Kwakkelde Kwak

Nobody is questioning your ability to read. It's more about what you write.

I could reply from a sceptic point of view and say those loans were given with the reason to make a quick buck. Sell loans you can't earn back, make them look pretty or hide them in a package then quickly sell them on, losing the risk and keeping the commission. In that case the government insurance makes no difference since the initial bank never used it, nor did the second or the third. Good government regulation could have prevented this. I don't have any in depth knowledge of the US housing market, but plenty of economists see deregulation as "contributing to the crisis". That's not the point though. The point is you give one example to back up a claim that "In most cases, the regulations distort the market and push investments into areas that are unsustainable, hence causing a crash." I'm sure you can come up with plenty more, but I can come up with countless examples where free market simply does not work. It's not that black and white.

Medhue Simoni wrote: In most cases, the regulations distort the market and push investments into areas that are unsustainable, hence causing a crash. That's quite a claim, without any references.

Skaveria wrote: Edit: Solved, Had to change the alpha mode on the diffuse material. Glad you solved it by setting the alpha mode, but that leaves you with an unused alpha channel in the texture. This means the texture will take up 25% more time to download, so saving as 24 bit as Rolig explained would be better really.

ArtieMacnar wrote: - What is the exact size and scale of things in SL that I need to input into [blender]? As in, how big is a [blender} unit compared to a unit in SL? As far as I know, a default Blender unit will translate into 1 SL meter. In 3ds Max (which I use), you can customize the units. Maybe some Blender user can tell you if this is possible in Blender as well. - I tend to do a lot of work in quads as oppossed to triangles, so just about how low-poly would I need to make say, a house or a piece of a building? The only good answer is a somewhat vague one: as low as you can get it, without losing the detail you want. Quads are nice while modeling, but not very efficient for realtime rendering engines (games). Imagine a wall with a single window. With quads, you'd have a 3x3 quad surface with the center quad removed. So you're left with 8 quads, which translate into 16 tris. The vertices on the edges don't define any shape, only the ones in the corners of the wall and the corners of the window do. So if you push the vertices you don't need to the corners, the shape will be the same, but the number of verts and the number of tris are halved. You can see it in the picture below. - Is it better for fairly large structures (for example, let's say I want to build a castle, a high-tech fortress, or a shopping mall) as "pieces", or to make a basic shape of the structure and then add the details into it? That differs on a build to build basis, but personally I have some rules of thumb. Render load and Land Impact are directly related, so optimising your builds will improve both. When you zoom out, the viewer will switch to a lower poly version of the model. This is a 3 step process (so 4 levels of detail) and the distance at which the model is changed depends on object size. You want to make sure people see your build from a distance, so the outline needs to be well defined with basic shapes. They will need to be very big, so using one object for the entire build works well. Details aren't important from a distance, so they can be built with smaller objects. Interiors don't have to be seen from a very large distance as well, so they can be built with smaller objects. I usually split my buildings into exterior overall (one object or a small number of big objects), interior (smaller objects), and details (such as cornices and windows, small objects). - Will I have to create UV maps, or are textures able to be applied directly to the shapes? In 3ds Max some shapes have their default mapping, for example a cylinder or box, so you could upload those without unwrapping them. As soon as you alter the geometry (extrude, pull out edges etc), the UV maps will be distorted. So in pretty much all cases, you'll need to unwrap your models. - How should I set up my [blender] workflow? No idea:) EDIT...You might want to change the title of the thread, if it shows "Blender" instead of "Maya", I'm sure you'll get a lot more response.

As far as I know, textures don't show up on the map, only object colors. At least that's how it used to be. So if you want letters, you'll have to model them with prims. Mesh and sculpties are useless. No matter what their shape is, they will show as hexagons (or something similair).

Dora Gustafson wrote: One thing I don't understand is why you make the UV map from the high poly mesh? As I understand it, it should be an UV map for the low poly mesh The result is supposed to go on the low poly mesh in the end anyway For simple normal maps you don't need any UV mapping on the high poly mesh. If you want to project more than just normals (specular, diffuse etc), or if you want to project a high poly mesh with bump, displacement or normal maps applied to it, you certainly need to UV map the high poly too.

