Chosen Few

Drongle McMahon wrote: However, you still use four times the texture area compared to the wall without the shadow. Also, if I made the wall with four box prims, could I not get exactly the same effect by using exactly the same texture with appropriate offset and repeat settings*? (Sorry, that's probably an unfair question, as it would likely be untrue for more complex, realistic cases). Sure, you could use four cubes to get the same effect, and you'd be able to cut the texture size in half. But you'd also be expending 432 polygons instead of just 10, not to mention 4 full prims instead of whatever fraction of a prim a 10-polygon plane comes out to for PE. I'm not sure exactly where the tradeoff is between texture memory considerations and polygon processing considerations. But I have a hard time assuming merely doubling the memory usage from 128K to 256K is going to be a bigger performance hit than multiplying the poly count by a factor of 40 or more. Obviously for this simple example, the difference for each is so small it's impossible to measure the real impact on performance. But as you scale up to more complicated examples, I do think the low poly count is likely to trump the relatively slight increase in texture memory consumption. Also, in a great many models, especially ones that aren't so neatly rectilinear, the texture usage could potentially be far less on a well UV'ed mesh model than on a prim model of similar design. In those cases, you get potentially get a triple win: less polygons, less texture usage, and often less PE to boot. Plus, if nothing else, it's just a heck of a lot faster to drag UV's around a canvas than it is to plug numbers into SL's editor. Drongle McMahon wrote: Using the UV map extending outside the unit box to achieve tiling, as in the wall horizontally, is very nice. Explicitly stacking UVs achieves the same effect, even more flexibly as far as texture use is concerned, but costs a lot of PE as you have to have more triangles and seams. More work too. For a case like the example, I wouldn't want to stack the UV's. You'd have to have at least 8 times as many polygons to make that work. There's no way to justify that. Where stacking does come in really handy is on models that already have to have higher poly counts, and/or less uniform distribution across the texture canvas. Cars are easy examples for this. Usually, the paint job on a car is going to be symmetrical. So, right away, you can cut the texture size in half. Just flip one side's UV's over, and stack them right on top of the other side. Each tire is going to look the same, so you only need one instance of the tire on the canvas. Ditto for both front seats. The savings can be enormous, when you hunt down every part that can share canvas space with another part. You can sometimes use this same strategy, to a degree, with a prim car or a sculpty car, but not always. And, as we discussed the prims and/or sculpties are going to have a higher poly count than the mesh. There's also another benefit to clever UV'ing that we haven't discussed. You can use a single texture on multiple models (or multiple parts of a single model), and each one can look like it was uniquely textured. As an example, here are some super low poly asteroids I made for a video game a couple years ago: Each one looks like it's got a custom tailored texture on it, but really, they're all using the exact same texture. They're just using it in different ways. By rearranging the UV's differently on each asteroid, the pattern of craters, ridges, etc, becomes entirely different on each model. So, even though they've all got the same basic mesh topology, give or take a few polys here and there, and exact same texture, each one looks entirely unique. There are only three in the picture, but I could do 300 different ones, all using that same texture, and you'd never know they're not unique. Imagine an entire rock garden in SL, with hundreds of unique rocks, utilizing just a single 256x256 texture. That's something you could never ever achieve with prims or sculpties, but you can do it very, very easily with mesh. Why stop at rocks, though? You could do the same thing for a forest full of trees, or the stone blocks of a castle wall, or a range of distant mountains, or an assortment of giant snowflakes, or the wings of a flock of butterflies, or whatever else you could think of. There's no end to what can be acheived, simply, effectively, and FAST, when the old constraints of SL are left behind. (Did I mention it's fast? Yeah, I think I said it's fast. How fast? It took me less than five minutes to mak the whole batch of aseroids. About three minutes worth of modeling, a minute or two of UV'ing, and another minute or two to whip up the texture in Filter Forge. Done before breakfast, and paid for the day. Can't complain about that!) Drongle McMahon wrote: There is a materials project wishlist thread where I added a laymans version of what you call a light map. Meanwhile, yes, the alpha overlay panel is a great way around that, although it does mean extra geometry. I will certainly use that (if I ever get the time again). I am sure you could add to the wishlist, although it may never be read where it matters. (The trouble with materials is that they will mean more and more single-use data to dowload). Thanks. I went ahead and added my small assortment of must-have items to the list. As for the increased downloads, I'm not terribly concerned about that. The amount of data in question can be really tiny, even for everything on my list. Shader materials themselves are parametric, so all you need is a small list of values. Things like bump maps, spec maps, and light maps can be capped at 64x64, just like sculpt maps, and they'll work just fine in nearly all cases. Normal maps will sometimes need to be bigger, but considering the kind of savings discussed above, I'm still confident that in the hands of any intelligent user (which admittedly may be asking a lot in SL), we can still come out far ahead of how things have been up until now. Drongle McMahon wrote: * 2x0.8 offset 0,0.1 for the left side; 5x0.8 offset 0,0.1 for the right; 1x0.2 offset 0,-0.4 for under the window; 1x0.6 offset -0.1 for above the window. (That took me longer to work out than doing it your way though. Yup, that's exactly the kind of math I REALLY hate doing. Had to do it every day for years when SL content was my full time gig, so it did get to be second nature, but good lord, does it disturb my calm. Drongle McMahon wrote: More important, fixing it in the uv map prevents a client messing it up, as does having the wall in one piece?). Yeah, that's always in the back of my mind, which is one reason I do prefer to UV it, rather than parameterize it in the destination platform later. There are two definitions of "client", and both can potentially mess it up. There's the technological kind, which is the viewer software, and there's the human kind, which is the customer. Both tend to really love to destroy anything that is left breakable. Of course, client software could probably bork a UV map as easily as it could bork the parametric data, through a botched download or whatever. But at least if the original model has all the needed information, it can easily be put back. If you're relying on the destination platform to remember things like repeats and offsets, it can be awfully time consuming to fix stuff when it breaks. As for those pesky human customers, I'd rather not give them enough rope to hang themselves, when and if I can help it.

There's going to be some variance, from model to model, of course. For larger models, it won't always be possible to avoid tiling a generic texture. But we have that same issue with prim-builds, too, so things certainly won't get worse, in that regard. In other platforms, we solve that issue with light maps, small secondary textures which dictate how much light is reflected off each point on an object's surface. Each model has two UV sets, one for the diffuse texture, and one for the light map. In most cases, the light map just needs a few pixels per face, since the shading gradients can be interoplated, so the light map texture itself can be really tiny. The diffuse texture can be tiled as much as you want across the primary UV set, and it won't affect how the light map gets applied. Shadows stay where then need to be, regardless of whether the diffuse texture tiles once or a hundred or a thousand times. You can even animate the diffuse texture without moving the shadows (or vice versa). Multiple UV support rocks. Hopefully, we'll get that technology in SL one day. Until then, we do have a few options of trickery we can employ. One option is to use shadow planes, in the same way we currently use shadow prims. For a simple example, say you've got a wall with a window sill sticking out of it. Obviously, there should be a shadow underneath the sill. If you want to repeat a small texture across the wall surface, you can't bake that shadow into the texture. But what you can do is add a small polygonal plane, under the sill, just in front of the wall surface, and you can put a translucent shadow image on that plane. Because we can apply multiple materials to a single mesh, that plane could be part of the same mesh as the rest of of the wall, and there won't be any alpha sorting issues. The 32-bit shadow texture won't interfere with the 24-bit wall texture. Or, if you prefer, it could just as easily be a stand-alone secondary mesh, so you can adjust it in-world to your liking. We do this all the time with prim builds. How many times have you put an extra prim underneath a chair or a table, to sit just above the floor, for the shadow? Probably more times than you can count. The only difference now is you can use a 2-polygon plane (or even a 1-polyon triangle) instead of a whole cube, so you eliminate five unnecessary sides, the unnecessary render passes that go with them for their transparency, the unnecessary transparency texture itself that you would have put on them. If you examine just about any prim build I've made in SL, you'll find lots and lots of such shadow prims all over the place. I'll likely be using lots of shadow planes in exactly the same way. Another way to go, which will work in many circumstances (but not all), is just to be clever about how you distribute your UV's themselves. Let's revisit that wall example. Say I want to use this small plaster texture to cover the whole thing: It's only 128x128, nice and tiny. Needless to say, from the sizing of the details that are in it, I'm going to have to repeat it quite a few times to cover the whole wall. That's easy, but what about that pesky window sill shadow? If I add that to the texture, I get this: Clearly, I can't tile that across the wall? So what do I do? The solution is I mount both images, on a single canvas, and I let the UV's do the work that UV's are good at, to distribute them. Check this out. Here's my wall: Now here's its polygon configuration: Note that extra quad underneath the window. (The window sill is a separate object, by the way, but it doesn't have to be.) That quad is gonna be really important in a minute. Before we get to that, let's look at how I'm arranging the two images on the texture canvas: This is a 128x512 canvas, with a total of five tiles on it. The top tile, quite obviously, is the version of the texture that has the window sill shadow on it. The bottom four tiles are all repeats of the sans-shadow version. I set it up this way, knowing that the wall was 4M tall, and that I wanted 1 repeat per meter. With that in mind, here's how I'll UV it. Rememer that extra quad underneath the window sill. That quad will occupy the top 20% of the canvas. It'll get the full width of the canvas, but only enough height to cover the one instance of the texture that has the shadow on it. The rest of the wall will cover the bottom 80% of the canvas. But it can't just be the width of the UV canvas. The whole wall is 8 times as wide as that one quad. So, to keep everything proportional, the texture should repeat 8 times horizontally, everywhere except on that one quad. So, here's my map: Each of the heavy gray lines is a full UV tile. You can see the extra quad for the shadow sitting at the top of tile primary tile, just as described above. The rest of the wall spans the width of 8 tiles, and the 80% of the height of one. Alternatively, I could have left it at one UV tile width, and just used the in-world repeat settings to make it repeat 8 times. Either way does the same thing. Unless specifically directed otherwise (which happens on some projects) my personal preference is always to do it directly in the modeling program, rather than after the fact in the destination platform. It's just faster. And here's the wall, with the texture applied: The shadow is right where it's supposed to be, the borders between the two texture sections are totally seamless, and the level of detail across the entire wall is superb. And that's just with a 512x128, which consumes only 256K of texture memory (equivalent of 256x256). If the wall were twice the height, I could simply make the texture 1024px tall, and I'd still be using a relatively small image, to get the exact same level of detail. The width of the texture wouldn't need to change. Further, I could put in as many additional windows as I want, and as long as no two of them are less than one UV tile apart, the texture tiling would remain perfectly seamless. Now, obviously, this was a very overly simplistic example. But it also had a very overly simplistic solution. There are plenty of other clever UV tricks we could throw at a more complex problem. Will you ever be able to apply a single texture to an entire building? Probably not. But you can't really do that in any game engine either, even with light maps and such at your disposal. There are always going to be SOME limitations. But those limitations are a hell of a lot fewer and futher between, and way less stringent, with mesh than they are with prims or sculpties. We can now achieve the aesthetics we want, with far less overhead than prims and sculpties ever afforded us. That's for large items like walls. How about smaller ones? Well, when a single texture canvas inherently has more than enough space for all the parts, in a model, the efficiency will be extreme. A single 512x512 can be more than adequate for the entire body of a car, for example, if the model is well UV'ed. Sculpty cars and prim cars, tend to have lots of unique texrtures, that they just wouldn't need if we were able to control their UV's. For even smaller stuff, like avatar attachments, the savings simply can't be overstated. Ideas starting to buzz around in your head now? I sure hope so.

