[Texturing problem using Zbrush, any ideas???]

I'm gonna agree with chosen, I've seen this behaviour before, and it was the result of the uv island for the problem area being too small. You need to edit your uv, and make sure your uv islands are appropriately sized. I use blender mostly to create and edit my UVs which I then import into zbrush for texturing. Uv master is fine for quick texturing, but I find it too limited to do a really good uv layout that doesn't waste a lot of texture space.

[Mesh Deformer now a Snowstorm (Viewer Development) Issue]

Thanks for the link!  Interesting to read the Q&A to see what is actually planned and get some insight into the process

[Entering into the World of Mesh using Blender and etc.]

I have not noticed significantly higher costs uploading meshes.  Most of my meshes are between 11 and 50L, compare that plus the 1-3 textures I need to upload to the same cost for a multiple piece sculpty item and it's associated textures, and a reasonable tri-count mesh is actually cheaper to upload.  Don't do your testing on the main grid of course, there is Aditi for that so you don't burn through your L's 

[Entering into the World of Mesh using Blender and etc.]

Gaia's link is the best place to start, then go to YouTube, search blender introduction and work your way through everything you can find. There's an excellent blender training series on cannedmushroom's channel that has helped me a lot. Once you get the basics and start getting familiar with the terminology, you will have a better idea what you need to be searching for. Blender wiki is also good, and there are other sites like blenderguru and blendercookie worth working through.

[Which 3D program works best for mesh clothing specifically?]

You don't need high end software for SL clothing, just what you can use and afford. Blender 2.59 is my modeler of choice, it has nice weighting tools and a not too difficult and overwhelming interface (since it was redone). There are plenty of available tutorials, and best of all, you don't have to fork out $4k to autodesk or pirate it, since its free. People are generally quite forthcoming with assistance too.

 

Re blocky movement, as long as you have the right amount of geometry going in the right direction, you're using the weights brushes where appropriate,, and you don't rely on the bone weight copy script to do all your weighting, you can get great movement in blender. Just a case of practice.

[weighting a rigged skirt in blender or maya? any tips?]

I think you probably need to look into the various weight painting tools and learn how to use the brushes to make the weight paints smooth. The sl avatar has terribly blocky weighting, and pretty much no smoothing between bones so this seems to be what you are seeing following the bone weight copy process.. The brushes I most use in blender are add, subtract and blur, in combination with the size and strength sliders. I recommend you check YouTube for some video tutorials in weight painting in blender. Find a process and package that works, and stick with it.

[Deformable mesh clothing update]

Charlar, I must comment. Resizer scripts do not work in rigged mesh clothing, which is why people who want to wear and make mesh clothing and other attachments are so desperate for a solution that they are willing to put their money where their mouths are and pay a third party to make it happen!!

[Questions: trying to understand Physics shapes]

I am not sure how I would make a 24 prim linkset into 12 Land Impact just by taking the scripts out, my understanding is that legacy/SL prims still count as 1, which is why I have never really understood all the yelling about scripts doubling land impact or whatever.  I played around with the LOD setting in my chair, added a few more cubes for my HUD using various scripts that move prims around, send colour, texture, size and position commands back and forth to an attachment I am wearing, added a sit script and animation and it's still only 35 land impact, even when the chair itself went from 1 to 3 with the LOD changes that now mean it doesn't degrade until you're quite far away.  To be clear that is 33 actual SL prim cubes (I counted), and one 3 LI mesh chair with 3 texture faces and 512 textures on each.

 

I did a test with a linkset of 6 prim cubes in a linkset:

6 cubes in one object that equals 6 Land Impact.  

Put scripts in each of them - 6 Land impact.  

Made them HUGE - 6LI.  

Made them Physical - 6LI.  

Added my 3 LI chair to them - 9 LI when softlinked,  7 LI when hardlinked, physical or not, didn't matter

Made that linkset HUGE, as big as it would go without snapping back to 64m - 38 LI  Which to be perfectly honest, isn't that unreasonable, considering we don't have 64m tall avatars who would ever use a chair that size

 

So anyway, that's just been my experience all along with the exception of that teething period when the calculation was being tinkered with.  I have never, ever noticed that adding scripts to prims or meshes does anything to Land Impact, other than occasionally adding 1 to the final number.  That's not to say it doesn't, just that I have never had it happen to me, not for want of trying!

