Kwakkelde Kwak

I know, you showed me earlier and explained how you did it. The result is very usable, the way of creating isn't for everyone. So my point just is: anyone can make these objects, or just choose to copy the object in SL. There's no need for altering dae files or using exporters that don't always work in a program that most people don't have and never will have.. Hadn't you made these objects, I would have never tried to place two mesh planes in the same spot, simply assuming it would act like prims do, giving the terrible glitch. So I guess a "thank you" is in order

Porscha Pearl wrote: I am wondering if its necessary to retopologize it to be animation friendly or just leave it as it is and not to care about how the topology flows. Nothing is necessary. The better your topology, the less strange deformations you will get when animating and the easier it will be to texture the object/avatar. On a head you won't get any deformations in SL (same for hands), since eyes and mouth aren't animated. The winks and open mouths you can see in SL are morphs on the SL avatar so won't work on any custom mesh. Also what would be the ideal polycount the avatar should have? An aprox number, so to be smooth and also not as expensive to upload. And actually is there any limit as to how many polys can be uploaded? Cons and prons. I don't think the expenses on upload should be the leading factor. Lag vs looks should be. The SL avatar has 7000 tris if I'm not mistaken. I would not go over double that for a naked, bald avatar. There is no direct limit for polygons, but every material on a mesh object can have no more than 64000 vertices. with 8 materials that gives you 512k verts to work with, resulting in approximately 1 million tris. This is a number you might expect for everything on your screen combined, not for a single object.

Kitsune Shan wrote: The main difference with this method is to not get the glitchy overlappying effects on textures. And usually the alpha doesnt glitch about alpha sorting when you put something in front like hair. But this also varies lately depending of the size of the mesh and is one of the reassons of why I didnt post more info about it. My experience is two mesh surfaces never show this glitch. Two seperate objects in the exact same place act like the linked version you made. After playing around quickly, I still don't see why anyone needs to edit any dae files or use any bugs or anything. If I import your sample file, SL sees vertices for both materials. So copying the object in any 3d program, giving the copy its own material and merging, joining or attaching or whatever it's called in the various programs to the original (without welding any vertices) will give the exact same results in SL. The only difference I see is a slightly smaller dae file. This will not translate in a lower landimpact or less geometry or a lower load on the system after importing in SL.

That more or less confirms my experience. Better performance equals higher temps. It makes sense. 56 C is nothing to worry about btw. The fan on my NVidia doesn't start speeding up until the GPU hits 70 C, then it will keep it there. I wouldn't start worrying until the card stays above 75-80 C under load. If the fps get higher than 30 and you don't want to, you can also use the NVidia settings. In the NVidia control panel (3D Settings -> Manage 3D Settings, Program Settings tab) you can turn on Vertical sync then "Adaptive (half refresh rate)" and "Triple buffering" for your viewer of choice. That will prevent anything higher than 30 fps (using a 60Hz monitor). "Adaptive" will do the same, but will keep your fps under 60.

It would help if you could give an indication of your budget. I think I'd recommend the 660Ti, but that's a rather pricy card. You have an overview here: videocardbenchmark.net

To me that doesn't look like a graphic card issue, I'd expect the colors to be far more random than per texture. I think your cache is corrupted, clearing it should solve your issues then. It's under preferences (ctrl-P) then the "advanced" tab.

You might want to post what kind of computer that is, for 300 bucks it must have fallen off a truck, since my graphics card or CPU alone costs more than your entire computer. In crowded places I often only get 20-25 fps. In a simple skybox it can go over 200. @OP Like others said, just keep an eye on the temperatures. Depending on your card you should keep it under 70-80 C or something. You might want to look up the number recommended by the vendor of the card. For laptops a cooling pad would help a lot keeping the temps down.

