Kwakkelde Kwak

You might want to read the rest of the forums and see how helpful most forum users are, especially to new people. We all know how confusing and annoying SL can be. Pretty much all people are welcomed here with warm, open arms. Your issue has been recognized by LL and by us forum peeps. There's going to be a fix and now you know it, what more do you want? Don't use your tattoos for now. Another thing that seems to help, although not for very long, is clearing your cache. In your preferences (ctrl-p) you can do that under either the network or advanced tab, not sure how it's called. Restart your viewer and your av should be fine...for a while.

You still haven't made it crystal clear, not even better than blurry to be honest, what you think needs to be done. Do you want your money back? Then you're in the wrong place since we are all residents, not Lindens. You want to know if the problem has been recognized and if it's going to be fixed? That has been answered already, numerous times. What was the point of your initial post again? You said you paid for premium, that means you have land. How is suggesting you try before you buy rediculous? Why do you feel any of us feel superior? All I (and with me pretty much all others) explained was how you can temporarily fix your issue and that there is a solid solution in the near future. We do not agree with you that the situation is unacceptable and we aren't going to do that just because you say you are 2 inches taller than the average youngster over here. Get some anti-testosterone pills and take a deep breath.

TwoIron wrote: You mean the reality that something is wrong with the process of "baking" my avatar? I do accept it. It's you that has the problem with me simply pointing it out - which is why every post is about me and not the actual subject at hand. You do more than pointing out something is wrong, you whine and complain about the fact something doesn't work, which you are entitled to btw. With an attitude like that you won't get a lot of positive feedback on the forums, what do you expect? You could just as well complain in your local grocery store, the people on these forums can fix as much in SL as they can. Only difference might be your intimidating 6 foot 3 figure preventing happy shoppers pointing out the obvious to you. So if you want some response face to face, the local gym or boxing school might be the place to look for it. I think their advice would be: "Very annoying, now get over it". What strikes me, is the fact you came to SL without knowing the first thing about it, then pay for land and clothes. Do you buy a car without testdriving it? Do you buy a house before entering it? Do you buy clothes without fitting them first? Most people start with a free account and try freebees for starters. If they like SL, they upgrade, if they don't, they leave. Nothing lost. Your situation is not unacceptable, it's unfortunate at best. You could have prevented it altogether. Anyway, the problem with the baking wasn't there in the past, from my experience it did not start happening when tattoos were added to our toolbox either. The problem is there though, nobody disagrees with you on that. Most importantly, the upcoming server side baking people already told you about, will probably fix it. So all you and the rest of us can do is wait it out. You can't expect LL to either shut down the grid or remove tattoos from second life until there's a fix.

If you are worried you might do it wrong.... it means you probably will be right in the end. If I were you I wouldn't worry about performance just yet, keep it in the back of your mind of course. First try to master modeling, so you are familiar with all the tools, tricks, possibilities etc Blender has to offer. When you look for tutorials you can include "low poly" or "real time" or "games" in the search. or a -"high poly". Maybe it's fun for you if you look around the mesh sandboxes on the betagrid and see if you can separate the good from the bad models, and try to find out why they are good or bad.

Like code said, you really need the image files, the skin will be useless. What you can do is either download other skin (google starlight skin) It's very unlikely the creator of the skin will give you the images, but you could ask for those. One other thing that would work, is sending the model you exported and uploaded again to SL to the skin creator. He/she can texture it for you and send it back. That way they don't have to hand over their textures. One final thing I can think of is giving the creator rights to edit your items, then they can texture your object inworld without it changing hands. None of these options are perfect, but it's all I can think of (within TOS) for the texture part, good luck. EDIT I don't think you'll be able to use sculpts, try mesh instead.

I never knew it was people's goal to have as much objects rezzed for as little LI as possible. I thought setting up a sim was about making it look and perform as good and attractive as possible. Three houses without furniture filling up a homestead won't be very good then, but neither will fifty fully furnished ones that break apart at 5 meter., leaving you in a discoball for a scenery. As usual, there's a balance, that was the point of my entire post. Regarding the polygons (and therefor LI) on any platform, you need to use them the best way possible for the situation. Problem is, in SL you don't have control over the situation, especially when the item is sold as a single piece and not part of a big scene. By forcing demending graphical settings on your customers or visitors, you force them to invest in new hardware or they will have a crap experience. It's these people we build for afterall. If we would build just for ourselves, we could build in Blender, 3ds max or whatever local program or local simulator and use as many polygons as our own computer can handle.

