Nacy Nightfire

Ah clarifying things helps a great deal. Do not use GUV tiles. Do not use AUV tiles. Use a regular unwrap in UV Master, you can paint to define your seam areas and make a UV set with at best a couple of islands. With the method you used every single polygon is an island. No wonder SL barfed. Your pe must have been enormous. And you certainly CAN reduce your polycount. Use Decimation Master right in Zbrush to reduce your polycount if you don't want to remove edgeloops by hand in another program,and use one of your lowest subdivision levels for export. The adaptive skin feature you are using to extract a mesh from zspheres has a resolution slider. Set it very low to begin with. You can then subdivide up a bit if you need to. You shouldn't be importing a highly subdivided model into SL. Just use the set "smooth" with the collada exporter (or define your smoothing angle via the Normals feature right on the SL importer.)

I think the problem may lie in your need to re-export the collada file after you confirm back in Blender that your UV's line up with the polypaint texture you are exporting out of Zbrush. Since you are rigging your mesh and sending it out of Blender, you should make certain the UV's you are asking Blender to export align within blender to the texture map you will apply in SL to the mesh. I find when I export a model from Zbrush to blender, without any texture flipping, I need to go into Blender's uv view, select all of the UV's and select Mirror on the Y axis to match the UVs to the Zbrush texture. It seems you've already exported your collada file, prior to the whole texture thing so perhaps regardless of flipping something about the UVs aren't matching. If flipping would solve your problem then just flipping the image on the vertical axis within SL would do the trick. I suspect your UVs just do not line up with your texture. Maybe they've just been accidently moved within the UV space. Also note when specifying your texture size for the purposes of transferring your polypaint in the Texture Map subpalette of Zbrush, be sure to also increase the UV map border setting to insure there is a painted overlap beyond the UV island seams to avoid those black seam lines from appearing.

Going up the learning curve is somewhat slow going for a lot of people whose only prior experience with 3d mesh was constructing sculpties. And in addition to to coming up to speed with one's 3d modeling programs of choice there's the added complexity of adapting to the somewhat changeable upload system this is both time consuming and tedious. Ultimately I expect we'll see an explosion of mesh content in the upcoming months.

I guess after 4 years here I've moved beyond caring much about wearable items. Focusing too much on ones own avatar and appearance can be pretty limiting. There's greater world of SL then simply clothing. And I will say that despite my not getting around to shopping much these days in SL, I HAVE seen some knock-out clothing and footwear items made in mesh. More will come along as folks continue to come up the learning curve and add mesh items to their inventory. Despite your perception that Mesh doesn't live up to expectations that it improves your wearable items, It might then be the case for you that the only advantage to mesh is the improvement of the general overall visual environment and the enjoyment of viewing all kinds of interesting complete avatars put together buy some incredibly talented people, and not improve the pixel paraphernalia you purchase to put on your avie. Even with that limitation, it's pretty great. I'm using the beta viewer and I like it alot, there are a number of viewers that now view mesh so you have your pick.

Thanks Drongle!

Asha, does splitting the uvs into alot of islands add to the count in SL, or just the fact that you have UV's in the first place?

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=33448

Maeve I think you make an excellent point. It would be interesting if some OTHER basic test, not one just regarding copyright issues, but also regarding a of what is and is not an optimized mesh might not be in order, before being allowed to build with mesh. That doesn't mean everyone will then go about making mesh correctly any more then the current test is going to stop adetermined thief from trying to take advantage. But I wouldn't be surprised if a whole lot of beginner mesh creators have no idea what makes up an efficient mesh. They just pile it all on and if it uploads, they are happy. Perhaps there aren't enough concrete rewards or punishments for people to do it properly.

Thanks for the explanation. Shadows, I'm guessing, can just be turned off, so probably that's what it didn't bother people that much. I consider SL to be similar to any other kind of recreation. You can't enjoy the advanced slopes? Don't blame the ski resort for your c*ppy equipment. Either make it a priority and save the money and spend it on proper equipment for what you are trying to accomplish, or accept your self-imposed limitations. Or just go away and enjoy another sport. As it is, in SL there are no required "lift tickets", anyone is free to enjoy SL at a basic level they just shouldn't complain that their personal choice or circumstances dictate that for this form of entertainment they are restricted to enjoying it at its most basic level.

Peggy, I'm confused. Sorry for my lack of knowledge in this area. Is there something inherent about mesh that requires a system that is more robust then one that allows you to view sculpties? I assumed (always a mistake, I know) that because mesh requires less geometry, etc. it should be as easier or at least as simple to render, especially since everything IS mesh as we view it.