Ronald Greybeard wrote: any updates? Most certainly, from the Second life Server forum: Second Life Server (main channel) The main channel is getting the interest list improvement project which has been on Magnum for the past few weeks. In addition to the interest list changes, this version adds support for normal and specular maps. This blog post has more information about the project. The next step is to release a project viewer, which will allow users to try out this new functionality. https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_Server/13#13.02.08.270166 Scheduled Wednesday 2013-02-20 05:00-12:00 PST

Chosen Few wrote: Obviously, these solutions will not translate directly to SL (yet), so you'll need to bake the effects, if SL is your target platform. From what I understand the latest main server update includes the new material support, the one with normal maps. That by itself doesn't mean we can use it in a day, a week or a month, but it's on the way. Might be worth to wait it out for objects like these.

Drongle McMahon wrote: "The result in 3ds Max is 4 verts, 2 polygons (4 tris)." Yes. That's very different. In Blender, it deletes one of the polys, even if they have opposite normals. It obviously doesn't like doubled faces between the same vertices, although it doesn't complain when they are there in the imported file. Hmm. It's becoming a technical issue at this point rather than a practical one. That is unless others can upload with the 58 verts I mentioned. You can simply leave the verts unwelded, to SL it makes no difference, it will split them on upload. In other words, you can simply copy your object in Blender, then join it to the original.

Drongle McMahon wrote: 2. Importing Kitsune's dae file into Blender has interesting effects. The same happens with the Blender exported file that was manually edited to make the overlay the same way. Blender sees only one set of vertices and edges, but sees two faces for each triangle. These can be selected by material etc as you might expect. They behave normally for subdivision, but extrusion behaves anomalously, and dissolving a diagonal edge or trying to rotate it, won't work. Importing it into 3ds Max has the same effect. The last bit you write makes perfect sense. Subdivision works on edges and there are only 3 per double triangle. Extrusion works on a face and there are two of those. As far as I can make out, there is no way to make this kind of structure from scratch in Blender. However One of the extra faces disappear when you remove double vertices after duplicating a face. You can merge two of the duplicated vertices of a triangle and still have two faces, but when you merge the third, one face disappears. If you try to make a face where one alrady exists, it doesn't do anything. This works a bit different in 3ds Max. What I can do is duplicating a single quad, set the material ID to something else, attach it to the original and weld the 4 verts. The result in 3ds Max is 4 verts, 2 polygons (4 tris). If I try the same with a triangle, only one of the verts is welded. 3ds Max notices the normals don't match I think and refuses to weld. So if I flip the normal on one of the two triangles I can weld it to the other. When this is done I can flip one of the normals again resulting in 2 overlapping triangles, with only 3 verts. However, this is not how Kitsune made the dae from what I understand. Exporting the double quad and uploading it to SL results in 4 faces as expected, but 8 verts as well. The result in SL looks like the example. You can texture both faces and you don't get the texture glitch you get on two prims overlapping, then again I don't see that with two overlapping seperate mesh planes. EDIT. This is what happens with Kitsune's example as well. SL sees double the vertices. In 3ds Max I see 32 verts. When split by smoothing groups (what SL does to make sharp edges) I get 58 vertices. SL sees 116 though. So there are no magic faces with shared verts. The uploader simply doubles the geometry. I don't see any difference in download weight between two seperate mesh planes and the double plane. Physics should be the same as well, as long as you set the physics of the linked plane to "none". Server weight is bigger for the linkset of course. For some reason the display weight is lower for the linkset. btw I use a "non-bugged" exporter.

Sure there is, the support stopped, not the download. phoenixviewer

Firestorm is V2 based. Try singularity, phoenix, cool viewer or whatever other V1 based viewer.

Haven't used it in years, did you try one of the V1 based viewers? Maybe those work, for the time being that is, since they'll be useless "soon".

Bug might not be the right word, let's call it something like "an unexpected, unsupported feature". We have no way to determine how the uploader or viewer interprets the data from the collada file, especially in the future. The result may be that this feature is going to be broken at some point. What I ment with "bugged exporter" was the fact people have been experiencing serious trouble uploading anything using those versions of Autodesk Collada.

leliel Mirihi wrote: The moral of this story is don't use alpha textures unless you have a signed note from god saying it's ok in this one special case. Do you have a PO box or email address by any chance?

