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Fizz Savira

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Everything posted by Fizz Savira

  1. Thanks I found after more experimenting that I was taking the wrong approach - I was blending too much influence from nearby bones which is what led to the noodly look. After I undid that, I start fussing with the mesh itself to get better bend lines and that helped a ton. Sometimes I got better results when I converted some of the quads to triangles and forced the quads interior edge to be along the bend edge. Trying to sort out the weighting vs. adding in more mesh detail is quite challenging! In the end, pardon the pun, I added more detail to the rump to get a better seating shape Still struggling with the pelvic crease for when the thigh moves, but the overall shape is coming together
  2. I've been spending some time designing a mesh avatar, and one of the issues that is still causing me fits is getting the weighting right. Watching one of Gaia's tutorials (like this one: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/avastar-6-weighting/ ) has as usual been super helpful. However, while I've managed to get the rump of my mesh avatar to not be terrible, the elbows are defying me. The arms end up looking rather noodly. I'm sure the knee joint has the same issue, just haven't worked on it yet :) So, I'm wondering if there are some good tips and techinques for handling these traditional problem areas. I'm trying to understand what the limits of good weighting is versus how much mesh I need to get a good result.
  3. That's really good news, thanks Gaia! Now all I have to do is be patient, lol.
  4. Will that include exporting the current shape as defined by the shape key settings?
  5. I'm wondering if there are plans to improve the export to collada function to handle modifiers and shape keys on a mesh? Currently, without that ability, I end up having to do alot of extra work to make something with shape keys (and the awesome mirror modifier) because the only way to export is to then create an editable copy (using an older version of blender, sigh) and then reconstruct the UV maps by hand (UGH). If somebody knows of a better way to do this, I'm all ears :) Essentially I'm trying to have a mesh that I can come up with multiple shapes from, and have those be easily exported to second life. Having to genreate UV maps after each shaping is a hugh amount of wasted work... Thanks!
  6. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/STORM-1716?focusedCommentId=324040&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-324040 There you go
  7. Just to back this up a bit, here is what one of the linden's said in the JIRA related to this featuer: Oz Linden commented on STORM-1716: ---------------------------------- Perhaps this issue really isn't all that important, or worth the trouble to integrate. So far, only one designer has responded with one test garment. Let me be clear - the lack of test material is a major blocker for testing, and therefor accepting, this proposed feature. If you want it, step up and do it soon.
  8. What bugs me the most about not being able to mirror my mesh shoe designs is that from the viewer point of view, it's doubling the download cost of the mesh data.
  9. Second Life, for as long as I've known it, has always done progressive download of the "mip maps", loading a low resolution first and then loading higher resolutions as needed, using something similiar to the LOD mechanic (I'm guessing) to determine which resolution to use. So using one 1024 texture for your high LOD is the way to go (assuming that one 1024 is the right size for your situation; sometimes I go as low as 256 for some things), and one of the great things about mesh is that you can use a single texture for multiple pieces of your model, which means your overall texture load for that object is less than the sculpted equivalent. So yay!
  10. Maeve Balfour wrote: *snip* Sorry for the mini rant, things like this just makes my blood boil, LOL. So yah, Fizz, be proud - You are doing the right thing, definitely! :matte-motes-smile: I agree, those things make me upset as well. I suspect we will see plenty of that given the difficulties involved Well, I'm trying to do the right thing, that's for sure. Sadly, I have no metrics to work against except my sculpted products. I've pushed those to be efficient as well, so I think that if I can come in face-count wise, less than those, I'm good, right? right? LOL. Seriously, some metrics to design against would help. The new informational display showing the breakdown of an object, including prim costs and rendering costs is super helpful, but I'm still working in a bit of an information vacuum sadly. For example, a recent design of mine (a test really) uses 5 sculpties to construct. That's over 5000 quads? at highest LOD. Now that 5000 includes all the low LODs as well, so comparing against a mesh requires some care. I made a mesh version of that same design, ripping out all the hidden parts and eliminating lots of over kill in the design, and that comes in at 683 quads at the highest LOD. I made a low LOD version of that, which came in at approximately 50 quads (a few triangles snuck in to solve materials issues). So assuming I'm lazy, that total works out to 683*3 + 50 or 2099 quads which is well under half compared to the sculpted equivalent. I think that's a win, if my math is right? But I still don't have a sense of whether or not that's good enough...
  11. Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: Fizz Savira wrote: Unfortunately, there are some parts of the lowest LOD mesh that don't map nicely on the high LOD map *pout* Did you look at the lower LoD model in Blender or inworld? Chances are you won't see the "misfit" at all inworld, since the object is so small.... I did look at the model in world, and for my first attempt at this, there was some visible jumping around. The second version, after I made some changes to how the high LOD unwrapped, looked alot better, so I'm now feeling that this problem is more solvable than I had first thought, with less work than I had thought.
