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I dont need to be a tech to know that I can't build inworld with meshes and that I cant see my finished creation inworld until Ive paid to import it.

You can build in-world with meshes, just like you can build in-world with sculpties. There is no difference.

You can't edit meshes in-world just like you can't edit sculpties. Again, no difference.

Supporters of mesh have generally been dismissive of anyone voicing concern about the plans or demanding some commitment by lindens to providing us with not only a function inworld building system but an improving one.

What's wrong with the current in-world building system?

They also demand more and more of sl resources...

Meshes will reduce resource consumption because they are more efficient than parametric and sculpted prims.

Think about LEGO: There are classic LEGO bricks and there are prefab parts such as trees, windows, doors etc. You can't edit those prefab parts. A 1-piece LEGO tree will always be a tree. You don't have to use the 1-piece tree; you can build your own tree from classic bricks instead, but then you will need more parts, and the result may look a little clunky. LEGO has always worked like that, but now in SL the same principle is suddenly wrong? Why?

If you want to create your own 1-piece LEGO tree, you need a LEGO factory. You can't do it "in-game".

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Come on you guys can we have mesh avvys or not ??

I thought at least you techs would tow the same line

I'm not in the closed beta. I'm just summing up what I've heard so far.

I guess the lack of clothing layers is the dealbreaker here. Mesh avatars are still prims, after all. They just deform with the avatar skeleton. You will probably see a lot of mesh clothes, but few human avatar replacements.

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I just want to see your standard mesh avvy to see how they compare with what I see in sl.... is it that complex a request ??

The default human avatar mesh is unlikely to be replaced. Most mesh avatars will be cartoon characters, robots, aliens and stuff. You can see several of those in the videos that the blog post links to.

There are several reasons why mesh avatars can't replace the default human avatar:

• no facial and finger animations
• the body can be resized but not reshaped (sliders for belly size, breast size etc. don't work)
• mesh objects don't support multiple clothing texture layers

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"If no one makes money here anyway, why all the worries about mesh?"

Oh, I am sure you´ll be one of the 100 persons in SL who make more than 50 dollars net by content creation. Absolutely. Good luck with it!

You did not answer my question.

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I'll put it very simply why I worry about meshes...

because if they replace the inworld building system with mesh software and there are no linden reassurances that they wont... what do those of us who dont want to learn the complexities of a new building system do ??

They don't replace anything; they extend. You can use prims just like you did before. You can use mesh components just like sculpted prims and create mixed builds.

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"As Masami pointed out:

If you target that market and stick to classic prims, your business is probably doomed."

.

Masami has no clue, anyway. if her attitude would be somehow serious, she´d be at IMVU for uploading meshes and sell them. But no, she will not, cause Anshe won´t let her upload whatever she wants to upload. Which might be a wise decision.

Nice straw man.

I don't use IMVU because it is not available for Linux. As I pointed out earlier, I don't use ActiveWorlds for the same reason. It's really that simple.

Btw,only the very best 3D modellers are good designers. And these rare unities do have a job and have a good laugh on the amateurs who actually think that they can make a noteworthy amount iof money by flooding some virtual marketplace - where almost no one makes a notewothy amount of money by content creation - with their stuff which won´t sell elsewhere.

If no one makes money here anyway, why all the worries about mesh?

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why are they even thinking of this when second life is running at it's worst?

It's not running at its worst. In fact it has improved all the time. Apparently you were not here in 2006, when the grid would just totally break down at 15,000 concurrent logins.

Mesh will improve it even further, because in a mesh-based environment, your fps are likely to go up. That is a big deal to anyone using Intel graphics cards (i.e. the majority of SL residents).

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Not more or less than Activeworlds is a commercial graveyard.

I wonder why you keep bringing up ActiveWorlds. I don't know if ActiveWorlds is a failure, but if it is, it certainly did not fail because of meshes.

Commerce ever worked and ever will work with rare goods. Mesh itself is not a rare good, it was back in the early 90s. But this is over since 10 years.

