link, verified and then i could upload meshes. It took me 2 minutes to get there and i learned a bit about copyright ;-)

maybe you need to get verified for mesh upload ? That should be mentioned in the very first screen of the importer...

Some weeks ago there was a response from one of the Lindens, who said that they had "currently no plans to remove the mesh beta regions". I am not sure if Mesh City will remain available for us to place permanent content there. However it might be a nice incentive for the Beta testers to get a "Mesh City region" on the Main grid. Well, i doubt that this will happen...But who knows ;-)

Hey. I just finished my sword escapade. It is not a master piece, but maybe it is a usefull example: From left to right: Optimized Mesh (3PE) First mesh version with more detailed Guard (4PE, see closeup below) Sculpty Version (4PE) Here are some closeups of the objects: I must admit that i did not create a baked texture for the sculpty guard. Originaly i used a simple brushed metal texture as you see on the first image above (sculpty on the right side) It could look better. maybe i will fix that later. I have added a separate material for the edges so i did not need to bake the dark edges into the guard texture. The guard texture itself is tiled and uses the symmetry of the guard to save texture space. Here i have modelled the edges as a separate mesh to see if i can gain anything by modelling. I do not think, that it was worth the effort. The texture for the Sculpty has a different mapping. This was unintentional. Note that for the mesh i used a completely different texturing approach: the side of the coin got its own tileable texture and the flat side of the coin is textured by a planar image. For the Sculpty i baked the entire texture into one image. Now the conclusion for me is: While for the sculpty i had to do a lot of experimenting until the model quality came out as wanted, the quality of the mesh model was ok for me from the beginning. I had a lot of trouble to create the LOD meshes for the mesh version, while LOD of the sculpty came out good right from the beginning. The most challenging part on the mesh side was to keep the textures compatible, because i needed to do some radical reductions on the lower LODS which forced me to unwrap each LOD separately and then match the maps of all 4 LOD versions. That was a lot of work. On the positive side for mesh the LOD behaves much nicer. While texturing was a charm for mesh, i had some trouble to get it good for the sculpty. The most challenging part was the impression on the blade. I needed to tweek the mesh to the extreme to get enough tecture space on that part of the object.

How exactly do you unwrap ? The pinning is only available for the default: Unwrap -> Unwrap All other unwrap methods (projection, smart, etc..) do not take care about the pinning... Or maybe you found a bug ?

Vivienne Daguerre wrote: In your UV map window, select all the UVs and press "P" to pin them. Now you can remove vertices and unwrap again. The new UV map will be laid out as before, minus the vertices you removed. What a nice idea! I'd love to add that tip into my LOD tutorial ;-)

When you are on blender 2.4 you can use the poly reducer scripts. Both reducer scipts (available in edit mode under Mesh -> Scripts -> ...) preserve the UV-map (more or less). BTW: The decimate modifier also "forgets" the UV map in Blender 2.5

I like your Tog ;-) Loki Eliot wrote: Only issue i have, and have no clue about fixing is the texture i made disappears when the Tog degrades to a lower LOD layer. Anyone care to enlighten me to why that is? Maybe you have unintentionally used 2 different materials for your lod meshes ? Ensure that the texture faces in the different LODS match one to one to each other...

if LL would supply an upload descriptor (idealy XML based), then we could create an upload set which takes care of instances (avoid duplicate uploads), and either create an LSL file (like we did with sculpted prims in the past) or create an assembly list based on LLSD (as we will support in the future for all prims). See also CTS-634 But i still prefer to see such caretaking of duplicates done by the importer itself.

For Blender: When you add more meshes in edit mode, then you create submeshes within the current object. the number of materials can not exceed 8 for this construction. When you add more meshes in object mode, you actually create more independent objects, each of them can have up to 8 materials. When you export to Collada, you go to object mode, then you select all objects which you want to see in the dae file. And later you import that dae file to SL. Only when you create other LOD files for your work, then you must ensure that the order of the exported objects is exactly the same in all files. Drongle's patch ensures that the order of exporting is dependent of the object name. Previously it was unknown how the export order was determined. Hence i found mixup in the LOD's because every LOD file had different order of objects.

