Vivienne Daguerre

Quote: "Since I have read that meshes can impact so bad on perfrmances of a sim then how will be handled the supersmap of mesh clothes we will soon seen in SL ? Hpw will be possible to protect regions from overcoming of people with lot ofmesh clothes?" Where did you read that? From my understanding the opposite will be true. Mesh will be less demanding on resources than a lot of normal prims, flex prims, and sculpts used currently to make clothing. I think your source is mistaken.

Looking good

I started out as you, making texture clothing, back in 2005. I had been in SL since 2004 and decided I wanted to make clothing for the role play market niche. Then flex prims came along and made all my clothing obsolete. Everyone wanted flex prims! No problem, I took a deep breath, made new stuff and dumped all my old stuff. I look back at some of that old stuff now and laugh, and hide it where no-one can see it. My photoshop skills have come a long way since those early days!! Then sculpties came along. It did not make all my old stuff obsolete, for some things work fine without sculpted parts. I bought some sculpted clothing part kits, but quickly decided I wanted more control and to be able to make custom sculpties for my clothing and other objects that I create. I started searching the web for "SL sculpt" and found Vlad Beornsen's blog, Shiny Life, and watched his excellent video tutorials on how to make sculpties with a program called ZBrush. I bought ZBrush, which is very good at organic shapes, detailing and texturing and dove in. When the mesh beta opened up to everyone, I quickly realized that I needed more than ZBrush. I was unwilling to pay the high price of professional 3D modelling tools and decided to use Blender. Once again kind people of Second Life had made helpful tutorial videos for the rest of us, in this case Gaia Clary on her Machinimatrix website. She has a great Blender Primer there, as well as a good introduction to mesh and rigged mesh, which can be used for clothing that moves with the body. There are gazillions of free tutorials for Blender on the web, but my favourite series of video tutorials for Blender were made by "Canned Mushrooms," also known as Jason Welsh, who teaches Digital Art programs in college, including Photoshop, Blender, ZBrush, Maya, and more. He is a great teacher and not hard to listen to and watch. Now you have everything you need in terms of resources to get started. You don't need ZBrush, Blender can do everything you need. You will need to invest a lot of time to watch the videos, try things out, and learn through trial and error, and you may or may not have that kind of time to invest with busy lives today. If you don't want to invest that kind of time or do not have it, you will be able to buy mesh collars, vests and such I am sure to incorporate into your own designs. Your skills will definitely NOT become obsolete. There will still be texture clothing parts and flex prims and sculpties used in clothing as well. Clothing that does not have mesh parts will still sell well if they are well crafted and marketed. Rigged mesh is nice, but has its drawbacks. It will be good for some things and not so good for other things. I hope this helps. I have been experimenting with mesh clothing. If you like, look at my blog where I posted pictures and some discussion of it: MyBlackRose

So many of us are learning as we go, myself included. We will walk this road together. I am grateful that there are people here who know lots more than I do! You ask a good question. We will all benefit from this discussion. I agree with the previous posters that mesh, sculpties and prims will all have their place in our tool box. I look forward to what Gaia does with the kettle quest! I would love to learn to optimize things better.

The challenge is to create something beautiful with detail using all the tools in your tool box, trying to keep it within a reasonable prim count. Prim count is important to people, especially if you have a 512 sq.m. parcel with an allotment of only 117 prims to work with. For those with larger parcels and more prims to work with, other considerations come into play. If the object is central to your theme or a focal point, you would be willing to spend more precious prims on it than you would something in the corner of a building, rarely seen. Sometimes detail is important and worth the additional prim count and sometimes it is not. If you build anything, Vivienne, even with conventional prims, you know this already. You hate mesh. We get it. Your communication has been successful.

When I enable lighting and shadows on the latest mesh viewer, 2.7.1.232042 of June 6, my screen is totally black. I can see the mini map, my name, and any huds that I might be wearing. I am using 2 ATI mobile 5870 graphics cards on an Alienware laptop about a year old. Any tips or suggestions on how I can work around this to see light and shadow? Anyone else having this problem?

You might be right. I hope you are. If in effect we can set normal prims and sculpties in a linkset to "None", that will reduce prim use for a lot of things! That would be almost as good as increasing prim allowances.

I have noticed a few interesting things about linking prims and how the prim count varies. 1. Sculpties when linked to mesh might not count as 1 prim. I had some sculpty logs that had a cost of 1.8 and a prim value of 1. Their physics type was set to Prim. I linked them into my mesh fireplace, and they increased the prim count of the fireplace by 1.8 prims, not 1. When I set the physics type to None (the fireplace was the root prim, not the logs) their cost went to 0! 2. Setting normal and sculpty prim types to None in a linked object also reduces prim count. I thought that was very interesting and rezzed a different cooking hearth I had made of normal prims and sculpties on the main grid. It was one object with 56 prims in it, and the prim count was 56. Just on a whim, I changed the prim type on all the prims except the root prim from Prim to None. My prim count for it dropped from 56 to 28!! I hope this is not an accidental benefit that goes away as a result of me highlighting it! Ah well, if that is going to happen, it had best be corrected now and not after it goes to the main grid. I can hear the cries of "Run! Run! The peasants are revolting! And they are rising up too!"