Drongle McMahon wrote: Pretty much right, except that the compressed sculpt maps should be more like 3 bytes per vertex instead of 12 if the unused pixels are all made the same color. It would be great if there were an easy, user-friendly way to do that. I have to wonder why sculpt map exporters don't just leave the unused pixels blank. Why interpolate them to full color at all? I'm no programmer, but it seems to me it would be easier, programatically, just to leave those pixels at 0,00 (black) than to have to examine their neighbors and determine a blended color from them for each one. Is it maybe just a historical artifact? The fact that we didn't yet have lossless upload options when sculpties first came out would have made the interoplation necessary back then, would it not? Drongle McMahon wrote: By the way, what is a Cylon? Is it somewhere we can look a it? Cylons are the villains of Battlestar Galactica. They're a race of killer robots. As Void mentioned, I've posted pics of my sculpty cylons before. I don't want to derail this thread by posting images again here, since it would be a little off topic. If you're interested, you can see an early version of it in the way old archices, and a somewhat newer version in the archives. The original was made entirely of NURBS spheres, in Maya. The newer version has some toruses and planes in it, which lowered the total prim count considerably, not to mention made it look better. No doubt the model could be made way more efficient with the smaller sculpt maps that I now know are an option, thanks to you. But still, it would be at least an order of magnitude more poly-heavy than the mesh version will be.

Alisha Matova wrote: Since SL is full of textures, why not uv map in a way that alowes us to use them. That was precisely why I kept the UV layout from the torus, in my example. Any existing generic texture could be applied to it, without having to change a thing. This made for a good "beginner level" example. Were it a more advanced lesson, or were I making the same model for any of my own work, I'd never leave it like that. I'll explain. This subject may seem like a logical no-brainer, at first glance. As you said, Alisha, there are thousands upon thousands of existing textures out there, so sure, make models that can use them. That's only fitting. But upon closer examination, the concept is riddled with problems. As with so many "which path should we take" questions, it really boils down to what our goals are for the given task. If the goal is just to allow people to mix and match everything with everything else, at their leisure, just as has always been the case in SL, then sure, be as generic-friendly as possible with all your UV's. But if you're gonna do that, you might as well just continue using prims and sculpties, because here's going to be little if any benefit for you in using mesh. On the other hand, if the goal is to do the things that mesh is actually good at, like dramatically lowering rendering costs of your models, or creating things you could never make with prims or sculpties, then there's no sense at all in being so inefficient with your UV's. I'll take these principles one at a time. First, let's talk about render costs. I'm going to largely ignore the subject of polygon efficiency for the moment, and just focus on efficiency in UV'ing the polygonal models we're already making. We all (hopefully) know by now that prim builds are relatively poly-heavy because they nearly always have hidden faces, and sculpty builds are quite poly-heavy just by virtrue of the fact that they are sculpties. I'd like to think eveyrone involved with mesh is striving to do better than that. Since the subject at hand is UV'ing, let's focus in on texture efficiency. The single biggest reason SL runs as slowly as it does is because of texture inefficiency.  It's not uncommon for a scene in SL to contain tens of gigabytes worth of texture data, while most video cards can only handle a few hundred megabytes at a time, at most. Hence, video cards choke, and SL's frame rate for all users remains at a tiny fraction of what it otherwise would be. With that in mind, it's really not in the community's best interest to encourage people to keep using the thousands of existing inefficient textures that are out there. The whole point of mesh is to do away with exactly these kinds of limitations, to improve performance as well as aesthetics. People selling those textures will likely choose to disagree, of course, as well may many of their customers. But the self-interest of the status-quo-invested doesn't change the mathematical principles or the cold hard computer science involved. Lag is lag, and the factors that contribute to it are the factors that contribute to it, period. Second, and far more fundamentally, it's possible to make things with mesh that you could never make with prims or sculpties. Because of this, there's no escaping the very real fact that with a great many models, it's simply not possible to UV them in such a way as to allow the use of generic textures. For something like that picture frame, or an exceedingly simple prim-style house, or a the equivalent of a low-prim vehicle, etc., sure, it could work. But it's important for everyone to understand that those kinds of models are just the first water molecule on the first snowflake on the smallest tip of an icerbeg the size of ten galaxies. A lot of people are just kind of in "do-over mode" right now, looking at ways to remake the same stuff they've already made in SL, only with mesh this time instead of prims or sculpties. That's fine, as a starting point. But once people get past that, and start to explore the other things it's possible to do with mesh, they'll quickly see that 99.99999999% of mesh models cannot (and should not) be compatible with the kinds of textures we've all been using in SL these past years. An example we're all already familiar with is the base avatar mesh. We've all seen its UV maps a thousand times (the skin/clothing templates). There's no way we'd ever be able to make that model compatibile with textrues that were meant for prims. It's just not built that way. Neither are most mesh models you'll ever encounter, even ones that are far simpler than the avatar. Mesh opens up a new and better world of possibilities, both aesthetically and technically, for everyone. In the words of High Aldwin the wizard, "Forget all you know, or think you know." Clinging to the old ways of thinking as an SL user doesn't really jive with what mesh is all about. It's time for SL content creators to expand their thinking, to join the larger collective of 3D artists. It's also worth noting that there's a new business opportunity here. If you're selling a model that doesn't have a prim-like UV layout, the sky's the limit for the amount of profit you can make on that one model. After all, why stop at selling it with just one paint job, when you can offer dozens of texture packs for it as well? You could do different color schemes, different lighting schemes, bakes of different kinds of materials, etc., etc., etc. This does several key things for your business: It keeps your customers interested, and in the habit of coming back to you. People already routinely come back to their favorite clothing designers, to see if that blue dress with yellow flowers is available yet as a yellow dress with blue flowers. Now they'll come back to you to see if that brick-front colonial home is available with cedar siding yet. It curbs texture theft. No longer will you need to worry about your full perm textures getting out, and being used for lord knows what, by people who didn't buy them. If a texture only works on your model, it's of no use to anyone who hasn't already bought the model. Let it run grid-wide, who cares? They still need to come to you to be able to use it. Even if you lose money on the stolen texture, at least you made something on the model itself. It gives you a chance to explore your creativity as a texture artist, in away you otherwise might not have. Let's face it, texturing prim and sculpty models well is a tremendous PITA. We've all gotten so used to it over the years, we tend to forget how horribly time consuming it really is. Texturing a model you've made "your way", in a 3D modeling program is damned sight easier and is inherently MUCH faster. You could turn out 55 different varieties of that shiny new sports car you just made, in less time than it would take you to texture it once if it were made the "SL way". It allows you to "sign your work". Leave a small portion of the texture canvas unused, and you can put your name or logo on it, so people know it came from you. This isn't erase-proof, of course, if it's downloadable, and it won't necessarily be practical on smaller textures, but at least the option is there. OK, so what about the people who want to buy a model, and then retexture it themselves? No problem, just include the UV map with the purchase (or charge a little extra for it, if you prefer). If you want to go the extra mile, you can even include a shading map, just as sculpty artists often do. As for that picture frame, here's what I'd do with it, if I were making it for one of my own builds: 1. I'd resize the faces across the canvas, to ensure even texel density on all. The side faces have far less surface area than the top and bottom faces, so they should occupy proportionally less canvas space. This will not only keep the texturning on the sides from looking squished, it will also allow for far more detail on the larger faces. 2. I'd delete the bottom faces. When the frame is mounted on a wall, those faces will be the back of the frame. No one will ever see them, so they're just a waste of resources. Their removal would not only lighten the polygon load, it would also allow for even more texture canvas space to be devoted to the front of the frame.

So you know, in any 3D simulation, it will almost always be the case that polygons are one-sided. Double sided polygons would make everything take twice as long to render, and can potentially introduce shader issues, and other graphical problems that are generally far more trouble than they're worth to have to deal with. In SL, absolutely everything is single-sided, from prims to avatars to land to sculpties to mesh models. They're all the same thing, really. In just about any other game engine or virtual world editor you'd ever care to play with, you'll find this to be the case as well.  When modeling for realtime environments, it's best to make sure backfaces are not displayed in your modeling program. That way, you'll always know what will actually be visible in the simulation. In some programs, this will mean enabling backface culling, or backface occlusion. In others, it will mean disabling backface display. It's all the same thing, whatever it's called. What's important is that only the front faces will render. I'm not a Blender user, so I'm afraid I can't tell you how to turn backface culling on or off in that particular program. I quickly Googled the subject, but was presented with so much conflicting information about what should be such a simple feature, my head started to spin. I have to believe there's an easy on/off switch for it in there somewhere. It would be ludicrous if there weren't. As for the rigging problem, as Coby said, it's best not to do any rigging at all, until after all the modeling is done. When you change a model afater it's been rigged, especially if you add or subtract geometry, you introduce all kinds of potential problems. From your description of the issue, and your screenshots, it seems that one or both of two things might be going on. The first possibility is that when you copied the bone weights the second time, to apply them to the duplicated mesh, you ended up with two sets of data, and they're interfering with each other. In Blender, I'm not sure how to fix that, after the fact. Were you using Maya, I could tell you an easy way to check for that, and fix it if it did turn out to be the case. You'd simply open up Component Editor, see which bones are operating on the vertices that are misbehaving, and zero out the values for whichever bones shouldn't be affecting them. The problem could be fixed in seconds (assuming that's the only thing wrong). But I have no idea if Blender has a similar tool or not. The other possibility that comes to mind is is that since the geometry of your model is no longer a straight-forward match for the geometry of the default avatar skirt, it stands to reason that it might not be appropriate to simply copy the weights from one to the other. If you take each 'side' of your skirt separately, each has the same basic structure as the default skirt. Each is just a one-sided cylinder. But when you combine the two together, that's no longer the case. Structurally, you've got what amounts to a torus. While the original cylinder and this new pseudo-torus two may remain identical from a UV'ing perspective, they're completely different in terms of vertex ordering. Thus, depending on how exactly Blender does its mathematics for rigging, the copied weights from the cylindrical skirt may not be applicable. You may just have to create new weights, rather than copying & pasting. If so, no big deal. As you probably know, if you're going to continue to make rigged meshes, you're going to be doing an awful lot of weight painting anyway. Might as well start now.