You cannot charge anyone for an import of Sahara sand.

This is nonsense. According to your analogy, silicon chips would be worthless in North Africa because the Sahara is full of silicon dioxide. If you buy a mesh object, you don't pay for its weight in vertices or polygons. You pay for the way these vertices and polygons are arranged; you pay for the information, not the medium.

The fact that a mesh can be any shape or form does not mean that any shape or form is worth paying for. It doesn't mean that any particular mesh has the same value for everyone. Sometimes value does not even depend on quality. If you are looking for a steam locomotive for your sim, an average-quality locomotive mesh will be more valuable to you than a high-quality car mesh or boat mesh or house mesh. Because a car or boat or house just won't do it for you.

As long as SL was protected by closing the virtual door, anything made by anyone with a certain skill  - within the environment - was a rare good, by nature.

No. Case in point: freebies.

Example: There is a lot of freebie hair in SL, sometimes of very good quality, yet there are still people making money with hair. Why is that? It's because no matter how many hairstyles get released as freebies, there will always be some that are not free. And for some reason, there are people who want exactly those non-free ones. Even copybotters acknowledge that these items are valuable, otherwise they would not bother stealing them.

You can see this in the real world as well. Take a look at a luxury car from the 1960s and compare it to a mainstream car of today. You'll see that the modern car is much more technically advanced than the old one. It has lots of features that the old car doesn't have because they didn't exist in the 1960s. Does that mean that the market for luxury cars has collapsed and luxury cars have become extinct? Of course not. In fact it doesn't even mean that luxury cars from the 1960s have become worthless.

Unique ideas and designs will always be valuable. In fact they are the only source of value in a world where no one really needs anything, where everyone can fly and teleport and rez objects out of thin air.

And this is what you don't seem to understand. Mesh is not a threat to any creator except those who refuse to embrace it. It's a new (i.e. new to SL) way of building which helps reduce client-side lag and improves the overall appearance of everything. It doesn't mean that everything becomes worthless over night. The structure of the in-world economy won't change. There will still be freebies, mainstream goods, luxury items, and contract works. The only change is that prim builders will have trouble competing with mesh builders, especially if parcel prim limits are an issue. For example, prefab homes for 512m² parcels will benefit strongly from mesh. If you target that market and stick to classic prims, your business is probably doomed.

I do not know if you ever aligned two prims in SL: You tell me that you plan to get a piece opf land and plant a magic box, and that´s it. So i guess you never ever built anything in SL or for SL. Is this true?

I've explored pretty much every aspect of SL building in the past four years since I joined. I was among the group of early sculpted prim adopters that Qarl invited to join the Sculptie Dev group. Back then it was a commonplace that sculpties were an intermediate solution on the road to full mesh support. The road turned out to be longer than expected, but now we're almost there.

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"the majority in favor of mesh import is actually quantifiable:"

I do not doubt this. But the majority was in favor for homesteads, mono, Viewer 2 and whatever else Linden Lab idiocy before they recognised that theory and reality are two different instances.

Citation needed. I don't remember the surveys you are talking about. Do you have URLs?

"There is certainly more money in mesh content creation for SL than for TurboSquid and the other graveyard sites."

R#this is your wishful thinking. It is contradicted by 5000 years of economical history.

OK, referring to your earlier example: How often has that $2 steam locomotive mesh been downloaded since it was added to TurboSquid in 2006? Unfortunately, the site won't tell. What the site does tell, however, is that in those 4 years the product has not received a single rating, neither positive nor negative.

But it gets even better: If you pick one of the "top sellers" from the list on the left and then sort his products by popularity, you'll find out that the most popular top-selling products received no more than two (!) ratings.

It's a graveyard, Vivienne. SL's upcoming mesh marketplace will wipe the floor with TurboSquid and friends.

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"There are no nicely made builds in SL."

This is not true. Ever toured route 2? Sure, in comparison to professinally made 3D games where any object and texture is carefully optimised and crafted for zillions of dollars SL sucks. But Mesh will not change this.

