Baal Zobel

just as I thought. I did hope some clever person had found a work around.. thanks for the replies

Does anyone know of a way to stop prims or meshes casting shadows, apart from making them transparent.

Great replies thanks I will try the all

I have been happily building a large scene in Max 9 assuming that when the time came I could just export individual objects from the scene as FBX files and convert them to Dae and then into SL I have done some experimenting with individual files and the export worked well. But it seems that the exporter will only export all the objects in a scene and not selected objects even when Export selected is used. Is there something I am missing or do I now have to carve the scene up into smaller exportable chunks. Thankyou

If I were you I would check and see if there are any full mesh builds. If you find one, try IMing the builder. Maybe they have some real information that will help you. As far as I know the only person flush enough and “brave” enough thus far to attempt a full mesh build is Suzanna Soyinka at city of Lost angels, and even that has been a seeming very slow and I would imagine hard learning curve. If I wanted to know some facts from the horses mouth I would start there. The rest is just speculation. Building a few Mesh buildings and dropping them in a sim is not a full mesh city. You can more ore less ignore any data coming from that kind of area. Personally I think you would be pretty crazy to spend the time it would take to build a full Mesh city without some very serious reason for doing so. If you are doing it just for show then your time would be better spent building it for a game engine such as Unreal or Unity where at least your efforts will gain you some kind of realistic recognition in the real world. Even if you can achieve your aim and pull off a full mesh city, you will be displaying it in an extremely outdated environment. If LL were serious about full mesh builds they should have employed someone to create one , and then they could have written us all some useful documents and we would not be reduced to wild speculation. I have seriously considered a Mesh city for the past 2 full sim builds I have put together. But I do not have the time to waste messing with something so un tried and tested only to find that the tech cannot yet handle it. And neither would I want to be a guinea pig for LL. It is true that most mesh builds perform bad because they are created by those who have little or no experience with mesh building in a professional capacity. There is a reason for this, anyone that good would not be building in SL. Apoloogies if this sounds a little negative. I speak as someone who spends a massive amout of my time in SL. and most of that time is spent building complete sims some of which have been large complicated cities. But at this moment in time I would not even dream of attempting a complicated full Mesh sim.

Lets hope its not made to easy for the rip off merchants to export Meshes back out of SL. As it is most content is only of use to SL users. But a well made mesh can be sold outside of SL in a mutitude of ways, and is a much more attractive prospect for those who spend their time in SL making money out of other peoples work.

It had to come of course, but I think many have no idea of the huge changes it may bring. All these nice changes only really have meaning if people use them to enhance the world. I imagine sim after sim of imported meshes, that have no other purpose than to demonstrate how good the creator is a creating meshes. Endless art exhibitions that really have little purpose in SL. I have used 3DSMax for many years but for some reason the thought of mesh import makes me a little wary of the outcome. I have watched pretty much the same thing happen in the games industry over the past few years, what was once a great on line community of armature creators, has now been wiped out by the professional, because in all honesty you do have to be something special to compete at the mesh creation level. But of course even meshes will look dire until something is done about lighting in SL. Which for me, as an environment creator, is far more important than being able to bring in meshes that will still look dead without dynamic lighting. Possibly the best use I can see for meshes right now is for avatar creation. Another case of SL running before it can walk maybe. A new flashy toy to play and show off with for another year or so. I feel more people should concentrate on creating worlds and not just things. There are to many meaningless things in SL, and meshes will add to that a thousand fold.