Agreed. Not only has it been useful, it's been highly enjoyable. Where we've had disagreement, everyone's calmly and informatively discussed their views, and presented the facts as they understand them, without negativity of any kind. It's been a perfect thread so far. From my point of view, this is the best welcome back to the forums I could have asked for. Thanks, everyone, for that.

THEGaga wrote: leeks

Drongle McMahon wrote: Of course where the more efficient mesh has less vertices, all bets are off. Yup, that was my point, exactly. Considering that a mesh model can have potentially hundreds, or even thousands, of times less vertices in it than a sculpty model, it's pretty hard to say that either one is always going to win or lose. For the most part, I do think meshes will come out ahead, though, given the numbers you provided. Assuming a mesh model is even reasonably well made, it's hard to envision a scenario in which the sculpty version would win. Let's apply your numbers to that Greek column example: 7 sculpties x 1024 vertices x 12 bytes = 84K1 mesh x 750 vertices x 16 bytes = ~11KEven if all four LOD levels, and the physics mesh were identical in size to the highest LOD (which of course they're not; they're much smaller) the mesh model would still weigh 35% less than the sculpty model. Apply the math to something more expansive like my Cylon, and it gets even nuttier: 198 sculpties x 1024 vertices x 12 bytes = ~1.6 MB1 mesh x (estimated) 7000 vertices x 16 bytes = ~109KAgain, multiply by 5, to more than cover all the LOD levels and physics, and the mesh data comes out to less than a third of the sculpty data. But of course, there will be a LOT of models that won't be well made. In another thread I posted in just a few hours ago, someone was asking for help with a very simple model. I noticed right away that the author's first attempt had more than double the amount of polygons it needed. That sort of thing is likely to happen all over the place. But on the other hand, there are always going to be tons of sculpty models that have way too many sculpties in them, too, so the comparison may be a wash, in that regard. Average SL users are nothing if not wasteful. (I did post a tutorial in that thread, of course, to show how to make the same object, with the minumum amount of polys. Hopefully, at least SOME readers, will take the principle to heart, and apply it to their future models.) Steerng this back to PE for a second, with the above in mind, I'd be willing to bet that more than 90% of the people whining about PE would realize their worries are totally unnecessary, if they'd just learn to model more efficiently. Really, if someone's model has more polys than it needs, they've got no one to blame than themselves that the PE cost is too high.

Glad to know all is well now, Jo. I find it really interesting that a previously unseen client-side issue should all of a sudden pop up in both 1.x and 3.x viewers. I wonder if something happens server-side, in response to OOO being turned on or off. It's hard to believe that would be the case, but it's the only explanation I can think of. Anyone have any ideas?

Who is this "you" that you're addressing this message to, exactly? You do know that none of us here made the viewer, right? If you've got an issue you want to bring to LL's attention, file a bug report or a support ticket. They don't read these forums. That's not what the forums are for.

Here's another method. You'll kick yourself when you see how simple this one is. Just use a torus. Set it to have 4 subdivisions around the axis. Now you've got a rectangular torus, which is what a picture frame really is. For the height subdivisions, pick any number larger than 4. The first three divisions, when snapped into alingment and scaled, will become the bottom, outer sides, and inner sides of the frame. The rest will become the top. I went with a total of 5 for mine. That's way less than yours, but you don't need all those divisions on the top. Just put two divisions up there, and soften the normals on the edge loop in between them. The soft normals will make the top look like it's nicely rounded over. In this way, you cut the poly count, and the resulting in-world PE cost, by about 30%, while maintaining the same basic appearance. There you go. At only 40 polys, it's less than half the weight of your original, it's sensibly UV'ed, and it took less than 60 seconds to make.

Drongle McMahon wrote: "but if it's a sculpty, I have to have 2048" I agree with almost everything you say about sculpties, but to be fair to them it should be noted that this isn't necessarily true. For a long time now, smaller sculpt maps produce smaller numbers of triangles. If I recall, this works correctly down to the 8x8 map, 4x4 = 16 vertices*, 32 triangles. Thus it is possible for a sculpty to have many fewer triangles than the simplest prim cube (108). While that's not very useful, intermediate sizes below the standard 64x64 can be useful. The 32x32 map, and equivalent oblongs, produce 512 triangles, much less than a sphere or torus prim. Unfortunately the small maps are not widely known about or used. Most stick to the standard 64x64 even when it's not needed (and some even think 128x128 is still better). So it makes no real difference to your overall conclusions. Thanks, Drongle. I was not aware that smaller maps can now produce lower poly sculpties. That's good to know. I think you're right that it probably doesn't make a ton of difference, though, as the vast majority of sculpt maps out there are 64x64. Drongle McMahon wrote: Also, perhaps deliberately, you omit consideration of the download resource cost. Here, and I think here only, sculpties are considerably more efficient (although the streaming priorities seem to be set up to disguise this). Nah, it wasn't a deliberate omission. I didn't think of it. But now that you've brought it up, I'd love to discuss it. Please enlighten me if I'm mistaken, but I'm having a hard time understanding how it could always remain true that sculpties are more efficient downloaders than meshes, in practice, and at real scale. Take that Greek column previously discussed, for example. As a sculpty model, it would be seven assets. As a mesh, it's just one. Can we really say with certainty that it takes less to download seven unique sculpt maps than it does to download one mesh? I don't know enough about the mesh data set to answer that intelligently, but I'm hoping that you do. Drongle McMahon wrote: For people with fast mechines on slow connections, this can be as important as the rendering resources where meshes win every time. Initially, perhaps. But that's just temporary. Once the scene has loaded, rendering is far more important than streaming, and remains so until the scene fundamentally changes. If someone's doing a ton of traveling around the grid, or if they're in a place where new objects are constantly rezzing and derezzing, then download speed would be of paramount importance. But in more typical use cases, render speed is going to be the chief factor that makes or breaks the experience. Drongle McMahon wrote: As you know, what is now called PE (oh no, now it's Land Impact!), was originally intended as an estimate of that cost, although it is now interpreted as an effective average (by LOD) triangle count (which happens be mathematically equivalent). I never understood the reason for that change in focus. I was actually going to mention that, but some of my previous posts were so long, I deleted what I'd written about it, to save characters. Yes, back in the beginning, it was "streaming cost", if I remember correctly. The numbers were still understood to represent the equivalency for prims, but it was the cost to stream those prims, rather than the cost to render them. I always considered it to be about rendering costs as well, though, no matter what the name was. Generally speaking, a mesh that costs more to stream will also cost more to render, since the amount of included triangles is what's going to determine the weight of both.