Thanks! I am looking forward to it. I will wait for your version to take on the new 2.57.

Are you planning a new Jass Pro or Jass Magic for the new Blender 2.57 soon Gaia?

Jason Welsh, aka Canned Mushrooms, is great! He even prepared a ZBrush lesson on sculpties for Second Life. His commentary is fresh and he is a well experienced graphic arts teacher at a college. He knows his stuff and he knows how to teach it. I highly recommend these links.

Have a look at Google Sketchup. The free version will do everything you need it to do. (Only professional architects should even consider buying the pro version in my opinion.) It is easy to learn, intuitive, and has excellent videos to show you how. If you can learn to build in Second Life, you should be able to learn to build in Sketchup with no problem. Watch a couple of the tutorial videos on their website to see what you think. http://sketchup.google.com/

I have had this happen to me at times and it is maddening. You may have already done this, but I recommend doing it again just in case you missed something. If the mad vertex is on say the right thigh, go through all the joint groups for the left side of the body, one by one and make sure that the vertex is not assigned to one of those. Now, decided what group on the right the vertex should belong to and make sure it is assigned to that group. I have had spikes appear when I have accidentally ended up with some vertices not assigned to any group. I apologize if I am telling you something you have already tried several times. I met an avatar in world, might have been Linkin Slate, not sure, who had the same problem with a vertex on his ankle. He said there was a bug with LODs in rigged mesh that can cause this. I have not encountered the bug and don't know anymore than that about it. Perhaps someone reading this might know more.

Vivienne, all you do is troll and say the most negative things. Perhaps you are trying to show us all what fools we are by comparison to your obvious brilliance. In this group you have to do better than that. Show us your mesh. Maybe then we will take you seriously. Otherwise, we will view you as what you are, an attention seeking troll.

I never used Blender for sculpties, always used ZBrush, and it does not do something like this well. If you ever decide to post a tutorial on how you did that kettle as a sculptie, I would love to see it!!! I did not learn Blender until mesh came along and I realized I needed something more than ZBrush (although ZBrush is great for texturing and detail work).

OMG, you are good!!! Nice job You are the sculpty Queen.

Arton, I owe you a big hug! When I set the physics shape type to prim, then the higher resolution kettle came in at 3 prims, and the lower resolution kettle came in at 1 prim. I thought that convex hull was the simpler choice. It would appear there is much I do not know. I learned something today. Thank you everyone!! (sheepish grin):matte-motes-agape:

It is true that prim equivalencies are not yet finalized. I wanted the Lindens to have a look at this example before they do finalize things to take it into account. I find once things are finalized they tend to be set in stone. I have sent my collada files to Nyx via email. However various posters here are correct; prim equivalency is not yet finalized and in the end my stew kettle could come in at less than 4 prims. It may turn out, for all the reasons Drongle listed, that sculpties will still work best for small things and mesh will work best for buildings, and mesh clothing since people tend to care less about prim count on attachments since they don't officially count toward the sim total. I know they still have impact on sim performance, but people don't seem to care about that; vanity wins. But drat, mesh is sooooo much easier! Sculpty wrangling is such a pain in the butt after having tasted the freedom of mesh.

Second Life 2.7.0 (230926) May 24 2011 16:57:49 (Project Viewer - Mesh)

I appreciate all the helpful suggestions! Ok, I made a simple cube to use as my physics shape and saved it as a new .dae. On the physics tab, I selected this new .dae. It still came in as 4 prims :matte-motes-confused: Here are some screen shots to give you more details. This is pretty low at all LODs already. A Physics shape cannot get any simpler than this, and the Physics Cost is showing as 0.

I let the uploader make the physics shape. I believe the default is the convex hull, which is the simplest. Please correct me if I am wrong. You may be right. This may be one of those areas where sculpties win. Perhaps mesh is not for low poly stuff. I had hoped the mesh would work out for this because it was easier to make it for mesh. I could twist and turn a sculpty shape to wrangle it into the right shape plus handle, but that will be much more time consuming and less elegant.

I will be the first to admit that I certainly do not know it all. I would love to learn whatever I can from whoever I can. I am going to declare this kettle to be public domain. If you want the blender file, Zbrush file, collada file, texture .jpg to play around with, just let me know the best way to send it to you. Once mesh hits the main grid, I will make it a freebie. It did not take long to make, and if I can learn from this or help someone else learn from it, it would be well worth the time invested.

If you can recreate this kettle to make it only one prim, go ahead Vivienne. You have my permission.

Gladly Gaia. What is the best way to send it to you? I decided to take some pictures of front, top and angled views of the mesh and UV map as they appear in Blender. As you can see, the sides are very chunky, not truly rounded. It looks round because of texture light and shadow baking (done in ZBrush).

Vivienne, my skills are just fine thanks. If you wish to troll, head on over to the SLU forums. This forum is for serious mesh discussion among mesh creators.