Chosen Few

Tazmania Trefusis wrote: Have you a video tutorial or screenshots for that process instead? There's a screenshot right in my above post, showing the transitional stages between sphere and cuboid. As for video, I whipped one up just now for you. I didn't have time to edit it, narrate, or insert any comments. I just recorded the process on-screen as I moved the vertices and hulls around to turn the sphere into a cuboid. It's about five minutes, from start to finish. I hope you're able to follow it. (Don't get spoiled, by the way, anyone. I won't be able to do a video every time for every tutorial.)

Ellada Dionysus wrote: Thank you for this answer. I came to the forums to find this answer too although I am not a creator and this post is the most clear answer I ever read here though I don't visit the forums everyday and I might have missed a lot of mesh discussions. You're welcome, Ellada. I'm glad the information was helpful. Ellada Dionysus wrote: SL users especially the buyers are all confused including me cause upto now from what I read here and there it gave me the impression that as time goes I wouldn't be able to see prims and sculpties and that they would gonna be unusable. It's unfortunate that rumors like that get started. My guess is the information probably mutated as it made its way through the grapevine. One poor scared prim builder probably said to another, "We won't be able to sell this stuff anymore," meaning only that he was afraid the existing products wouldn't be able to compete with the far better looking mesh products that would soon be coming. But the person he said it to probably misinterpreted the wording to mean non-mesh products would no longer be allowed to be sold. Presto, a rumor is born. Sadly, a lot of people in the world find it easier to just blindly repeat disturbing information, rather than stop to consider whether it even makes any sense, let alone bother to look into it to find out if it's in any way true. In reality, there's no way prims and sculpties could be removed from SL at this point, even if anyone wanted to do that, which no one does. That stuff is intrenched, and despite what the panic mongers out there would have some people believe, it can't just be done away with. Ellada Dionysus wrote: Mesh might be the oldest way to 3d modeling but is a new way in SL so we the users that are not 3d designers but just simple users think of mesh as a new thing. Understood. But I hope you can also understand why I said it was funny. Here's the thing. I'm sure every single SL user has played a video game before. I'd like to think that when any SL user looks around the screen in any game, it woud occur to them that the stuff they're looking at is not made of prims and sculpties. I'd also like to think they'd realize that since mesh objects were what they saw in every single video game they've ever laid eyes on, they'd realize that mesh can't actually be anything new. And from there, I'd hope to think they'd put two and two together, to realize that the only thing that's really happened is that SL can now use the same kind of content that everything else has already been using all along. SL was an island unto itself before, with its completely proprietary content, but now it's become more normal. That's all. But I know I'm overly idealistic, and I'm wishing people too much credit with that line of thinking. Realistically, I have to resign to the fact that most people lack the intellectual curiosity even to wonder about such things. I said it was funny, but when you think about it, it's actually kind of sad. No doubt the world would be a much better place if more people would just stop to ponder, "How does that work?" from time to time.

Rufus Darkfold wrote: I'm seeing quite a bit of randomness in my experiments with SL physics. Maybe it's the wind. Maybe. If you want to test that, you can script an object to return the wind vector, and see if the object behavior seems to match the readings. Rufus Darkfold wrote: How do combat sims function at all then, with all those weapons and bullets flying about and colliding with things? With the older version of Havok that SL had for so many years, combat sims used to crash all the time. It's gotten better since the implementation of the newer version, but still, it doesn't take much to bring a sim to its knees. Weave a handful of toruses into a piec of chanimail cloth, make it physical, and you'll see what I mean. As for bullets, those tend to be fairly simple collisions. For the most part, each bullet hits an object once, and then dies. It's pretty rare that you'd end up with a situation in which a bullet will find itself bouncing back and forth between two surfaces. Rufus Darkfold wrote: Even fairly quiet sims will have plenty of collisions. We generate collisions every time our avatars walk somewhere. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with that statement. You might as well say the fact that air is always falling onto your head is proof that it won't hurt if I drop an anvil on your head. I'm not trying to imply that any and every collision will toast a sim. What I am saying is that when a particular item looks like it could potentially cause problems, it's well worth considering that (especially when there are more effective ways to accomplish the same task). Not too long ago, a sim I built for one of my corporate clients was stuck in single digit FPS for the better part of a full day, before I tracked down the cause. Two physical objects that were scripted to fly around the sim as part of a shooting game, crashed into each other other way up in the sky, and due to their shapes, they got stuck together like jigsaw puzzle pieces. It was a one in a million shot, but it happened. The constant repeating collisions just from those two objects quickly overwhelmed the sim. The same thing could potentially happen with the Plinko board. The ball could get stuck bouncing between two posts. Much stranger things than that have happened. It would be much safer just to script the ball to behave in the desired manner, and leave the physics out of it altogether.