Had to break the post in two. Too many characters. Josh Susanto wrote: Again, the problem is not mesh. The problem is fanatical mentality that has surrounded it. Hopefully people just get over it, but somehow I doubt that. Anything that remains effectively elitist will have both proponents who truly consider the costs and benefits, and others who advocate it simply because it is both new, and something that makes them more personally impressive, or because they have something personal to gain by obliquely disparaging competing products or services. There's that odd backwards thinking again, which arguably makes SL so special. Mesh modeling is not elitist in any way. It's what every 3D artist on the planet, outside of SL knows how to do. This has been the case for decades. It's only people who grew up with prims and/or sculpties who think mesh is some newfangled thing that only the very select few can touch. The truth is, as I said before, the elites of the world are those who know how to model well with prims and sculpties. People who can do that have a skill set that 99.99% of all 3D artists in the world do not possess. The common peasants the 3D modeling world are all mesh modelers. Josh Susanto wrote: 6) Not every mesh builder or mesh advocate at LL would need to see a reason to kill sculpts in order for it to be the decision they will reach. Some sculpts, at least, are too inexpensive The proliferation of free copymod sculpts is a barrier to the collection of mesh upload fees, which I have explained drived the RL value of the $L down. There are copy/mod meshes as well. So I don't get your point. Any item in SL could be uploaded once, and then freely copied across the grid, by the entire population, whether it's a sculpty or a mesh or anything else. Upload fees are not at all relevant in the way you seem to want to believe. Josh Susanto wrote: Their presence also contributes to the perception that their mesh equivalents might really not be all that necessary. That's not an unrealistic perception. Not every sculpty can or should be replaced by a mesh. As we've discussed several times now, there are, and will continue to be, plenty of cases in which a sculpty is a better solution for a given problem than a mesh. That's perfectly fine. Nobody's ever gonna have a problem with that. Josh Susanto wrote: But my stone spheroids with one pucker and no seam will always be a better option than someone's mesh rock that still has things on both ends you'll want to hide, especially in mega-size. When I go mesh, I'm not going to start by making a bunch of rock spheroid megas. That's just silly. Why should a mesh rock (or a mesh anything else) have "things on both ends you'll want to hide"? There's absolutely no reason they ever should. I think you're letting your experience with sculpties color your preconception about what mesh modeling actually is. The whole point with mesh is that you can make any shape you want, with zero waste, zero extraneous parts. If you don't want a pucker in there, just don't put one in. If you don't want a seam, don't make one. You don't have to find ways to hide these things. They simply won't be there in the first place (unless you deliberately put them there). Regarding spheres in particular, there are lots of ways to model a sphere without poles and without a seam. SL's prim spheres are the polar kind, as are spherical sculpties. But that's hardly the only way to do it. As for things like rocks, you don't even have to approach them as a deformed sphere, the way you would with sculpty modeling. A rock can just be a rock. It doesn't need to have any correlation with primitive topology at all. Once you've gained a little experience yourself with making mesh models, you'll see what I mean. Your experience up until now with sculpties has been so specialized, you've skipped over the more general. Josh Susanto wrote: 7) PE cost, I agree, is not the only consideration, or at least should not be everyone's only consideration. Just as people will pay more for something that looks better, they will either pay more for something that looks the same at a lower PE cost, or they will pay more in PE costs for something that looks better at the same $L price. There's a hiuristic. I get it. I'm cool with that. I think it's great, in fact. That's why I know that sculpts have to be killed off. They offer too many choices, and that's not good for people who have a vested interest in one particular set of options. I'm not trying to kill mesh, myself. I'm trying to keep options open for my customers and for myself in the long-term. You had me right up until "that's why I know that sculpts have to be killed off". Everything you said before that was spot on. But again, I really don't think sculpties are going anywhere. We've got them, they're part of SL, and that's that. Their popularity will dwindle, as people begin to discover the almost infinite freedom they have with mesh that they could never even imagine with sculpties. But sculpties will still remain as an option. There's no reason to do away with them outright. Josh Susanto wrote: I am eager to see your Cylon. I'd also like to finally see an Alien Queen. Please hit that next. Ooh, good call. My old prim aliens definitely need a mesh overhaul. It had been on my "when I get around to it" list to make sculpty versions, but that was a long list. Most of it will be shredded now. The mesh versions will be way better. Josh Susanto wrote: The reasons I say that mesh builders have more money to throw around than do sculptors are several. When I lived in the US, I was also often not making ends meet, even with 3 or more jobs. If someone hadn't actually given me a computer in SF, I would have missed the first year of sculpts altogether. And yet, people complaining about budget problems in the U.S. all seem to have Photoshop and a bundle of other software I can't afford. They also seem to have processors that will run things I'm unable to run on a Sony VAIO laptop my wife and I got only about a year ago. Blender opens but does not run. Wings does not open. Cracked versions of (um) "other things" which mesh builders have begged me to take do not open or do not run. I can't even get Gimp to load up. And my current configuration actually works better than anything I had in the U.S. Even in my boss's office in downtown SF (yes, I was allowed). I'm using the 092 version of Sculptypaint, Lunapic, and, more recently, Irfanview. I'm sorry to hear you've had so much software trouble. It's hard to imagine why a system that can run SL can't also run Blender or Wings or even GIMP. SL is far more demanding than any of those programs. I've got all three on my nearly 10-year-old Dell, which I'm sure is way, way less powerful than your Vaio. They run just fine on it, as do Photoshop, Maya, etc. But SL can't run on that thing at all. There's simply no reason a laptop that was new a year ago, even if it was a low end one, shouldn't be able to run those three programs. Something's wrong with your system, and it's likely not the hardware specs. Chances are you can fix whatever's preventing those programs from running. That's really neither here nor there, though, with regard to your point about this alleged financial disparity between sculpty artists and mesh artsits. Most sculpty artists use the very same programs as most mesh artists. Some use sculptypaint, yes, but not most. You're one of only two people I've ever encountered in SL who use Lunapic, by the way. And all kinds of people use Irfanview. If the history of this forum is any indication, by far the most popular program among sculpty artists is Blender. But sculpty artists as a group make up just a tiny fraction of the entire Blender user base. What are the rest of those users doing with it? Mesh modeling. I highly doubt the financial status of the average Blender user is any different from that of the average sculpty artist who uses it. I'd be willing to bet that Blender will remain the most popular program among SL mesh artists. Most people just aren't gonna shell out $3500 for Maya or Max. I myself am a Maya user, but that doesn't mean I'm any richer than a Blender user. My software expenditures are part of my cost of doing business. After expenses, my take-home pay isn't much different from that of the average SL user, I'm sure. Josh Susanto wrote: Some applications that are being used to produce mesh product cost more than a lot of Colombians make in a year. Again, I'm OK with that. Users deserve the best options possible if they are willing and able to spend. People use those very same applications to make sculpties. So I just can't see your point. Josh Susanto wrote: But the incentive for them to spend is smaller as long as people are, with any frequency, getting comparable results and effects with anything cheaper; especially with anything free. Sure, but the vast majority of free programs that can make sculpties can also make arbitrary meshes. So again, I don't see where you're getting this assumption that mesh modelers are somehow richer than sculpty modelers. Josh Susanto wrote: Introducing mesh is a GREAT idea because it provides more consumer options and potentially increases total revenues for anyone deriving revenue from the total SL economy, by creating a more compelling in-world experience. But now that mesh has arrived, the same argument can't be as strongly made about continuing to make sculpt available. The thinking among mesh fanatics seems to be that because the argument is not as strong, it is not valid at all. That is my issue. So dismiss the fanatics the same way all reasonable people dismiss all fanatics, and call it a day. Those people don't control anything. If they choose not to make sculpties, fine. It doesn't affect you or me in any way. Josh Susanto wrote: The eradication of sculpts raises the threshold in terms of whose products are allowed to compete by cutting out of the market a huge demographic segment that can't get the secret Illuminati digital handshake to begin step 1 by at least getting the buttons in Blender to do something (anything) when clicked. OK, let's say there are people out there who just absolutely cannot use anything but Sculptypaint, because they've got some kind of chip in their head that is programmed to explode if they so much as look at another program. Yeah, those people wouldn't be able to use mesh. What's their fate going to be? They'll just keep right on making sculpties with Sculptypaint. This threat you perceive regarding "the eradication of sculpts" is entirely in your own mind. There's been no indication whatsoever that anything of the kind is ever going to happen. So why keep worrying about it? Josh Susanto wrote: 9) When I tried treating the Lindens with more respect, I found it was counterproductive. As you can see from the merchant's forum, they have repeatedly lied and condescended not only to me, but to others. Whole threads have been deleted without explanation, and I have had to begin archiving messages on my own computer. I have learned that one important aspect of doing business with Lindens is absolutely not to trust them about anything if I don't absolutely have to. I don't know who you talked to or what you said. I also don't put a whole lot of stock in the negativity that people harp about on forums. It's all too easy for, "_____ Linden told me something a year ago that was true then but is no longer true today," to be come, "____ Linden lied to me," and then everyone jumps on the bitchfest bandwagon. That kind of mob mentality happens all the time, and it's frankly disgusting. If you've got a legitimate grievance with a company, the way to resolve it is to talk directly to that company, not to bitch about it on forums (especially ones that company employees don't even read). It would never occur to me to jump online and complain about LL, or Adobe, or Autodesk or even Domino's Pizza, or any other company with whom I do business. If I have a problem, my first instinct is to call the company up, speak with a real human being with whom I can forge a bond, and work it out. That's the mentality I apply, and my dealings with LL have all been positive. Think maybe there's a pattern there?

