Kyrah Abattoir

A while ago i made myself a little RLV toy that automatically blocks IMs from people who are in local chat range

It will vary from software to software, but at the end of the pipe, the finished mesh, it's all about vertex normal orientation and edge splits.

Yeah a small amount of AO can also help for those low light nights, if you can't use a bit of environment. But burned in things like cast shadows tend to mess with your normal maps by making areas that the normal map considers to be "sun facing" darker, and thus harder to lighten. @Fionalein In a perfect world there would be a tab for each of the rendering modes so you could put burned in diffuses for non ALM users and full materials for ALM users (oof that workload tho). But we can never have nice things.

It's probably not really noticeable but consider this: To create a hard edge, the vertex is doubled up so each face can have a unique normal, 4 smooth shaded quads in a 2x2 grid use 9 vertices, 4 flat shaded quads will use 16. More data so unless it's on purpose, you made your mesh heavier and uglier. During the rendering process, the GPU will render a polystrip until it hits an uv seam, edge split, material change (it's a bit more complex but this is a simplified example).

That seem like a lot of textures, I typically drop down my specmap resolution because precision isn't critical for it.

Can't you set the file unit in maya? Seems like a pretty basic thing to support.

Yeah a friend reported me they had issues with the standard exporter after switching to the beta version of Blender.

I noticed that quite a few creators who use Blender don't actually appear to know about smooth shading... Quite a few furnitures I bought where, on close inspection, all the polygons are "faceted" like that. On top of being ugly it actually is slower to render.

Welcome to the good guys club @Abadoxx

@Abadoxx That's a good example but normal map isn't just for "surface" details since you can fake curvature with it too, pretty much anything that doesn't contribute to the object's overall silouette can be normal mapped. The main advantage of normal mapping is to leverage the hardware rather than relying on higher and higher texture resolutions. A normal mapped object will look more interesting and vivid than one with details burned into a hig-res texture.

I use normal maps all the time, all my products mention "Advanced Lighting Recommended/Required" and do minimal shading for non ALM users. If you make your normal maps properly it will look just fine in most settings. Subdivision is a big nono for realtime rendering and baked lighting should be avoided if possible because it requires large textures which cost a lot of vram.

However, a lot of the "high res content" I tend to shoot down is not "smart" high res. A lot of objects in SL can be simplified and made better with NO loss of visual fidelity because the creator shot up so high to begin with that even 50% of what they've used is still more than enough for any possible use.

The big question is whether they do that because they will never be able to run SL at normal settings or if they really only care about SL for making snapshots.

I did feel awful shelling out the 1000$ setup fee back in the days.

The few SL users who actually wish to own land (as in not rent from another resident) typically want to develop it themselves.