Freecilla Kuhn wrote: How to avoid it I don't know but you could use Color in the Texture tab to add a touch of grey to match it better. You could also remake the texture a bit darker but that could take several trys to get it right and still might not work well. Simply making the textrue darker won't do. Notice the lighting toward the bottom of the sculpty matches that of the rest of the wall. It grades from light to dark, from top to bottom. If you make the texture darker, it'll be too dark at the bottom, and it still won't match. The problem appears to be the distribution of light across the entire surface, not just the base color.

I assume you're talking about the differences in the lighting, and not about the fact that you've got different repeats per meter on the sculpty vs. the prims. The lighting discrepency is most likley because sculpties have so many more vertices than prims do. SL uses vertex lighting. The more vertices a surface has, the more light can appear to reflect off of it, and the more the shading can appear to grade. If you set both objects to fullbright, they'll probably look the same. If you don't want fullbright in effect, then there's not much else you can do, short of building the wall differently. Even if the lighting weren't at issue, I'd still suggest not using a sculpty for this purpose, by the way. It would only take three prims to build that section with the window in it (not counting the window itself, of course). Considering that with the sculpty, you'd need an invisible cube in there anyway, just to get the wall's physics to work properly, you're talking about a total difference of only one prim. There's really no way to justify the extra rendering overhead that sculpties bring with them, just to save only one prim. So you know, it takes about 18 cubes to equal the rendering cost of one sculpty (not counting textures). Sculpties make for really terrible wall materials. For best results, use prims or mesh. (A mesh version of that same wall could have less than 5% of the poly count of how you've got it now, could look a heck of a lot better, and would have correct physics.)

duLuna Bosatsu wrote: "Select the first column of vertices, and snap it over onto the first." D'oh! Typo. Should have said "Select the second column and snap it onto the first." I'll edit the post. Sorry about that.

I'm glad you figured it out, Leviathan. Thanks for posting to let us know. One of the fun parts of Maya is that no matter how long you've been using it, there's just no way to know everything about it. I can't tell you how many times I've shown a colleague something I thought was such a simple beginner thing that everybody must know it, but they had no idea. Likewise, I've been shown plenty of slap-your-face-simple things over the years by people who couldn't believe I didn't already know them. The learning experience never ends.

You can safely leave the last row and column each unpaired. Those are going to pair up with the firsts anyway, when you fold and roll the plane into the torus shape. But if it makes you feel better, you can go with 65x9, and then everything will pair. I doubt it will make any difference. One thing I would suggest, either way, is that you keep the direction of the pairings uniform. I notice you've got your arrows alternating drections. That's could make things a little screwy, UV-wise. For the rows, snap all up or all down. For the columns, go all left or all right. If it matters, I did up and left for mine.

It looks good, aesthetically. You obviously captured the shape of the car very well. But from a technical standpoint, it looks like you've got quite a bit of extraneous geometry you don't need. Here are a few things I notice right away: The cracks around the doors don't need to be there. The texturing can take care of that. Same with the T-top panels on the roof. Even the door handles are iffy. The insides of the wheel wells may not need to be there at all. It's unlikely anyone would notice if they're absent. After all, who's gonna swing their camera in between the tire and the body to look in there? The wheel wells appear to have 14 facets each. You could save a ton of polys by lowering them by just a few, down to like10 or so, and they'd still look sufficiently round. Remember, game modeling is about making every polygon count. If you've got a detail that needs to protrude a good distance from the main surface, such as the mirrors, by all means invest some polygons into building those parts. But never waste polys on surface details or near-surface details that the texturing can express just fine.