Josh Susanto wrote: 1) People often tell me that my stuff DOES NOT look like SL. When you're able to see my museum boxes in stereo, this will only become an even more accurate statement. I've been looking over your offerings on the marketplace, and I must say, from what's pictured there, you've done some very fine work. Your photosourced (at least I assume they're photosourced; correct me if I'm wrong) relief panels and other sculpted objects look great. You've found a fantastic way of expressing the "more with less" principle that so well characterizes the quintessential SL artist, and you've added your own unique flair to it. I would agree that a lot of your work "does not look like SL" in the sense that very few, if any, other artists are doing the kinds of works that you've been doing. You've really built a great niche for yourself, and you've done it with style. It's great to see. But at the end of the day, there's no escaping that what I'm looking at are very clearly just SL objects, great looking SL objects for sure, but SL objects, nonetheless. You could take all those same screenshots, remove the backgrounds so I can't see the tell-tale SL ground textures, put the images on some random website that never once mentions Second Life, and I'd still go "Those are sculpt prims", at the very first glance. The kinds of geometric shapes you've had to work with are the same kinds of shapes we see everywhere on the grid, despite the fact that you happen to be using them in a novel fashion. There are only just so many ways you can bend a sculpty into shape, after all, and those methods broadcast themselves every time. Remove the constraints imposed by sculpty geometry, and your stuff could look like it came from anywhere. That distinctive "This could only have been SL" form factor won't have to be there anymore. You've already proven you've got a great eye for composition. Add to that the open ended freedom of form inherent to mesh modeling, and the great work you've already been able to do will only get even better. Personally, I can't wait to see what you're gonna do with it, once you do get up and running. I expect we'll see some rather remarkable works of art from you. Josh Susanto wrote: So far, everything I've seen of mesh still looks like SL's "distinctive look"; a look I'm still not really sure why exists to begin with. I'd say there are two main reasons for that. One is on us, as users, and the other is on the technology. I'll take the user part first. Existing SL artists are still in the early stages of discovery, regarding what can be done with mesh. It's natural to cling to what we already know, in the face of change. A lot of people (myself included) are right now focusing more on how we can redo our old work better than on what we can do that's brand new, that no one's ever seen before. Once people get that out of their systems, they'll start blazing new, less familiar trails. But that will take time. The technology part remains a barrier to truly breaking the SL mold altogether. We have mesh itself, but we don't yet have the things next-gen, and even last-gen, game engines have, to take full advantage of it. We don't have the simplest of tools, like light maps, bump, spec, etc., which are what help make things look so great on other platforms. We don't even have a proper material shader system, just the same circa 1998 flat-lit texture system that SL has always had. Mesh by itself will broaden the horizons considerably, in terms of the kinds of objects we can and will make. The visual quality of the world will improve by orders of magnitude, just from that alone. But until we also have a full featured graphics pipeline at our disposal to control how it's all rendered, a good portion of the present SL look will remain, in everything. Without mesh, there wouldn't be much point in developing the other stuff. Hopefully, the fact that we now have mesh will one day mean we get all the rest of it, too. Fingers crossed. Josh Susanto wrote: But mesh still has an SL look that even some of my worst stuff seems not to. Visually, there's absolutely nothing a sculpty can do that a mesh can't. It may well be that what artists' work you've seen so far just hasn't been all that special. But that's got nothing to do with the medium itself. You could create arbitrary meshes that have the exact same geometric structure as your sculpty models, apply your same textures, and they'd look 100% identical to your sculpties. From a rendering standpoint, they'd BE your sculpties. There would be no way visual way to distinguish between which ones happened to have been uploaded as sculpt maps, and which ones weren't. So there's no such thing as "mesh has a look". Josh Susanto wrote: 2) I'm sorry that I've overstated how long I will take to get into mesh. I know that there will always be all kinds of pointless gripes. I probably should have saisd I would wait until I'm confident enough that I can see why the remaining gripes are pointless, which is what I did with sculpts. Quite sensible. It's largely academic at this point in time, anyway. Third party viewers are too popular, and none of them yet can display mesh. Until they get there, there's not a whole lot of immediate practicality in spending your time making mesh items. Any investment into developing your mesh inventory is mostly an investment into the future, rather than into the now. I don't blame anyone who wants to wait until " ". Me, I'd rather not wait. But then, I'm not selling off-the-shelf products these days. So, I've got no reason not to jump into the deep end. Josh Susanto wrote: 3) A) I still understand the initial resistance to sculpts. Several things about them are just plain silly. There are plenty of uses for which I would not even try to use them, and for this reason I am happy that mesh, in some form at least, has finally arrived. Sculpts didn't replace standard prim types mostly because of the physics. But I don't see any similar excuses to keep sculpt around now that mesh is here, other than, for a few things at least, it is actually slightly advantageous. I defend sculpts only on that basis, but I do defend them vehemently on the question of PE cost for items such as those I tend to provide. If we were building a world from scratch right now, then I'd whole heartedly agree, there would be no reason to include sculpties in that world. But that's not what's going on. For better or worse, sculpties are an integral part of SL. They can't simply be done away with. There's way too much existing stake in them for that. As for why sculpties never replaced prims, the physics were part of it, yes. But it's more than just that. Sculpties are simply too poly-heavy to be practical on a large scale. Use too many of them, and your frame rate drops to a crawl. If you recall, that problem got so bad, so quickly, that it wasn't long before LL revamped sculpties, so that the lowest LOD became 6x6 instead of 8x8. This cut the poly count of all distant sculpties within view nearly in half, from 64 to 36, without much visual detriment. Sculpty lag was alleviated tremendously. But it even with that improvement, it only went form really bad to pretty bad. It'll never get to good, not when so many wasted polygons have to be there in the higher LOD's, and they do have to be there, by definition. Josh Susanto wrote: B) The sinks are important yes. Not only for preventing inflation in-world, but also to prevent the $L being driven down in value next to RL currencies. I get that the tier fees are the bread and butter, but the RL value of the tier fees, itself, is dependent upon how quickly LL can suck more L out of the economy and make it disappear. Just because the money "doesn't exist", "never existed" or "doesn't actually go into an account when LL collects it, but gets destroyed" does not mean that it is not revenue; it is revenue not lost due to inflation, and it is substantial. I can't agree with your analysis. The RL value of L$ doesn't directly affect LL's ability to collect tier fees. First, I have to believe that most people pay their fees with real money. Second, when tier is paid with L$, it really doesn't matter what the exchange rate is. LL will always take exactly as many L$ as are required to cover the US$ value. It could be L$1 or L$1,000,000 and LL would still get their real money out of it, just the same. There is an indirect dependency, though, of course. A stable economy attracts and maintains a stable user base. Those users pay tier. If the in-world economy were to tank, the dropout rate would go up. There would be less users to pay tier, so LL would make less money. It's in LL's interest to keep the economy healthy, simply because it's in our interest as users to have a healthy economy. That's all. Josh Susanto wrote: 4) Warning me not to become a conspiracy theorist is like telling a fish not to get wet. Ask anyone on the merchant's forum. Haha, point taken. I give you credit for knowing yourself. Josh Susanto wrote: People in all kinds of businesses are worried about losing their jobs for all kinds of reasons, yes. On any job I've had, if my work underperformed the company hype the way mesh has so far, I would already have cleaned out my desk. You've lost me, I'm afraid. How exactly has mesh "underperformed the company hype"? The technology does exactly what it was designed to do. It works. We can make a mesh model in just about any 3D modeling program, and bring it into SL, check. The cost associated with doing that is dependent on the amount of data required to describe and render the particular model, check. That's what was expected, and that's what was presented, right from the start. Where's the disparity? Josh Susanto wrote: It's clear from the way the commerce team does things, though, that, maybe short of somebody burning the office down (if even then), no LIndens are going to get fired this year, no matter what. So, yeah- I should agree; the mesh team would have nothing to worry about, even if mesh did nothing but crash every sim in which it were rezzed. But do they know that? I don't pretend to know what you mean by "how the commerce team does things". But I can tell you two things, with certainty: 1. Every Linden I've ever met (and I've met a lot of them over the years) has been a human being worth knowing. I don't always agree with LL's policy decisions, of course, but I do see the organization for what it is, a collection of highly talented, highly passionate individuals, who do very challenging work, and usually do it well. Further, they tend to be highly approachable. Not a single one has ever made me feel unwelcome, unwanted, or unappreciated. I firmly believe that anyone who says otherwise either just hasn't made an effort to get to know any of them, or is just plain looking for negativity. I understand the tendency to see any company as some faceless entity, which cares about nothing and no one. But that's never the reality. Companies are made up of people, and those people are just like the rest of us. 2. People have already been fired this year, and it would be ludicrous to assume nobody else will follow. Companies hire and fire all the time. LL is no different. I'm frankly stunned at some of the people who have been let go. I stopped trying to assume any rhyme or reason behind LL's personnel decisions the moment they fired Qarl. The man invented sculpties, squashed more bugs than you could count, had a lot to do with bringing us mesh, was one of the most publicly beloved figures at LL, and is just an all around great guy. Yet they let him go. It makes no sense. But then, such things rarely ever do make sense to anyone on the outside. It's arguable that they're not supposed to. If we had enough information to piece it all together, we'd be on the board. Josh Susanto wrote: 5) When mesh was first announced, I was among the many who did not actively follow what was happening but was periodically inundated with the hype. I know people who were beta testers who clearly were not well informed as to the PE costs as compared to the technical benefits. In fact, the person who most agressively pushed me to start getting mesh ready ahead of time only comes to SL now in order to cash out and tells me that if I'm even going to bother to participate, I might as well stick to sculpties - and not due to my personal lack of ability. This person was and is a successful merchant, but seems to feel she was duped. If I had been following technical updates instead of just trying to ignore the hype (none of which mentioned PE costs), I might have been "informed" about how the lag problem was being "fixed". But that doesn't explain what happened in the case of some beta testers.  I don't know who your friend is, but I have no idea why anyone could possibly feel they were "duped". There was always going to be a PE cost. We all knew that. Selective hearing can be a powerful thing, though. As for why some beta testers apparently were better informed than others, that's rather obvious. Testers are human. Just because someone was allowed to participate doesn't mean they actually did, in any meaningful way, or even at all. If an individual chose not to attend meetings, not to read the announcements, and not to communicate with other more active testers, then they easily could have gone through the entire beta period without ever learning a single thing. Ever know anyone in school who was really smart, but flunked out anyway? Was that the school's fault or the student's fault? You can't blame the company when a beta tester chooses not to educate himself or herself on what they're testing, any more than you could blame a school when a student chooses not to do the course work. I'm sorry to put it in these terms, but frankly, even if PE cost had never ever been discussed (which was NOT the case), it still would have been idiotic for anyone not to assume there would be a cost of some sort associated with the complexity of each uploaded mesh. That was my very first question, in fact, when I was first informed that mesh was in development. How would they regulate it? What's to prevent someone from uploading a billion-polygon model, and bringing everyone's framerate to a standstill? Pretty much everyone else I know had similar questions, right off the bat. I don't know why your friend wouldn't have. In the very first weeklly private beta meeting I attended, which I believe was only the second or third meeting ever, PE was discussed. If I remember correctly, Pastrami Linden was leading, and he said something to the effect of, "A prim is about ___kb of data. That's equivalent to about ____ faces on a mesh..." and the discussion took off from there. Sorry, I don't remember the exact numbers. I did not attend every meeting, so I don't know the exact evolutionary steps PE took along the way to get to its present form (I know a few of them, but not all), but in the meetings I did attend, PE was almost always one of the topics. There's simply no way someone could have been paying attention through the beta and not have known about it. I remember there was this huge model of the Titanic someone had made. With just about every new revision, people would ask, "How many prims is it now?" Obviously, nobody could have asked that question if we didn't know there would be a prim equivalency for meshes. With all due respect to your friend, I don't know how she could have missed all that. I can only conclude she must not have been paying attention to much of anything. From the way you described her present attitude, it sounds to me like she's just fed up with SL right now, for who knows what reason. It happens to all of us from time to time.

I think the Van Gough piece has me spoiled. I'm not as impressed with the guitar one. The shots just weren't all that well composed. As a film, it felt more like a tech demo than a work of art in itself. Great music, though.

I'm at the 1920s Berlin sim right now. I've looked around pretty throroughly (with occlusion culling enabled), and I don't see anything flickering at all. I do see a few instances of Z-fighting, as Parrish mentioned, as well as a few alpha sorting issues here and there, but nothing like the kind of flicker you described. If it helps, I'll list the issues I do see. In the NE corner of the Antiques & Curiosities building, there's a plywood cube Z-fighting with the outer wall, at ground level. The "Dance, drink, flirt" poster Z-fights with the wall it's mounted on, when viewed from a good distance away. Consider moving it just a smidge further away from the wall. (Nice poster, by the way.) The Otto Griebel sign on the North side of the Coming Events wall wall is slightly crooked, relative the the wall, so its upper right corner Z-fights with the wall. Snap it stright, and it should be all set. The posters in the windows at the Millinery Shoppe all have alpha sorting problems with the windows themselves. As the posters are all rectangular, there's really no reason they should be alpha in the first place. I'd suggest replacing them with 24-bit versions. The chandelier in Solitaire Creations has alpha sorting issues with the rounded corner window. There's probably no way to fix this, other than getting rid of either the chandelier or the window. I'd say live with that one. Separate issue, but your one-prim sculpty chairs in the upper window of the Weimar building don't hold up well over distance. From the street, the become blobs. They don't look like chairs until your just a few meters away. I'd suggest replacing them with chairs made from a few more sculpties, or with meshes. A similarly designed mesh chair would likely have a prim equivalency of less than one. You might want to lose the Second Life Marketplace sign. LL doesn't allow that kind of use of the SL logo. I love the African gray parrot, in the antique store. I've got pet birds in RL, so I'm always a sucker for a well made bird. Please tell Oriolus I like his/her texture work, on that, and just about everything else in the store. Nicely done. Overall, I have to say I like the build. Just about everywhere, the texturing is very period-appropriate, and well painted. You've captured the style of the period quite well. The Tophat sign, in particular, is a really nice touch. There are a few textures here and there that don't quite match, such as some of the rooftops on the shops, but they're hardly showstoppers. My only major critique is I wish the street had shading. Most of the buildings are so carefully textured, with faux lighting and shading, but the street is just flat. It kind of spoils the feeling. A shadow prim, placed just above the street, would do wonders to bring it all together.