You can either have a bunch of unconnected submeshes in ONE object, or you can have a bunch of individual objects, each having 1 or more unconnected meshes. The LOD mixup happens only when you try to import multiple OBJECTS. That means, once you have uploaded your stuff, then you see that it is indeed a linkset and you can separate the parts in the SL editor and relink them as you like. The mixup does NOT happen when you upload one OBJECT with many submeshes. In that case you can not break the object into parts within the SL viewer.

That happened to me too with LOD0. I solved it by removing the slm file, restarting the viewer and then it worked for me. Also have you ensured that the object names are created such that they will yield the same sort order in all thee files ?

Drongle McMahon wrote: "Blender-2.5 uses no longer a python based Collada exporter" OMG. Why not. That's terrible. And stupid. Can you still use the python one? Or has the Blender document model changed too much? What about the units, hiding identity-revealing paths etc? I guess I will certainly keep clear of 2.5. I suppose you could import the 2.5 output into 2.49 and re-export it? I didn't test the root asssignment. I was not really interested in linksets, just saving upload fees. Your guess is probably right. Since the default seems to be that the last-selected is the first, it should not be too difficult to modify this to leave that one out of the sort. But anyway, you can just unlink the one you want as root, then select the rest follwed by the unlinked one and relink. That would do it, wouldn't it? Why could you not export your four piece thing? Yes, this is the typical workflow nowadays (even for sculpted prims ;-) Create and model in Blender 2.5 save your model in a blend file start blender-2.4 try to read the blend file (works in most cases, but always gives a warning message) export as Collada, or export LSL (for multi part sculpties) If 4.) fails, you always can use File -> Link. And IMHO this is the better way to do because you can not unintentionally break your Blender-2.5 model when you only do a Link from 2.4 I meanwhile started testing. my very first result is: i could upload my 4 part object once but after doing a small modification in one of the LOD meshes and reexport that LOD only to Collada, a secnd upload failed massively and also crashed the viewer again. However i could later upload with success after i removed the slm file. And this points IMHO to yet another bug in the meshimporter. I can not verify that the first object in the upload will become the link target. At the moment it appears to me random. But i have not tested in depth. In general it would be nice to see in the previewer which of the parts will be assigned as root element. I will make a feature request for that ;-) In Which way do you mean your last question ? I could export my 4 part piece as a single mesh object with 4 submeshes. But: I wanted to make a set of swords with varying elements, think of having 4 different blade types, 4 different handles, etc... When i make them as 4 separate objects, i can later combine them as i want. I wanted to compare a sculpty sword made of 4 parts with an equivalent mesh sword. If i had collapsed the 4 sculpty meshes to one mesh mesh ;-) that would have been a very unfair competition, no ? I could easily make this sword with a PE of 2 and sculpties could only compete when i made the sworad out of one sculpty-mesh. Which i did not want to do because of texturing issues and LOD behaviour...

Thank you ;-))) However this will work only for Blender-.2.4 Since Blender-2.5 uses no longer a python based Collada exporter, it will become more complicated to add a patch ;-( One more question: It appears to me that this patch sorts all included objects by name. That may make a difference when it comes to controlling which of the objects takes the part of the linkset root in SL ... I still have to test and upload my 4 parts object. i currently do not know which of the parts will become the root of the linkset. I suspect it will be the first object which appears in the file ?

I now added a bug report ( CTS-694 ) and a feature request ( CTS-695 ) about this issue.