You can make this work with Maya, but it takes some non-obvious tinkering, due to how the sculpty exporter is set up. Sculpties themselves weren't designed with this kind of modeling in mind, back in the begninng. So, when Qarl Linden wrote the sculpt map exporter for Maya he set it up to employ surface sampling, rather than precise per-vertex position reporting (which is why it works so well with NURBS, which by definition, do not have exact vertex positions in the first place). Enterprising users later built their own exporters for programs like Blender and Wings, and those work on different principles than the Maya one.  As you probably know, NURBS modeling is generally the way to go for sculpties in Maya. But for certain kinds of objects, including gears, it's actually more practical to use polygons. However, if you've ever experimented with trying to get polygon-based sculpties out of Maya, you probably know it doesn't tend to work well. There's always quite a bit of inaccuracy in the vertex positioning. To get it to sample plolygonal surfaces with reasonable precision, you need to double up all the vertices. Here's a gear I made just now. As you can see, the SL version is pretty much a dead ringer for the Maya version. To make it work, I had to model it in a way you probably wouldn't expect. Here's how I did it: 1. Start with a poly plane, with 64x8 divisions. 2. Select the second column of vertices, and snap it over onto the first. Select the fourth row, and snap it onto the third. Repeat this for every other column. Then do the same for the rows. The plane should now look like it's got half as many divisions as it actually has. The vertices are doubled up. 3. Fold the plane three times along its lenth, to form a four-sided cylinder. Each side of the cylinder will appear to have 1x32 divisions. 4. Now let's form the teeth. On one side of the cylinder, select two adjacent columns of vertices. Leave the next two columns unselected, and then add the next two after that to the selection. Repeat this until you've got 16 rows selected, and 16 unselected. Move the selected rows away from the cylinder. 5. Using a bend deformer, roll the tube into a torus. It should now look exactly like the Maya screenshot above. 6. Delete history, freeze transformations, and reset transformations. (Always do this as a final step before sculpt map export, every time you make a sculpty.) 7. Export a 256x16 sculpt map, and upload to SL. If you plan to bake a texture, you'll first need to clean up the model. Those doubled up vertices have to go. Here's what to do: 1. Merge all the overlapping vertices. 2. Open up the UV texture editor, and verivy that the UV map is correct. Depending on which sets of vertices you moved when you did the overlapping, the UV map might be offeset by a row or column (or both). If so, simply set your UV grid to the appropriate number of divisions (32 for U or 4 for V), and snap the UV's into place. Needless to say, the above is a little bit of a pain. But then, sculpties are a pain in general. There's really no need to use them for this purpose anymore, since we've got mesh support now. You can make a an equivalent mesh gear in just a couple of clicks.

To expound a little on what Romsey said, you cannot turn just any old arbitrary mesh into a sculpty. To be sculpty-compatible, it has to made in a very specific way. The best way to think of sculpties is like origami. Every sculpty is ultimately unfoldable into a perfect rectangle, just as every origami model is unfoldable into a rectangular piece of paper. No matter how it's been bent, folded, twisted, or stretched in 3D space to take on the appearance of a three-dimensional object, its two-dimensional topology is still just a plain old rectangle. Further, to be a sculpty, a model has to have an entirely uniform UV layout, a prefect grid, occupying the entirity of a single UV tile. It can't have any unused canvas space at all, and the grid lines must be evenly spaced, no exceptions. Sculpties are extremely limited. For more information, check out the sculpty wiki, at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims For arbitrary meshes, use theCOLLADA format (.dae). With this option, you don't need to worry about all the constraints of sculpties. You can model any way you want., with complete freedom over your topology and UV layout. You mentioned your viewer crashes on upload. That's unfortunate. I hope you've been sending in crash reports. What are your system specs, and what drivers are you using? Maybe we can try to poinpoint the problem.