Josh Susanto wrote: 1) I do think most sculpties are crap, and we couldn't do much worse to replace them with mesh. Yes, even some of my own. Fine. Let's be careful not to jump from discussing the limitations of the medium itself into critiquing the quality of the human-made artwork. That's really not the subject I was referring to when I said "most of what we see on the grid looks quite terrible". My point was simply that for the first several years, the system wasn't set up in a way that would enable any of us to do any differently than what we’ve all done. In many ways, it still isn't. But it's getting there. SL content, even the best of it, has a distinctive look to it. You can always tell it’s SL. This is in pretty stark contrast to just about every other platform. Show me a random game or virtual world scene, and I probably won’t be able to tell you at first glance whether it was made with Unity or Unreal or Cry Engine or what have you. It’s possible to make an incredible variety of looks with any of them. But SL always looks like SL, and that’s primarily because we’ve for so long been so limited in the things we can make its content out of. Sculpties improved things a lot over just prims, but sculpties too have a look of their own. A sculpty model, no matter how good or bad in terms of aesthetic quality, can always be identified as a sculpty model, from a mile away.  Josh Susanto wrote: 2) I AM somewhat excited about mesh, but I'm not even going to touch it until people have basically run out of new negative observations to make about their various personal mesh experiences. You're going to be waiting an awfully long time. If there's one constant in SL, it's that people complain ...about EVERYTHING, especially change. Some will keep going with new versions the same old complaints for YEARS, whether they're founded or not. Heck, there are still people out there to this day who dedicate themselves to reporting "new negative observations" about Quicktime, or BVH, or various script functions, or mono, or any of the hundreds upon hundreds of once new features that have been added to SL over the years. Those same kinds of people will also continue to complain about mesh for many years to come. If you’re gonna sit around and wait for all of them to run out of breath, all I can say is good luck, and I hope you packed a big lunch. Josh Susanto wrote: 3) By "efficient", I should have explained that I specifically meant PE cost. And because this will be the very last sticking point in getting people to go to mesh, this is why I believe that LL will inevitably add a PE cost to sculpts. Whether or not they should have before is a separate question. Assuming that they should have before now, it will be fair to ask (when they finally do it) why they've put it off until they're "incidentally" having trouble getting people to use mesh. Assuming that they shouldn't have when they didn't, it will be even more fair to ask why they are doing it at all. You're probably right that the low PE of sculpties will serve as an excuse to prevent SOME people from immediately embracing mesh. But I don't think that will be the case for the long term. The smart ones will figure out that all three mediums (mesh, sculpties, and prims) all have their place, and they'll use all three accordingly. When sculpties were invented, we had these very same discussions about them. Stubborn prim users were afraid sculpties would overshadow prims, so they launched all kinds of complaints about sculpties every day. But eventually, everyone learned that prims and sculpties could and should coexist. One wasn't to replace the other. The same will be true of meshes. It's not a case of either-or. It's all of the above. As for your assumption that LL will increase sculpty PE in order to get people to use mesh, I just don't see what possible motive they'd have for that. If I'm a Linden, what the hell do I care whether you choose to build your shiny new rocket ship out of prims or sculpties or mesh? All I care about is that you have all three options at your disposal, and that all three continue to work. Linden Lab makes their money on tier fees. They want you to create content because content is the reason people own land. They hope your content will be compelling enough to attract more users, who in turn will want to buy more land. Remember, LL is just a service provider. They don't get anything extra for hosting your land if you use a mesh instead of a sculpty for a given object. It's in LL's interest simply to give you the best options they can to build your content with. That's it, and that's all. Mesh is what it is. Sculpties are what they are. LL has no incentive to care which one you use for what, beyond the obvious. Has it occurred to you that maybe the reason people at Linden Lab are excited about mesh is because it's worth being excited about? Josh Susanto wrote: 4) Having mesh as a new option is great. But the hype surrounding mesh in the lead-up to its release tells me that someone at LL has a personal interest in getting people to use mesh that goes beyond the company's interest. Maybe if mesh fails to catch on by some point, someone is out of a job. Something like that; not to hard to imagine. Careful not to join the conspiracy theorists. SL already has more than its share of those. OF COURSE there's hype surrounding mesh. It's the most fundamental and potentially beneficial change to SL that has ever happened. It simply couldn't be a bigger deal. If anything, it's been under-hyped, compared with how important it really is. Since the very first day SL went online, the single biggest criticism of it has always been that its content is all non-standard. But now, that doesn't have to be the case anymore. SL finally works the same way as everything else. Not only does this mean that the world will look and work much better than it ever has, it also means that a tremendous barrier to mass adoption has been removed. Both of these factors mean that a lot more people will be using SL than ever before. All of that is good for LL, and good for all of us. As for people losing their jobs if mesh doesn't succeed, forgive me, but I have to say I find that notion laughable. First of all, it's not even a question of "succeeding" or "not succeeding". Mesh is here, and it works. There's no measure of "success" beyond that. Second, most of the people who tirelessly worked to bring us mesh have already been let go. There are very few members of that team left still working at LL, and none of them have the power to influence policy in the way you seem to want to believe. If LL chooses to fire the remainder of the mesh team, it won't be because you chose to make that giant mesh castle in the sky out of sculpties. It'll be because that's what corporations do, for reasons that usually have nothing to do with anything that we on the outside might imagine. Corporate board rooms are crazy places, to say the least.  Josh Susanto wrote: 5) Look at the total timeline between when mesh was announced for release and when it was released. During what proportion of that time had people been made aware of PE costs at all, much less how they were actually going to impact the utility of mesh as compared to sculpt? PE cost is a pretty important product feature to consider, but it was the elephant in the living room that everyone chose to ignore before it was announced, easily because they did not know what, exactly it would be. I figured the elephant would be massive lag, and I said so. When PE cost was explained, it appeared to be, to me at least, nothing but a way of getting around the massive lag I had anticipated. As a member of the private beta team, I knew mesh was coming long before it was ever publicly announced, and I can promise you, the concept of PE was made very clear to all of us, right from the start. It took a long time for them to work out the exact formula, but we all knew that in principle, there would have to be limits on mesh complexity and size. As soon as the NDA was lifted from the private beta group, all aspects of it, including the PE concept were publicly discussed. The public was made aware of literally everything that we private beta testers had known. Again, they were still tweaking the PE formula at that point, but the concept was hardly a secret. As for PE being a way to help prevent massive lag, hell yeah, that's exactly what it is. Nobody ever suggested anything different. You didn't honestly expect they wouldn't limit the amount of polygons people could use, did you? That wouldn’t have made any sense at all. SL doesn't run on magic. It runs on mathematics, just like every other computer system. Resources are finite, and have to be allocated proportionally. Since prim count has always been the measure by which all things in SL have been restricted, from scripts to textures to physics to objects themselves, it only made sense to stick with that. It's worth noting, by the way, that the amount of bang for the buck you get in terms of mesh complexity and size per equivalent prim is pretty generous. If you could only see some of the poly count constraints I've had to work under when creating assets for various games and virtual worlds over the years. The amount of complexity I can pack into the 117 prims allowed on a 512M parcel in SL is huge by comparison with many. But even setting that aside, the fact is you can now create all manner of things with any given prim amount that you never could even dream of before with just prims and sculpties. So where's the problem?  Josh Susanto wrote: 6) Killing sculpts, even where they are a good option, is a bottom-line issue for LL, and that is why they will do it. What on earth gives you that idea? What possible incentive would they have to kill sculpties? Sculpties are a very important part of SL, and all signs are that they always will be. Josh Susanto wrote: By the time PE costs were explained, a lot of important designers had already invested long hours into mesh products that were rendered inefficient compared to similar sculpts in terms of the PE costs. By the time it was explained? You mean day one? As I said, it was explained, in concept, right from the beginning. As for those poor unfortunate "important designers" whose mesh products are so horribly inefficient, I'll say three things: First, I'd love to hear from some of them, and see if they're really complaining like you seem to think they are. For my part, as someone who made 100% of my living by creating content in SL for several years, I'd say I qualify as "an important designer". I'm not complaining. (At least not about this.) Second, if anyone invested time during beta into developing products that they expected to be able to sell right away upon release, they had to know they were taking a huge risk. Things change constantly during beta; that's the nature of the beast. Nobody should have expected any values to stay the same. Any beta period is for testing and feedback, not getting a head start on related product development. Third, I have to reiterate that there are plenty of selling points for a mesh object over a sculpty object aside from just prim count. A clever (and honest) marketer would seek to educate his or her customers on this. One might, for example, put something like this in one's advertising: "Both versions of this product are excellent, and both have nice low prim counts. The sculpty version has a few less prims, while the mesh version produces only a fraction of the lag, has correct physics, and looks way better. You decide which version you want, or you can buy both at a discount!" If the ONLY thing anyone cares about is having the lowest possible prim count for every single item, we might as well just draw a pretty picture of the item, and slap it on the side of a cube. There you go, one prim for everything. Me, I'd rather create the best looking, most practical items I can, with all the tools at my disposal. That means meshes for some items, sculpties for others, prims for some, and combinations of all three for still others. There's a whole new world of possibilities, and those of us who are savvy will capitalize on all of it. I for one am pretty excited about the fact that the PE of most items is going to go WAY down, right along with the rendering overhead. My film-quality Cylon avatar comes to mind right away as a great example. In its present form, it is 198 sculpties, which is why I've never put it up for sale. I've never wanted to be responsible for large numbers of half-million-poly character models walking around the grid, so I've kept it off the market, even though a great many have repeatedly asked to buy it. I estimate the mesh version will weigh in at right around 8,000 polys, and will have a PE somewhere in the double digits. Way better, all around. There are countless other models all over the grid that could similarly benefit.  Josh Susanto wrote: This has been a political problem between LL and mesh designers, and the inevitable resolution will be to make the corresponding sculpts somehow less efficient. It's not an "inevitable resolution". There's been no indication whatsoever that anything of the kind will happen. Some of us feel that it would be beneficial if it did happen, but I don't think anyone here (besides you) thinks it ever actually will. I know I sure don't, at least.  Josh Susanto wrote: Sculpt designers are less politically important than mesh designers simply because, as a group, we don't have as much money to throw around. Now you really do appear to be jumping on that conspiracy theorist bandwagon. Where exactly are all these oodles of money that mesh designers have to throw around, and where exactly are we supposedly throwing it? More importantly, how do I get my share? I'd really like to know, because right now, just like 99% of America, I'm barely covering my bills. Further, why do you assume there's this tremendous divide between "sculpty designers" and "mesh designers". I'm both. Most 3D artists I know are both. Again, it's not about either-or. It's about using all the tools that are available to you, in the most sensible possible way. Forgive me, but it sounds to me like you're just comfortable with sculpties, and you're uncomfortable venturing out, so you've erected this hard wall of separation in your mind. The irony is that if you've already been making sculpties, then you're already a mesh modeler. Sculpties are just a particular type of mesh, after all. The only difference is that now there are less constraints on you. I'd also like to add that I've never needed to "throw money around" in order to get my voice heard by LL. When I want to talk to someone over there, I just pick up the phone. It's not a difficult concept. Dealing with LL is just like dealing with anyone else. Treat each human being there with individual respect, and they'll treat you the same way right back. Accusing them of essentially having been bribed by some mysterious group that you're not a part of isn't exactly the way to do that.  Josh Susanto wrote: Also, every time mesh data gets loaded to replace sculpt data, LL gets paid the mesh money and keeps the previously paid money for the sculpt data that is now practically useless in a lot of cases, and certainly will be useless in almost every case if the PE cost of sculpts can be set highly enough. LL doesn't make a profit on the L$ you expend by uploading stuff. Upload costs were a part of SL, even back before Lindex existed, when LL's written policy was that they would not sell L$ themselves. It even used to state in the TOS that L$ are not real currency, and have no inherent value. Nowadays, they no longer argue that L$ don’t have value, but they’re not exactly raking in the dough off of them either. When you buy L$ on Lindex, they charge you all of 30 cents, regardless of how much L$ you buy. You could buy just 10 L$ to cover one texture upload, or a million L$ to cover practically unlimited uploads of everything you want, and they'd still just take in 30 cents. The reason they charge you L$ to uploa files is not so they can get you for another 30 cents when you run out. There are two absolutely vital reasons they do it: 1. It provides a sink for the economy, which helps ensure L$ retain in-world value. Without sinks, everyone would just continue to accumulate more and more L$, as premium members have a fixed income. Inflation would run rampant. None of us would be able to sell anything, because prices would just keep going up and up and up. It would be like post WWI Germany, on steroids. By keeping the supply of currency at a relative constant, the value of currency in-world is kept relatively stable. If a skin cost you L$3000 yesterday, chances are good another one will cost you L$3000 tomorrow. RL governments do the same thing. It's very important part of any economy. 2. It keeps people from abusing server resources. If everyone could just upload all day long with impunity, LL would run out of disk space and bandwidth in no time, flat. There has to be at least a perceived cost for uploads, to keep people from operating unreasonably. Believe me, LL's not in business to squeeze you for upload fees. Those fees have always been about sinks and allocation of network resources, nothing more, nothing less.

