Gaia Clary

hi. I found that the rigged default avatar from Domino's avatar.blend does no longer import to SL-mesh (for me) when i tick the "Skin weight" checkmark in the Modifiers section of the importer. The Upload button just Greys out then, without any notice why it doesn't like the weights. In the previewer i can see that the weights are there and the mesh looks correctly weighted. no spikes, no apparent errors... I created a Jira entry, where i also dropped two dae files, one with an uploadable mesh, another one with a failing mesh: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/CTS-608

Primstar-2 will be the replacement of Jass for blender 2.57. It is planned to implement most of the features of jass-magic also into Primstar-2 and actually we have it almost done by now. The biggest missing function right now is the Multipart exporter, but we expect to see a first fully working version of the exporter by end of june. Maybe it is important to tell that Domino Marama and i have agreed on joining forces, so he does the development and i do the documentation and tutorials and organize all the rest. I hope that clarifies a bit what we are doing right now behind the scenes ;-)

Here is the link: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/primstar-2/ But as i wrote before: The entire Regular-Prim support of Primstar-2 is not yet available. And MAC is no problem. Primstar-2 is an Addon module to blender-2.57 and uses the blender module extension, so it works just everywhere where blender-2.57 (and newer) also runs... (in theory at least ;-) but we have not yet seen any problems except some issues related to known blender bugs)

Morgaine Christensen wrote: too bad the 3-d modelings programs don't offer a basic primative mode modeled on how it is done in SL....that I know how to do ...LOL. Being able to create was a draw to come to SL and spend money. Really, what is left to draw people into SL or retain them once teh shiny has worn off? You might want to know that Primstar-2 (for blender-2.5) will eventually contain a Prim-editor which is designed to work almost like the SL-editor does. It will make it possible to create mixed builds with Sculpties and regular prims using blender and uploading the builds to SL (creating Linksets right in your SL inventory).

Blender 2.6 Collada ? This afternoon i have been experimenting again with meshes and i was able to import static meshes made by Blender 2.5 as well as made by blender 2.49. It just worked. I use this link to get the newest mesh viewer: http://automated-builds-secondlife-com.s3.amazonaws.com/hg/repo/mesh-development/latest.html Sometimes the current build is not good. You can see the state of a build right away. If your operating system is currently in bad state, then you always can navigate to the "previous build" until you find the last builded viewer for your computer. HINT: Windows users want to download the viewer tagged with CYGWIN ;-) Well of course it is development viewer and so it may not work sometimes. But since i joined the public beta 8 months ago this happened to me maybe 5 times or so. So i do not worry about that too much ;-)

Here are my 2 cents about Collada for everybody who does not exactly know what Collada is all about: Collada is first of all a Format specification. it is not a software which needs update every 2 months to keep interesting. It is DESIGNED to be stable. Collada's aim is to provide an open protocol for 3D Model interchange between applications. The 3D Scene seems to be open minded about Collada and many (see link below !) 3D applications implement at least exporters for Collada-1.4. I think there is NOTHING wrong about Collada beeing released in 2006. I think the opposite is true. If it does not need significant changes to keep up with the current development of 3D software, then it must be fit for its purpose ;-) It is an XML-Format It is widely accepted (see: wikipedia:collada ) It is maintained ( see: collada.org ) From all formats that could be choosen by LL, in my understanding Collada is the best choice they ever could do. Tell me any other format, which is open and as widely supported as Collada and allows the same level of complexity (static meshes, dynamic meshes (weighted mesh,rigging), even animation exchange seem to be supported by Collada...) And this may be an interesting nesletter too (i was very astonished while reading it :smileywink: ) http://www.khronos.org/newsletter/detail/official-collada-march-2011-newsletter And finally one more thought: If Collada is stone aged, then what is XML and HTML ? 

i am not done with it yet :matte-motes-evil: i know no bumpmaps available, but ...

This one is a preliminary optimized kettle. Primcost = 0.5 (latest mesh viewer) I will post more details later.