Very nice, Phadrus. When the video began, it took me a few seconds to realize that I was in fact looking at SL. This is exactly the sort of trend I was hoping would be set. A few of us were discussing this kind of thing in another thread just a few days ago. We talked about how the "SL look" will soon become a thing of the past. It's great to see that starting to happen. I especaially loved the part in the video where, after having watched the plane do its thing for a few minutes, and having gotten so used to its visual aesthetic, we see it come in for a landing on the carrier, and we're slapped across the face by just how remarkably unremarkable everything except the plane looks. The message hits home, loudly, clearly, and inescapably. All it takes is three or four minutes of seeing a proper 3D model in action, and we can't help but realize just how low our bar actually has been all these years. Nicely done.

kalliopi Ziplon wrote: what will happen to us that have a shop and had spend ours learning gimp and photoshop and creating stuff. all our stuff is worthy nothing now? we must start creating only to a mesh way? all the money i gave to buy templates and sculpts are gone? what happens to all of us that have stores and have payed so many lindens on templates and sculpts?. What makes you think you can't keep doing the same things you were already doing? Mesh is just an option. You can still make prims and sculpties, if that's what you want to do. The only difference is now you can import mesh models, too. Prims and sculpties aren't going anywhere. Use them as long as you like. kalliopi Ziplon wrote: i got blender but there are not tutorials like it was for the oldest ways to make things , It's so funny how SL-centric users think of mesh as some kind of new thing. Mesh IS the oldest way to make things there is, when it comes to 3D modeling. SL was totally isolated before, having been limited to its proprietary parametric solids (prims) and its bizarre pseudo-mesh objects (sculpties). Now that it has arbitrary mesh support, SL is becoming normal. It now fits with how all other 3D platforms work. A major benefit of that is SL artists can now step forward to become full fledged members of the 3D artist community at large. The barriers have come down, and that's a truly great thing. As for tutorials on how to make things, they're everywhere. Take your pick. Whereas before you had to hunt specifically for SL-related tutorials, now you can just use any and every basic 3D modeling tutorial you can get your hands on. All those thousands of generic tutorials that weren't applicable before, they're all useful now. Start at the beginning, forget all about SL for a few days, and learn the basics of mesh modeling itself. The skills you'll learn will be applicable to just about any platform you'd ever want to model for, including SL. So, once you've got a handle on the basics, simply apply that knowledge to whatever you want to make for SL. kalliopi Ziplon wrote: good tutorials to know how to make a tattoo -clothes-paintings -templates and so on Nothing has changed in this regard. The way to make tattoos now is the same way it's always been. The same is true for skins, and basic avatar clothing. You now have the OPTION to make mesh clothing as well, or even to make entire avatar bodies from scratch. But again, it's just an option. kalliopi Ziplon wrote: why they cannot make it in a way that our creations will not be lost ? Nothing's going to be lost. Everything you've ever made is still there. You can keep making those same kinds of items for as long as you want. kalliopi Ziplon wrote: but apply to the new way as well ? That's exactly what's happened. I don't know why you think otherwise. Have you tried it? Make a prim. It still works. Make a sculpty. That still works, too. Again, the only difference between now and before is you now have the option to use mesh models if you want to. That's it. The other options have not gone away, and they're not going to. kalliopi Ziplon wrote: and i cannot use the new mesh viewer Why not? What happens when you try? kalliopi Ziplon wrote: why they are making us not being able to enjoy the game we love so much? They're not. Again, you can still do all the same things now that you could do before. There's just one new option now, along side all the other stuff. kalliopi Ziplon wrote: i spend 3 years learning and learning and now they are telling me i have to be a newborn in the game?why? You're not a newborn. Again, your existing content is still there, and if you want to, you can continue to make that same kind of content. You should realize, though, that prim and sculpty based models, for the most part, will be vastly inferior to mesh models, in a great many ways. Those who refuse to learn how to make mesh models are going to fall behind. Now here's the good news. Mesh modeling is MUCH easier than prim and sculpty modeling. If you learned to get good at using prims and sculpties, you're more than capable of getting good at making mesh models, too. It might be a little uncomfortable for a while, sure. Change always is. But you should be excited about all the great stuff you're going to be able to make that was never possible before. You should also be excited about the fact that as a competent mesh modeler, you'll have a marketable skill. Any mesh models that you make for SL, you could also sell on generic 3D model sites like Turbo Squid, Creative Crash, and many others. Further, with a little additional investment into learning best practices for other specific platforms, you could sell your models on more specialized sites like the Unity store, the DAZ 3D marketplace, etc. There's a whole new world of opportunity out there for you, if you choose to become a good mesh modeler. Anything you've managed to achieve in SL thus far is potentially minuscule by comparison. kalliopi Ziplon wrote: what can i do now?in what way to create stuff?what will hapen to my stuff? What you do now is exactly what you've been doing. You can choose to make mesh models, too, if you want (and you should). But you certainly don't have to. As for your existing stuff, as I've said a few times now, it's not going anywhere. I don't know why you think it would. kalliopi Ziplon wrote: even to my avatar i had given time and eford to look like she does Great. Keep her as she is, then. You don't have to change her if you don't want to. Again, I have no idea why you have to change anything at all. That said, chances are once you see what you can achieve with mesh, you'll probably WANT to make some improvements to your avatar. But that will be your choice. No one will force you to change anything you don't want to change. kalliopi Ziplon wrote: why must it be all for nothing? It's not for nothing. You've simply got new options now. That's all. kalliopi Ziplon wrote: please help me understand all this , sorry for being so mad and sad is because i adore the game ........................ I'm glad you adore it. We all do. That's why we're here. So, you're among friends. I strongly encourage you to embrace the change, and take full advantage of the new options that are available to you. You don't have to if you don't want to, of course. You can just go on using prims and sculpties like you always have, if that's what you prefer. But you'll be missing out on an awful lot if that's all you ever do. I encourage you to enjoy mesh, right along with everything else SL has to offer.

