Kwakkelde Kwak

Nice thread, very informative. I don't agree with everything but I don't want to sound like a broken record myself...so I'll let that be. One thing though... Penny Patton wrote: Most people only have 512MB of VRAM and Second Life refuses to use more than that for textures regardless. ( Although, SL will eat up all of your VRAM. Nobody knows what it does with the rest.) Really, nobody does? VRAM is used for storage of vertices and faces, the more geometry on screen, the higher the memory use. VRAM is used for anti-aliasing, a multiplier of 2x makes your gpu draw a picture twice as large, increasing memory use by a factor 4, just like the textures stored. 4x AA draws a picture that uses 16x more memory, 8x AA uses 64 times more video memory. At a screen resolution of 1920x1200 memory use is about 9MB without AA. With 8x AA that adds up to more than the total texture use of 512 MB that SL is limited to. VRAM is also used for shadows, which use their own additional maps. Triple buffering (something I use in combination with vertical synch to keep the fps at a reasonable 60fps instead of 100+) uses VRAM. A high screen resolution uses more VRAM. Creators only have control over the geometry of course, but any user can lower VRAM use with the above in mind. Running out of VRAM can have serious consequences, since your video card will use your slower RAM to compensate. If you are already running low on that, the result can be even disastrous, because if you run out of that, the again slower hard drive will be used for swapping.

Oh you're so sharp (and Gaia too) If that's the case the number of materials would certainly cause it.

@Code Oh yes repeating myself, responding to the post in general @OP If it was the number of materials causing your problem, the first picture you posted wouldn't be possible, at all. Glad you got it to work, but that certainly was not the cause of faces going invisible after applying a texture. If there are more than eight materials, the uploader will ignore the geometry.

Again, it just has to be some texture issue, nothing is wrong with the model. There is no such thing as a material-less object in SL. You can change the texture. I bet that is all you have to do.

You can't fake the distortion (thank god, we have enough lag ), but you could add normal maps with the pattern on it and give the embossed parts less transparancy and a slightly different colour. I don't see that on your glass. I haven't tried it so I don't know how convincing it would look. Anyway, by the looks of your pic it's a huge improvement over what we had before.

You don't have to be a millionaire to run SL, but you can't expect entry level hardware from 8 years ago to run a program like SL. If there's room for a dedicated graphics card on your motherboard, you should be able to run SL just fine on medium settings. Look on ebay or a similair site for a used GeForce 9600GT or 9800GT. They shouldn't cost more than 25-30 bucks. btw, in your other question you say you have DDR2 memory running at 400 MHz and that it will change to 800 MHz when you update your OS. Your memory is already running at 800 MHZ, since it's dual channel (2x400). Changing to Win 7 64 bit will allow you to use your 4th GB of RAM, 32 bit OS's will only see around 3GB. It won't increase the speed of your memory, that's determined by your hardware and your BIOS settings.

Delphin Epsilon wrote: I cant seem to upload any meshes on my account in beta grid, but it works in normal grid..weird You have to take the "quiz" for both grids, maybe you forgot to do that? mesh tutorial

No refraction, but as I understand it, it will be possible to use diffuse, reflective, specular and alpha levels on top of normal maps. This should be enough to make pretty convincing cut or molded or whatever the technique is glass. Slightly different colour, less transparancy and nicely bent (reflected) light for the embossed parts should all be possible with just the materials right?

LadyPetunias Audion wrote: ......shine to it and added a bumpiness to it..... A long shot, but did you by any chance apply the bump too all faces and the shine to just a couple? The shine really shows the bumpiness.

I can't think of a way how materials would flip any normals. By the looks of your picture there aren't any flipped normals anyway, just invisible faces. My best guess is you assigned a texture with an alpha channel to your object, the invisible parts covering some walls. Try a solid texture to see if this is true. Did you unwrap your UV's and make a dedicated texture for the object? btw, the first picture has materials applied just as well as the second picture. It's the default 32x32 white texture, assigned to any freshly uploaded mesh.

Sounds like overheating to me as well, either CPU or GPU. You could try to monitor your temperatures to be sure. Even when it isn't the cause of your problem it's good practice. Depending on your hardware you could use Speedfan, Realtemp, Coretemp, HWmonitor, Everest or any other monitoring tool.

I think Blender uses another axis setup than 3ds max, 3ds max uses x axis forward. If that's the case, it might explain your rotated bones. There are no bones for the fingers on the SL avatar, all hand movements you see are morphs, not animations. SLAV should work, did you run the mse script as explained on the SLAV page? You can't open the files directly, the script imports them for you. There are two scripts, one is for pre-2012 versions, the other is for 2012 and 2013 versions (and 2014?).

You can get the standard avatar, completely rigged and correctly named, using the free version of SLAV. The wiki is a good place to get you started from there.

When I open the model you posted, everything is scaled in meters, so the model is huge. What are the dimensions the uploader shows you? The model also had a lot of unweighted vertices. All vertices have to be at exactly 1.0. What version of windows are you using? If it's XP, the log is somewhere else. It's in a hidden folder, so you need to show those. btw, please do not model the entire inside of a t-shirt, it creates unneccecary lag for everyone and will give you a hard time weight painting.

Duckie Dickins wrote: I coukd be wrong but i thought viewers had a hard limit of 512 megs of video ram regardless to what your card supports The texture memory is limited to 512 MB, but your gpu processes a lot more than just textures, it processes everything you see. Normally I see around 700MB of video memory in use when SL is open, sometimes it's close to a full GB.

Some more information would be helpful, only thing I can think of right now is you did set all IDs, but you didn't assign any material or the same material to all sides. I think the dae format stores materials, not ID's. So make a multi/sub with 6 materials and assign it to your box.

