Kyrah Abattoir

They aren't actually different "fonts", UTF-8 character are just... pretty wild sometimes.

Nomod only inconvenience your users. Personal opinion here: It seem, to me that it is always the talentless hacks that are most worried about getting their stuff stolen. Everyone else just create more things and provide good support. I highly suspect that this is more likely than we think. People are more likely to look for mesh ripping tools when they are locked out of basic inworld editing.

You don't need an addon to do normal editing...

To me it looks like a specularity issue on the bladestuff. In addition, you might want to tweak your substance outputs: Albedo and Diffuse maps are not equivalents, Albedo maps are typically very muted and strictly represent the color of the surface, diffuse maps are much more vibrant.

I keep telling people that a lot of those texture bakes on buildings are unnecessary but it isn't a discussion they want to have.

How many triangles. My first theory would be that your model is going over the maximum vertex index limit per mesh, and is being automatically split by the uploader "for your convenience" (but it never helps) Second possibility is that it is an Alpha sorting issue.

It all depends how big the map is, to be fair, while the diffuse might need to be 128x128 (or a bit more) to get clean alpha mask borders, the normal map can be lower than that. And the specular map can probably just be the default "blank" texture.

To be fair, for thin jewelry-type chains, the BEST practice would be to make your mesh a flat polygon strip and to make an alpha masked, normal mapped chain texture repeat along it. I don't have an example on hand, but a friend of mine once showed me one that they made, and It was so convincing that I couldn't figure out that they did without them telling me. (I was actually gonna start lecturing them that it looked a bit too high poly when they smirked at me and told me it was just clever normal mapping)

Of course but do you do you think they are just gonna "fix" their meshs once the bug is fixed? Even LL says it themselves: Don't rely on bugs or undocumented secondlife features in your products. They absolutely should tho, it's not going to get better if they let it all rot.People aren't going to stop pushing for higher graphical fidelity, only the infrastructure to support those has currently fallen off.

Have you inspected their LODs?

Avastar is marked as beta for a reason yes.

Have you tried to rig for the system avatar first?

unfortunately OBJ is extremely limited and FBX is a binary & closed format.

Disagree.

A long time ago i was experimenting a lot with various glass effects for one of my buildings, the idea was that I didn't believe that all windows had to truly be transparent, as long as it sort of "felt" like they were. I wanted the crazy complicated house I had made at the time to use opaque glass whenever possible And this is one of the cornerstone of the problem, SL residents not realizing (or refusing to aknowledge) that they have unrealistic expectations. A lot of residents confuse optimization and lazyness, or overflowing details with effort, when it isn't necessarily true either. Perfection is not achieved when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove.

Well one thing you should try is to make sure you don't upload with joint offsets. That option is mostly for bodies.

zip to the 14 minute mark if impatient.

GTA and RDR are a bit of an unfair comparison, these are both made by rockstar games who basically made huge openworld singleplayer/small scale multiplayer their trademark. These are completely static world and for what I remember, every section of the world you aren't directly in has carefully crafted distant LODs for entire chunks of the world.

Sounds a bit like how the firewatch team worked: discrete "sectors" with "impostor" lod models when they don't need to load a location in full detail but still have to show it.

They 'could' add an 'off sim environment' checkbox that reserve the the area from 3800 to 4000 meters for your off-sim landscape, built at a 20m>1m scale. Your viewer would then silently use a second camera and render that zone before rendering the regular sim itself?

The more I read this topic the more I start to think about the Dunning-Kruger effect.

It really depends, If they are trying to make it look like the SL equivalent of some famous sports brands, why not, as long as it is done tastefully.

Pretty good too.

That's an interesting approach @Aquila Kytori but I should have mentioned that the main reason I use this method is with curve modifiers. But using an array to have a "placed" duplicate of your object rather than using instances is neat. EDIT: I appear to have found a very interesting method based on @Aquila Kytori's animation. As it turns out you can effectively have two array objects under the control of two different sets of modifiers by using data transfer to change the vertex group influence of the copy but not the original by setting up a second object with a different vertex group weight for your "preview" zone vs the "work" zone. It is a bit of a kludge but changes are visible immediately. Ignore the model itself obviously, it's just a test.

I agree, it will typically cost less than the prim equivalent to make a clean, optimized mesh, but less doesn't mean 1LI.