Mesh will change this. You should occasionally log out of SL and take a look at the game modding scene. There are lots of talented amateurs producing high-quality content.

"Vivienne,  did it ever occur to you that people upload models to TurboSquid  because they can't upload them to Second Life and sell them here?"

What for? Pay Linden upload fees? Linden distribution fees? Linden Fees for land? Linden Advertisement fees? It would be extremely silly. These people have a much better distribution system with a working google search and web portals. Why should they add the expenses for something like Second Life tio their already small budget?

All they need is a patch of land to host a SL marketplace vendor box. This, by the way, is what I plan to do after mesh is rolled out on the main grid.

"To  Linden Lab this is a win-win situation because experienced modelers will  make their platform look better and attract new residents."

That´s the plan. But everyone who thinks that there is any money in mesh contentbcreation in SL is just a dreamer.

There is certainly more money in mesh content creation for SL than for TurboSquid and the other graveyard sites.

It all depends on for how long the vibes of their shiny all-positive propaganda spread by the mesh-crowd will prevail, until it´s crashed by SL realities.

That's your wishful thinking, Vivienne. The only ones to be struck by reality are the builders who refuse to adapt. Parametric and sculpted prims were an aberration, born out of necessity to overcome bandwidth bottlenecks. The majority in favor of mesh import is actually quantifiable: See here and here.

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You seem to agree with Vivienne that almost everyone in SL is going to exploit mesh import to rip stuff from 3D model sites.

Now tell me: Why don't people rip stuff from SL and put it on 3D model sites? Thanks to GLIntercept and friends, mesh export has been possible for years. Why aren't you concerned about that? Why do you believe that ripping is a one-way street? Why do you think that all the crooks and thieves are inside SL and not elsewhere?

Is it because you think that SL stuff is crap and not worth ripping? Then I agree with you.

Is it because you think that no one is running a sustainable business on TurboSquid sales? Then I agree with you as well.

Soon there will be a 3D mesh model site where people can actually make money. Its URL is https://marketplace.secondlife.com/. The nice castle you mentioned will appear there because its creator will upload and sell it. He would be stupid not to do so.

Believe it or not: Second Life provides a higher level of copyright protection than TurboSquid. Because if content theft happens in SL, it will become visible sooner or later. And all the mesh uploaders will be on verified accounts.

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I agree. But much less skills than a nicely made SL built would require.

There are no nicely made builds in SL. Everything in SL looks like crap if you compare it to <insert random computer game here>. This is not the fault of the creators, though. The constraints are built into the platform.

Linden Lab is going to fix that.

I doubt that there will be any money in simple object creation in the future, mesh or prim. That´s the logical result of opening the doors there.

Vivienne, did it ever occur to you that people upload models to TurboSquid because they can't upload them to Second Life and sell them here?

Did you ever purchase a model from TurboSquid? You most likely didn't, and we both know the reason: TurboSquid models are nice to look at, but useless. SL models sell much better because they can be put into a context, they can be combined with other models to create something new, they can be brought to life by scripting, they can be experienced from a first person perspective by multiple people all over the world at the same time.

TurboSquid and similar 3D model sites are mesh graveyards. They are the places where 3D content goes to die.

Second Life will allow freelance modelers to make money without giving their models away. This is much more attractive than the TurboSquid option. To Linden Lab this is a win-win situation because experienced modelers will make their platform look better and attract new residents.

So there. Now you know the secret masterplan behind mesh import. If you are a builder, you better brush up your skills, because soon you'll have to compete with ex-TurboSquid modelers.

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You have to remember Masami I'm Blender illiterate.  I clicked, File, Export, Collada 1.4 and I kept getting an error message with no idea how to correct it.  "Cannot Find Folder" "Please set path in file colladaImport14.py"  That may sound easy enough and I'm sure it probably is but I have no clue how to fix it.  I'ma Max user...Blender though a great program confuses me to no end.

Your installation was broken. That's not a user interface problem.