Obviously both will increase LI, but a vertex costs more than a triangle. Adding one triangle can cost as much as 3 extra verts though, so I think you're approaching this the wrong way. Just keep both to a minimum. I can't think of any situation where you have a choice of removing either a vert or a tri to get the same result.

There's some bug in the fbx exporter, try the command line instead of the menu: FBX export not working That works for me. Then convert the fbx file to dae with the converter I linked earlier. It's far from perfect, mapping is saved, but solids are split into faces, making a big mess. (boxes seem to import complete, I didn't try cylinders or spheres) Blender will open the fbx or dae, I'd do my final editing there if I were you. There's a plugin for autocad that lets you save obj files, it's not free though: Automesher Application

I didn't mean to offend you in any way, but it is possible, as I described and as Drongle even showed. It's clumsy and far from perfect under all circumstances, but it works. Objects in front may cause issues, yes, didn't I already say that twice? Two walls, made the way as proposed, would need four prims, not two. Four prims will have a landimpact of two. You're absolutely right when linked to a mesh there might be no landimpact rise at all. Why use prims though if you are already building in mesh? To me it feels like repairing a car with timber.

You can still use the fbx exporter in autocad and the fbx converter to turn it into a dae file. Even though the 2d days of autocad are ancient history, I don't think it's going to be easy to get good mapping and a good topology without using a true 3d program. Autocad 2014 has a dae importer, not sure if it has an exporter. Still waiting for my fresh copy.

Using 3ds max I'm able to import dxf/dwg files. I'm not sure if the other 3d programs do that. EDIT going by the other post Blender will import dxf as well:) Autocad has the option to export as fbx, you could try converting those fbx files to dae with Autodesk's converter, but I wouldn't recommend this, since Autocad's dwg format is a bit like SL prims, the usual objects are extrusions and lathes etc, not wireframes. I'm pretty sure Blender will import the fbx files, you could do your final modeling and mapping in there.

LepreKhaun wrote: Unsure why you said that, but in no sense can SL's poor implementation of "shininess" be mistaken for the glossy obtainable with specular mapping. I said it because it's the only dynamic way to create the effect at this moment. If you reread my initial answer, you'll see I'd prefer the material option. The fact is though, it's not in the main viewer yet. You won't have any problem with z-fighting if your planes are adequately separated and the alpha sorting bug is something we all have to live with in SL There won't be any sorting issues within the object itself. The lower of the two planes doesn't have a texture with alpha channel, so the only sorting issues will be between the front plane and objects in front of it. As far as using prims in your link set with mesh, since the mesh LI will most likely be set by its Download weight due to scaling, prims (specifically boxes, cylinders and prisms) can be used in those cases w/o adding to LI. But discussing the pros&cons of the mesh/prim hybrid in architectural builds has come up before and might be best left to its own thread. If you build in mesh, you can combine several walls into one object. Two walls in prims will add up to a landimpact of 2, I'm pretty sure the mesh version will stay at one, even with a whole lot more walls.

You can still do it in Blender to save some prims. Do exactly what Drongle and I suggested with the double planes and the alpha map. Just don't so it in SL, do it in Blender. Put a unique material on both faces so you can texture them seperately in SL. You won't be able to see the effect in Blender, not that that matters.

Rahkis Andel wrote: I already conceded that she probably didn't need to worry about the tris in this case. On several occasions. I think you're splitting hairs here, and I'm not sure why. I'm not trying to split hairs, it's not about who is right or wrong. Keeping your mesh in quads is usually the way to go, for many reasons of which you described most, so that is good advice. My only point was it is a misconception that tris are to be avoided at all times, they can be real geometry savers, especially at the end of the modeling process.

Rahkis Andel wrote: What if down the line she wants to add a loop cut straight through that trim edge? It's all triangulated so she can't. She would have to extrude a new row of faces. Will it matter in this unique case? Maybe not. With the row above the edge you already have the "adding a loop" issue, both in your example and in the model made by OP. You have 45 degree rotated quads, which is a very common way to go from low to high poly, there is no nice ring or straight loop in that area. Besides, we're technologically beyond the point where we will make significant gains from losing a few edges here and there by making heavy use of tris. That kind of really low poly modeling is rather unnecessary here, and I see no particular benefit to it. Clearly, you do and that's great. Difference of opinion. It's not a exactly a couple of edges, it affects a couple of loops from the bottom. However, it isn't really accurate to say that a tri is more reliable than a quad. We have a triangulate modifier; you can always know what your mesh will look like when triangulated -- there is no guess work here. If you have one triangle in an all quad mesh, when it is all triangulated, that one triangle is going to stand out a little bit. A tri is a tri, a quad can be split into tris two ways, so the result of a tri is always more predictable. This has got nothing to do with the issue at hand though, since the issue was using tris to make the edge or quads, not whether splitting quads into tris was a good idea. One triangle will stand out, a uniform geometry like in the OP's model doesn't have a single tri between quads though. The two things that I can think of off the top of my head that can make tris disadvantageous (asides from the workability factor) are: Smooth shading, lighting and shadows will be subtly less consistent across the affected faces. Normal maps will have a higher quality when evenly triangulated meshes are used. How much either of those things matter depends mostly on how big of a perfectionist the artist is (disclaimer: I am one). That said, if there are disadvantages to a method and no real advantages to it, does it really matter how minor the disadvantages are? I really don't see why and how in all three cases. Triangles can mess up edgeflow. That's why all the things you describe can occur. But your edgeflow isn't any more fluid than the one in the other model. One edge is vertical, the ones under it are diagonal, in both the quad based and triangle based model. This can affect lighting, in both cases. The only way to prevent that is by making straight edgeloops, which inevitably results in a high poly model.