Without a doubt jackie, there are folks who feel the way you do, but I suspect there is another subset of SL members who just don't know enough about mesh and cant see it with the viewers they are currently using so they don't know what great stuff they are missing. In the four years I've been in SL, I've never experienced an actual stable viewer. I just roll with the punches and make do as both the SL and alternative viewer developers pump out newer, greater, and more "fixed" versions. It's a way of life in SL. I'm not angry, resentful or bitter about it. (not directing this to you, jackie, but to the vitriol in general about this topic that I've come across). I'm just patient.

I highly recommend Ashasekayi's video on UV unwrapping which is part of a series from a class she teaches at Builider's Brewery. It's beyond excellent, particularly if you are using Blender. Even if you are not using Blender this is a valuable video that gives beginners to UVs the hang of the work flow necessary to get an optimized uv layout.

Drongle, ripping is dependant on where your mouse pointer (not to be confused with the Blender cursor icon) is located. Don't click, just place the "plus sign" on the seam opposite of where you want to pull away a vert and then hit V. Play around with it bearing that in mind and you'll see what I mean. You'll get more consistant results after you get the hang of it. For a cube corner, sometimes you do also have to rotate it a bit to get the third connection detached, but not always. Edited to correct. I wrote "arrow" by mistake. The position of the mouse is a plus sign. Also if you are seperating a corner into 3 detached planes and the last vert is stubborn, place the cursor just outside the geometry in line with the edge that you are seperating. ek...even more editing.

"Oh, and for the record - mesh CAN be worn as non-rigged ATTACHMENTS, just like traditional attached sculpted clothing too - fully resizable, BUT it will be exactly the same result - that "cardboard" rigid look. It's only when meshes are worn as RIGGED meshes that you cannot change their shape / size." I thought what Maeve said that I've quoted above bears repeating. Meshes should replace sculpties as rigid (non-rigged) attachments , they will have more efficient use of geometry and be easier to texture then their sculptiy equivalent. If you are unhappy with the rigging effects, then by all means don't rig your meshes, but you can still wear 'em as attachments, and they are better then scultpies.

I believe folks who can't see mesh don't have much incentive to switch over to mesh enabled viewers since they can't see what they are missing. I'm thinking of attaching a small billboard photo over my avatar to make my cat avatar visible to people who just see me as a blob. I hope it encourages a few people who aren't using meshs enabled viewers to give it a chance.

Thanks Chosen Few, that's going in my mesh notes! Good stuff

I've been trying out the new developers (development?) viewer and I'm liking it! But I ran into a problem I struggled with a bit that I thought I'd share. This may not be viewer specific, in fact, it may be the way it's supposed to work and I just hadn't run into this before by chance. I struggled with my mesh refusing to accept my texture. It turned the model completely black which was a "head scratcher" because I made UV's and baked a texture to them. (I later realized it was black because most of my texture's background was black and the whole thing was essentially blurred together having no UV's to take guidance from.) It turned out I had a few very small flipped normals that I didnt' notice. Even when I began to think that the normals wasn't my problem because I thought I got them all, I STILL found yet another. Finally I got it all together. Note "CTL N" did NOT realign the normals properly. When using extrude alot I think Blender gets confused. All these small faces had to be flipped individually. I hope this helps someone else struggling with the same problem. Find those little guys and flip them! Don't rely on "CTL N" to do the job.

Yaaay! Thanks Asha! (ps re: your utube vids - the uv mapping tips on your lantern tutorial were soooo helpful! Thanks a gazillion)

Twiddle please clarify. What exactly did you in Blender to check and correct the normals. Often CTL-N in edit mode will not work properly and you have to make your normals visible and flip them individually. Also depending on y our settings, polys can be drawn 2-sided in Blender, but in reality what you may be looking at is the back side which is invisible in SL. Note everyone: for Blender 2.6 settings to show poly's as one sided no longer seem to be working, if anyone has a fix, I'd appreciate it if you could post it.

Thanks!

Drongle, That was incredibly helpful. I was struggling with this as well. I couldn't program my way out of a wet paper bag, but I opened up the collada file in Word to check it out. Is this "translate" section the part of the file that indicates the center is on the origin?:

You mean you aren't connecting with the SL forum via an ENIAC? You must have a large house.

excellent.

It only matters if it's "de-cuff"

Time machine? I've found it. It's called dreaming. (A poor substitute for THAT might be SL. ) I go back in time often when I sleep and it's a hoot. I can't welcome you over to share my brain, however. It's unfit for human habitation and the experience would bear none of the delights of "Being John Malkovich" I'm guessing most likely would pay to NOT see the world thru my brain. I must get around to cleaning that up some day.