Jo Yardley wrote: In short; when I look trough certain alpha textures pretty much ANYTHING behind it dissapears and reappears really quickly, not just water, trees and other alpha textures, no EVERYTHING. Jo, my apologies. I misunderstood what you were talking about. Questions about the alpha sorting glitch come up so often, I just assumed that that was what you meant. But the rapid flickering you're describing is an entirely different thing. Had I not tried Void's experiement with an invisiprim, I never would have figured it out. Now here's the good news. As Void surmised, the problem does indeed appear to be linked to occlusion culling. If I disable object-object occlusion, the flickering behind invisiprims stops instantly. Turn it back on, and the flickering resumes. I'm not able to replicate the problem with alphas on my end, so I can't verify it specifically for that. I only see it with invisiprims. But I'd bet dollars to dounuts it's the same exact thing. If you don't already know how to disable occlusion culling, here's how: 1. Press ctrl-alt-d to add the Advanced menu to your top menu bar. 2. Press ctrl-alt-q to also add the Develop menu (or click Advanced -> Show Develop Menu). 3. Press ctrl-shift-o to turn occlusion culling on or off (or click Develop -> Rendering -> Object-Object Occlusion). Note, the shortcut won't work without the menus first being enabled. Give it a try, and please let us know if it solves the problem.

For some inspiration, here's my favorite SL timelapse: 

I don't know for certain. You'd be better equpped than I to dive into the code, and try to figure out what's really going on with invisiprims. A freind/colleague of mine gave me the reversed draw order explanation a few years ago, and it did seem to make sense. If it were just an issue with how 1-bit alpha is treated, then I'd assume trees would produce the same effect, but they don't. It also wouldn't explain (or at least I don't THINK it would) why invisprims hide water, which is a GL effect, rather than a texture. By the way, I do see what you were talking about, regarding invisprims making alpha textrures appear to flicker on and off. They didn't used to do that. I wonder what's changed. From my experiments just now, it only seems to happen with very distant objects. Objects close to the invisiprim itself seem unaffected. Weird.

Void Singer wrote: I also see a driving force in making the creation of items external to SL much easier.... when SL began apps for 3d creation were exclusively the domain of high priced businesses... now we have multiple options for the free creation of these same things that can be used not only in SL but in other places too... yes, the skill sets are more advanced, but they're also now accessible to people without having to shell out gobs of cash. Yup, another inevitible consequence of time. Technology gets cheaper and easier to access. In fairness, Blender and some other free 3D modeling tools do predate SL. I remember dabbling with Gmax, back in the early 2000's. TrueSpace was available as early as 1994. But your point is well taken. The financial barriers to getting invoved as an amateur or semi-pro 3D artist are lower than ever. Blender is now almost as powerful as the best of its commercial counterparts, and tons of good inexpensive tools now exist as well. Even Maya, which used to be as much as $8000 is now only $3500. It's still out of reach for most, obviously, but it's a damned sight better than it was.

Void Singer wrote: clear understanding Heh, nice one! I do hope that was intentional. In any case, yeah, it's possible we're all talking about different things. For practical purposes, I'm not sure it matters, though, because in each case, there's really nothing to be done about it. Regarding the invisiprim texture in particular, my understanding is that's a special case. From what I was told, it reverses the draw order for certain scene elements, forcing avatars and alpha textures to be rendered "behind" everything else. Contrary to its name, it doesn't actually make anything invisble; it just sends them to the back of the scene. It was originally a bug, which was deliberately left unfixed, because it turned out to be useful.

Rolig Loon wrote: Does it bother you at all, though, that SL is rapidly drifting toward being a world made by talented 3D designers and losing some of the "Your World ... Your Imagination" feel that it had when we arrived? I see it as just the opposite. What had been a tremendous divide between "the SL artist" and all other 3D artists has now been removed. Medhue's story is a great example of this. He's now able to use his pre-existing skills, after having not been an adopter of SL's previously unique way of doing things. The truth is SL, with all of its proprietary ways, always was purely the domain of only the most exclusive artists in the world. Over the past 8 years, if you could make anything look good in SL, you were one of very few on the planet with that particular skill set. It wasn't something you could come in already knowing how to do. It took months, if not years, of serious practice and self development to get good at it. And man, did we ever get good at it. The visual quality of builds improved at least a hundred fold over the years, while the tools and technology behind creating them remained more or less at a standstill. Pioneering works like Bedazzled's China Town, Chip Midnight's skins, Xenius Revere's baked chapel, and countless others, all served to raise the bar for what was visually possible in SL. Even before mesh and sculpties came on the scene, the "your world" of two or three years ago was very different from the "your world" of six or seven years ago. When sculpties came along, we had these same kinds of discussion about them. "ZOMG! You have to make them in an external modeling progam? No way! No fair! Only very talented established 3D artists will ever be able to do that. The sky is falling. We're all doomed! Cats and dogs living together! Mass hysteria!" But ordinary people did learn to make sculpties. And just like with prims, the builds they made with them were timid at first, but then got markedly better over the following years. Now here we are, at the dawn of a new era with mesh. Except it's really the dawn of an old era. Anyone and everyone can now bring their content into SL, without the monumental learning curve that was previously required. Externally acquired skills are now applicable. The new SL user has never had it so good. The only people whose feathers are rustled are the ones who already have investment in the status quo. They put a LOT of effort into becoming among the elite, the ones who can manage to make decent looking content with SL's bizarre tool set. They don't tend to see themselves as "elite", of course -- they prefer to think of themselves as average people who just happened to stumble across this so-easy-to-use, super-intuitive building system so thoughtfully provided for them. But elite is what they are, nonetheless. For among the millions of 3D artists living on this planet, only a very small handful have managed to do anything of note in SL. (Selective memory is a wonderful thing, isn't it? Never mind the fact that this thing that is "so easy to use" took you months to figure out. Yeah, it's super intuitive. Right.) The fact is prim building is WAY harder than mesh modeling. Ditto for sculpties. If someone is capable enough to be good at building with prims and/or sculpties, oh the wonders they could accomplish when handed the open ended freedom of traditional 3D modeling, as long as they're willing to dive into it. But habits can be hard to break. As Agent K so well put it, "People are dumb, panicky animals, and you know it." It's just easier for some to play Chicken Little than it is to actually look at the truth of things. If there is a "divide" to be found, it's not between the "talented 3D designers" and the laymen. No such distinction need exist. It's between the open minded and the stubborn, the willing and the unwilling, the eager and the fearful. As for "my world, my imagination", I can say I've long been imagining what my SL could be if I could only bring in my mesh models. But that's all it was, my imagination. It certainly wasn't my world. My SL world was prims for the first four years or so. It was prims and sculpties after that. I got damned good at using those media, but they were never ever what I really wanted them to be. Now I can do a whole lot more, and that's wonderful. (Now just give me a proper material shader system, and a better lighting engine, and I'll really be happy.) I do find myself with a brand new problem, though, and that is where to begin. There's so much I want to do, and I've finally got so much freedom to do it, it's hard to know what project to start with, and even harder to plan what to do with any particular one. I'll give you an example. A few days ago, I decided to rebuild my Klingon Bird of Prey, as a mesh model. I began with the exact same technique I'd used when I started the original prim version all those years ago, just in Maya this time instead of in SL. I grabbed my orthographic diagrams, and arranged them on a set of intersecting planes, to give me a scaffold of sorts, to build on top of. But then I froze. All I could think was, "Uh, now what? Where do I start? How exactly do I want to approach this? " See, for the prim version, there had been only one practical way to proceed. Rough out the basic design with as few prims as possible, and then use the textures to fill in the details. That's it. But with mesh, there are a hundred different possible directions I could go. Should I apply the same basic principle, just model the flat surfaces, and just use my same existing textures to hint at the details? Or now that it's feasible to do something more geometrically complex, should I actually model details like the wing feathers and the various pipes and such that run along the fuselage? If I do the latter, at what point do I decide any particular detail is too fine to bother modeling, and let the texturing take over? Most importantly, why should any of this even be a big deal? I've done this a thousand times for other platforms, after all. So, why should the fact that this is for SL be throwing me for such a loop? I've been going over and over the build in my mind all week, and I'm no closer to laying down the first polygon. Apparently, without ever realizing it, I've set up a divide of my own, right in my own head, and I've spent the last seven years reenforcing it. If a build is for SL, approach it this way, and if it's for anything else, approach it that way. That segregation is hard to let go of. Where I've been used to SL's constraints so rigidly guiding my hand, I've now all of a sudden got so much freedom, I'm just not sure how to handle it. It's a truly bizarre feeling. I'll get pat it sooner or later, of course, but it's gonna take a while. I'm curious, anyone else having the same problem? Rolig Loon wrote: Does it worry you a little bit that the advance of 3D modelling is spreading a cultural divide of sorts? Separating SL further into creative types and consumers? That kind of divide is absolutely necessary for a healthy and vibrant society. We need creators and consumers, both. There's nothing wrong with that. I can't agree, however, that the advance of 3D modeling is responsible for spreading the divide in any way. I'd argue just the opposite. The more tools are available, the more opportunity there is for people to create. The doorways to becoming a content creator in SL are now open wider than they ever have been. It's fer easier to become a creator now than ever before. The real reason the divide appears to be widening is nothing more than natural progression. As time goes on with any technology, the ratio of creators to consumers always goes down. That's not because there are less creators. Usually, there are more. It's just that the rest of the world arrives, too, and most of them have no interest in creating. The pool gets diluted (as it should). In the early days of SL, everyone was a creator. The ratio of creator to consumer was 1:1. Eight years later, we've got more creators than ever, but we also have countless millions of consumers. The ratio has gotten lower, even though the total amount is higher. This same pattern has been true of nearly every technological genre you could think of. The first person to eat cooked food was the person who first discovered fire. Now we all eat cooked food, but not all of us actively cook. The first people to look at photographs were the first users of the camera. Now everyone in the world looks at photography every day, but not everyone is a photographer. The first people to watch movies were the people who pioneered the film industry. Now we all watch movies, but relatively few of us make them. The first users of the Internet were all programmers and designers. Now everyone uses the Internet, but most people don't create much of anything with it (besides tweets and Facebook status updates). Early adopters are primarily creators, always. Consumers arrive later. SL is no different. The divide you speak of was always destined to happen. The state of available 3D modeling tools has nothing to do with it. As time goes on, the audience gets bigger. It's worth keeping in mind that not everyone takes "your world, your imagination" to mean "I get to make stuff". For a great many people, it means "I get to buy stuff" or "I get to hang out with my friends" or "I get to watch stuff happen" or what have you. People like you and me, who tend to think always about creativity first, are relatively rare. In SL, we found a place to congregate, which made it easy to believe our own culture was the only one. But it's not. There are many others, just as vital, just as valid. We don't lose anything in now being surrounded by that. Those of us who are wise will recognize that we're enriched by it. It's also worth noting that the ratio, although it has gone down, is still nowhere near realistic levels. A disproportionately large portion of SL users are creators. Most of the "ordinary" world still hasn't found SL yet. When they do (and they will), the ratio will drop to a tiny fraction of what it is now. ETA: OK, I've edited this post about a hundred times now, for typos, and I'm getting sick of finding them. If there are any still in there, they're in there to stay. Yup, insomnia is just that much fun.