If I get an IM or a visit while I'm working, I just tell the person I'm busy. It's never a big deal. This is no different than when you get a phone call at an importune time in RL. It's never a problem just to say, "Hey, I'd love to talk to you, but I've got something else going on right now. How about giving me a shout in a couple hours?" If someone takes offense to that, they're out of their mind, and it's probably not in your best interest to associate with them anyway.

Void Singer wrote: we'll to be fair, in the instance of application to clothing/avatar it's grouped with the clothings "layers" (appropriate use), and in that instance it's being used as a layer mask of the alpha (or as leliel points out an alpha mask, I wasn't aware of the documentation) OK, so if it's a layer mask, call it a layer mask. Don't call it a layer. A layer mask is not a layer any more than a pencil eraser is a pencil. Just because one may be attached to the other doesn't mean they're the same thing. But I guess if it were just called "alpha mask", people would probably think it's got something to do with the avatar's face, and they'd be even more confused than they are now. I don't think we can accurately define it as a layer mask anyway. It affects the entire layer stack, not just one layer. It's much simpler to define it as a channel. If we were working in any 3D platform besides SL, there would be lots and lots of channels to work with, and they'd all be defined as what they are. There would be a bump channel, a spec channel, a reflectivity channel, an incandescence channel, etc., etc., etc., and yes, a transparency channel. All would be individually controlled by alpha maps. Only in SL do the words "alpha" and "layer" get thrown together so haphazardly. It used to be confined to the forums, but now it's right there in the viewer, which makes it even harder to educate people on how nonsensical it is. Just because it's labeled as such doesn't make it real. I could glue a lunchbox to the back seat of my car, string a few lights on it, and slap the words "Flux Capacitor" across the bottom of it. But that wouldn't mean my car's gonna travel through time. There's no such thing as a flux capacitor, no matter what the sign says. And there's no such thing as an alpha layer, no matter what that little label slot in the avatar editor says. We already know the Lindens are screwy when it comes to labeling things. Profile vs. path, anyone? They got those two terms backwards years ago, and it's been that way in the viewer ever since. That mislableling caused a lot of people, including myself, to believe prims were constructed in an entirely different manner from how they actually are put together. It took quite a bit bit of convincing from well educated people on this forum (and I think you were one of them, Void, if I remember correctly) to get me to realize how mistaken I'd been. I can only imagine how many people are now equally entrenched in their belief that there is in fact such a thing as an "alpha layer". Void Singer wrote: alpha layer alpha layer alpha layer >=) j/k