Hi. I am currently working on a tutorial about "optimizing mesh-objects for SL". I would realy like to take your kettle example as the example object and use it to show some optimization strategies. If you want so, then i'd appreciate if you send me your blend file of the mesh-kettle so i can make it the "star of the optimization tutorial" ;-) Cheers, Gaia

Well... It appears to me that now is the time to get back to mesh tutorials ;-) So what do you think what sort of tutorial would make most sense (for you) ? What are meshes and how they differ from Sculpties How to make meshes (using blender (2.4, 2.5)) How to make optimized meshes for SL Static mesh creation for SL Rigged meshes for SL (using blender 2.4) LOD Magic for Meshes Mesh physics Tiny meshes (do we want them ?) ... I have setup a poll for this question and if you like, you can influence the way i go by voting at http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2011/06/01/what-is-the-most-wanted-mesh-tutorial/ - Gaia

The Basics about Sculpted Prims (Part I) So you have been working with sculpted prims for a while, but still wonder why your methods sometimes work and sometimes fail ? You wonder what is right and what is wrong about all of this ? In this video i want to let you look behind the curtains and explain what a sculpt-map really is and how it works in detail and what you actually can do with sculpted prims and what you can never do with them. Here is the link to the Page:  http://blog.machinimatrix.org/3d-creation/video-tutorials/sculpties-basic-tutorials/ And here is the video on YouTube:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/3d-creation/video-tutorials/sculpties-basic-tutorials/modelling-sculpties/ minute 8:23 shows the import process and where lossless compression can be enabled.

This looks pretty much like a lossless compression issue. Or maybe for some reason you have not exported your map as a 64*64 pixel image but smaller. There are still many possible reasons for failure, but your result can certainly be improved. You might want to publish the blend file e.g. to http://pasteall.org/blend and tell us the link. I am quite sure your problem can be solved much faster then without guessing too much ;-) ...

Josh Susanto wrote:A lot of sculpts I loaded when I was using Mac seems to get noisy for no obvious reason. I thought it was a viewer issue, but even checking the sculpts again with a different viewer on a Sony Vaio years later, they remain inexplicably jagged. I am curious to see some of your jagged sculpties. If you make one of the original models (from which you derive your sculpties) available as .obj, then i will take a look at it and tell you why it ends up jagged in SL ;-)

Medhue Simoni wrote: We are mixing 2 different things tho. 1 is the actual mesh, and the other is the texture map. The idea was to break up this exact confusion, which IMHO comes from the fact that "Face" means something different when used in the context of a 3D tool (one Polygon) and when used in the context of SL (one set of polygons attached to one texture)

hmmm, i thought it was absolutely clear what i meant with "surface" ;-( to clarify. I refer to the term "Faces" as it is used in blender, Maya, 3DMax, etc... So as i understand it, in the 3D modelling context face is a polygon, while in SL context a face is a set of polygons. To make it even clearer here is how i understand the basic terms: Vertex a point in 3D space. Edge a line in 3D space between 2 vertices. Polygon A plane figure that is bounded by a Closed path. Face Mostly used as Synonym for Quads orTris (see below), but actually best fitting as Synonym for "Polygon". Tri Short for Triangle, a Polygon defined by a closed path with 3 connected edges. Quad Short for Quadrilateral, a Polygon defined by a closed path with 4 connected edges. So you can see, that wherever you look at, the term "face" is a bit whishy-whashy, at least it is not well defined. And what we have here with the definition of SL-faces doesn't make it better. I do not understand, why the term "surface" is not good. For me it describes pretty well, what an SL-face is all about. As Nyx mentioned, the term "Face" is interconnected with the term "Side" which surely makes sense with basic building blocks (prims) but no longer with meshes... (IMHO)

"Face" seems to be a defined word in 3D modelling ( See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygon_mesh for example). The SL notation of "Face" differs. I would like to propose an official renaming of "Face" to "Surface". Then we could describe building units in SL more precise as follows: A Prim can have up to 6 individual contiguous SurfacesA Sculpty always has 1 single contiguous SurfaceA mesh can have up to 8 individual Surfaces, where each Surface can have its own texture settings. Note that for meshes a surface does not need to be contiguous.This issue also came up 2 days ago in another thread: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/red-light-for-LODs/m-p/888985#M956 But maybe it is worth to push it more up into public view ... 

your sculpty is inside-out. quickfix: in the editor, object-tab check the "inside-out" checkmark fix on image level: flip the red channel of your sculptmap image horizontally. if you use primstar, there is a video howto fix it in the model: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/jass-magic-auto-detection-of-flipped-sculpties/ The manual fix is shown starting from minute 1:00 in the video