Madelaine McMasters wrote: Oooh, there are 512M megas? I want one! You could try megaprim.sl. Make sure you're logged into SL when you request the prim. I see the prim I suggested is not available there, the 64x64x512 one. They do have a 128x128x512 one for example, with the right amount of taper this should work just as well for a 64x64 plane in the distance.

ArtieMacnar wrote: So, as a student of animation with a copy of Maya, I don't know a whole lot about Maya, but I can tell you that if you have a student version of it, you are not allowed to upload anything created with it to SL.

You can also use a megaprim box with a maximum "slice" (edit menu on the very bottom). The dimensions should be 64x64xsomething very big like 256 or 512. That would be a lot easier to texture than a sculpty or cylinder.

Drake1 Nightfire wrote: Firstly, don't be an ass. It was a simple typo. I think XShiloXwolfX was simply confused by your typo, since the graphics card was clearly mentioned in the OP.

Second life is more or less "doomed". While it may not look like it, it is far more difficult to render than most high end games. Add to that the fact that pretty much everything needs to be streamed/downloaded and you'll have (relative) low performance on any system. 20 fps sounds very low though, I have a faster CPU than you do, an i7-3770k and a slower graphics card, a GTX670 and usually get 20+fps in a very laggy sim on ultra settings. On sims that aren't laggy, the fps will go as high as 100-200. SL seems to like Nvidia cards better than Radeon ones, so that might make a difference. A good internet connection is crucial, not just your up- and download speeds. Also make sure your video drivers are up to date. The public chat seems to be bugged, setting it to compact mode might help with the fps, it does for me.

Ok, thanks for that. At least we now know it was one of those things, or both:)

Great you got it all sorted out! Could you please post what fixed your issue? Did the renaming of the materials fix your object or changing the exporter? Or did you do both before you uploaded again?

ChicByTrinity wrote: The fbxmax.dlu file does exist in the directory, but NOT in the plugin manager. The same file causes these startup errors. Maybe it doesnt work with Max 2012, I saw you have Max 2013. As I said, you need the plugin made specifically for your version of 3ds Max. The are 32 and 64 bit versions of the fbx plugin 2013 for 3ds Max 2012 available on the page I linked, maybe you picked the wrong one?

As I remember, the update of the plugin was automatic. In the plugin manager (customize menu) it should look like this: Are you 100% sure you installed the correct version? there are versions of the FBX plugin 2013.x for a number of 3ds max versions (years), 32 and 64 bit and 3ds max and 3ds max design. They are not interchangable. Going by your numbers, all four materials were applied to all four faces. Assuming your faces were quads in 3ds max, the 84 of them translate into 168 triangles. This is exactly a quarter of the 672 you saw in SL. So I'm pretty sure your object has four faces in SL, but all on top of each other. Others have had this issue, I remember a space station discussed in the forums behaving the exact same way, also made with 3ds max. It's right here. I think the issue has got to do with spaces in the material or object names. Medhue Simoni's suggestion of exporting as .obj might give a clue. Importing it back results in spaces and hashtags in the material names replaced by underscores (_). So you could try renaming your materials or use the .obj workaround. I haven't been able to reproduce the problem, so unfortunately I never found a definitive answer.

People have been having all sorts of issues with the 2012 version of the collada exporter. First thing to do is replacing it with the 2013 version, found here. I use 2013.2 without any issues. If that doesn't help.... "84 faces" in 3ds max is not enough information to see if something went wrong with the materials. Could you post a triangle count instead AND a triangle count as specified for the highest LoD in the uploader? You can change the viewport statistics in 3ds max by right clicking the little plus in the top left corner, then selecting "Configure viewports..." then opening the "Statistics" tab.

It would be very helpful if you could post the following: - number of triangles in 3ds max, number of triangles in the uploader - 3ds max version, collada exporter version - a basic workflow

hazeonelove wrote: That's where he hangs out, so now, we will not be able to hang out. Unless he wants to leave that place for awhile. hazeonelove wrote: And you can ask around, this beach is known as the Pedo-Beach. Alarm bells anyone?