[Questions: trying to understand Physics shapes]

Yea I have it linked with 24 regular box shaped prims filled with all kinds of funky scripts for a HUD and it costs me... 24 land impact  The box is the root prim.

[Questions: trying to understand Physics shapes]

Aaand on your advice, added the physics shape to a random material from the main mesh, scaled the model down in Blender so it didn't come in 20 metres high, restarted SL cos the browse button didn't highlight when I selected physics from file, and uploaded successfully with a server weight of 0.6 and a Land impact inworld of 1 :D  Thanks!

[Questions: trying to understand Physics shapes]

ooh I did not know that.  Anyway I managed to muddle it out, not sure exactly how it happened between viewers crashing, disappearing from my PC altogether, and between either the browse button or the calculate button vanishing, and multiple restarts.  Surely I missed some incantation or sacrifice to some oldworld god somewhere along the line!  :matte-motes-sour:

I'll try again with the material assignment, thanks for the advice!

And even though it said it had a Land Impact of 6, by the time I got it in and scaled it down, it works out to be 2  Should prolly do the scaling in Blender first.

[Questions: trying to understand Physics shapes]

Thanks for the reply!  I'll go download the project viewer because nothing I do seems to be working  It has to be easier than this...

[Questions: trying to understand Physics shapes]

Hey all, I have a little model I'm trying to upload using a custom physics shape for the first time ever.  I am having a couple of issues and want to determine if it's something I am doing, or a viewer bug?  Or what else is going on?

Basically - why does the calculate weights button disappear when I select my physics model?  It seems to be fine when I go through the physics tab and generate a physics shape there, but I'd really like to learn how to create a physics shape myself.  It was previously 28 tris, kind of cube shaped with an extension for the back of the chair, and a complete model with UV, I then deleted a bunch of faces so it's the 6 tri thing you see above but neither model worked.  Do I even need to create a UV with a physics shape?

[Texture faces and numbers]

I'm not sure but the models I have exported from Blender 2.59 have no issues with texture faces switching with LOD levels.  But then again I didn't make the LOD's, I let the SL importer sort that out

[Texture faces and numbers]

Thanks LindaB!  I figured it out actually, for anyone who might be looking for the same answer... in blender the face # order when the model uploads to SL is determined by the material groups order so that's cool.  I was having issues importing my obj's from Zbrush to blender because the UV map was being destroyed/deleted for some bizarre reason so I have to export the colladas from Zbrush, into blender, assign the material groups in the correct order and then export again for upload to SL - that way it all seems to work  Learning excercise for next time I guess!  Do things in the correct order the first time to avoid redoing work!

 

[edit] thanks for your reply Drongle!  It's good to know I'm on the right track.  I might have to ask over at Zbrush Central about polygroups and the order, as far as I know there is no order

[Texture faces and numbers]

Hi!  I'm creating a set of mesh objects that will be texture changeable by script for several texture faces per object.  The problem I have is in the face number assignment.  I want face 1 on object A and object B to be the same material face - but SL seems to see fit to assign different face numbers and I can't work out why.  I am using Zbrush and polygroups to assign my material faces, but when I upload it to SL, the texture face numbered "1" on object A is called face "5" on object B, and face 5 on object A is face 3 on object B.  So my scripting is going to be hellishly hard working out which texture goes on which face.

I hope I have explained this well enough to understand, I barely understand it myself!  If there is some script that reassigns face numbering, or some way to create the material faces in Blender or Zbrush that might influence it?

The only way I have worked out is that if I create the polygroups on object A first, and then duplicate object A to create object B, the faces have the same numbering in SL.

[edit] I should add that I could do the last thing I mentioned, but all the sculpting work is done and that'd basically mean I have to redo it all :(

[Mesh Clothing Resizer project hits its funding goal]

Plus, if LL do it, they are taking the opportunity for some enterprising coder to write a tool that converts prims into meshes and uploads them, like the inworld sculpty building tools that convert prims to sculpties and export RGB maps for the user to upload.  You know someone's gonna eventually make something like that

[Mesh Clothing Resizer project hits its funding goal]

That's my experience with mesh as well.  My mesh stuff is done and rezzed and finished while my sculptie stuff is still weird textured blobs.. for a good 15-20 seconds or more while they all load.  