As Wade said, one option is to set the repeats via script, just as you would with a prim or a sculpty. Another option, specific to mesh, is to set the repeats via the UV map. By overlapping the UV's and/or making the UV layout larger than just a single UV canvas tile, you can repeat all or part of a texture any way you want.

Maxwell Graf wrote: It was deleted, if i understand the guidelines correctly (having gone over them a little too late, doh) because he who shall not be named that is possibly going to work on the fix that shall not be mentioned, was mentioned. I used his RL name. Ah well. Yeah, it definitely wasn't a good idea to use his RL name. I doubt he would mind, since the whole world knows who he is anyway, but that's not for any of us to decide. Rules is rules. As for using his Linden avatar name, I'd like to reiterate that I've said it dozens of times since he was let go, and none of my threads have ever been deleted. I even organized "Burn Your Sculpties Day", to honor him. That thread wasn't deleted either, and is still up, to this day. The only reason I'm not mentioning his name here is because I haven't yet spoken with him to verify anything as I said in my last post. Once he's told me himself that he's actually on board with this, I'll have no problem using his name in association with this topic. So, once again, let's drop the consipiracy theories, guys. Put away your Nike shoes. Dump the Kool Aid in the sink. Disengage those land mines underneath your front lawn. No one's gonna steal your tin foil hat, nobody's coming to take your guns away, and nobody at LL cares if you mention the Linden avatar names of their former contractors. If you don't want your threads deleted, just don't break the forum rules. It's that simple. ETA: It occurs to me that this thread may not be long for this world, either. It's also against the rules to post a new thread, just to talk about the deletion of another one. As soon as the mods notice this one, it'll probably poof.