Here is my optimized sword (left), my first attempt from yesterday(middle) and the Sculpted Prim variant (right) The sword length is ~93 centimeters. The closeup is from the optimized mesh sword: And actually i found that i made a mistake in the LOD0 of the mesh-Blade (easy to fix): But actually not realy important: And now i get back from Sword Escapade to Tutorial making ;-)

Just a weird idea ...: double the number of Prims per region (15000 -> 30000) double the PE per regular prim and Sculpty Keep mesh as it is now Then a sculpty would cost 2 PE and things get more comparable without breaking content. :matte-motes-evil-invert:

i am in the middle of making part III of my tutorial series. If you like, you can checkout the first 2 parts of the kettle Quest tutorial Part III is exactly adressing how to create the LOD's for meshes. it will take me another 10-20 days until that part will be good enough for release ;-)

Basically i created the wheel from scratch. I did not derive it from a sculpty because that would give realy ugly results: The outer wheel (yellow): A torus with 32 * 6 faces around The inner wheel (green) : A circle with 8 vertices, filled and extruded along y the spikes cylinders with 8 faces along circumference and one face along the long axis. Both ends extruded to the red handles. There are actually 4 spikes in this mesh, the intersections are hidden in the green inner wheel. That is realy way cheaper than creating 8 of them ;-) The handles and the spikes are on one single mesh, but use 2 different materials. For the LODS: I removed edge loops where they would not harm for the next lower level of detail. For LOD0 special case: I cheated a bit, but it works in world: I reduced the LOD0 to 2 circular surfaces. I could then use a billboard image. Actually i made a mistake in the object and i used 15 faces, where i could have done the same with only 8 faces. This would drop the download costs even further down. And since i also used the LOD0 as physics mesh, i could save another 50% of the current physics costs (1.0) and so i probably could make the wheel even bigger without getting above PE=2 Note: I did not do any unwraps, so textures can not be applied to the object (only color). Doing the unwrapping would give you the chance to make this look realy good and detailed. But it would take another 2 hours (for me) to get there. You need it more detailed ? You could figure out by yourself, or wait for the tutorials to get ready ;-)

We would only need the numbers 1,2,3,4 anyways. But like Drongle metioned earlier, the numbers are not realy needed. So however it is done, it will work ;-)

So instead of talking, i prefer to show ;-) Check it out at: secondlife://Aditi/secondlife/Mesh Sandbox 20/250/196/23 The wheel has a diameter of 2.46 meters, id say a bit big for a ship wheel ... ;-) The PE=2 comes from the Server Weight, which can not be pushed below 2. So whenever you rezz one object the minimum costs are PE=2. But if you add the wheel to a link set, its costs go down, e.g. 3 wheels in one link set -> PE=3 Also note, that this wheel has 4 separate texture faces (marked in red, brown, yellow and green). Furthermore look at the wheel closely. You see that it has some smooth part and some flat surface part. This is because we can tel for each face if we wanted it flat or smooth. With sculpties you would need to collapse (waste) rows or columns to get the same effect. Now compare THAT with a single sculpty please ;-)

1 prim meshes can not be made cheaper than 2 PE. Meshes get less in price when bundled into linksets. Dont ask me why this is so, but it works. Also the problem which makes meshes much more expensive typically comes from the default physics shape which is way(!) too detailed. If you can create a simple physics shape with just a few triangles, you get physics weight down below 1. if you create very low triangle lowest LOD your download costs go down significantly. if you can bundle multiple meshes into one linkset, your server costs go down significantly. Here is my current project: Sculpty object (PE=4, 8000 tris for LOD3): Comparable mesh object not fully optimized (PE=4, 4000 tris for the sum of all LODS of all parts) Closeup of mesh version: In this sense you can make comparable objects in price (as long as they have less than a few meters BBox side length). For larger objects the download costs raise beyond usability (as you have already observed)

You can get the costs down by linking multiple mesh objects together. Also you can get the costs down by adding the simplest possible physics shape. Currently big objects get realy hard punished by mesh PE. It is not clear why this is so. And the question why a BIG low poly high efficient mesh costs more than a BIG high poly low efficient sculpty, is only partially answered so far. Lindens ask us to not make this comparison. Although everybody does and (imho) it makes a lot of sense to compare ;-)