Chic Aeon wrote: So this is an important thing to know . Yeah. I also learned how to mirror parts of my UV map today (something I apparently did by accident last month - LOL. On purpose is better. Just mirror or mirror and overlap? You can save a lot of valuable texture space by overlapping UV islands. I think it was Maeve who posted a floor a couple of months ago where all the tiles were mirrored/rotated. A very irregular, natural effect with only four tiles on the texture as I remember. You can forget about baking in occlusion or shadows on a floor like that, but on a symmetrical build you can still "reuse" a lot of your texture.

Can you also post your GPU temperatures when idle and when SL is running? GPU-Z or Realtemp should work. Can you also post your fps? In SL, hit Ctrl-Shift-1 and it will show on top. Or you could use something like fraps.

Drongle McMahon wrote: ETA - what puzzles me is how it is possible to access the two "layers" using Select Faces - does clicking toggle the selection? - or maybe you can't and have to do it from a script? I couldn't work that out from the video, Will have to do some experiments tomorow. As I remember selecting all faces then deselecting all but one was the way to select the "second" face. All I know is it was a bit of a pain, but very workable. Anyway, the faces were recognised as individual, so a script should give you access to any of them. What I am wondering about is whether LL is aware of this bug and more importantly if they are planning on exploiting/supporting this bug.

Are you rezzing mesh by any chance? I know mesh objects rezzed in such a way that they intersect with an avatar, the physics will be ignored, so it appears to be "phantom". Try rezzing in a free spot.

My first step would be to contact the creator. In your inventory right click the texture and select "properties". It should show you who made it.

That looks like a UV/texture issue. By the looks of it you have a white background for your texture. You could change it to black, but chances are you will get black lines in other places then. What should work, IF this is the issue, is expanding your texture into the background, or pulling your UV points inside the texture. This will prevent the bleeding from the background onto your texture. In most 3D programs you can bake your textures a bit bigger than the UV islands, in Cinema 4D it's called "Pixelborder" . In this forum it's discussed for Cinema 4D: Unity3D Your UV islands do need some distance between them of course, so the "pixelborder" doesn't overlap.

Did you see an increase in fps? Unlike what you might expect, my experience is the laggier/fuller/more complex a region is, the cooler my card. It looks like the GPU isn't getting information fast enough in those cases. On a near empty sim the fps can go into the 100's, making the card quite warm. So better coding from LL could cause (over)heating of your card. Maybe all it takes is a good cleaning of your graphics card fan/heatsink. Better to use compressed air and/or a toothbrush than a vacuum cleaner, which can damage your computer because of static discharge. Or you could try to find a program that allows you to control the fan speed. What is the temperature btw? GPU's can get quite warm. My fan doesn't kick in until the GPU is 70 or so degrees Celsius. Temperatures up to a constant 70 or 80 should be safe I think, but you should look that up for your specific card.

Here's the blog page: Kitsune Shan's Blog The bug only occurs with the bugged Collada exporters. Those would be the 2012 ones and early 2013 ones (2013.0 and 2013.1) for 3ds Max (and probably Maya as well). Maybe that helps. Personally I don't think we should rely on a bug, so people should be careful with it. Then again, we all relied the invisiprim bug for years.

Rhys Goode wrote: I can't wait to show these numbers to my friend who's motto is "UV maps are for later, after you get the basic shape set". The two go hand in hand, but you can only make a UV map if you have geometry first:) Anyway, the un-unwrapped model probably has a load of seams. All vertices on such a seam will count for every UV island they are connected to. So on a plane where all the individual tris are a UV island that would be six times. This results in a lot more data with all its upload consequences. Why the vert count went up by a factor 4 I don't know, that has got to be a mistake. A factor 4 is pretty much what you get when you subdivide your object one time.