My guess is that threads pertaining to the subject in question were deleted because they were technically a solicitation, which is strictly against the rules of the forum. Even if the intent is to raise money for something that we all think is a good idea, it's still not what this forum is for. Trust me, nobody has any issue if you mention that certain ex-Linden's name. I do it all the time. And no one has any reason not to want you to talk about that "irksome problem", or discuss ways in which it might be fixed. It's been talked about many times on the forums, in fact. But when someone posts a message saying "I'm raising money for ________, so please send cash to this website I set up for it..." that does cross a line, no matter what the blank happens to be. One inherent danger with these kinds of solicitations is that there's no way for the average reader to verify that it's legit. Today it might be about fixing a problem we'd all like to see fixed, but tomorrow it could very weill be the SL equivalent of helping Minister Umbuntibaba get his money out of Nigeria. The only safe policy is to disallow all solicitations, altogether. Think about the consequences if they were to allow this sort of thing here. The board could very well end up chock full of threads advertising fund raisers of all kinds. While some would undoubtedly be for good projects, others would be for really bad ideas or scams. Not only would that put the community at grave risk, it would also render the forum largely useless for its intended purpose, as the very presence of the solicitation threads would serve to dilute the actual on-topic threads. I don't know about you, but I really don't want to have to sort through a hundred "Send your money here" posts, just to get to that one poor guy who asked a mesh question yesterday, and is patiently waiting for it to be answered. Further could you imagine the monumental burden that would be thrust upon the moderators if they had to police the solicitations? How could they possibly be equipped to determine which ones are legitimate and which ones aren't? Say they decide to leave one in place, and it does turn out to be a scam; would Linden Lab then be liable? It's certainly arguable. The only way to prevent these kinds of nightmare scenarios is just to make sure that no solicitations at all are allowed, even ones that we might like. So, before anyone jumps on that bitchfest bandwagon, take a breath, and think about the situation logically for a minute. What makes more sense, from an operations perspective in running any forum? Would it really be a practical use of manpower to spend time hunting down threads pertaining to the alleged activities some guy who used to work here, only to delete them for no particular reason, or does it make more sense just to delete threads that actually break real rules? The answer is pretty obvious, guys. The person doing the fund raising is free to advertise it through legitimate channels. He could post on his website, on his blog, on Facebook, in any number of SL-related and virtual-world-related online magazines, even on his land in SL, or literally anywhere else in the universe where such advertising is allowed. He could even put the link to his site in his forum signature, so it shows up right at the bottom of all his posts. It's just not allowed as a thread. Again, the fact that many of us here would choose to support the project if it is indeed for real, is not the point. The rules exist for good reason. The more shortsighted among us probably won't ever get that, and that's a shame. But the wise and thoughtful members of our community should respect it. For the record, I'm in full support of the project, if it does indeed exist. Once I've spoken to the man himself, to verify that all is on the level, I'll gladly donate. I do plan to ask why, if it is indeed legit, he hasn't yet said anything about it on his own blog. There are also other questions that need asking. For instance, what if the target amount is not hit? Will he still do the work for whatever amount does happen to be collected? And if not, do we all get refunds? Or conversely, if too much money is raised, what happens to the excess? Does he keep it as a tip? Does it get put aside toward funding future projects that, like this one, would be for the benefit of the community? Does it get proportionally refunded back to the donors? Does it get given to charity? There's no way to get verifiable answers to any of these questions here on the forums. Solicitations just aren't practical here.

I had that happen once with a rig of my own, but I don't remember what caused it or how I fixed it. I do remember it was something simple. It's been a while, though. Sorry, I know that doesn't help. If it comes back to me, I'll be sure and post again.

Very nice work. It's such a pleasure to see SL starting to look like it should.

WannaPiEcE Crabgrass wrote: Alpha layers Grrr...

