Kyrah Abattoir

That's looking pretty flawless in this picture.

It's not so bad if all you're making there is a checkerboard.

The only place i can think of edge splits raising dramatically is if you where to make a checkerboard-type model.

I agree, and unfortunately those limits are nowhere near what they should be for a good overall SL experience.

I don't think what SL does is what you'd consider "true" mipmapping. And regardless, mipmapping reduces the render load, but all the mips are usually loaded in vram together.

I'm not sure what you mean about having to manually weight, that's a pretty normal step of modeling, weight transferi is merely a starting point.

Not that I know, you only get one uv channel.

Another thing about large atlases, games like rage use a gigantic texture atlas that range in the gigabits of texture data, however they aren't loaded in vram as is, there is a complex system in the background that loads and unloads chunks of it in and out of ram/vram, at varying resolution, depend what the player is looking at and how far he is from it. Recycling from a common pool of textures is the next best thing when it comes to secondlife (and less 'cutting edge' engines), and the smaller the better. Games like minecraft atlas all their textures in a handful of texture sheets but that's also because they use such a low resolution to begin with that atlasing them has next to no cost (they can cram 4096 tiles in a single 1024x1024) Oh yeah i forgot, when atlassing textures you will encounter issues with edge seams because texture filtering will blend the edges of your tiles with the next one.

@Ana Stubbs Can we see the new version? Curious.

You have to delete the faces AND the edges composing them so that the "normal source" object only contains the flat surfaces of your object. Ensure all your faces are in "shade smooth" mode. Tick autosmooth on both source and target. Don't use recalculate normals in the uploader (why would you)

Rather than a single lose triangle, a lot of people use a single triangle in the top left front/bottom right back corners, as long as you don't use "remove doubles" they will remain. The method I'm using these days is a single triangle with it's 3 vertices at <0,0,0> <1,1,1> <-1,-1,-1> "normally" the surface won't be visible.

Very nice! That's an excellent example! To those who have problemw with this, personally i keep the data transfer modifier on the top of my modifier list and I don't actually apply it. ChinRei is right, you can very easily break them if you apply the modifier, which is why I don't..

Avatar 2.0 most of the time. (Interesting body preferences I see...)

Show us the wireframe?

I believe this is related to physics shapes and center of mass. Just work around it.