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I tried to export a mesh from Blender that I created in 3DS Max created, I've used Max for close to five years yet I couldn't export from Blender as .dae.

File --> Export --> COLLADA 1.4 (.dae)

Really, it's that simple.

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Learn what? How to import ripped game stuff and convert one million free non-collada or even collada models into SL compatible formats?

You sound like the typical techie. I like your kind, but i would not even give you the permission to use my credit card, even if you were married to me.

Wow. You're not even trying to be subtle.

Here's a word of advice for you, Vivienne: Don't accuse people of content theft unless you have rock-solid evidence.

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Against, you forgot the most important thing:

 

o Lindens may want to examine how editable and modifiable mesh is by second parties.

More evidence that Prokofy is a technocommunist in disguise: Now she is suggesting that meshes should be open source.

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Is it russian?

It's an official LEGO brick. Probably Danish.

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In world tools are akin to building with legos.

That's right. And this ...

... is the LEGO equivalent of a mesh prim.

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Oh, this sounds as heartbrekening as the whining of the mesh crowd on that stupid, minor prim which was in the way of their 15 years old technolgy for sooooooo long.

The prim wasn't in the way. The network was.

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If you want to show it off, you can do it in Activeworlds (since 10 years - for much, much less fee), you do not need SL for this.

The ActiveWorlds client is not available for Linux.

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Open source doesn't mean decency and solidarity. Au contraire.

Open source means Soviet communism! It is the tyranny of the godless geeks! Marx, Lenin and Mao would use Linux! LOL

Blender is wonky and infuriating, and forces you to buy the manual. See above.

Blender is awesome, and the manual is free and available for download. See above.

Again, why aren't you learning Chinese or Russian in this global economy? Don't you worry about getting left behind?!

No, I don't worry.

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Wow, Sl would be closed within a week.

I'll believe that when you and Prokofy hit the "cancel account" button.

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I see lots of people arguing that there needs to be mesh editing tools IN the viewer, and many arguing that it would be too complex.

Actually, very simple editing tools for meshes could be integrated into the existing editing tools VERY simply.  In the Editing Floater, up at the top where you select the radio/check boxes that allow you to select what you are editing (i.e., Position, Rotation, Strech, Select Texture, etc.) we could add a "Select Vertex" and "Select Poly" options as well.  At this point, Editing an existing mesh in world, while tedious, would be doable.

No. The mesh you see in-world is only one of up to five separate ones: four levels of detail, and one collision mesh. Each of these has a separate and independent set of vertices and polygons. If you edit one mesh, you usually have to edit the other four as well to keep things consistent. There is no way to forward the changes automatically to the other meshes.

And that's only about static mesh objects. If you have a mesh attachment that is supposed to deform with the avatar skeleton, you need a way to edit the embedded rigging information as well.

And then there are textures. Each textured 3D mesh has another 2D mesh attached, the UV map, which is used to map texture pixels to 3D coordinates. Now imagine you have a wall with a window, and you want to move that window to another position in that wall. If you do that, the adjacent polygons around that window will be stretched in various ways, and so will the texture on those polygons. If that texture happens to be a brick wall or something similar, the result will be a mess because the bricks won't be straight any more.

These are just the implications of the most basic editing operations, i.e. moving existing vertices around. Adding or removing vertices and polygons opens up an entirely new can of worms. The reason why mesh editors look intimidating is because they provide a comprehensive set of tools to deal with all those issues. Once you know what those issues are all about, the tools won't be intimidating any more. You'll be happy to have them at your disposal.

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Get it through your head..some of us want to build inworld...we want to STAND inside our builds as we make them...we want the tools to do that...

and yes to put it bluntly I want to build without having to learn a mass of new software

You can do that. Prims are not going away.

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800????

Oh, that REALLY impresses me.

There are 30,000 sims in SL.

So yes, by bragging with these 800 known blender users you have really opened my eyes.

I say it again, Vivienne: Create a group "Mesh Haters" and invite people to join.

Hint: Sims cannot join groups.