Here's the thing to understand about simulated physics. It doesn't have any of the random chaos of the real world. It's based on just a very finite set of mathematical principles. In RL, if you could somehow magically remove all chaos, you'd see the exact same behavior you're seeing in SL. Drop a perfect sphere precisely on-center onto a perfect cylinder, and the ball would not roll off. Perfect gravity would pull your perfect sphere straight down, with no side-to-side motion. Each bounce would be precisely straight up, and each fall would be precisely straight down. Whether the ball bounced just once or a thousand times, it would still end up in exactly the same spot. It won't roll off until and unless some lateral force acts upon it to make it move to one side or the other. The reason games like Pliko can exist in the real world is only because that kind of isolated perfection just isn't possible in RL. No object can ever be a perfect shape, not a sphere, not a cylinder, not anything. And no force operates in isolation from every other force. The ball will never be a perfect sphere, will never have entirely uniform weight distribution, will never have the same amount of bounciness at every point on its surface, etc.. Ditto for the cylinder. So right away, the chances of one ever being able to successfully balance on the other are next to zero. Further, the ball will never fall straight down. Air currents, micro-gravitational fluctuations, vibrations, electromagnetic forces, and even subatomic forces, will always cause the trajectory to vary. So, of course, in RL we'll always see the ball appear to randomly bounce off in one direction or another when it hits the cylinder. In SL, those chaotic factors just aren't there. Drop the ball, and it will fall straight down, every single time. If it bounces, it will bounce straight up, every single time. It will always land in precisely the same spot. Even if that spot happens to be the point of a needle, it won't roll off. So, the kind of random "plinko effect" you might have been expecting just isn't going to happen, with just the physics alone. Now here's another interesting point to consider. Nothing in SL is actually round. Everything is ultimately constructed from flat surfaces, facets. What we call a cylinder is actually a polyhedron with 24 flat sides (26 if you count the top and bottom). What we call a sphere is a polyhedron made from 528 flat triangles. Examine any scene in wireframe mode, and you'll see all this, easily enough. In the above wireframe screenshot, you can see exactly what I just described. I've colored the two objects full-bright red, to help them stand out against the background. Even though the sphere is physical, it remains at perfect rest on top of the cylinder. It will never fall off, unless something pushes it off. As you can see, because the sphere has not been rotated, its polar axis is straight up and down. It sits directly on its southern pole, the single point at which its lowest set of triangles converge. In the absence of any outside force to tip the sphere it in any direction, the downard force of gravity will keep it perfectly balanced on this point, forever. The cylinder, is likewise oriented straight up and down. It's been rotated 90 degrees one axis, obviously, but this still a neutral orientation. The southern pole point of the sphere is resting directly on top of one of the cylinder's edges. Again, unless an outside force acts on it, it will never roll off. Now here's an easy experiment you can conduct, to demonstrate how the physics responds directly to the faceted nature of the objects' geometry. Rotate the cylinder clockwise one degree. Drop the sphere onto it, and it will bounce off to the left, instead of straight down. This is because it will be impacting on a left-sloping side of the cylinder, instead of onto the corner. Now reset everything back how it was, rotate the cylinder counter-clockwise one degree, and drop the ball again. It impact on a right-sloping facet, and bounce off to the right. You can repeat this a thousand times, and you'll get the same results every time, no chaos, no randomness, no Plinko effect. The physics remain entirely predictable, each time. If you want to build a Pliko board, you're going to have to script the ball to behave artificially. The physics alone aren't going to do it. The ball is going to have to be told to pick a random vector for its next motion each time it impacts a peg. ETA: It's also worth noting that even if you could get the Plinko board to work physically, you really wouldn't want to. Physics calculations take place on the server. The more collisions it has to deal with, the slower it runs. Sufficiently complex physics problems can cause serious lag, and can even crash a sim. If you want to build physics games, do it in a game engine that can handle it. SL just isn't made for that.

Medhue Simoni wrote: All that being said, It is quite amazing for it to only cost 14 prims, as it would have at least cost 41 normal prims just to get anything similar with normal prims. Hmm, 14 becomes 41. That reversal of digits gives me an idea for what could be a fun challenge, or potentially a teaching game. Take any of your prim builds, and whatever the prim count count is, reverse it, and see if you can get a mesh version to have exactly that number PE. I think people would discover an awful lot about poly modeling, not to mention develop an intimate understanding of what is and isn't a good idea with respect to modeling for SL in particular, through this exercise. If the reversed number comes out drastically lower, as with your example, then the player gets to learn how to work with a low poly count. If it comes out the same, then he or she gets to discover just how much extra detail you get to pack in when you can make every poly count, instead of losing so many to hidden faces and such. And if it comes out higher, then it's an exercise in waste, which in itself does have educational value. In all three cases, it will likely be quite the challenge of trial and error (and hopefully eventually deliberate calculated action) to hit the exact target number. What say you, anyone up for it? Nice looking bridge, by the way, Medhue.

I really wish they'd stop calling it "alpha layer". It causes so much confusion. It's not a layer. It's a data channel. They should call it "alpha channel" or "alpha map". To be even more specific, they really aught to go with "transparency map". Alpha maps are used for all kinds of things besides just transparenc, after all.

What Drongle is referring to are properly called light maps. I'd give my (avatar's) right arm if we could have them in SL. I use them all the time on other platforms, and they're soooooo amazingly handy. They're my number one must-have item. (They don't have to be just for AO, by the way. They can map any lighting scheme you'd care to put on them, with the only overhead being a small extra set of UV data, and very tiny 8-bit grayscale texture.) The rest of my list, in no particular order, includes bump and spec channels, normal maps, and a standard assortment of basic shader materials (lambert, blinn, and phong, at the very least).