Orca Flotta wrote: No, not at all what happened. I'd still have no idea what TD even means if not old salts would have stressed that part excessively as very important. TD 0.99 is bad enough to fok up your ride, so they told me. So your view on a TD of less than 1.000 being horrible is purely based on what someone said? I don't get the idea that you know what it means. A simulator sends 45 updates per second to your viewer (or any other viewer connected to the sim). 45 updates per second translates into ~22.2 ms for every update (1/45). Every update includes network updates, physics updates, sim updates, agent updates, image updates and script updates (as shown in total frame time in the statistics window, ctrl-shift-1). If one or more of these are very high, 22.2 ms might not be enough. Let's say there is so much going on that the sim needs 30 ms to send out all the information. 22.2/30=0.741, which is your time dilation, the sim fps will be 0.741*45=33.3. So a TD of .99 means everything "goes" 1% slower than LL wants it to. They could have set the sim fps at 20, or 100. It's basically a gradual process, so anything lower than 1.000 indeed means you experience lag, but only because that's measured against a very arbitrary value of 45. Now as I remember, this is how it used to be, something "special" is going on with the scripts. Maybe the change was made after 2007, although I think it was earlier. (Maybe I didn't hear about it until then and it was always like this) Because scripts can easily push the frame time up, LL decided to throttle scripts if the sim fps is going to be under 45.0. So if all updates excluding scripts need 20ms and the scripts need 10ms, only your scripts will be affected. The simulator still allows all the updates excluding scripts to be sent every 22.2ms, but most of the scripts will skip an update. This can not affect your water. It also means that if the sim fps go under 45.0, you will have terrible script performance. Maybe this is what you were told. I have a hard time believing you will notice any difference if you get your updates 1% later than normal. A TD of .99 means your updates take only 0.22ms or 0.00022 seconds longer than when everything is running as it should. A TD of .978 means everything takes 0.0005 seconds longer, again I don't think you'll notice this. All the above is wide open to criticism, additions and corrections, I have been rightfully corrected on this subject in the past and hope I got it right this time

In addition to that, the 25 fps "because that's what they use in movies" is not very accurate either. In movies there's motion blur. In most 3d engines, including SL, there are static/sharp frames. In a single frame in a movie, the light from frame one to frame two is recorded, in a 3d game it's just frame one. So 25 fps in a game will look not nearly as smooth as 25 fps in a movie. Also, the Time dilation being bad and the sim FPS not being important is not correct. Apart from 0.978 being good or bad, the sim fps and dilation are directly related. The maximum fps is 45. 0.978*45=44, which is shown in the console. ____________________ The HD3000 is't part of the motherboard, but integrated into the CPU. ____________________ @OP "Hardware skinning" lets your GPU take over some tasks from the CPU. Turning it off might help your framerate, as long as your CPU wasn't running at full power. I'm not 100% sure if it will make a difference, because your GPU is integrated into your CPU. It's worth a try though I guess. Don't expect fireworks, for that you really need a dedicated graphics card. If it fits your laptop and if your power supply is up to the job, I think a GTX560M will be a good match for your computer. Depending on your laptop, you might be able to pick one up second hand for well under $100. It definitely won't help with your gray textures and ping times, those are probably caused by a slow connection. My ping times from Western Europe to the SL servers are about 150-200ms. From North America they should be under 100.

I can be even more pedantic. Of course there's a real circle. The only thing is, you can't calculate its circumference exactly. When you use a floating value of pi, you calculate a circumference by turning the circle into an endless amount of lines. Pi isn't something you need to define a circle though, you use the radius for that. The distance from any point on the circle to the centre is exactly the same. This wouldn't be the case if a circle wasn't perfectly circular.

I agree with LepreKhaun that in a 3d polygon way it looks much better. However, there are some rules to how a diamond is usually cut. A heart shaped diamond looks like this: Building it like in the picture, with flat ngons, quads and tris will give a much more realistic result.

Well yes unless you want certain parts to be invisible. I understand what you mean now though:)

Dora Gustafson wrote: The lesson is we should always use 24 bit RGB and never 32 bits for UV mapped textures Never include an alpha channel in your textures Could you explain a bit further what you mean? All textures on objects are mapped, some correct and some messy, but they all are.