Going by my SL mesh experiences, the reason for this can be the physical shape of the floor. When it's a convex hull, you can't rezz on it, when it's a triangular based (for some obscure and confusing reason called physics type "prim") shape, you can rezz on it. On the legacy prims you can always rezz. Anyway, I'm glad you found a workaround.

arton Rotaru wrote: You will never see such poor LOD models in other games. Of course, they only have to worry about the over all poly budget, and they don't have to deal with this land impact thing, where people have to pay real money for each prim in SL. So we have to make more compromises than other artists will have to. That's for sure. Overall polycount and LI are directly connected so game devs face the same design issues we face here. I wonder if people spending RL money on a game would ever accept poor LoD models like we see in SL, I don't think so. There are some big differences between games and SL though, for example, in games the engine can load and unload scenes, when you enter a next level, or when you go through a door. In games you can't rotate your camera behind objects, in games you can't walk or fly everywhere. Another big difference is people in SL often go to a place and stay there, a club, their house, a store. I can understand the trade off between LoD models and LI in those cases. Why would a landowner sacrifice valuable LI for visibility from the next plot where his/her visitors will never go? There are other situations though, where an entire sim is used, a racetrack, a city, a mall (do they still exist? ). In situations like that I would never let LI overshadow the looks from half a sim or a full sim away. All in all, it really depends on the situation on how LoD models are used. This of course is a big problem with the biggest difference between games and SL: unless the object is purpose built, the creator will never know how and where it will be used. So I think it's good to have some creators who build very low LI items and others making similair items that keep their shape very well. There is no good or bad design philosophy here, well except when builders know their model will break up too soon for its purpose (like the car mentioned earlier) then advice to crank up some debug setting. I've done this in the past myself with some sculpties, but I wouldn't do that anymore since we have full control over our LoD models.

Two things are going on by the looks of it, one you can easily fix, the other you can't. The sharp edges you can fix. I don't know how it's called in Blender, but you need to make sure every polygon is in the same smoothing group (no hard edges). The hard edges can also be caused by your UV mapping. SL splits vertices where two materials meet. Also make sure you do not check "generate normals" when uploading. The fact the object is darker in SL is because of the shaders. You can fix this by setting the texture to full bright, but that will give you a radiating plate of dougnuts at night, not exactly tasty looking.

And that will keep you from buying that car..hey maybe that whole capitalist free market and competition thing kind of works after all! I'm afraid though that the number of laughs is matched by the number of "wow that has to be the best looking car in SL" 's. Maybe it's dirty race tactics, making sure you have a great computer so you see things the way they should without lag, then distract half the other people with laughter and lag the other half into driving off the track.

I agree, but want to add one small thing. When I build, I do not look at the RenderVolumeLOD Factor. I do test on all default graphic settings. Low means a low LODFactor, but it also means a short draw distance. Ultra means a higher Factor, but also a higher draw distance. I do not build with settings in mind like LODFactor 1.125 and a draw distance of 512. That just doesn't make any sense to me. People that want a draw distance longer than the defaults can always set their other graphical settings higher, like the LODFactor. They do need a fast computer of course.