Vengeance Ethaniel wrote:Don't want to spend ages making top quality meshes if only 20% of the Second Life users are going to be able to see it. I guess that when meshes are hitting main grid, then people will rush to mesh enabled viewer versions soon. And haven't all major viewers meanwhile started to support mesh-features or at least started to implement them ? So i believe that even if you do not want to jump on the V2 train,it looks to me that there will be options for everybody (to keep with their habits AND get access to mesh) ...

ok, it IS squished. But somehow its different from what i expect to see. So the constraints imply that i can not go below 16 faces. (8*8 sculptmap...). That implies to me that when i SEE only one face, then only 1/16 of the texture should be used when it is scaled to <1,1> But i see the full texture in U and 1/4 of the texture in V. And that implies that my object has actually 4 (squished) faces instead of the expected 16 faces... How can that be explained ?

I tested a cube made out of 4*4 faces (8*8 sculptmap). It does not suffer from any LOD effects. I set my renderVOlumeLOD to 1.25 and went far far away until the cube was no longer visible (because it became too small to look at). i could not see any LOD jumpings while moving the camera forward/backward. So it IS LOD stable... Now it would be realy cool if we could get fractional costs ;-) a 16 faces sculpty -> 0.0156 Primcosts well, just an idea ...

Is there a way to proof that the faces are NOT sqished ? Are the meshes realy made out of 6 tris and 2 tris ? Domino states that the viewer code contains a hard coded constraint that the minimum supported sculptmap size is 8*8 pixels...

From the "theory of sculpted prims" a 2*2 pixel should give a perfect quad, because: A face is defined by its 4 corner vertices and the sculptmap stores the vertex locations. So if you want to store a map containing 4*4 faces, you will need an image of size 5*5 pixels. There is one constraint on image sizes for sculpted prims: their heigth and width must be power of 2 numbers. Hence in order to store a sculpty with 4*4 faces, you need 5*5 pixels distributed on an 8*8 pixel image. This implies that a sculptmap of size n*m (where n,m are power of 2 numbers) can store n/2 * m/2 faces (quads), in our example the 8*8 pixel image can store 4*4 = 16 faces. (Yes, i know there are exceptions from this rule, for 128*64 pixel sculptmaps the face count is 46*22=1012 faces...) The used pixels are distributed (almost) evenly over the image as follows: each secnd pixel of the map is used as container for a vertex location, starting at the bottom left pixel of the image. But we have one extra row/column of pixels to populate (remind we nee 5*5 pixels to store a 4*4 faces map) And we use the rightmost column and the topmost row for this. The following images show the sculptmaps for 8*8, 4*4, 2*2 and 1*1 faces from left to right. For easier display i have zoomed all images by a factor of 16, so the real image sizes are 16 times smaller than shown in the image below. The black parts in the sculptmaps are unused areas: The rightmost image contains 4 used pixels stored in a 2*2 pixels map (enough data for one Quad). And according to what i just explained above, this is a perfect map and it obeys all rules ;-) However i also have read about "the smallest possible sculptmap is of size 16*16 pixels". But as curious as i am, i tried the smaller maps too and ended up with what i report here. I have been testing on Agni (the main grid) but there when i upload an image of size 2*2, it seems to be automatically converted into a 4*4 image. Nevertheless i saw only one face (2 triangles) in wireframe mode after applying the map to a sculpty.

The following 2*2 pixel sculptmap renders correctly as a single face (2 triangles) in Second Life (the little dot on the next line): However i could only import it as a 4*4 pixel image. I used "Kirstens S21 2.7.8 (7)" for this little experiment. Here is a snapshot in World: Cheers, Gaia

Drongle McMahon wrote: This confusion between "faces" in the usual mesh sense and "faces" in the in-world objec/LSL/texture sense keeps arising. I guess we need a new word for the in-world face. It used to be "submesh", but that caused equal confusion. So, I guess, would "materials" because that means something else too. It's especially hard with meshes because now the "face" doesn't even have to be contiguous. Any ideas for a new word? What about this: A mesh can have up to 8 individual "surfaces", where each surface can have its own texture settings. Note that a surface does not need to be contiguous.