  12. I just tried a few experiments: First, I went from high LOD to lowest LOD by shredding my mesh. I added back in some hidden triangles to capture the missing materials, and that satisfied the uploader *YAY* Next, I stumbled upon exporting the UV map as a PNG and did that (an amusing coincidence since I then read the reply by Drongle ...), then used that as a guide to unwrapping and moving the lowest LOD UV's. That works OK. Unfortunately, there are some parts of the lowest LOD mesh that don't map nicely on the high LOD map *pout* It seems that I need to account for this during the design of the high LOD UV map... However, at least I'm getting somewhere finally! Thanks again for the sage advice everyone
  13. Great responses, everyone The hidden triangle trick sounds super useful, I'll give that a whirl. And it's very encouraging to hear that blender has some tech coming that will make UV management simpler. Right now, if I remove an edge-loop (not a border one), I have to manually select pairs of UV verticies and weld them together again to get the right texturing behavior. My hope was that modifying the UV map would be easier than doing a seperate unwrap and trying to get the two or more of them coherent so that the textures don't fly around all over the place, but right now it's very tedious. Regarding the comment by Chosen about "it's just alot of work" - well, of course it is The number of hours I pour into my sculpty designs is large, but for that I already have a workflow sorted out, which does involve LOD management, but not UV management. The whole UV thing is new, and so trying to add that in, without going down paths that are just a waste of time, is what this thread is about
  14. I've been trying to come up with a good workflow, in blender, for making well behaved meshes (in this particular case, shoes). I've tried a couple of different approaches: 1. Make a low poly model, use that for the lowest LOD, then improve it to make (eventually) the highest LOD. This one kinda sorta works, except that I've run into an issue with the materials - because the lowest LOD doesn't have faces that reference some of the materials on the higest resolution LOD, the importer complains. 2. Make a high poly model, then reduce it until it's low poly. The problem with this one is that I end up with holes in the UV map where I've removed edge-loops. The holes lead to crazy texturing behavior. I'd love some thoughts on how to cope! Right now, every which way I look amounts to a *huge* amount of work.
  15. I need the inside during box art photography. Also, if you cam in close to look, you'll see some of the inside even with the avatars ugly hideous foot crammed in Also, 708 verticies is less than a single sculpt map with the previously mentioned design, so in terms of viewer rendering costs, it's a huge improvement over the sculpted version! Here's an example of my box art (scuipted):
  16. Thanks for the response Glad to hear that on I'm the right track, but it does sound like I have my work cutout for me. Regarding eliminating the interior parts for low LOD's -- brilliant! Of course you can't see those at low LOD, so that'a great idea! Here's my 708 vertex snapshot... (Whoops! This picture has one level of subsurf enabled)
  17. Thanks for the quick answers Too bad there isn't an easy solution to making the LOD's, I was hoping for something simple that I had overlooked, oh well! And yeah, 2748 is a bit high for the shoe - the prior count was 700ish before I subsurfed it. In this case, subsurf is doing too much so I'm going to get rid of a bunch, but before I do that work, I wanted to do it towards solving the LOD issue, not making things worse, hence my questions My thinking was to budget the mesh version to being no worse than the sculpted version, in terms of rendering cost. For physics, since the object won't be allowed to rez on the ground, I'm just using a simple cube. Is there a better (lower lag inducing) solution for physics? And regarding the UV maps, I've been guessing that for it to work, you have to have each lower LOD level use the same UV map, at least the outer edges of it??? Not sure how to word that well. Interior verticies for the UV can be removed without degrading the texturing? Sigh
  18. I have a mesh shoe I'm working on, and I'm trying to do the right thing regarding level of detail. I've done a careful design, and the result (currently) in blender weigns in at 2748 verticies at the highest level of detail. My plan is to do a careful reduction of that mesh to generate each of the required levels. Question #1 - Why does my 2478 vertex mesh show up as 3143 verticies in the upload window? Where did those 395 verticies come from? I do have some verticies in vertex groups, but the mesh is not rigged, so those should be discarded, right? Question #2 - What is the right ratios between each of the different LOD's. I had assumed it was a simple factor of two, but it's not. Question #3 - This mesh shoe is a conversion from one of my sculpted designs, and that one requires 5 seperate sculpts for a total of 5120 verticies. That has a prim cost of exactly 5. My mesh version has less verticies (looks better!), even when all the level of details are added in, but the land impact is closer to 10. Why? Question #4 - I'm using blender, and I'm wondering what a good design process is for addressing level of detail. I'm familiar with using subsurf to add in resolution, but I'm wondering what's a good technique for automating the decimation process while still having a say in how the decimation occurs. Right now the decimator built into the upload generates meshes that are smaller than the original mesh, which leads to some really bad popping artifacts as you cam in and out between lod levels. Thanks!
  19. Thanks for the info. Strangely enough, I did some more work on the model (it's a foot), and then replicated it to make the other foot, and poof -- back to a reasonable vertex count. I have *no* idea what's going on, LOL. I suspect it's a blender thing, because the size of the DAE file went from 2.5M to 1.5M, even though it's duplicated in the smaller one...
  20. So I made a mesh thingy, pretty simple with less than 1000 faces. When I go to upload that mesh, the uploader claims I have 26000+ triangles. Last I checked, 2 * 1000 (quad faces) is closer to 2000. Help?
  21. Try going to a different region. I've had that happen, and it's often caused by asset server lag, and sometimes you can fix that by switching to a different region. If you own the region where it's happening, you can also try restarting it
  22. In order for the mesh to be wearable, during the upload you need to check the "Skin Weights" check box. For that to work, when you export your mesh from whatever program you use (I only know blender, sorry), it must have the various vertex groups assigned that match those in the default avatar file (again, I know about avatar.blend). If some of the vertex groups are missing, the upload will not work correctly. To see which ones might be missing, enable the debug console. When I was first doing this, the mFootLeft and mFootRight vertex groups were missing. By creating empty groups for those (which are unused by the viewer) my uploads started working correctly. Hope this helps!
  23. You should definitely post a JIRA on it. An object in world that causes viewers to crash is sometimes treated as a security bug depending on how it can be abused.
  24. The mesh project viewer (found here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Alternate_Viewers) has the fix in it. I tested the project viewer with the mesh I was having trouble with, and it worked great
  25. What is the secret to getting the collada exporter in 2.59 to not mess things up? I saw something about a rotation issue of some kind, I think, so I'm wondering what the precise work around is... Thanks!
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