Anakin Crystal wrote: Kwakkelde Kwak i get a bitmap error...."fail to create bitmap" when i use MR, even though i still processes the file apparently..i think i will get a SS of that to also if you need me to... From what I read that error indicates some memory issues. Maybe the model is simply too big for the amount of RAM you have. MR can be very RAM consuming. You might be able to fix this by closing all other programs. You could also try to split up your UV map into several ones, to be honest I'm not sure if this will reduce memory use, but it sounds logical. How much RAM do you have? If I render big scenes (bigger than your build without a doubt) I sometimes see memory use of over 8 GB. You can see the physical memory use of 3ds max in the "rendering" window. You can see your total memory use in the taskmanager. with all this blurryness in the textures...even if i use MR, i still the blurryness and dark borders, thats even with out a "light" and no shadows are disabled... The blurryness is most certainly caused by the layout of your UV map (the first of the two and parts of the second). Going by the looks of the first map, you'd need a texture a lot bigger for any sharp renderings. As I said, 1024 is the limit, so I like to refer to the 3 options I gave you earlier. The map, organized as it might look, isn't very efficient. Most of it is black and therefor wasted. If you have a surface of let's say 5x5 meter somewhere on your object, you want it to have 256x256 pixels on the UV map. (the higher the sharper, but this ratio seems to work for me for buildings in most cases). That is about 50 pixels per meter, or one pixel for every two centimeter. For reference, the biggest part in your first UV map, the cross in the lower left corner, is about 170x170 pixels. To make better use of the entire canvas, try to weld as much as you can in the UV editor instead of using so many separate islands. On these welds you'll also lose the black borders then, because there is no black that can bleed onto your UV islands. When you weld together as much as you can, you can scale your islands up, resulting in more detail. You can either move, rotate and weld in the UV layout you have now or select certain faces on your model which are connected and unwrap those as a group. By the looks of your building and UV map, you probably need to assign multiple materials in 3ds max, resulting in multiple faces in SL. You can use up to 8. As far as I know you can't RTT a single material, if anyone knows if this is possible please let us know. What you can do is detach all individual materials from one another, RTT all of them then attach them again. Don't forget to set the padding in the RTT window to get rid of the black lines remaining.

By the looks of the wireframe in the pic this sure looks more like a caching issue than the "missing prim enigma".

I suppose you're not going to change the model in Blender or any other program, so let's see what can be done without. If the physics cost is too high, link your uploaded mesh to a box in SL and set the mesh to physics type "none" (edit menu, features tab). It will remove all load on the physics engine, but you can no longer walk into the object. If the download cost is too high, you can set the numbers in the uploader for triangle limit lower for medium, low and lowest. Depending on the model this could make a small or huge difference, both in looks and in landimpact. You could go as far as setting low and lowest to zero. It really depends on the shape and size if this works. For a possible next time, make sure you tell the builder your landimpact limit. Also ask for instructions on how to upload the model.

Oh I guess I need glasses Maybe it is too small? Then at least I didn't write that post for nothing...

Theresa Tennyson wrote: SERVER support is in beta at least. VIEWER support is in alpha. Think of it as the basketball court has been built but the team has just started practicing. And they're kind of clumsy right now. No need to nitpick over a term too much, but the fact we can download a viewer and try it out means it is out of alpha already. Alpha is inhouse testing. The basketball court is more or less done, the rules of the game are written, now it's up to the clumsy team to see if the court is bumpy and if the rules make it a playable and fair game. There will be some players that have played the game before elsewhere and know what should work and what not.

say Moo wrote: But normal support is not officially supported as we speak on the agni grid, since it's alpha (very alpha). It is very very much beta. Why else would it be on the beta grid? I think we can expect it pretty soon.

say Moo wrote: When normal map support kicks in (finally), most mesh objects can be lowered in tri counts (since you can bake the high details as normal map and apply it to the low tri mesh. Inworld this low tri mesh looks like a high detailed one, without the lag tax.). I'm impatiently awaiting the support of normal maps. (a wonderful world is near) Call me sceptical, but going by the current SL content, it won't help performance all that much. Skilled mesh builders will be able to make "better" mesh, but the unskilled builders will just keep their high poly objects and add 8 1024x1024 normal maps to all of them, lagging SL even more. Oh well, we're used to it

