Kiyoshi Nyoki

Phlogiston rules!

Good news but unfortunately it means that I need to start designing stuff I can't even see myself (when I turn on lighting in SL, everything slows to like 1 fps )

The worrying is exactly what I am doing now Thanks for the reply. I figured myself as well that this most likely was a case of staring too hard at a single number, and I have been trying to get that into this person's head, but to no avail so far

Hello xD As a builder, I have never paid much attention to collision and its effects on sim performance (mostly because I only built for my own enjoyment). Recently I have finished a build (a stage with roof, the stage area is one big flat prim, the complete build is unscripted, nothing is set to physical) for someone, and that person now complains that the collisions the stage causes lag on the sim. In his words, a collision "score" of 5 is abnormal. As far as I have been able to test, 1 avatar standing on a flat prim would cause a collision value of 0.45 for the avatar, and 0.45 for the prim. Two avatars cause 0.45 for each respective avatar and 2 * 0.45 = 0.9 for the prim. A collision value of 5 would mean some 11 avatars standing on the dancefloor. This leads me to believe that, since there are floors all over SL (we hardly ever walk on grass after all) the collision value of that specific dancefloor is not very important for lag as such. I have been trying to do some reading on the subject, and found out that apparently avatars colliding with eachother, or scripted prims that rely on collision are more to blame when lagspikes occur. Obviously I want to prevent the dancefloor from being deleted because of the wrong cause, so I hope someone can shed his / her light on this issue. Thanks a bunch! Kiyo

And thanks once more I tried uploading with a custom UV map, and I turned off the MeshImportUseLSM setting, but still no luck. I think I am doomed to use the higher LI model for now (we are redeveloping a whole sim, so we have some prims to spare), and try to wrap my mind around where it went wrong later.

Hello Drongle, thanks for your quick response. The mesh is most sharp, with just a few smooth faces. The problem is that that fact didn't change between this afternoon and now, i.e. between the two uploads. So that doesn't explain the difference. I did mean not UV-mapped at all, indeed. So I might want to check that then, although both times the mesh was uploaded without a UV-map attached to any of the materials. The house is one single mesh. The physics shape hasn't been set yet (I just used the 'default' setting in both cases). Unfortunately I don't have the old file (I told myself to make new versions with every save, but I forgot... so I can't backtrack). To me it feels like Blender is somehow using the old vertex- and facecounts with the new upload. Don't know if that makes any sense. I will try setting the UV-maps tho. Perhaps that will solve it. But basically, nothing changed between uploads 1 and 2, except for quitting blender and opening it again, and saving a new export-file over the old one.

Hello all, This afternoon, I encountered a nasty problem. I have built a house in Blender, and when I wanted to upload it, the LI was 100 - 110. So I decided to remove all unnecessary vertices and faces, because I figured that less faces mean less triangles, and thus a lower LI. That worked, I managed to upload the house at a cost of 51 LI. Strangely enough, right now, I made some minor adjustments (not increasing the vertex / face count), and decided to upload again. But the house is suddenly 100 - 110 LI again. I am at a loss here... I don't feel like redoing the whole place from scratch, but on the other hand I can't use my uploaded model because I didn't have the UV mapped properly yet. I am using blender 2.62. Thanks for any input! Kiyo

That's exactly what I planned to do But it's good to know that 10.86 is the number to keep in mind when designing things.... it won't always be this big And thank you too Drongle, for your helpful advice

Thank you The land impact cost isn't as bad as I expected, to be honest. It is going to replace a 210 prim building, that is the maximum amount of prims I am allowed to use. The way the building stands now (25*25*20), and without specifying the LOD-models for the lower LOD-levels, it comes in at about 130 prims. Because the building is so big, it renders detailed from a huge distance already, so I plan to make the three remaining LOD levels really low poly count, with a picture of the detailed building slapped on to it. I expect to end up somewhere around 180 - 190 PE. But essentially you are right, ofcourse. There is a fine balance between too much and too little detail, and because this is my first attempt, I decided to go all out And I am pretty surprised that the land impact isn't much higher (obviously it would be if I let the upload interface determine the lower LOD-level models!). Once again, thanks for your nice words AND your helpful advice! Kiyo

Hello all, Thanks for your efforts of helping me out It cost me all day, but I have tracked and solved the problem, thanks to the mentioning of hiding parts of the building. What I ended up doing was to hide all materials but one, then make a UVmap and AO-texture out of that, and then the same with the next texture, until I finished all eight. This means that each single face appears only once in 1 out of 8 UVmaps that I created, and together they form the complete UVmap for the whole mesh object. Now I have cracked this nut, I can start retexturing everything again This is the building with the AO baked into 8 separate materials / textures, and me next to it on the test grid (thanks for that tip, I really didn't know you could test there!) Now that I have almost completed my first ever project in Blender, I can hardly wait to start on the next one Thanks again! Kiyo

Thanks for your comment. I have been trying to wrap my mind around what you said, but I am afraid I can't get it to work yet. Are you saying that the total amount of faces in a mesh get to be split over all the 8 meshes (so a single face is never in 2 UVmaps at the same time) or are you saying that the faces of material A need to be inside the area of the UVmap image, and the other faces (for materials B, C, D, etc) can be placed as an island outside the area of the UV image for material A? Ugh, this is all far more difficult than I ever imagined... Kiyo

Heya Drongle, first off: thanks for your answer, it pointed me in a different direction to search for an answer. To answer your questions: 2, 3 and 4 are all okay, no problems there. Drongle McMahon wrote: 1. Are you sure all (blender) faces were included in one, and only one, of the UV maps that were active when you baked? The AO bake background is usually black, so that any ambiguity and probably any missing faces could be black. Do any faces accidentally have zero dimensions in the UV map? (My answers... I can't seem to get to make the quote option to work for me) Well.... here it starts going wrong. I am not sure exactly what you mean here, but I do think you are on top of the problem. For each separate UVmap, I moved all the faces that I didn't need in that UVmap outside the black area (or outside the image), and scaled those faces to 0 (by using S -> 0) I could say those faces have zero dimensions. What I could try is to have all faces in one UVmap (the one for the first material) and then ONLY unwrap the faces I need for the other materials in separate UVmaps, instead of unwrapping all faces and scaling the faces I don't need to 0. I get the feeling somehow this is a texture conflict between several UVmaps... What I have found by trying to add different textures in SL, is that only the UVmap for the first material I created in Blender works correctly (i.e. is showing the right texture), all the ones I made afterwards show a brownish colour. That leads me to think that the UVmap for the first material somehow determines what the textures for the other materials need to be as well, instead of the other 7 UVmaps I made and assigned. I am sorry if the description of the problem is unclear, but I do have tried to make it as clear as possible Kiyo

Hello Maeve, Thanks for your answer! I will try applying other textures to see what happens. And I didn't know of the aditi test grid, but I will go there to test now I know about it Kiyo

Hello, I have been trying my hand on a mesh building (just the outer shell) and I have assigned 8 different materials to the building (I did this in Blender 2.49). Then I upgraded to Blender 2.62, and added a UVmap, and a texture based on the UVmap, to each different material. To make the UVmaps, I dragged everything outside the 'work area' in the UV editor, and then manually selected and distributed the faces I needed on the UVmap. I used this UVmap, after baking the AO, as the basis for my textures. The problem is that in Blender, after pressing F12, the whole building renders fine. When I import the mesh into SL though, some of the materials show as intended, others only show black. I have no clue what I am doing wrong, or why this is happening. Perhaps you have some ideas as to what is happening here. Many thanks in advance, Kiyo