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The current SL head is under 1000 vertexes.  The entire SL avatar is roughly 3400.  Even if you want to use a head with that much geometry you will still have to chop it down for your LOD.  If you are starting off at roughly 3k, then your first LOD will be around 1.5k, then in the 700s then in the 300s.  You are of course free to let SL chop it for you, but they will be using a very similar algorithm to do it anyway.

In any case, my point stands that automated remeshing systems are not particularly useful when making low poly models.

 

Also, there are no hard numbers that I know of, but I seriously doubt that one prim will equal 4096 vertexes.  The best information I have seen so far indicates that you are off by an order of magnitude or more.

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Your optimized mesh is using almost as many vertexes as SL uses for the entire avatar.  Drop your vertex count into the 900s.  Then do an optimization that deep with a hard surface model and and show your wire frames.

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Oh really.  I would love for somebody to show me how to apply normal and specular maps to a SL prim of any kind.  The closest you can get is baking those down onto the diffuse, which is absolutely not the same thing.

As far as the polycounts go, I suppose that will depend on the prim price when it is finally announced.

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Ill cope with the flood the same way all of us have all along.  Dont price your items in a race to the bottom and you wont end up at the bottom.

As I mentioned earlier, most modern game models will not be properly compatible.  The poly counts will be too high for SL and they will be relying on things like normal and specular maps.

Yes, they could just upload the model and apply the diffuse texture only.  All that means is that they have a high prim model that looks flat and works is a lawsuit magnet.

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If "overall look" is good enough for your model then have fun with that.  I cant say I feel very threatened by it.

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Tools like that are useful for taking a 100 million poly zbrush model down to a 1 million poly model that can be imported and baked in a separate program.  They do not normally produce quality results when reducing models down into the hundreds or low thousands of polygons.

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It would be difficult to get any hard numbers, but as a quick example:

There are 43734 models listed on Turbosquid for Architecture

1099 of those models are marked for realtime use

Certainly, many models not marked for realtime use might still work in SL.  However, many of the models marked for realtime use would not be suitable for SL for a variety of reasons.  If we figure that these two factors roughly cancel out, then perhaps 2.5% of the available models would be usable with a small amount of modification.

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Now you are getting at a much more tenable argument.  However, while I do agree that this will be a problem, I dont believe that I will be an unmanageable one.  While there are a great many 3d models in the world, only a small number of those are suitable for game use at all.  The majority of free and pay models available on the internet are designed for use in still renders.  They usually have very high polygon counts that make them unsuitable for realtime use, even in more advanced game engines.

Of the small subset of models designed for realtime use, most of the ones being built today are built for modern game engines and have high polygon counts while relying on things like normal and specular maps, which SL does not support.  They could be adapted for SL use, but that would take work and the resulting quality would be reduced to the conventional levels that we are used to in SL.

As far as 3d models with a SL appropriate polygon count, available in 4 LOD versions with collision boundary, and requiring only a diffuse texture map?  There are models like this out there, but certainly not in the sort of vast numbers that would be required to crush the SL economy.

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Im sorry, I dont mean to be rude but Im having trouble telling if you are being sarcastic or not. 

Are you suggesting that legoing primitives together inworld is a more advanced building method than the construction of arbitrary meshes with UV mapping?  Are you also saying that 3d mesh modeling is outdated technology from the 90s?  Thirdly, are you arguing that using 3d meshes is a mistake because building with primitives is the wave of the future that SL will risk missing out on?

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You are still free to make whatever you want using whatever methods you want.  People are still free to buy these items if they desire to do so.  You are arguing that more advanced and effective methods of production be stopped in order to protect your existing business.  How is this not Luddism?

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Meshes bring SL up to the point that everyone else was at 15 years ago.  How much longer should we wait?  Until there are no bugs and everyone is satisfied with the way everything runs?  I dont think that will ever happen.

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Those numbers dont sound right to me.  If thats the case, 1 cube is about all that can be uploaded for 1 prim.  A simple sphere similar to the SL prim would cost at least 7 prims.