Kyrah Abattoir

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.

I wouldn't use flat personally, adding sharp edges where necessary will give you better control. "flat" shading is obtained by introducing edge splits and this will effectively doubles your vertex count.

The positive feedback loop is that "if it sell, more of it will be made". Most people who use SL don't see the relationship between the content they use and the performances they get (it's not me, it's the others!) or just blames Linden Lab. The beauty of shared spaces, ultimately we are collectively responsible for it, but we don't really see it because individual impact is not perceptible.

@HeatherD Tungsten Is that fitmesh? How do you do the fitmesh/non fitmesh bone blending without avastar tho?

Yeah I don't think i've ever uploaded a mesh with its texture, there is no real advantage to do so excepted... maybe saving a few seconds to re-apply the textures.

Are you splitting into separate meshs at the wrists? Could be a scaling issue.

The primary reason people buy avastar is because its creator made a perfect (nearly perfect) replica of the SecondLife Avatar in Blender. All the sliders behave as close as possible to the one we use in SecondLife. So when a creator make a piece of clothing and rigs it, the result they get in Blender with Avastar is very close (if not identical) to what the result will be in SecondLife. Linden Labs doesn't provide tools themselves so that's essentially what you pay for with Avastar. But as others said, Blender has a pretty steep learning curve and while I'd like to encourage everyone to give it a honest try because being able to create your own objects is really a fun and empowering experience when combined with SecondLife, it is not going to be quick or easy. Your first steps should be to learn the basics on the blender interface and workflow, and the basics of polygon modeling. Armature rigging (clothes) comes much, much later.

I thought the only point that mattered for SL creators was the "money" standpoint. Also "SEE FIRESTORM.LOG FOR DETAILS" is there for a reason.

Oh no, he make some genuine and valid points, but not on this topic.

The size is irrelevant, it's merly a scaling factor, what matters is how much information is packed in ths space. Do remember that SL doesn't (cannot) rely on cooked content while any major unreal/unity game cannot exist without it.

Objects that are added to the navmesh cant be moved its a shame that its not also used to determinate what is static in the scene.

Dunno if i mentioned my "semi-automatic" approach but here goes. I'll put a decimate modifier on my model and dial it to the target polygon count and when i run out of ideas on how to further reduce the mesh, i look at the decimator "suggestion" sometimes what Decimate does is unacceptable for me but some other times it removes some of the guesswork on hand made lod models.

I don't really agree with this graph, a terrible product is still terrible even with the best marketing money can buy.