You're most welcome, Jo. I'm glad you found the information helpful. I'll be curius to check out your Berlin sim when I get a chance, by the way. Sounds neat.

Josh Susanto wrote: Sculpt IS a stopgap when applied in cases where mesh would me MORE efficient. Sculpt IS NOT a stopgap when applied in cases where mesh would be LESS efficient. There's no disputing that simple and straight-forward logic, of course. However, how are we defining the word "efficient", exactly? For the answer to that question is what directly determines whether this kind of logic is even applicable in the first place. If we're talking only about prim count, then you've got a point. Some sculpty models will always be more "efficient" than arbitrary mesh models, in that regard, as we've discussed. But if we're talking about the bazillion other things that fundamentally matter to any 3D simulation, such as poly count, texture usage, rendering speed, memory consumption, etc., then an arbitrary mesh can always be far more efficiently constructed than any fixed, completely unchangeable structure like a sculpty. By its very definition, a sculpty has to be contorted and bastardized to take on the appearance of any desired shape, without regard to polygon distribution or count. By contrast, an arbitrary mesh can, and almost always is, constructed directly to BE the desired shape, with as few polygons as possible, and with optimum distribution. There's a world of difference there. Sculpties, are almost always wasteful, whereas arbitrary meshes never have to be. Even at the most basic level, the disparity can be huge. If I want to make triangular plane, I only need one polygon if I can make my own mesh, but if it's a sculpty, I have to have 2048. If I want to make a rectangle, then I just need two triangles if it's an arbitrary mesh, but again I have to have 2048 if it's a sculpty. If I want to make something spherical, I could do it with as few as 72 triangles, but a sculpty spheroid is, once again, locked in at 2048 . If I want to make something cubical, I could do it with 12 triangles, but if it's a sculpty cuboid, there's just no escaping the ever present 2048. Etc., etc., etc. For these most basic of shapes, we're talking about difference factors of 100x or 1000x or even over 2000x. There's simply no way to imagine a simple case in which a sculpty would be more efficient than an arbitrary mesh in terms of poly count. OK, so how about a more complex case? Consider the Greek column I discussed with Rolig. As I mentioned, that particular model would require about 7 sculpties to produce the requisite details, which means an almost laughably huge 14,336 triangles ...for a coulmn! The arbitrary mesh model was more than 10 times as efficient, at just around 1400 tris. And that's just for one. Say I'm building the Parthenon, which has 69 pillars. The sculpty version would boast almost a million polys! That's insane. The mesh version would be piddly by comparison, at just under 10,000. Heck, I could model every single statue, every crack and crevace, and probably still not need a million polys for the entire thing. If I tried to do that all out of sculpties, I shudder to think what the final poly count would be. I think you can see where I'm going with this. The fact is, in every category except prim count, there's simply no way sculpties could ever be more efficient than arbitrary meshes. No amount of wishing it were so will ever change that. So, it's really a question of what we consider most important with each build. If prim count is the primary concern, then yes, there are situations in which the otherwise wasteful sculpties will win out, as we've discussed. But if every singe underlying principle of how 3D graphics works is what we consider important, then sculpties can never win. It's quite unfortunate that SL has been set up for so long to put prim count at odds with everything else. Some people are so programmed to "think in prims" that they just aren't willing to accept that that's just not what makes it tick, under the hood. Perhaps it would help to expound a little on the history I briefly touched on earlier. Back in the day, the prims per land metaphor was devised as a way to neatly divvy up server resources. As I mentioned before, that analogy did make very good sense at the time. Geometric rendering costs didn't really need to be considered, since there was an inherent fixed cap on that, as long prims were the only medium we had to work with. A region could only contain 10,000 prims (the current level of 15,000 came later), which meant there could only ever be a few hundred thousand polygons at a time in any one region. So, the metaphor worked for front end management, as well as back end allocation of resources. All was harmonious. But the harmony was only by coincidence. It was an illusion, which wasn't at all scalable, not future-proof, not in any way. As soon as you introduce variable poly counts per single object, it all goes out the window. Reality takes hold, and the illusion is shattered. Josh Susanto wrote: I imagine it's too soon to add a totally unnecessary PE cost to sculpts, but that might not stop them. I really don't think they'll ever change the PE cost of sculpties. This discussion is entirely hypothetical. I believe they SHOULD, but I don't think they WILL. Josh Susanto wrote: I figure it's sort of inevitable at this point because not enough people are yet buying into the belief that mesh is a panacaea for builders. Nah, it's not a question of "belief". There are only two things holding people back from fully embracing mesh at this point. One is the fact that not all viewers are equipped for it yet. The other is just simple inertia. It takes time for people to adapt to change. Both of these factors are highly temporary. If you think about this from outside the perspective of a singularly invested SL user, it's almost comical. People are actually complaining that SL can finally do the same things every other 3D platform can do. All that's really happened is that a major barrier to the rest of the world has been removed, but somehow, some people choose to see this as something new, like LL invented mesh modeling out of thin air or something. Mesh modeling has aways been THE way realtime 3D graphics is done, everywhere outside of SL. But because SL's original architecture lent itself more easily to the use of parametric solids, this completely bizarre prim system became the standard of measure for all things inside Second Life. Those whose 3D content creation experience began with SL tend to have no idea that SL is the only place where their particular mindset, and their acquired prim modeling skills, are directly applicable. The standard everywhere else is mesh. If SL had started with mesh, and was now introducing prims and sculpties, we'd be having this exact same discussion about the change. Lots of existing users would be "set in their ways" about using mesh, and would be questioning whether prims were really worthwhile. Preconception is a powerful thing. It's well worth noting that nearly every pre-existing 3D artist who ever joined SL, including myself, was at first mystified by what a clumsy and under-capable system SL was utilizing for content creation. We learned to make the best of it, of course, and some of us even came to very much enjoy the constant puzzle-solving challenge of figuring out how to do more with less. But for many on the outside (and even some on the inside), SL remained the laughing stock of the 3D modeling world. "Why would I ever want to go in there and play with Legos, when I can stay out here and use clay?" people would ask. (It's kind of amazing how many people independently came up with that exact same analogy. I had that discussion with people more times than I could count.) My response would always be, "Well, yes, you can build much better models in Mays or 3DS Max or Blender than you can in SL. But then what? Look, if all you want to do is build the best looking race car you possibly can, keep right on doing what you're doing. But if you want to be able to get in that race car, and drive it around town, and show it off to your friends, that's why you should do it in SL. It might not look as good, but it will be able to do some pretty cool stuff. SL isn't just about modeling. It's about interaction and social connection, and you can't have that if you're just out there on your own." Some got it, some didn't. But all agreed, SL's content, even the very best of it, wasn't much to write home about, visually speaking. As SL users, we tend to get so used to it, we forget that most of what we see on the grid really looks quite terrible. We silently accept, "that's just what SL looks like", and then when we encounter something that looks mediocre, we go "Oh, that's awesome!" since it looks so much better than the norm. But mediocre is still all it ever was. When compared with how things look on other platforms, SL's content has always left a lot to be desired, to say the least. That's not a slight against any SL artist, by the way. There are plenty of highly talented people in SL, who have produced some truly remarkable works, pushing SL's limitations beyond what anyone could have expected in the beginning. But that caveat of "SL's limitations" has always been there, nonetheless. We were never exactly about to see the next Crysis or Mass Effect or God of War happen in SL. But now, the game is finally changing. For the first time, SL has been brought into alignment with how everything else works. And that's huge. It's still got a ways to go, in terms of lighting, shaders, etc., but at least we've got the geometry to work with now. As for the belief factor, whatever the current crop of builders do or don't choose to believe really doesn't matter, in the grand scheme. Whether any individual likes it or not, the SL world has changed (for the better), and its content will inevitably rise with that tide. The only question is who specifically will remain onboard as the seas get higher. Those who choose to remain stationary will drown. Those who decide they're going to start creating content the same way every other 3D artist in the world has already been doing for the past 20 years or so, will do great. Josh Susanto wrote: For mesh to be the perfect solution LL wants you to believe it is, sculpts will somehow have to become a really, really big problem. It's not about what LL or anyone else wants anyone to believe. It is plain and simple fact that any reasonably well constructed mesh model will render far more easily and efficiently on your screen than will any comparable sculpty model. You should be excited by that. Sculpties are already a really, really big problem for everything except prim count. They render horribly, they don't take textures well, their physics are absurd, they take way longer to make than they should, they're wasteful in every way that matters. Brilliant as they were for the purpose for which they were invented, they'll always be problematic.