As for using out-of-world programs to create mesh - well you mentioned sculpties, and we also use out-of-world programs to create sounds, animations, textures, poses, etc etc.  Some scripters use out of world editors to write LSL and then just copy/paste it into a new script.  I use notepad or wordpad to write notecards because SL is notoriously crashy and the last thing I want to do is lose my product manual.  So yea, using an out-of-world solution to create an inworld product is a complete non-issue and I don't really know why people keep bringing it up.

[New Blender 2.6 Release and Problem With Rigged Mesh]

Thanks for the info, I was going to test it today, but didn't have time.  I did have a play around with the new weights tools, pretty neat  

[why why why?]

---

1.  It costs more in uploads

2. mostly i costs more in prims 

3. in order to combat item 2 you should do your own LOD version there for costing more in time and money.

---

 

No, no and no.

 

*Individual mesh items may "cost more" than the standard 10L per single upload.  I have made entire shoes, in a matching pair, that cost me less to upload than the equivalent of one sculpted shoe - each sculpt = 10L.  Each texture for each sculpt = 10L.  Doing the simple math here, a shoe with 30 sculpted prims (and this is lightweight - I have built shoes that have 115 sculpted prims...) would cost 300L or MORE to upload, depending if everything goes ok the first time you do it, plus an additional up to 300L to upload each texture.  Assume you have used 1024 faces per sculpty and have hidden a bunch of faces away on the sides the end user can't see.  you now have 30000 polygons, (or 60000 triangles) that need to be rendered by the SL viewer.

Now you take the same object built in proper 3D.  I can do a shoe equivalent to a sculpted shoe in mesh.  Both shoes in a set together would come to 2000 - 8000 polygons (which SL translates to double that count in triangles) depending on the complexity of the shoe.  I can make it in a single object, no multiple sculpties or prim linkset involved.  Let's be generous and say I go with 8000 polygons, which is a lot for a pair of shoes.  That kind of object would cost me 11-50L to upload.  ALL of it.  That's several uploads I can do before I even hit the cost of one single sculpt set.  Now I can make that object have one texture, 2 textures, up to 8 textures.  So let's say I make one pair of shoes at 8000 polygons, with 8 texture faces.  that's STILL cheaper than a single set of sculpty map uploads.  50L for the mesh, 80L for the textures and we have only hit less than half the amount of money it costs to upload 30 sculpt maps.

*Provided you have built your model using the optimal polygon count and placement, have no wastage in terms of surface area, and have created a decent low polygon Physics model, it would cost you LESS in prims to create the same thing than it costs in sculpties.

*When you become proficient in 3d building, meshes are faster to build, texture, create LOD and physics models for and convert to an SL usable format.  Plus you don't need to spend hours inworld recreating your object because SL has mangled your sculpt maps and nothing fits together anymore.  That for me is the biggest time saver of all.  You upload, it, rez it, apply your texture and you're done.

So that's why  Well, part of the reason why, anyway,

[General Mesh Confusion- what is it?]

Mesh is sculpty without the sculpty limitations.  You can create meshes using exactly the same starting process as sculpty, so that is probably why you were confused, perhaps the corset maker started with an object primitive instead of building in polygons.  Basically sculpties are static, have a maximum number of faces/polygons allowable -1024 - and a square texture space that cannot be changed.  You can't add geometry to a sculpty.  For example, if you had a shirt shape, and you wanted to extrude sleeves, and delete the faces on the ends of the sleeves and in the neckline and hem - can't be done with a sculpty.  

One sculpty = one prim, can only have one texture, and complicated objects can be multiple sculpties.  If they are all made with 1024 polygons, as in a hairstyle, this is potentially tens of thousands of faces that your viewer has to render, which is why hairstyles made with 150 sculpties are so laggy.

Meshes on the other hand don't have these limitaitons.  The only limitation is that the upper limit of triangles your mesh can have is 64000.  

