bodzette Coignet

That looks awesome. Wow! I wonder if the results of that are what I saw on one of the mesh sandboxes a couple of days ago. The rows and rows of prims look like that. I'll need to examine more closely to see if they are a mesh object instead of a linkset.

I've heard this idea from various different people and I think it's a good one. Most 3D tools have the ability to gradually build up a mesh out of smaller mesh (effectively the same as building with prims in SL) and then merge them together to make a single large mesh. The same thing should be doable within second life and would enable even noobs to make mesh.

Not true. Google Sketchup is very easy to use and free and provides a similar quality to prim builds at a minimum. Likewise AC3D and some of the other cheaper ones. Blender is complicated but it's free. The workflow to bring sculpties from Blender to Second Life is also well documented and you build sculpties in Blender in exactly the same way you build mesh. ZBrush is easier than Blender but harder than AC3D or google sketchup. Mirye Shade is about the same as AC3D. Archipelis is seriously easy. You import a photograph and it *builds* the mesh from the photograph. I don't know about Maya or 3DS Max because they are too expensive for me. The hardest part of all isn't the mesh building, it's the texturing. And guess what, given that there are thousands of people in SL selling photoshopped textures (which is all textures are) I doubt we're going to see a lack of textures. Gimp is a free photoshop clone for those who want to try their luck. No, anyone who thinks mesh is going to be limited to a handful of people hasn't checked the facts or is just wilfully ignorant. I personally can't wait.

The only thing that you can take from Falcon's competition deadline of end of may combined with his quip that he'd like to wear it in Agni for 3 months is that the end of may date is the absolute earliest it could possibly be, not that the end of may is for real the actual release date. If you read the transcripts, the Lab is very keen to get it released, but there are still problems. The major problem I can see is that not everyone uses viewer 2 although viewer 2 is now slightly in the lead as being the majority viewer. That said, maybe there could be staggered release whereby certain regions get it first and a warning could pop up for non v2 based code that mesh would not render. I dunno... just some blonde speculation....