FlashFuchsia wrote: It looks perfectly fine in the preview and I checked the size with an avatar model from the SL forums and sized it to that back while I was UV mapping. The upload fee is only 13L and it says there's a 2.285 land impact, but I don't know if that's a lot or not. The object is only 1706 polys. A landimpact of 2285 is not a lot, it is humongous. A full region in SL accepts 15000, so an empty region would at best fit 6 of your objects. The upload fee is connected to the file size, 1706 polys won't result in a big file, hence the low cost. The high Landimpact can be caused by various things. If it is the download weight determining the number, I can think of two that could apply to your model. Either you loaded your model into all 4 slots (high-very low) or the scale is not right. If it is the physics weight, don't worry, hysics don't work on a worn object. You say you scaled the object to the proper size in 3ds max, but did you apply the transform? It's under "Utilities" (the hammer) on the far right in max. When you scale an object, the "size" will stay the same, but the "scale" will change. If you select your object and right click the scale button, it should read 100% for all axes. If not you have to reset the scale. With your object selected, click "Reset XForm" then "Reset Selected". You can work with editable poly just fine btw, I always use it.

That one does have some trouble with certain things regarding SL. You could try the 2013.3 (64 bit) or 2013.3 (32 bit) version for 3ds max 2012 for starters. Do not use any spaces or odd characters in object, texture or material names. If that doesn't help, plenty of helpful people here, I'm sure we can figure it out.

Before we explore all other options, what kind of exporter are you using and what version of it?

Anakin Crystal wrote: I will also try MR, just my experience with MR i get errors and errors in my renders alot.. is that because i dont use the Arch and Design? What should my set up be if i use MR? Raytraced shadows? and do i need to configure anything in the "rendere? " What kind of errors? And to that final question... that really depends on what you are trying to achieve. If there was one "perfect setting" for mental ray or any other renderer, it would be the only option. So do you want occlusion? Do you want shadows from the sun? Do you want reflective walls? Do you want ..well I could go on and on.

It's hard to say what's the issue without seeing a bit more. You provided some good pics of the result, but I can't see your RTT settings because the picture is too small. Talking about too small, that might be the cause of your blurriness. Can you post a picture of your UV map or RTT result? You can render to any size in 3ds max, but SL won't accept anything over 2048x2048 and it won't save anything over 1024x1024 on the servers. If that's your issue, you can do a number of things to cure it. 1) The "dumb" way, which isn't always bad, is splitting up your object into multiple UV maps with multiple textures, increasing the canvas size. 2) You can do it the "smart" way and re-use certain parts of the texture. If a wall is repeated many times in your build, RTT one of them, then apply that texture to multiple walls. Depending on your lighting that might not always work. 3) Then there's the "special" way, which is a trade off between looks and performance (/Landimpact), just like the "dumb" adding of more texture space. You can duplicate your geometry in 3ds max and put the light texture on one of the objects with a single repeat, then a generic brick, stucco, panel or whatever texture on the other with a high repeat. In mesh objects the two textures should look like layers in photoshop, without any texture chatter in SL. You of course do need the light texture opaque-invisible rather than black-white. You also need to make sure you put the material on the correct face in SL. Personally I prefer 2, but again, that's not always an option. The black lines on your texture are caused by texture bleeding. You can set the padding (under the Objects to Bake rollout in the RTT window) a bit higher. Depending on the size of your output texture the padding can vary. The smaller your texture (or better the smaller your texels), the bigger the padding needs to be. I also prefer MR over Scanline. Maybe you could increase the render values such as soft shadow precision and sampling quality. Most settings can be found under Render Setup -> Renderer. Indirect Illumination has some useful settings too, like final gather.

I didn't mean objects blocking your path, I ment objects creeping up behind the camera. That could be the plants or the ceiling light for example. The ceiling light you can set to physics type "none" if it's not a single object in a linkset. Whether you want that for the plants is a bit more subjective. Disabling the constraints of the camera doesn't affect the "moving camera behaviour" in any way. btw, this is just guesswork, but it suits the discribed problem perfectly.

Pamela Galli wrote: It does kind of sound like what happens in you are inside a hollowed cube, but I have never experienced it with mesh. My walls are all separate, there should be no hollowing effect at all. It makes no difference whether you're walking in a hollow object or standing between walls. If the viewer detects a physical plane/box behind the camera it will zoom in to keep the camera on the correct side of it. Maybe your walls are very close together, maybe you have a lot of physical (not the moving ones) objects in the house. When I experience what seems to be your customer's issue, I usually scroll up slightly with the mouse to keep the cam closer to my avatar. Maybe that will help him/her.