You have a lot more freedom in how you create, you can create items that have more than 1024 faces, but a complete mesh can have far fewer faces than the same item built using sculpties which makes mesh items a lot more user friendly in terms of lag.  You can delete faces that won't be seen, you can extrude to make new geometry, etc

They take less time to load because you are not also loading a sculpt texture, they are less lossy, because you don't have to convert your sculpt to a texture, blur it to smooth it out and then upload to possibly lose information to the SL upload/conversion process.  You don't have to run mesh objects through a scripted rezzer and/or spend hours and hours reconstructing the object inworld because somehow your conversion process failed.

You don't have to hide poles (the point where the lines on the sphere converge into a single spot) under shoe soles, inside waistbands, since poles become horribly deformed in SL.  

You can use one texture for multiple areas and you're not limited to a single square texture per object.  You actually cut up the mesh when you create it, and make a UV layout which is your texture template - so you have a lot less wastage of texture resources as you can assign your mesh pieces their own place on the UV layout and every piece can be very close together, where in a sculpty if you have to hide polygons to get what you want, that area of the texure is wasted.

Meshes can have up to 8 separate material faces - which means up to 8 textures per single mesh, as opposed to a sculpted prim's one.  Which makes it possible to create an entire shoe, hairstyle, complete outfit in one single mesh object, instead of multiple sculpties, which again is a lot more user friendly in terms of client lag and texture loading.

Mesh doesn't count as one object = one prim.  The calculation of how many prims a mesh object is equivalent to is variable and depends on polycount, size, Level of Detail models, Physics models and whether the object is worn or rezzed.  Also whether it is linked to certain SL primitives like the Torus.

Mesh can be attached to the bones of the SL skeleton in a program like blender, and used to create clothing that moves naturally with the body, suits of armour, avatars, digi-legs, whatever you like.  We can't edit the skeleton and the clothing doesn't currenly adhere to certain sliders of the SL avatar, but the latter at least will hopefully be resolved.

 

In short - Sculpties are a fun and very clever hack, specific to Second Life, and are a very inefficient way of building.  The way mesh has been implemented is the longtime accepted 3d building method for many platforms.  Building mesh in SL will give the builder many more skills that can be used elsewhere in 3d modelling, than just sculpties.

[Mesh one sided, flipped normals, huh?]

Solidify is a modifier that adds geometry to make the object have a thickness. If you were to use solidify on a square plane, you would get a cube, complete with polygons around the edges, I've found solidify to be less optimal than simply duplicating the faces, you don't really need the thickness, unless it's a bulky piece. To duplicate, select all the vertices on the hem by alt right clicking loops until you have enough mesh selected, then press ctrl D, escape and then go to mesh, normals, flip.

[Mesh one sided, flipped normals, huh?]

I have never experienced this problem with duplicating verts for the back side of a rigged object, I think, like Chosen said, you are inadvertently changing something when you duplicate. I duplicate only the edge loops that are necessary (ie: around waist and the visible part of the hem) and flip only those, after the model is complete, modeled, uv mapped, textured, and I am satisfied with the weight paints. Duping and flipping is the last thing I do before I export the collada, and I do it in edit mode so it's part of the mesh, not object mode, so it won't be a linked child in sl.

 

If you dup and flip before you do the weight painting you may have an endless struggle getting both sides the same without clipping when you move. By doing it the way I describe, the duped verts have exactly the same weight assignment as the original. If you want to change anything about the model, delete the duplicated verts,make your changes, then redo the duplicate/flip process. I'm using blender 2.59 and this works every time.

 

Edit- I reread your post. The copy bone weights you are doing on the duped vertices is unnecessary, they already have that data.

[Strange shoes issue (solved)]

The ankle lock in these shoes, and many others, will run just fine in no-script sims as long as they are attached in a script enabled sim first. If you attach them in a no- script sim, none of the scripts will start running on rez, and this will happen.

[What is everyone's thoughts about mesh clothing?]

All I ask is that people give the content creators of SL a chance to settle in and get comfortable with what they can and can't do in the new technology.  Forming an opinion on what is currently available (which are a LOT of copies of a certain subset of a certain designer's fullperm templates) is fine, but don't judge us all on their standards please.  Some creators will come up with beautiful, innovative, detailed designs, when they find their sea legs, so to speak.  we're not all buying mesh templates and putting textures on them.  But it's new, and we are still learning how it all goes together.  Plus, these creations take time.   That's all